The Trades Union Congress (TUC) was supposed to be protesting at this year’s Tory spring conference, but it ended up redirecting its energy to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Never fear, though – as local groups in the North West are refusing to let the Tories off the hook that easily.
The conference is taking place on 18 and 19 March at the Blackpool Winter Gardens.
Over the coming fortnight we will be mobilising trade unionists in support of the ITUC day of solidarity with Ukraine on 15 March.
And we will support the mobilisations in London and around the UK for the UN Antiracism Day on 19-20 March – particularly as this government refuses to welcome enough refugees from Ukraine into the UK.
The wages and bills crisis is about to bite. The TUC and the whole trade union movement demand action. So we will be bringing our campaign to win pay rises and a new deal for workers to a town or city near you soon and hosting a national mobilisation in London this summer. Dates and details to be announced soon.
But local groups clearly felt they should still take action.
Tory spring conference: the demo is on
So, two days of action are happening anyway. Wendy Fell from Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre Trade Union Council and Unite Community Lancashire said in a statement:
Within 24 hours we and allies locally… turned round the TUC pulling out. We have got things agreed with the police who will be all over that area of Blackpool. We have got a march route organised and adverts and social media material ready.
The two days of action will see plenty going on. On 18 March, St Johns Square in Blackpool will see stalls and speakers from 1pm. Then, on 19 March, people will meet at the Comedy Carpet on the sea front near to the Blackpool Tower. They’ll march to the Tory conference at Winter Gardens/St Johns Square. If you can make it in person, be sure to follow the demo on social media:
will try and dominate the domestic news agenda with their narrative. While the media and the Conservatives are in Blackpool, we will attempt to get our own ideas across, ideas which include social justice and fairness – unlike theirs.
The Conservatives haven’t had a conference here since 2007 and it warrants a big turnout to let them know we’re watching. Watching as they trash our NHS, increase food-bank use, give their mates lucrative contracts, fail to deliver on any promises, ignore the refugee crisis, refuse to act on the environment, the cost of living crisis and so much more.
With the price rises and cost of living crisis, disabled people face the devastating impacts of poverty more fiercely than other demographic. Please do all you can to help us in that crucial task.
So, if you’re in or near Blackpool on 18 and 19 March, it’s time to show the Tories that people won’t take their toxic governance lying down.
The climate crisis worsens with each passing year — and even the current levels of warming are disastrous, affecting ecosystems as well as social and environmental conditions of health. People in the world’s poorest countries remain most vulnerable to the crisis. The world’s governments are slow to react to the greatest challenge facing humanity today, even though potential solutions are not in short supply, with the transition to a green economy offering the most effective pathway to tackling the problem of global warming at its roots.
There are, in addition, intermediate steps that can be taken toward climate stabilization, such as carbon pricing and even the adoption of a universal basic income scheme as a means to counter the effects of global warming. Meanwhile, policy frameworks for climate adaptation are urgently needed, as renowned economist James K. Boyce points out in this interview. Boyce is professor emeritus of economics and senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He received his PhD in economics from Oxford University and is the author of scores of books, including, most recently, The Case for Carbon Dividends (2019) and Economics for People and the Planet (2021). He received the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.
C.J. Polychroniou: The climate crisis is the biggest problem facing humanity in the 21st century. In the effort to avoid a greenhouse apocalypse, competing approaches to climate action have been advanced, ranging from outright technological solutions to an economic and social revolution as envisioned in the Green New Deal project and everything in between. Two of those “in between” approaches for cutting carbon emissions are cap-and-trade, a system already implemented in the state of California, and carbon pricing and carbon dividends, which is the approach you are advocating. Why do we need to put a price on carbon? How does carbon pricing work, and what are its benefits?
James K. Boyce: First, let me say that I do not think it is useful to invoke the language of a coming “apocalypse.” It’s a vision with a lot of historical baggage, much of it downright reactionary, as my partner Betsy Hartmann explains in her book, The America Syndrome: War, Apocalypse, and Our Call to Greatness (Seven Stories Press, 2019). It misrepresents the climate crisis as a cliff edge, an all-or-nothing question akin to nuclear war, as opposed to an unfolding process that has ever-worsening consequences for humans and other living things. And it can instill a sense of despair and hopelessness that is deeply counterproductive. I agree with the late Raymond Williams that the task of the true radical is “to make hope possible, not despair convincing.”
Something similar can be said about the contrast between technological fixes and revolutionary transformations. Economic and social revolution is a process, too, not a one-off affair. Technological change can help to propel institutional change, and vice versa, and often there is an intimate connection between the two. I do not think we will solve the climate crisis with new technologies alone. The transition to a clean energy economy will require profound changes not only in how we relate to the natural world but also in how we relate to each other. I have argued that it will require a narrowing of inequalities and a deepening of democracy. But it would be folly to sit aside, waiting for social and economic revolution, before tackling the climate problem.
Cap-and-trade and carbon dividend policies both put a price on carbon. Instead of being able to dump carbon into the atmosphere free of charge (more precisely, free of monetary charge, since nature is charging us big time), pollution would carry a price tag. But there are crucial differences between these two policies. Cap-and-trade gives free pollution permits to corporations, up to the limit set by the cap. Consumers feel the bite in higher prices for transportation fuels, heating and electricity, just as they do when the oil cartel restricts supplies. The extra money they pay goes as windfall profits into the coffers of the corporations that received free permits. This may blunt political opposition to a carbon price from fossil fuel lobbyists, but their first preference remains no cap at all, as was shown in the repeat debacles of efforts to pass cap-and-trade bills in Washington, D.C. in the first decade of the century.
Carbon dividend policies put a price on carbon, too, either via a cap with auctioned (not free) permits or by means of a tax. But instead of fueling windfall profits, the money from higher prices goes directly back to the public in equal per-person payments, consistent with the principle that we all own the gifts of nature — in this case, the limited capacity of the biosphere to absorb carbon emissions — in common and equal measure. As I discuss in my book, The Case for Carbon Dividends (Polity Press, 2019), this is an example of universal property. The right to receive carbon dividends cannot be bought or sold, or accumulated in a few hands, or owned by corporations. Universal property is individual, inalienable and perfectly egalitarian. This new kind of property, which is more akin to traditional common property than to private property or state property, could be a cornerstone for what is sometimes called “libertarian socialism.”
It’s not that we simply need to put a price — any price — on carbon, although anything is better than the prevailing de facto price of zero. What we need to do is to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, to curtail their extraction at a pace and scale ambitious enough to stabilize the Earth’s climate by the middle of the century. This is the goal of the Paris Agreement. In practice, it means that high-consuming countries, like the United States, must cut their use of fossil fuels by about 8 or 9 percent per year, year after year, between now and 2050. The easiest way to arrive at the “right” price on carbon is to cap the amount of fossil fuels we allow to enter our economy to meet this trajectory. For each ton of carbon they sell, fossil fuel firms would have to surrender a permit. They would buy permits (up to the limit set by the cap that tightens over time) at auctions. This is not rocket science. Quarterly auctions have been held since 2009 under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for power plants in the northeastern states of the U.S. The carbon price comes about as a side effect of keeping fossil fuels in the ground, not as an end in itself.
In addition to climate stabilization, a side benefit of carbon dividends is that they would take a modest step toward reducing economic inequality, which has reached obscene levels in the U.S. and many other countries. Most households would come out ahead financially with carbon dividends, receiving more in dividends than they pay in higher fuel prices, for the simple reason that their carbon footprints are smaller than average. High-income households with their outsized consumption of carbon, and everything else, would pay more than they get back, but they can afford it.
You have also argued for a universal basic income as a solution to inequality and the effects of global warming. How would a universal income be funded, and would it be an addition to existing welfare programs or a replacement for them?
Correction: Universal basic income can be part of the solution. Guaranteed employment can also be part of the solution, and as my colleagues Bob Pollin and his coauthors have shown, the clean energy transition will generate millions of jobs. The extent to which existing welfare programs become redundant would depend on how much money we’re talking about. A big advantage of universal income, compared to means-tested welfare payments, is that it unites society rather than dividing it between the welfare-eligible poor and everyone else. Universality helps to ensure political durability, as we’ve seen with Social Security and Medicare here in the U.S.
For universal basic income, a key question is how to pay for it. Most proposals rely on government funding. But redistributive taxation can be a heavy lift, and its durability is never certain since it depends on the vagaries of party politics. This is one reason I favor universal property as a source of universal basic income [universal property refers to the idea of a universal birthright to an equal share of co-inherited wealth]. Carbon dividends are one example. In his new book, Ours: The Case for Universal Property (Polity Press, 2021), Peter Barnes discusses a number of other possibilities.
We now know that dramatic mass climate catastrophe is inevitable, especially for mega-cities and coastal populations. What are the sorts of changes (involving migration, changes in how cities are structured, changes in how nations relate to each other, technologies, etc.) that could help humans as a global community weather these catastrophes without massive human deaths? And what are the sorts of pressures and dynamics (protests, legislation, international cooperation) that would actually make these changes imaginable to implement in time?
Every year that passes without serious policies to keep fossil carbon in the ground, where it belongs, increases the suffering that climate change will inflict. Coastal populations will be among the most seriously affected, but they will not be alone. Drought-prone regions in Africa, for example, are at grave risk, too.
Not long ago, proponents of action to halt climate change (“mitigation” in the official lingo), including many governments in the Global South, were averse to discussing adaptation, fearing that it would let the big polluters off the mitigation hook. Times have changed. Today, the need for adaptation is urgent and undeniable. The key questions are how adaptation resources will be allocated across and within countries, and who will foot the bill.
In principle, the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international treaty which today has near-universal membership, addresses the “who will pay” question by saying that countries will contribute “in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” The advanced industrialized countries bear greater responsibility and have greater capabilities, so they should pay for adjustment costs accordingly. Whether and to what extent this principle will be translated into concrete action remains an open question. So far, the results have not been encouraging.
