Life under Capitalism

Birmingham council wants to axe 26,000 jobs

Life under Capitalism, Tories, UK politics
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Birmingham council wants people to take pay cuts or get fired:

The council wants to abolish allowances—additional payments workers receive for working unsociable hours and difficult shifts, including weekend working.

Allowances can make up a third of an employee’s take home pay.

A worker who currently earns £15,233 a year could see their wages slashed to £11,794—a loss of £3,439 or 23 percent.

Someone who now earns £19,027 could drop to £13,125—a loss of £5,902 or 31 percent.

There is of course no intention of allowing workers to refuse working on difficult shifts… This is a direct assault on the council’s workers and hits those workers who are already doing what are often difficult jobs for low wages. For many of them those allowances are needed to pay the bills; they can’t survive on just the base salary. And Birmingham isn’t the only council to play this game, just the first. According to Socialist Worker the following councils have also issued letters:

  • 8,500 in Sheffield
  • All 11,000 council workers in Barnsley
  • 8,500 in Sheffield
  • 8,000 in Walsall
  • 4,000 in Croydon
  • 800 in Oldham
  • 500 in Havering

This is the way in which the Tories want to solve Britain’s “debt crisis”.

America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere

Life under Capitalism
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Says Paul Krugman, as all our seventies doom science fiction dreams and fears seem to come alive in the New Great Depression:

jump you fuckers

The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

[…]

But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.

In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.

Bad enough, but much worse is the fact that almost every European government seems bound to walk the same road. We’ve got Greece that on the one hand can’t be bothered to collect the taxes of the people who own all those nice villas just outside Athens, can pay off the banks to not collapse, but now has to pay for it by squeezing ordinary workers hard. Germany meanwhile is putting its nose in the air at Greece’s profligacy but is still planning to put the screws on its workers too. We all know already what the ConDem(med) coalition wants to do to the UK even if Cameron is still vain enough not to want to be milk snatcher 2.0, while the most likely coalition in the Netherlands is not so much divided on whether or not eighteen billion euros in spending cuts are needed now, but on where to cut…

A spirit is haunting Europe and it’s the spirit of undead neoliberalism, the last gasp of the freemarket fuckers, using this crisis to once again help themselves and their banker friends to our money.

QotD: Death of a thousand budget cuts

Comment of the Day, Life under Capitalism
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Whitehall Watch gets the real impact of the proposed ConDem budget exactly right:

But the real impact is going to be not on public jobs – important as they are – as on the services that people get. The poorer you are, the more dependent you are on public services and provision. The more money you have, the more you have options to provide for yourself if you need to and public services fail to deliver. This doesn’t show up in any of the economic analysis of the impact of the Budget on the population, because public services aren’t priced. The effect on many vulnerable people will be devastating.

It’s not just the people dependent on disability or unemployment benefits who are vulnerable, but also the many more families who need public services to survive, as their wages are not enough to pay for all their necessities. These people may not be exactly poor now, but will be if the budget is enacted.

CotD: American Chernobyl edition

Comment of the Day, Life under Capitalism
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Jim Henley on the wider implications of the BP oil spill:

There can’t be three foreigners not in the employ of Rupert Murdoch who, today, can read about the “American model of democratic capitalism” without sniggering. This is a country whose elites can cry real tears about the pensions of Britons while regarding the pensions of American autoworkers as the next thing to a crime. While there is a real principle at stake in the difference, it’s not one you’re supposed to voice: Concern for British pensions is a way to keep powerful and connected people unaccountable for their actions; Auto worker pensions can only cost such people money.

You would’ve thought though that Katrina would’ve done this already.

Efficiency savings always mean making political choices

Life under Capitalism, Tories, UK politics
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Chris Dillion argues that it’s impossible to just “cut waste” from goverment spending:

The idea that waste can be identified well by a top boss is deeply dubious. It ignores two central facts of economics: the importance of limited knowledge and of incentives. The true knowledge of where waste lies is fragmentary and dispersed across millions of public sector workers. A Chancellor cannot aggregate this knowledge. Nor can he rely upon civil service managers to do so; these do not have incentives to cut their own departments or jobs. The upshot is that, as I’ve said, top-down management is a terrible way to cut waste.

Therefore the idea that it was ever possible for the new ConDem government to immediately identify and target six billion pounds worth of unnecessary spendings without making political judgments was always absurd, yet treated seriously both in Westminister and the Westminister orientated media. As Dillon shows, the first announced cuts are nothing but political — and there’s nothing wrong with that. Obviously, you can disagree with the choices made, but that you can’t cut spending without making these choices should not be controversial.

But absurd or not, it remains easier to sell cuts as efficiency savings — who could object to that — than as explicit political choices. That’s something the Tories (and everybody else) learned from the far more ideological battles of the eighties.