The issue of how scarce resources for adaptation will be allocated — and whatever happens, they will be scarce relative to needs — is a critical question that has yet to receive much serious attention. If allocation obeys the default setting prescribed by neoclassical economics, the lives and properties of richer people will get priority over those of the poor because that the rich have greater ability (and hence willingness) to pay. Sea walls will be constructed to protect the “most valuable” real estate in Manhattan and Mumbai, for example, diverting flood waters to the locales where poor people live. In my view, this would be a travesty, adding injury to insult. If we believe that a clean and safe environment is a human right, not a commodity that should be allocated on the basis of purchasing power, then adaptation policies ought to prioritize those at greatest risk regardless of their ability to pay. Protests, legislation, international cooperation — all of these will be needed to make this happen. This is not just a matter of economics and ethics; it’s a matter of life and death.
A think tank has warned that the extent of the cost of living crisis is going to become so bad that it will hit people like a recession. Nearly every part of society is going to see a fall in their living standards. Most notably, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will shave £10bn in real terms off people’s social security. Plus, child poverty rates for some groups could hit nearly 80%.
But the think tank has also issued an even starker warning. Because much of this analysis doesn’t factor in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And where it has forecast this in, the collapse in people’s incomes could be worse than the 2007/08 financial crash; a level not seen since the late 1970s.
how household incomes and inequalities may change over the next five years
The report uses government, Bank of England, and Office for Budget Responsibility data. The Resolution Foundation then uses its own modelling to work out what will happen to living standards. Overall, It paints a grim picture. The report’s key takeaways are:
“High inflation will squeeze incomes in 2022”.
DWP social security rises “will not keep up with price rises”.
“Tax rises and increasing housing costs” are going to hit people’s pockets.
“Real incomes will take a huge hit in 2022-23, and potentially fall again in 2023-24”.
“A drop in poverty in 2020-21 has probably already been undone”.
The full report makes for even worse reading – especially for people reliant on the DWP.
Everyone will be worse off
Overall, the report says everyone will be on average £1,000 worse off (excluding retired people) in 2022/23 than in 2021/22. It states that even without the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:
real incomes are currently projected to be lower in 2026-27 than in 2021-22, and the period from 2019-20 to 2024-25 is currently on track to be the worst parliament on record for income growth
The report says the collapse in living standards will be worse for people reliant on the DWP.
The poorest: hit the hardest
The report says that inflation means the DWP will effectively cut social security by £10bn in 2022/23. This will take its value to the lowest levels since the mid-1980s. But moreover, as a proportion of everyone else’s average weekly earning, DWP social security will be at its lowest on record:
Social security rates will recover in the years after this, but only to the levels the DWP set in April 2021. Plus as the report states, the benefit cap isn’t changing. This will mean many families won’t see the full impact of the social security rises after 2022/23 anyway. People affected by the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) and the two-child limit will see a similar impact.
Meanwhile, rent prices for social housing are set to increase proportionally more than rents for private sector accommodation in the next three financial years:
Back to the 1970s?
When the report does factor in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it says that in April 2022, inflation could hit 8.3%. If this happens, it would mean the collapse in real income would be the most drastic since the late 70s/early 1980s:
From 2020/21 to 2026/27, the poorest people are predicted to see repeated falls in their overall income – whereas the richest will eventually see theirs rise:
All this will lead, as the Resolution Foundation says, to poverty increasing again, and the:
prevalence of absolute child poverty is projected to be higher in 2026-27 than in 2019-20, with a large rise between 2020-21 and 2022-23 even before we consider the impact of the war in Ukraine
It will be worse for children in larger families with those in four-child and more families seeing their poverty rate hit nearly 80%:
An ongoing disaster
The poorest people in the UK are facing a disaster on top of the cost of living crisis that has already begun. Those reliant on the DWP are facing a collapse in income not seen in decades. It will come after years of cuts and freezes. And with the effect of the Russian invasion of Ukraine still not clear, the 2020s could be another lost decade for countless people. Moreover, as the Resolution Foundation’s analysis shows, the fact living standards can fall so low without us being technically in a recession shows that the way we measure the economy is weighted towards measuring the situation of the rich rather than society at large.
The poorest people cannot be punished while the government allows the richest to prosper. So, protest and community organising in the face of this crisis is more important than ever.
After amassing more than $100,000 in debt over more than two decades of farming, a Georgia-based farmer named Denver got welcome news last year from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers like him would be eligible for a new debt relief program. USDA would pay off certain loans and give him a little extra for tax liabilities.
Denver did not receive a payment. But almost a year later, he received another letter: A notice that USDA intends to take legal action to collect the money he owes the agency. Denver asked the Center for Public Integrity not to use his last name out of fear of retaliation.
“We know that institutional discrimination is systemic within USDA,” said Tracy Lloyd McCurty, executive director of the Black Belt Justice Center. “So then the question is, how many other Black farmers around the country are experiencing this and they just don’t know who to reach out to about it?”
How Denver and other farmers like him got here is a confusing mix of bureaucracy, policy choices and litigation. Farmers and advocates fear massive land loss and foreclosures if this legal muddle doesn’t get straightened out. Data the Center for Public Integrity received through a Freedom of Information Act request also suggests that the USDA violated its own promise to suspend debt collections during the pandemic.
But we’ll start from the beginning.
In January 2021, USDA promised it would suspend debt collections, foreclosures and other adverse actions on borrowers with direct farm loans, made between the Farm Service Agency and the borrower, given the economic hardship posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
That decision was followed up by the American Rescue Plan Act. The new law included a $4 billion program to cancel certain farm loan debts farmers of color owe the Farm Service Agency, a USDA subagency that provides loans to agricultural producers. The law energized Black and other farmers of color who have long faced discrimination by the department, which has approved access to credit at lower rates and provided inequitable program payments than white farmers received.
Eligible farmers such as Denver received notices from USDA that spelled out exactly how much it would pay to wipe out their debts, including 20% to cover tax liabilities.
As USDA prepared to implement the new law last year, eligible farmers were told they wouldn’t be punished for failing to make payments. So Denver stopped.
But legal challenges from white farmers claiming reverse discrimination were filed in several states. Eventually a federal judge stopped USDA from implementing the program and allowed a class action lawsuit to proceed.
“That’s one of the most heartbreaking situations that I’ve observed in my 30-plus years as a lawyer working with farmers,” said Susan Schneider, director of the LL.M. Program in Agricultural and Food Law at the University of Arkansas School of Law. “The USDA’s enjoined. They can’t really do anything.”
Advocates and farmers including John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, say they’ve received little communication about the status of the debt relief program. Boyd said last July the White House promised a meeting with President Biden. Weeks ago, he requested another with USDA Secretary Thomas Vilsack, but neither has happened.
As the year drew to a close, Denver and other farmers began receiving notices that USDA wanted to collect their debts. Some had liens put on their crops and initially weren’t paid so that the funds could be used to pay their loans.
“Why won’t they stop sending us papers if you done promised us they’re going to do something for us?” said Denver, a peanut and livestock farmer.
The USDA announced Feb. 1 that it was required by law to send the notices and “doesn’t intend to take any action that’s indicated,” Zach Ducheneaux, administrator of the Farm Service Agency, said in a video. That law, the Agriculture Credit Act of 1987, was designed to help borrowers learn about various loan-serving tools so that they can get out of financial trouble. Direct loan borrowers can expect another letter that more fully explains their loan servicing options, which they can exercise without having missed a payment.
“USDA’s recent actions to provide clarity to struggling farmers is a step in the right direction,” U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., said in a statement to Public Integrity. Warnock alerted Secretary Vilsack to Georgia farmers facing potential adverse actions in a letter dated Dec. 10.
Despite the attempts to clear up the confusion, the USDA letters have sowed confusion and distress among borrowers.
“It’s very confusing for the farmers, and they’ve needed a lot of information from our offices because they’ve been told one thing, and then they’re getting documentation that says another thing,” said Dãnia Davy, director of land retention and advocacy at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. “It just hasn’t been very clear to farmers what their obligations are.”
The USDA’s suspension of debt collections, foreclosures and other adverse actions is expected to continue so long as the national COVID-19 disaster declaration is in place, now set to expire March 1. But data the Center for Public Integrity obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request suggests that the department has continued to collect eligible debts.
The USDA did not respond to requests for comment.
Is USDA garnishing earnings?
The USDA offers two types of loans. Direct loans are made between the Farm Service Agency and the borrower. Guaranteed loans are made by a traditional lender but backed by the Farm Service Agency. Both programs are directed to borrowers that cannot get reasonable credit terms elsewhere.
In January 2021, the USDA suspended debt collections and foreclosures on direct loans. It asked agency-guaranteed lenders to follow its lead, but they are not bound by USDA’s policy.
Despite the suspension, the USDA collected about $538,000 in debts from Feb. 1 to Nov. 25, 2021, according to data the Center for Public Integrity obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. About 16.1% of those funds were collected among people of color.
The USDA told Public Integrity it needed to clarify some of the data, but did not follow up with any information including a response to specific questions such as why debt offsets and wage garnishments appear to have continued after USDA announced their suspension.
Meanwhile, a coalition of groups representing farmers and ranchers of color is trying to learn whether farmers will see similar collections as a result of the debt relief program being on hold, but it’s a tough question to answer, Davy said. Based on conversations with USDA officials, she thinks they’re trying to be optimistic about the program still going forward.
“I think they don’t want to concede any negative outcome pending the litigation,” Davy said. “I think they’re hoping there’ll be some other ways to work around this case scenario of massive foreclosures and land loss.”
As for Denver, his next USDA loan payment is due in coming months. He’s going to restart payments even if they’re not required. He doesn’t want to fall further behind.
“I work too hard to get where I’m at,” Denver said. “I’m not finna give these people my land because you done promised me something, and you don’t live up to your end of the bargain.”
The shuttering of small businesses during the pandemic has had a lasting change on the flavor of local communities. Now, businesses that survived are at risk due to the closure of bank branches that fuel local economies.
A new report by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that the monthly closure rate of bank branches doubled during the pandemic, resulting in the disappearance of over 4,000 branches from March 2020 to October 2021. Those closures hit low-to-moderate income and communities of color hard, the report’s authors found.
How did we get here?
Following the 2008 Great Recession, big banks merged and consolidated, then acquired small banks and their branches. A shift to internet and mobile-based financial transactions also contributed to the loss of commercial banking companies. As a result, communities saw a decline in small banks with local branches where residents knew their tellers or small business owners had a relationship with a loan officer.
The trend accelerated in 2020, as banks cut costs by eliminating brick-and-mortar locations.
During the pandemic, branch closures exceeded the peak of closures following the Great Recession. From October to December 2020, nearly 1,500 branches closed.
A third of the 7,425 branches that closed from 2017 to 2021 were in neighborhoods with low-to-moderate-income households or where a majority of people of color lived, NCRC’s analysis of Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data found.
“Even a small number of closures can have an enormous impact on these communities that already have few branches to choose from,” the authors wrote.
Portland, Oregon, saw the most bank branch closures of any metro area from 2017 to 2021, losing 20% of its bank branches. Hartford, Connecticut, and Baltimore ranked second, each losing 14% of their bank branches.
The biggest banks closed the most branches, with Wells Fargo topping the list at 993 closures. Mergers drove the closures of most brick-and-mortar locations, the report’s authors found. Of the top 25 banks that closed branches since 2017, over half the companies had pursued or completed mergers.
And the pace of closures doesn’t appear to be slowing. Grand Rapids, Michigan, which had the highest increase in the nation, saw 36 branches close during the pandemic, compared to 1 during the previous 20 months. Boston saw 55 pandemic closures, 14 times what it saw before the pandemic.
“This suggests banks are simply rushing to close as many branches as they can, as quickly as they can, anywhere they can,” the authors wrote in the report.
When banks close branches, they reduce operating and staff costs. “In the sense of a merger, it saves a lot of money. If you’re a bank investor, you’re looking for reasons to support the merger,” Jason Richardson, NCRC’s senior director of research and one of the report’s authors, said in an interview.
In areas with bank closures, small business lending declines. Small businesses that have relationships with a branch may no longer have a contact at a bank when it closes.
“It may make it harder for them to access credit when they need it or expand their business,” Richardson said.
More people have turned to mobile and internet banking services in recent years, but those don’t fully replace physical bank branches, said Bruce Mitchell, NCRC’s senior research analyst and co-author of the report. During the pandemic, bank closures have disproportionately hit rural communities and low-income adults, many of whom lack access to mobile banking and have greater need for in-person locations. According to a 2021 Pew Research survey, 43% of adults with lower incomes lack broadband services.
A 2019 survey by the FDIC found that most “banked” respondents – those with at least one member of the household with a checking or savings account – had visited a bank in the past year. “Branches still matter,” Richardson said. “They’re important for small business lending, particularly where there’s little investment already.”
The report’s authors recommended that the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to meet the credit needs of communities where they operate, be extended to non-bank financial services.
“With the increase in the number of banks that aren’t relying upon a geography defined by their bank branches,” Mitchell said, “the CRA desperately needs to be modernized to reflect this very changing financial market that we have in this country.”
In news that will anger a lot of people, banks look set to give their staff the biggest bonuses since the 2007-08 financial crash. At a time when the rest of us face a huge cost of living crisis, the banks’ actions will probably turn your stomach.
Bankers: laughing all the way to the…
The Guardianreported on bankers’ bonuses and pay. It noted that:
Mergers and acquisitions bankers got fees of £2.6bn in 2021. These bankers advise on company mergers.
HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and NatWest are “expected” to say they’re paying out £4bn in bonuses.
3,519 UK bankers earned more than £835,000 in 2021.
NatWest is expected to announce £4bn in profit for 2021 – while the public still own over 50% of it.
Overall, banks profits are expected to be £34bn – the highest since 2007.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are in the shit.
A crisis for the rest of us
As The Canary previously reported, the UK is facing its biggest cost of living crisis in recent years:
2.5 million families are struggling to pay rent and heat their homes.
Energy companies are putting prices up by over £600 a year.
The Tories are hiking national insurance by over 10%.
Over two million people could be destitute – the most extreme form of poverty.
Of course, all this comes after a decade of austerity – one which the bankers caused.
A decade of chaos
Successive governments cut 14% of all public sector spending in the last decade. This hit people reliant on social security particularly hard. Because Tory reform of the Department for Work and Pensions in 2016 led to policies like the:
Benefit cap: £1.62bn cut.
Benefit freeze: £10.2bn cut; 30% of households saw a reduction in money.
Two child limit: £5.35bn cut, affecting 3.8 million families.
“Abolition of £30 a week support for disabled people who were unfit for work (ESA WRAG)”: £1.365bn cut, affecting half a million disabled and sick people.
But clearly, none of this matters to the richest people in the UK. Because while bankers are getting huge bonuses, the Tories also recently gave the banks a tax cut. It shows that shocking inequality still exists in the UK. And it also shows that our country is still one of the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.
The poorest households are taking another hit to their finances. People could see broadband bills rise by 10% this year. It comes amid the ongoing Tory-enabled cost of living crisis and is yet another blow to households already struggling.
Cost of living: the crisis
The UK is facing its biggest cost of living crisis in recent years. As The Canary has already documented:
2.5 million families are struggling to pay rent and heat their homes.
15% of households live in food insecurity.
4% of households have used a foodbank.
In the coming months, things will get worse:
The Department for Work and Pensions is making a real terms cut to people’s social security.
Energy companies are putting prices up by over £600 a year.
The Tories are hiking national insurance by over 10%.
Over two million people could be destitute – the most extreme form of poverty.
And now, another area of people’s lives is set to become even more unaffordable – potentially impacting many other areas.
Communications: spiralling prices
Ofcom is the communications regulator. It deals with television, radio, internet, and telecommunications. On Tuesday 15 February, it released a report into how affordable communications services are. Ofcom’s findings showed that the price of mobile phones and broadband was also impacting the overall cost of living crisis. As the Guardianreported, Ofcom warned that mobile, telephone, and broadband bills could go up by over 10% this year. Based on an average bill, this would see households facing a yearly rise of just under £40.
This higher than inflation increase comes against a backdrop of people already struggling to keep up with their bills. Ofcom found that:
1.1m households (5%) are struggling with the affordability of their broadband. This included people cancelling services, missing payments, or cutting back on food to pay for it.
1m (4%) households are struggling with the affordability of their smart phone.
Predictably, it was the poorest households and those reliant on social security who struggled the most. Ofcom said that 11% of them were struggling with the affordability of broadband with 3% of low-income households cancelling services because they couldn’t afford them. Moreover, over 1m households (5%) don’t even have home broadband. They rely on mobile data for internet access or other devices. And 7% of this group struggled with these costs.
Social tariffs
Ofcom says part of the solution to broadband being too expensive is social tariffs. As it noted:
Special discounted broadband packages… are available to an estimated 4.2 million households in receipt of Universal Credit.
But only 55,000 homes have taken advantage of these discounted rates so far – just 1.2 per cent of those eligible. That means that millions of benefits recipients are missing out on an average annual broadband saving of £144 each.
Currently there are eight social tariffs available. Some of them are also available to people claiming other types of social security. But the prices and speeds of connection vary:
Ofcom says that 84% of social security claimants don’t even know about social tariffs. This is despite 6.8m households potentially being entitled to them.
Wider implications
Moreover, if people struggle to pay phone and broadband bills and get cut off, this will directly impact on other areas. For example, take the “out-of-work” Universal Credit claimant who Ofcom says spends 8.3% of their disposable income on broadband. They have to manage their social security claim online, so no internet or mobile data would mean chaos.
Historically, if you didn’t have internet access you could visit a library. But with Tory-led austerity closing over 800 libraries as of 2019, this is becoming less of an option. For children, the effect on education has also been stark, highlighted further by the pandemic. As Ofcom wrote:
4% [of children] relied solely on mobile internet access during the pandemic – with 2% only able to get online using a smartphone. School-aged children from the most financially vulnerable homes (5%) were more likely than those in the least financially vulnerable households (2%) to have mobile-only access.
Additionally, around one in five children (17%) did not have consistent access to a suitable device for their online home-learning. This increased to 27% of children from households classed as most financially vulnerable.
And none of this addresses the 3.3 million people in 2020 who had still never even used the internet. This figure includes two million chronically ill and disabled people.
A perfect storm for the poorest people
Struggling to eat, heat, and fuel their homes, the poorest people were already facing social exclusion, financial devastation, and overall socioeconomic hardship. Now, with the added impact of potentially no internet access, the situation for some of the most deprived and marginalised people in the UK is looking even more desperate.
So, community support and cohesion is crucial. We all need to be active in our local areas – offering mutual aid where needed and ensuring as few people as possible fall through the ever increasing cracks in a system collapsing in on itself.
Among the 15 members of a new Equity Commission charged with dismantling discrimination at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one name stood out: Shirley Sherrod.
Sherrod rose to national prominence more than a decade ago when right-wing website Breitbart selectively edited video of Sherrod, then the USDA’s Georgia state rural development director, telling an audience about the time she overcame her own prejudices to help a farmer hold on to his land. Instead, the video made it sound like Sherrod had discriminated against the farmer because he was white.
A media frenzy ensued. Sherrod was swiftly fired by Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack, who led the department under both Obama terms. He’s leading it again now.
Sherrod was offered her job back once it became clear that the video misrepresented her words. She declined, and instead focused on her longtime grassroots work that includes pushing for social justice with New Communities, a nonprofit farm collective.
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This time around, Vilsack’s administration has pledged to dismantle systemic racism at the department despite decades of mistreatment toward farmers of color in loans, program payments, civil rights complaints and more. The new Equity Commission, and its subcommittee on agriculture, are full of longtime critics of the department.
But other critics don’t think it’s possible to fix the department with Vilsack at the helm. They say USDA has published plenty of reports and recommendations over decades that spell out what it needs to do.
“The key is, this Equity Commission is nothing but a farce,” Lawrence Lucas, president emeritus of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, told Public Integrity last month. “They can only find out what we already know.”
Public Integrity asked Sherrod about some of the criticisms of the new commission following its announcement Thursday, and began with the obvious question: Terrible things happened to you under Secretary Vilsack before. Why do you want to serve under him again?
*This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
One of the things I’ve always had to do was not allow some of the stumbling blocks, as I call them, get in my way of trying to push for progress. That happened about 12 years ago and Vilsack apologized. I accepted his apology and moved on. So this commission has the opportunity to try to do some good, and when you look at my life’s work, I’ve encountered the issues farmers have, working with them at the grassroots level, and then I worked within the agency for about 11 months. So I think I’m one individual who would have an insight that a lot of them won’t have, having worked in this for the last 50-something years.
There are critics of the commission who say that USDA knows what it needs to do to root out racism in the department. Is the Equity Commission necessary? What will the Equity Commission deliver in its own report that will be different?
I’m well aware of all of the reports that have happened before now; the [Civil Rights Action Team] report and others. And I’m hoping we’ll go even further with pointing out some of the things that happened within the agency, but this is a way of bringing it back to the forefront and really pushing at this time for some of the change.
Those other reports are there, we’re all aware of them, but what’s happening? To have this commission at this time really working and pushing for a change is another effort that has to happen.
A lot of Black farmers believe that USDA is trying to take their land. You, too, had a terrible experience in the 1980s when the [then-Farmers Home Administration] foreclosed and took your land. How can this commission build the trust that’s needed with Black farmers?
Trust doesn’t just happen. But when you’ve spent your whole life working on these issues. I can ride about this area of the state and in some others and look at “Oh, I helped that farmer to save his farm.” I’ve been there for these farmers. I don’t want them to think that I can perform miracles.
But as I said during that speech that Breitbart took and edited to make it appear that I refused to help a white farmer, if I can look at all of the dangerous times I’ve been through, all the work that I did with others through the years and say, “OK, here’s another opportunity. Let’s try to see what we can make happen at this time.”
If you don’t do anything, then what? I’ve worked at the grassroots level most of my work life. I grew up on a farm. My father was murdered by a white farmer who wasn’t prosecuted. I can hopefully be an example for others to say, “Let’s try one more time to trust the process and see what we can get out of it.”
The debt relief program that was in the American Rescue Plan Act last year is something Black farmers in particular fought long and hard for, and now the program is on hold. And some say that Secretary Vilsack took too long to implement the program, allowing groups to organize and file lawsuits. Overall, some say it’s another example of the ways in which USDA continues to fail Black farmers. How do you respond to that?
It would have been great if they had quickly implemented the process and I’m sure if they had started it, there would have been lawsuits to try to reverse everything that was going on when you look at who we have to deal with. These folks have been organizing maybe when we were asleep. So they’re way ahead of us in trying to be able to stop any change that comes forth.
My whole thing is, if we don’t do anything, then what? If we sit back, what are we waiting to see happen? You’ve got to keep working and I have this thing on my desk that says, success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures. Who knows whether this is going to be that time or not. I know the climate in this country is not that great for it, but we can’t stop trying.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I will be doing my best. We’ve had many different efforts through the years. To serve on this commission was an opportunity to share some of the things that I know from having advocated for farmers through the years and having fought many of their battles through the years. I’m just hoping that I can help the group to see, and that we can help each other to see what we can do this time, that could be that time when there is success and not another failure.
The Conservative Party is once again causing an explosion in destitution. That’s the verdict of a new report. The think tank behind it previously warned that the number of families living in the poorest conditions had already sharply increased. And now, its warning is even more dire. Because government policies from the likes of Rishi Sunak could leave over two million people in the most abject of poverty.
One year ago…
The Canaryreported just under a year ago on the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). It looked into destitution levels in 2020. This is defined as:
a two-adult household living on less than £100 a week and a single-adult household on less than £70 a week after housing costs.
In real-world terms, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says destitution is:
going without the essentials we all need to eat, stay warm and dry, and keep clean.
In February 2021, NIESR said that destitution in 2020 had more than doubled. It found that the number of households living in this level of poverty had gone up from 197,400 to 421,500. NIESR also found that the amount of destitution was different across the UK. For example, in the North West of England rates were three times higher than the UK figure. And NIESR’s research is against a backdrop of increasing social decay.
Now, NIESR has produced another report. It says that destitution this year is once again going to explode.
“Powering Down”
NIESR released a report called Powering Down, Not Levelling Up. In it, NIESR made various economic forecasts. For example, it:
NIESR also looked at the government’s “levelling up” plan. It said that with no new money, the plan “severely limits the prospect for regional regeneration”. In real terms, NIESR said:
by the end of 2024, poorer regions in the North of England and the devolved nations will on average be some £7,500 worse off in terms of disposable income per person than in London and the South East.
NIESR also forecasts an increase in destitution for the financial year 2022-23. And it was this which was of most concern.
Destitution: set to explode
In short, the think tank said that based on its forecasts and current government policies, the number of destitute households will spiral. It said the:
impact of this inflation in energy and food prices is a 31 per cent rise in destitution, bringing the total number of destitute households to about 1 million.
It’s difficult to quantify how many people this will be. Previously as the Guardiannoted, 2020’s 220,000 rise in destitute households may have equated to around 500,000 people. So, based on that, NIESR’s forecast of one million destitute households could potentially mean over 2.2 million people will be living in the most abject poverty.
NIESR also said that the effects of destitution would be different across the UK. Despite the government’s levelling up agenda, this extreme poverty would hit the West Midlands and North East very hard. But its the North of Ireland that would destitution could hit the hardest:
The government: creating a crisis
The NIESR report paints a bleak picture of the next year. As it summed up:
The costs-of-living crisis is hitting the lowest income households hardest, as they spend a greater proportion of their income on fuel and food, while neither wage growth nor welfare benefits compensate for fast-rising inflation.
It also noted that the impact among the lowest income households would vary. This is because, as NIESR said, government changes to social security and the minimum wage:
benefit a slightly different segment of the population – not the poorest who are without stable jobs and falling through the cracks of the welfare system, but the poor yet slightly better off households who are lucky to retain their jobs.
However, even this small gain for this segment will soon be wiped out by increases in National Insurance contributions
2022-23 will see a perfect storm of destitution – created by the government – hit the poorest people in the UK. The economic and social shock will be huge. But the physical and mental impact of this on people already struggling will be even greater. Community will be everything – and as a community, we need to come together to support each other in the face of the government’s economic and social carnage.
ReShonda Young is trying to do something nobody in the country has managed in more than 20 years. Open a new Black-owned bank.
In the second season of The Heist, we follow her quest to confront the enormous wealth gap between Black and white Americans with tools of the banking system that has helped perpetuate it. And we tell the story of that gap, a centuries-long heist pulled off through virulent discrimination.
Here’s the thing: To open a bank, you need to raise a lot of money. And if you’re aiming for majority Black ownership, the wealth gap will fight back every step of the way.
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Season 2 Credits
Host/reporter: Jamie Smith Hopkins
Producers: Camille Petersen and Mitchell Johnson
Associate Producer: Isabel Carter
Executive producer: Gretta Cohn
Managing producer: Wilson Sayre
Editors: Sara Nics, Shoshi Shmuluvitz, Jennifer LaFleur and Matt DeRienzo
Contributing Editor: Jordan Bailey
Mix engineer: Rick Kwan
Design and audience engagement: Lisa Yanick Litwiller, Janeen Jones, Ashley Clarke and Alex Eichenstein
Urgent protection for minority groups facing increased repression needed in crisis connected to escalating clashes across central Asian ex-Soviet region, say human rights groups
Parents of men killed by Tajikistan forces have called on the international community to step in and urgently protect ethnic groups being targeted by the Tajik regime.
In a rare interview, families from the Pamiri ethnic minority have demanded that soldiers who killed their sons be brought to justice and urged the UN to prevent a new phase of conflict in Tajikistan, a landlocked country in central Asia.
In El Carmen de Bolívar, LGBTQ+ people want the history of their brutal persecution by police and paramilitaries to be told, but the sense of safety is fragile and many still face prejudice
Photography by Sam Ritholtz
In a mountain town near the north coast of Colombia, three drag queens strike poses in the blazing sun. Wearing extravagant Caribbean carnival costumes, they place each high heeled step carefully to avoid puddles. Neighbours come out to take photos and cheer.
This impromptu show has unique significance in the streets of El Carmen de Bolívar, representing the remarkable resurgence of a community once brutally victimised by homophobic armed groups.
Oxfam’s latest report on global inequality has highlighted some alarming statistics on how wealth distribution has worsened during the pandemic. While the wealth of the world’s 10 richest men doubled since the pandemic began, the incomes of 99% of humanity became worse off because of COVID-19. What are the solutions to this crisis?
Only two of the government briefings held at the height of the coronavirus pandemic were led by a female politician, and in both cases it was the home secretary, Priti Patel, a report into gender representation across the UK’s top jobs has shows.
The 2022 Sex and Power Index, compiled by the Fawcett Society, a charity campaigning for women’s rights, showed equality is still “decades off”, as men continue to dominate the top ranks of law, politics and business.
In the early weeks of the pandemic, novelist and activist Arundhati Roy brilliantly laid out the stakes of one of the coronavirus’s reverberating impacts. According to Roy, COVID-19 profoundly disrupted everyone’s modes of living under global capitalism. “It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a halt,” she wrote. Roy then powerfully asserted that the pandemic was — among other things — “a portal,” or a moment for us to “temporarily, perhaps … make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it [capitalism] or look for a better engine.”
The rebellions against state violence the following summer, prompted by the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and others, also contributed to the sense that we were on the precipice of a reckoning. Millions of people around the world took to the streets to protest against structural racism in a multitude of ways — marching, direct action, property destruction, and the tearing down of monuments to racism and colonialism.
Like today’s racial justice organizers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also wrestled with a national and international reckoning in the last years of his life by questioning the “giant triplets” of racism, materialism and militarism at the base of U.S. society. In his “Beyond Vietnam” sermon delivered in April 1967, King issued a damning condemnation of the war in Vietnam and U.S. militarism. “They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home,” King said, “and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” In an interview 10 days before his assassination, King told Rabbi Everett Gendler, “[W]e’ve got to face the fact that America is a racist country. We have got to face the fact that racism still occupies the throne of our nation.” He continued, “I don’t think we will ultimately solve the problem of racial injustice until this is recognized, and until this is worked on.”
In his last Sunday sermon, King articulated an analysis of the reckoning in what might serve as the closest equivalent to Roy’s analysis of the pandemic as a portal. In “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” King told the audience that they were living through a revolutionary moment, in fact, a “triple revolution” — a revolution in computer technology, “a revolution in weaponry” and “a human rights revolution.” After laying out the stakes, King implored Americans to respond to the moment by developing a global perspective when dealing with poverty, racism, colonialism and war. Americans desperately needed to change their priorities. Ultimately, to do this, as King wrote a year before, Americans needed to undergo a “a radical revolution of values” if it hoped to defeat the giant triplets.
And how might Americans take advantage of this potentially revolutionary moment? For King, the answer lay in building a coalition of poor people and workers and engaging in mass civil disobedience. He told the crowd who watched his last Sunday sermon that, “We are coming to Washington in a poor people’s campaign.” And King planned for this coalition to disrupt the normal operations of government until Congress took proper action to eradicate poverty. He speculated in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, “If 100,000 Negroes march in a major city to a strategic location, they will make municipal operations difficult to conduct; they will exceed the capacity of even the most reckless local government to use force against them; and they will repeat this action daily if necessary.” If the triple revolution was a portal for King, the poor people’s campaign would burst through it.
In today’s world, as in King’s, it’s clear that the Democratic Party is not the vehicle for our pursuit “for a better engine.” Right now, under a Biden presidency, we have broken records in the number of coronavirus infections. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) recent confusing guidelines for work and schooling seem to be more concerned with preventing further disruptions to the economy. The federal government has pulled the plug on the range of economic benefits keeping people out of poverty, such as rent relief, expanded unemployment benefits and the monthly enhanced child tax credit payments. Unequal vaccine distribution on the part of the U.S., global corporations and the rest of the West leaves much of the world at risk of emerging variants. Yet, we continue to live in a moment where the U.S. Congress can pass giant defense budgets in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion.
Continuing his crusade against militarism in the weeks before his assassination in 1968, King argued for redistributing resources away from militarism to ending poverty and promoting jobs, health care, education and housing. King also issued a warning about the direction of the U.S. that aptly describes our existential crises of entrenched economic inequality, a deadly pandemic and climate change. He told members of Local 1199 National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees on March 10, 1968, “Something is wrong with the ship of state. It is not moving toward new and more secure shores, but toward old destructive rocks.”
However, the work of grassroots movements continues in our time, as it did in King’s: Since the beginning of the pandemic, hundreds of activists in cities like Portland, Oregon, and universities such as the University of Southern California have rallied around the demand “Care Not Cops” in an effort to reorient priorities away from criminalization, policing and incarceration, and toward an ethic of care. This ethic of care applies not only to fighting against racist state violence, but also to developing COVID-19 mutual aid efforts. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) continued the trend of workers exercising leverageto secure better COVID-19 protections to improve working and learning conditions for educators and students. Although antiwar organizing and protests have not garnered as much attention, organizations like Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition continue leading antiwar protests against U.S. bombing in the Middle East. Indigenous people and antiwar activists struck a win against U.S. militarism in Hawaii when they successfully forced the Navy to drain the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility at Pearl Harbor where its jet fuel leak in the water supply sickened thousands. O’ahu-based Water Protectors led protests and engaged in community organizing, while established groups like the Sierra Club amplified activists’ calls to shut down the facility.
Despite his recognition that the U.S. might pass through its revolutionary situation into a darker moment, King maintained Americans had a choice. Despite white resistance to civil rights, the Vietnam War and the federal government’s unwillingness to escalate the war against poverty, King told striking Black sanitation workers the night before his assassination, “[W]e, as a people will get to the promised land.”
The path to the promised land for King was through meeting the revolutionary moment by undergoing a revolution of values and a reevaluation of society. And while King did not minimize voting rights, he did not see the ballot box as the only strategy for restructuring a society. He strove to convince Americans, especially all his allies in the civil rights movement, of the importance of building a multiracial coalition of poor and working people and engaging in massive civil disobedience.
We are in a similar moment. Only mass action — combined with the slow work of grassroots power-building — can break through the crisis. To paraphrase Roy and King, we must constantly put our “bodies and souls in motion” in our search for a “better engine,” or a sustainable, and good, life. We cannot confront the portal meekly; we must burst through it.
Molly-Mae is just one in a long line of privileged people who peddle the myth that their success is simply down to hard work and self-belief, and that’s all it takes to ‘make it’. Curtis Daly explains why this is bullsh*t.
Video transcript
The idea that all you need to be “successful” in our society is to work hard, is as pervasive as it is toxic. It’s time for us to pick apart this myth.
Social media erupted after Instagram influencer Molly-Mae made comments about her success on The Diary of a CEO podcast.
As you saw from the video, Molly-Mae claims that the true path to success is an individual’s ability to just go for it, that we all have the same 24 hours in a day, and all we need to do to ‘make it’ is to work hard. Despite acknowledging different economic backgrounds, she then completely ignores it anyway and simply explains that if you want something bad enough, hard work equals success.
Her point is not a new one, it’s a classic Thatcherite take which we have all heard before.
Molly-Mae is completely wrong, and here’s why.
Firstly, we need to look at how we define success.
Most of Molly-Mae’s success came after appearing on Love Island, a scenario that doesn’t happen to most of us. Her chances of being on the show increased because she is white and meets societal beauty standards.
Molly-Mae is working with companies that profit from scandalous, poverty wages. Should we really call anyone successful when their wealth is created by the exploitation of people and the planet?
Off the back of Love Island, Molly-Mae secured a deal that earned her £500k in one year with Pretty Little Thing. The parent company is BooHoo, which was found to be paying their staff as little as £3.50 per hour in some instances. They also decided to keep their factories open during the height of the pandemic, with no regard for the health of their workers.
Molly-Mae, and other CEOs, are literally making money off low wages. She directly benefits from scandalous, poverty wages as it enriches her, and many others in her position.
Wage labour is exploitation. The value that you bring to the company is taken away from you, and then a cut of that value is given back to you.
Is this how we want to define “success”? Success should be about more than wealth accumulation. And should we really call anyone successful when their wealth is created by the exploitation of others?
Then there’s the question of whether just working hard gets you what you want.
Different walks of life do determine where you end up, or it’s at least an incredible indicator of someone’s future. If you’re born in a poorer household, then of course opportunities are limited; worse healthcare options, lower standards of education, harder to provide a varied and healthy diet and fewer social links to lucrative opportunities. The options you have are often limited at birth.
What if you are disabled, or suffer from chronic illnesses, and need support as a result? Without that support – and many sadly do go without it – how can we expect everyone to have access to the same level of opportunity in the same ‘24 hours in a day’?’.
With bigotry still prevalent in today’s society, opportunities for those in minority groups are often limited.
Austerity also negatively affects these groups much more, pushing individuals into worse economic situations.
The collapse of social democracy in favour of neoliberalism has had a huge impact on society at large, with a significant decline in social mobility.
The welfare state and public services have been slashed for over four decades. .
Neoliberalism has caused a huge spike in income inequality and people’s purchasing power has been in severe decline
It’s not because young people are buying too much avocado on toast that they’re struggling, it’s because the rules have changed.
Buying a house is out of reach of many people as a result of wages not keeping pace with skyrocketing costs.
A lot of the success stories you see in legacy media paint a picture of young individuals or couples in their early twenties purchasing their first home through a can-do attitude. But almost every single time you look a bit deeper, and see that it was actually thanks to mummy and daddy.
These stories are aimed at those who are lucky enough to even look at buying a house. In Britain we still have thousands who are homeless. What do we say to these people? Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps? One day you too can be invited on to a reality show that will almost certainly give you endless possibilities afterwards?
If only rough sleepers use that spare change given by passers by and just simply invested in a startup or Bitcoin ( and don’t get me started on crypto currency).
Then there’s the factor of necessity due to everyday struggles. Humans will look at more immediate solutions when in more desperate situations.
When we worry about putting food on our table, paying bills, and rent, this can be overwhelming. Our immediate needs mean that long term planning and decisions will always be on the back foot and are already much harder to achieve.
Let’s look at this in a more radical way.
The issue with Molly-Mae’s comments is fundamentally a problem with capitalism.
How can we expect those at the bottom to simply just work harder to become successful, when capitalism literally rigs the system against those without capital in favour of those with it. That is why economic inequality explodes in a free market system, and social policies from the government ameliorate it.
Whether you work in a factory, retail, or hospitality, let’s say you bring in hundreds or even thousands of pounds for the company in an hour. The value was made through your human labour, yet in return, you will only receive 8,10, or maybe even 15 pounds an hour. The remainder of that value is never to be seen.
This is the reality – the reality of inequality under capitalism. It’s also a reality that inequality is being exacerbated further through social policy or a lack thereof, which means we need to understand the idea that simply working hard equals success is a load of bullshit.
The response to COVID-19 proved that the federal government is far more capable of managing the economy than many people thought. What happens now that Bidenomics faces rising headwinds?
As companies extract wealth, villagers say they see little benefit and are instead exploited in quarries, live in homes damaged by blasts and are unable to farm polluted land
A convoy of trucks laden with huge black granite rocks trundles along the dusty pathway as a group of villagers look on grimly.
Every day more than 60 trucks take granite for export along this rugged road through Nyamakope village in the district of Mutoko, 90 miles east of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.
A year ago we had such high hopes. We expected the Covid vaccine rollout to bring a swift end to the pandemic, opening a window for pushing bold solutions to the long-standing economic, racial, and gender divides that had grown even wider under Covid.
Where are we as 2021 comes to a close? These 10 charts highlight major inequality developments of the year, covering some steps back and some important steps forward.
The Rich Have Gotten Richer by Squeezing Workers and Consumers
The combined wealth of the 745 U.S. billionaires surpassed $5 trillion in 2021, up 70 percent since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairnessanalysisof Forbes data.
U.S. corporate after-tax profits hit a record high of$2.5 trillionin the third quarter of 2021, further enriching wealthy executives and shareholders. One factor behind the profits spike: giant corporations have used the excuse of pandemic-related supply chain bottlenecks to jack uppricesfor gasoline, food, and other essentials.
Workers, particularly those at the bottom end of the wage scale, have gotten some long overdue pay increases. But these were not the result of any employer largesse. Instead, workers have gone on strike and taken other actions to leverage their power at a time of pandemic staffing challenges. Unfortunately, rising consumer prices are taking a bite out of those wage gains.
Job Growth Has Been Strong, But Racial Inequalities Persist
The U.S. economy had strong job growth in 2021. The January to November period saw the creation ofnearly 6 million new jobsand a decline in the unemployment rate from6.3 percent to 4.2 percent. But these improvements conceal persistent racial inequalities. As of October 2021, the unemployment rate was 7.9 percent among Black workers and 4.0 percent among whites, a wider gap than at the beginning of the pandemic, according toBLS data.
The decline in the unemployment rate also masks the exodus of millions of people from the labor force since the beginning of the pandemic. As of November 2021, there were 3.5 million fewer people in the U.S. labor force than before the pandemic. The drop has been most dramatic among Black women, a sign of how racial barriers compound pandemic-related health concerns and the shortage of affordable child care services.
Job and Wage Growth Would’ve Been Stronger If Corporations Hadn’t Blown Record Sums on Stock Buybacks
Corporations went on a stock buyback spree in 2021, spending a record$234 billionon share repurchases in the third quarter of the year. As analystshave long documented, stock buybacks artificially inflate executives’ stock-based pay and siphon off capital that could be used to raise worker wages or make other productive investments.
Pharma Greed Has Created a Global Vaccine Gap That Makes Us All Unsafe
So much for a swift end to the pandemic. On top of the anti-vaxxer problem, we’ve got more than a billion people in developing countries still without access to vaccines because of Big Pharma greed. Profiteering executives, including thefive newly minted billionairesat Moderna, have blocked patent waivers that would’ve boosted vaccine production around the world.
In late November, the number ofvaccine doses administered per 100 peoplewas more than 18 times higher in high-income than low-income countries. The costs of this greed-driven global vaccine gap became painfully clear when the Omicron variant discovered in South Africa quickly spread across borders.
The Pandemic Greed Grab Boosted Support for Taxing the Rich to Pay for Vital Public Investments
A Vox and Data for Progresspoll, conducted October 8-12, found that 71 percent of voters support increasing taxes on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans to pay for the Build Back Better Act. This landmark bill, which passed the House in November and appears close to becoming law, is expected to raise nearly $2 trillion from the wealthy and big corporations to invest in human and environmental needs.
TheTax Policy Centerpredicts the top 0.1 percent will see their after-tax income drop by 5.9 percent while the poorest 20 percent will see their income rise by 4.4 percent in the law’s first year. The bill will also raise significant new revenue from corporations, including through atax on stock buybacks.
One noteworthy Build Back Better tax on the wealthy is a surtax on annual incomes above $10 million. Ultra-rich households will face an additional 5 percentage-point tax on annual gross income (including investment earnings) over $10 million and an 8 percentage-point surtax on income over $25 million. The first dollar of income over that $25 million, in other words, will face a 45 percent tax, instead of the usual 37 percent top marginal income tax rate.
The $230 billion projected to be raisedfrom this surtax on mega-millionaires will cover the cost of many of the Build Back Better law’s major investments. According to White House estimates, this surtax revenue is the equivalent of the combined cost of providing over 6 million children free preschool, increasing the maximum Pell Grant allowance for over 5 million students, building 1 million affordable homes, and helping hundreds of thousands of first-time homebuyers purchase a house.
One group likely to owe the surtax: corporate CEOs. In 2020, nearly 70 percent of chief executives at S&P 500 firms made more than$10 millionjust through their paycheck income — not even counting their investment earnings, which will also face the same surtax levels.
Contributing more to public investments is the least that wealthy CEOs should do to make up for decades of extreme pay disparities — disparities that made our country more vulnerable to the pandemic crisis. At theInstitute for Policy Studies, we analyzed the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median pay and found that while worker pay at these firms stagnated in nominal terms, average CEO pay rose by 15 percent to $13.9 million in 2020.
If enacted, the Build Back Better Act will be a major step towards a more equitable economy, but much more will need to be done to reverse our country’s extreme economic and racial divides. Fortunately, polls suggest that the public, particularly young people, have a strong appetite for further anti-inequality reforms in the years to come.
While the 2021 debate over spending and tax policies has dragged on too long, it’s encouraging that the central question has been how much revenue to raise from the rich to invest in human needs. This represents a long-overdue rejection of the failed “trickle down” theories the wealthy and their advocates in Congress have used to justify tax cuts and other economic policies that benefit the rich at the expense of the rest of us.
Amid all the anxiety about inflation, the good news this year has been that many businesses increased wages in an effort to keep a reluctant workforce on the job and contend with a tight labor market. However, wages rose quickly for the ultra-rich even as the pandemic raged in 2020, and economists say gains made by workers in 2021 are not sustainable unless structural changes are made.
Wage growth in the United States has slowed since hitting an all-time high in April, when employers sought to entice workers back to restaurants, cash registers and offices after pandemic lockdowns lifted. Reports suggest that employers plan on spending slightly more on wages and benefits next year — but not as much as you might expect after record numbers of workers left their jobs in search of better prospects in 2021.
Increases in average wages are often lopsided toward the rich, if history is any evidence. An analysis of new federal data by the Economic Policy Institute found that wages for the top 1 percent of earners grew much faster than the bottom 90 percent of earners in 2020, reflecting a trend going back four decades.
Although average wages increased slightly for most brackets of wage-earners, economists say this increase is partially due to job losses during lockdowns. Earnings for the wealthy grew much faster than for others in 2020.
Billionaires and multi-millionaires saw their wealth balloon over the past two years — even as the economy slowed and millions of people filed for unemployment. The bottom 90 percent of workers received only 60 percent of all wages in 2020, the lowest share since data collection began in 1937.
The top 1 percent earned 13.8 percent of all wages in 2020, nearly double the share that top earners received in 1979. While average wages for the wealthy did not increase every year since 1979, the redistribution of wages upward (from the bottom 90 percent to the wealthy) has remained relatively constant, according to EPI. The average annual wage for the bottom 90 percent was almost $39,000 in 2019, while the top 5 percent of earners averaged $320,000.
Wages for the top 1 percent increased by up to 7.3 percent in 2020, and the top 0.1 percent saw nearly a 10 percent increase in average pay. Wages for everyone else rose by just 1.7 percent in comparison, but that figure does not tell the whole story, according to EPI economist Lawrence Mishel.
“The bottom 90 percent appears to have done somewhat better [in 2020], but that’s partially because we are missing a whole group of people at the bottom,” Mishel said in an interview.
Heavy job losses were concentrated in industries such as food service and retail during the lockdowns of 2020, while many high-paid workers in finance and the corporate world continued to work remotely. Mishel said many of the lowest-paid workers in food service and retail, for example, lost their jobs or were laid off, which artificially boosted the data on average wages for the bottom 90 percent of earners.
Inflation also grew by a sluggish 1.2 percent in 2020, which pushed up the average “real wage,” or wages adjusted for inflation to reflect the actual purchasing power of a paycheck. Since 1979, the average real wages for the top 1 percent have grown by 179 percent, while the real wages for the top 0.1 percent skyrocketed 389 percent. The bottom 90 percent only saw a 28 percent increase over the same time period as the share of total wages paid to the wealthy expanded.
Mishel said there are multiple, deliberate public policies that have pushed lower-income people to produce more for less pay as executive salaries boomed in recent decades. Wage theft, the decline of unions, globalization fueled by corporate greed, the erosion of overtime and other protections for workers, and a federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 per hour have all enabled business owners and those who hold the purse strings of capital to chip away at workers’ bargaining power.
From 1979 to 2017, wage growth for 90 percent of U.S. workers trailed behind the rest of the economy, according to a paper Mishel co-authored earlier this year. Mishel and his colleagues say this is the result of wage “suppression” rather than “stagnation.”
“I suspect that workers are doing better in 2021 than in 2020 and will do better next year, and the reason that people are pushing back is that their wages have been suppressed for 40 years, and they are seeing an opportunity,” Mishel said. “The question is, will this continue?”
Mishel is skeptical of the “great resignation,” the much-debated term that popped into the media this year after millions of workers left their jobs thanks in part to a labor shortage and booming economy. Instead of “quitting,” Mishel said, workers are “switching” to higher-paying jobs as employers improve wages and work conditions to attract workers and keep businesses staffed. Rapid job growth is also fueling labor demand.
“We are in a situation where workers individually are leveraging some newly found power, and they’re doing that because there is a huge increase in job openings fueled by policies which provided stimulus,” Mishel said, pointing to President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan that provided a round of pandemic checks and enhanced unemployment benefits earlier this year.
Conservatives are currently slamming Biden over inflation, but proponents of Democratic efforts to stimulate the economy say supply chain constraints are a major factor in rising prices of fuel and other goods. The pandemic is not over — in fact, COVID is rising once again — and consumers are still choosing to spend money on goods over face-to-face services, which puts additional pressure on the supply chain.
The job market has not fully rebounded back to its pre-pandemic peak, but at 4.2 percent, the unemployment rate is lower than some economists expected.
“This is quite unusual to have such low unemployment” after an economic downturn, Mishel said. “But this is not a magical moment; this was driven by policy.”
The federal stimulus did increase consumer buying power and demand for goods and services, and that’s one reason why the Biden administration boasts about creating 5 million jobs during its first eight months. Yet fact-checkers point out that no administration is solely responsible for creating jobs. The economy was improving when Biden took office, and changes in technology, demographics and fuel prices also contribute to job growth on a mass scale. People are more likely to take jobs when employers offer higher wages.
Meanwhile, real wages are not keeping up with inflation, which hurts lower-income families who spend the bulk of their income on basic necessities. Still, stimulus and demand for labor has given some individual workers a little wiggle room and perhaps a shot at a bigger paycheck or more rewarding work, and many are taking advantage of the opportunity.
Whether renewed demand for labor will put a dent in wage inequality — after decades of “wage suppression” that tilted earnings toward the wealthy — will depend on structural changes such as an increase in union membership that allows for more collective bargaining and better protections for workers in low-wage industries, according to Mishel.
Structural change is not impossible; picket lines are popping up across the country, and Biden’s Build Back Better plan that Democrats are rushing to pass in Congress would invest in creating union jobs at fair wages. Opponents fear more government spending will make inflation worse, but supporters are not so concerned. Democrats say Build Back Better is financed by taxes rather than government debt, and spending would be spread out over multiple years rather than hitting the economy all at once (like stimulus checks).
“I would expect that wages start growing faster in 2022 but prices will grow more slowly than they have been, so I think real wages will bounce back,” Mishel said.
The asylum seekers on the Poland-Belarus border are not aggressors: they are desperate pawns in a disgusting political struggle
One thought is a constant in my head: “I have kids at home, I cannot go to jail, I cannot go to jail.” The politics are beyond my reach or that of the victims on the Poland-Belarus border. It involves outgoing German chancellor, Angela Merkel, getting through to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus. It’s ironic that this border has more than 50 media crews gathered, yet Poland is the only place in the EU where journalists cannot freely report.
Meanwhile, the harsh north European winter is closing in and my fingers are freezing in the dark snowy nights.
It is hard to protect yourself from HIV when having sterile syringes or condoms can lead to arrest: discrimination is restricting progress in eliminating HIV
Forty years after the first cases of Aids were discovered, goals for its global elimination have yet to be achieved. In 2020, nearly 700,000 people died of Aids-related illnesses and 1.5 million people were newly infected with HIV.
This is despite scientific and medical advances in the testing, treatment and care of people living with HIV.
Many Americans are noticing the rising price of goods from sour cream to carburetors as politicians sound the alarm on an inflation crisis.
You may be wondering what single force would cause the cost of a dairy product to go up at the same time as the cost of a car part. The truth is that not all inflation is the same. Each sector has its own issues.
And none of it is solved by less government funding for our safety net, as some politicians have proposed.
Some of it is what we can call pandemic inflation. Because our economy bounced back quicker after the COVID-19 shutdowns than anyone predicted — thanks largely to investments from the American Rescue Plan — people have more spending money and demand has risen faster than our underinvested supply chain could handle.
This rising demand accounts for price flares in auto manufacturing and lumber, for example. At the same time, you’ll notice prices that had plummeted during the shutdowns returning to pre-pandemic levels. Think: plane tickets.
Meanwhile, recent price spikes on other goods that families depend on — like diapers, meat, and dairy — can be linked to corporate greed. Decades of corporations monopolizing industries and cutting out competition has given them the power to artificially inflate the prices of these necessitiesunder the guise of “inflation.”
Big business is simply milking this opportunity to claim that they need to raise their prices while theyuse those profitsto engage in stock buybacks — which benefit shareholders and CEOs, not small farmers or the grocers who stock the shelves.
This is hard on consumers as well as small and family-owned businesses who depend onbigger conglomerateslikeAmazonfor supplies and market access. With bigger chains hiking up prices, many smaller businesses are going under.
But the price pressures that hurt families the most are not caused by the pandemic — and in fact have been rising for decades.
By far the biggest ticket items on struggling families’ budgets arerent and child care. The housing crisis is so bad that no person earning minimum wage full-time can afford rentin any U.S. state. And the cost of child care costs more than college tuitionin 30 states.
The Build Back Better Act being debated in Congress right now would help address our housing supply crisis by building new affordable units with a $150 billion investment. The law would also reduce out of pocket child care costs for families, increase labor participation, and raise the wages of care workers.
More local policies like rent control, which advocates won recently inSt. Paul, Minnesota, could also help regulate prices.
A few conservative lawmakers have used inflation as an excuse not to pass these programs. But they have it exactly backwards.
The best thing we can do to offset the pain of inflation — whatever its cause — and for the overall health of our economy, is to raise the standard of living for all of us. That means lowering the poverty rate, raising wages, and reaching full employment.
For too long we’ve supported an economy that depends on low-paid jobs, dangerous work, and big businesses monopolizing power. That makes all of us suffer. Slowing down our economy to boost profits for corporations won’t eliminate the need for families to purchase the products they depend on or fix our supply chain issues.
We need to build a system that supports a healthy economy for everyone, and the Build Back Better Act would be a down payment on a future clean bill of health.
The detection of a new, heavily mutated, and potentially vaccine-resistant coronavirus variant in Botswana and other nations is sending shockwaves worldwide as public health officials rush to understand the strain and its possible impact on the global pandemic response.
For vaccine equity campaigners and epidemiologists, the emergence of another highly contagious coronavirus mutation is far from surprising given the massive inoculation gap between rich and poor countries, which has left billions of people across the globe without access to lifesaving shots — andkept the door open to variants.
Botswana, where the new strain was first identified earlier this month, has fully vaccinated just 20% of its population.
Tim Bierley of the U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now said in a statement that the B.1.1.529 mutation is an “entirely avoidable” consequence of deliberate policy decisions by rich countries, which have hoarded vaccine doses and refused to force pharmaceutical giants to share technology with developing nations.
“The U.K. has actively prevented low and middle-income countries from having equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines. We have created the conditions for this variant to emerge,” Bierley said, referring to the British government’s opposition to a proposed patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines.
“For more than a year, South Africa, Botswana, and most countries have been calling for world leaders to waive intellectual property on coronavirus vaccines, tests, and treatments so they can produce their own jabs,” Bierley noted. “It’s a vital measure that will be discussed at next week’s World Trade Organization conference. But, so far, the U.K. and E.U. have recklessly blocked it from making progress.”
“There have been countless warnings that super-variants could emerge if we do not remove artificial barriers to global vaccination,” he continued. “If and when this new variant starts to tear through the world, remember that the British government has led opposition to the plan that could have stopped it.”
Srinivas Murthy, an infectious disease expert,echoedthat sentiment.
“Allowing new variants to emerge and spread, 13 months into the vaccine era, is a policy choice by the rich world,” he argued.
In marked contrast to their slow-walking of the proposed patent waiver, European countries sprang into action in response to the new variant, moving to imposefresh travel restrictionson visitors from southern Africa as global marketstumbled.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission,saidFriday that the body will “propose, in close coordination with member states, to activate the emergency brake to stop air travel from the southern African region due to the variant of concern B.1.1.529.”
“Rich nations are very quick to ban travel but very slow to share vaccines and know-how,”saidMadhu Pai, Canada Research Chair in Epidemiology and Global Health at McGill University.
Dr. Ayoade Alakija, co-chair of the Africa Vaccine Delivery Alliance,tweetedthat the renewed push to cut off travel “was our greatest fear, and [we] were almost prophetic in predicting that the world would eventually shut Africa out having denied us access to vaccines.”
Five quick tweets on the new variant B.1.1.529
Caveat first: data here is *very* preliminary, so everything could change. Nonetheless, better safe than sorry.
1) Based on the data we have, this variant is out-competing others *far* faster than Beta and even Delta did pic.twitter.com/R2Ac4e4N6s
At apress conferenceon Thursday, South African Health Minister Dr. Joe Phaahla said the B.1.1.529 variant — which has thus far been detected in Botswana, South Africa, and Hong Kong — may have been behind recent coronavirus outbreaks in the small South African province of Gauteng. (Update: The first case of the B.1.1.529 variant in Europe wasidentifiedin Belgium on Friday.)
“Rest assured that as people move in the next coming weeks, this [variant] will be all over,” he warned.
Professor Tulio de Oliveira, a renowned bioinformatician, told the media that in the B.1.1.529 variant, “what we see is this very unusual constellation of mutations.”
“This is concerning,” he said, “for predicted immune evasion and transmissibility.”
As Naturereported, “The variant stood out because it contains more than 30 changes to the spike protein — the SARS-CoV-2 protein that recognizes host cells and is the main target of the body’s immune responses.”
“Many of the changes have been found in variants such as Delta and Alpha and are linked to heightened infectivity and the ability to evade infection-blocking antibodies,” the outlet noted.
Think about next Friday. Imagine having it off. How would you use your extra day of freedom? Would you sleep? Catch up on doctor appointments? Call your friend? Spend all night watching movies with your family?
If it feels strange to imagine slowing down, then you’re not alone. We are living in a crisis of exhaustion, which in turn feeds a common tendency, or compulsion, to live life at maximum speed and efficiency — this was true before COVID-19 and is increasingly alarming now. We use phrases like “spend your time” because U.S. culture taught us that time is money; if we don’t use it, we “waste” time.
There are myriad reasons for the fact that we bring economic language into our everyday life, but one of the primary ones is simple: We work too damn much. A common response to the banality of excess work is that it’s necessary to get everything done — and that’s true. Between our daily political crises, health care system failures, the worsening climate crisis, racist and gender-based violence, ever-growing inequity, and the new stress of reviving our social lives in an ongoing pandemic, those of us who want to transform our communities have little time to waste. But these days, I think we have little to gain by following the same patterns of labor that landed us here.
This is why I’ve been an advocate and member of 4 Day Week: a campaign to reduce working hours, without reducing pay or benefits, starting with an ongoing petition campaign to recruit organizations to try it out in 2022. Here are three reasons why I’m on board, and why you should be too.
We Deserve, and Should Demand, Time to Rest and Recuperate
Perusing the Google search results of “future of work” will yield many results about automation and training digital skills, but very few on the well-being and material realities of workers left outside of the picture. Amid the current wave of worker exhaustion and dissatisfaction, the four-day workweek is first and foremost a tool that we can use to give us the tangible benefit of more time away from work to rest and recuperate.
The benefits of a four-day workweek to us as individuals and our work culture are clear: better physical and mental health, fewer burnt-out employees, more equitable workplace outcomes, and so on. But to me, a reduction of working hours for the same pay isn’t about those benefits — it’s fundamentally about justice. It should be workers and communities who reap the gains of technological innovation and “efficiency,” not just the executives and shareholders of corporations that increasingly perfect their tactics of excessive accumulation.
When we think about the future of work, we must realize we’re long overdue for innovations in the basic assumptions about how and why we work. The five-day, 40-hour workweek was invented for a version of work and life that made sense to businesses and workers in 1908. Is it not long past the time to question why we are using this more than 100-year-old, arbitrary system? Why can’t we change it and move toward something better? The COVID-19 pandemic and its ever-unfolding influence have shown us that transformation in work is both necessary and possible, and as fewer people return to work or want to return to offices, it’s the perfect time to consider a four-day week.
Here, it is important to note the foundational and inspirational work of Tricia Hersey, the founder of The Nap Ministry, an organization and practice that examines the liberatory potential of rest. She says it’s time to claim our right to rest and our right to refuse the grind culture of modern capitalism. Hersey, who for the last five years has led this platform, practice and movement, proclaims our need to rest as an inherent right, a spiritual necessity and an anti-capitalist resistance of white supremacy culture. In a recent post, she simply states: “Stop saying rest is a luxury or a privilege. It is not — it’s a human right.”
A Four-Day Week Would Center Humanity, Life and Sustainability — Not Output
Let’s go back to those classic U.S. ideas of “time is money,” “wasting time” or even “living to work.” There has been a steady march toward the “workification” or “economization” of every aspect of modern life, especially in the 21st century. As Amelia Horgan writes in her recent book, Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism:
[Work] creeps in several directions. We work harder at work. We work longer hours. At work, we are expected to use our emotions and personalities for the benefit of our employers. Outside of our official working hours, we are called upon to excavate more of our social lives, turning hobbies into side gigs so that we can survive on our current jobs’ meagre salaries and scrape enough social and cultural capital or resources to get another job in the future.
This is not the result of a few overzealous employers. We’re trapped in a work culture that promotes the ideas of dedication to the workplace “team” or “mission” at all costs. What if time were life? What if people were valued not for their economic potential but for their humanity? What if we adopted a system of creation that centered sustainability over commodity production?
The four-day workweek alone can’t guarantee these futures, but it does allow us to talk about life beyond livelihood and “economic worth.”
For so many of us — advocates, social workers, activists, organizers, lawyers, policy makers, and more — work often consumes all our time, energy and mental health. This is the foundation of burnout. This too, is exploitation. So why not solve a problem at its root cause? Social justice movements and work are necessary and urgent, but in working to change the society we live in, we must push back against the toxic overwork and urgency that is so prevalent in our organizations and in ourselves.
I don’t want to rise and grind anymore. I want to show up more fully for my family, my friends and the causes I care for. I simply can’t do that if I’m exhausted every single day. Fighting for the change we want in the world does not have to grind us to our bones. In fact, we can’t allow that; we can’t expect to show up every single day without enough rest to solve today’s challenges. We are people, not machines, and a four-day workweek represents a step toward a culture that rebalances our lives, our relationships with work and our impact on each other.
More Time Off the Clock Means More Time Strengthening Broader Social Justice Efforts
Let’s take a look at an indirect benefit of a four-day workweek: Less time away from one another means more time with one another, building space and capacity for mutual aid, neighbors and communities.
Our time shouldn’t be replaced with another coercive requirement. The day must be for us, our loved ones and our chosen communities. With that additional time, not only will we be healthier and more capable of living our lives outside of work, but we will enhance our capacity for collective organization and social change. After all, research suggests that rest improves our attention and performance; why would this not be true for our movements?
We cannot expect to transform the world if we are not transforming our movements and organizations on a day-to-day basis. adrienne maree brown wrote about this similar conundrum over a decade ago when she led the Ruckus Society to change its concrete principles, actions and structures to reflect its vision of broader transformation. We now need to do the same when it comes to centering life, not output.
Sometimes I think organizing efforts fizzle or eventually disband because it’s someone’s third or fourth side project, and grind culture keeps us going until we literally break down — unless funding and a staff come along. (And even then we lose so much to the grind of the nonprofit-industrial complex.) The four-day workweek might shift our work culture to a more balanced place, where we have actual time to think about our own priorities, what we want to spend energy on, and how we can do it given our constraints. That balance might in turn create an aperture, an opening to a new future where we have gained some slight traction in the fight against injustice.
We Are at the Beginning of Something Big — But We Must Fight For Comprehensive Change
It bears stating that the four-day workweek is just one tool and a starting point. This should be just the beginning of a long, transformative journey.
Even so, for some, pushing for a four-day workweek in our current labor environment may seem distracting, even trivial. Certainly, what is at stake seems less urgent than other ongoing battles like the fight for $15; unionization efforts by teachers and Amazon warehouse workers; strikes at Frito-Lay and Nabisco factories; and the struggle for dignity for workers in the gig economy, domestic and care work.
There is also no doubt that to date, the four-day workweek conversation has centered white-collar office work. This criticism is fair, and the push for a four-day workweek must clearly do more to strongly center the working class, and low-wage and gig workers, especially. But other critiques that simply think it’s not possible are from writers and thinkers who don’t have the imagination, or belief, that how we spend our time is actually up to us.
What is clear is that if a four-day workweek remains a perk granted by employers, and not a systemic change, then this criticism will absolutely be true. While these groups of workers who would benefit are absolutely not all owners and managers, there is no denying that they are not the most exploited by our current system.
It is for precisely this reason, among others, that I would urge those of us who see the current system as broken to consider the transformative potential of a four-day workweek standard. As a foundational policy and movement, the four-day workweek might return material benefits to workers whether they’re a server or a health care worker.
If you agree, I urge you to sign and share my organization, 4 Day Week’s call to action and pass on the message that the future of work must be a future of transformation and justice for all — finally.
The effect of Rishi Sunak’s budget has potentially become clear. Several think tanks have calculated that despite measures around things like Universal Credit, the poorest people in the UK will still be worse off. And the picture is even bleaker for the most deprived of all of us. Because the think tanks have not even been able to quantify just how much worse off the most destitute in society will be.
The budget: losers and losers?
The Canary previously reported on Wednesday 27 October’s budget. It noted that Sunak made some changes to Universal Credit and the National Living Wage. These included reducing the Universal Credit taper rate from 63% to 55%. Sunak tweeted that the taper rate:
withdraws support gradually as people work more hours. It is currently 63%, so for every extra £1 someone earns, their Universal Credit is reduced by 63p.
As The Canary noted:
Around 5.5 million families were hit by the £20-a-week cut to Universal Credit. So, over 3.6 million of them, including many sick and disabled people, are still worse off – because the changes to Universal Credit will only affect 1.9 million people. Moreover, as The Canary previously reported, the £20-a-week uplift was inadequate to begin with. With inflation continuing to rise, the value keeps diminishing.
Think tank the Resolution Foundation has crunched the numbers further. As it summed up:
Around 75 per cent of the 4.4 million households on Universal Credit will be worse off as a result of decisions to take away the £20 per week uplift despite the Chancellor’s new Universal Credit measures in the Budget.
But the devil is in the detail. And the Resolution Foundation have found that the negative effect of the budget varies depending on how poor you are.
Haemorrhaging money
Overall, the changes in Universal Credit don’t fully make up for the loss of the £20-a-week uplift for many. The poorest people are set to lose the most:
The budget also hits poorer lone parents on Universal Credit. The Resolution Foundation says that a lone parent with one child who works 20 hours at the minimum wage will actually be £5 a week worse off by April 2022:
A single adult not working will be £20 a week worse off:
A couple with two children, where one adult works full time on the minimum wage, will only see a £4 weekly increase in their money:
However, the Resolution Foundation didn’t look at is the poorest 5% of households. It breaks its analysis down into 20 income brackets. But it says that:
We exclude the bottom 5 per cent, due to concerns about the reliability and volatility of data for this group.
Spiralling poverty?
The New Economics Foundation’s analysis also paints a similar picture. It found that:
the poorest fifth of people would have been £380 a year better off on average if the £20-a-week uplift had stayed in place instead
And it said that if Sunak had kept the £20-a-week uplift, this:
would have prevented 300,000 more people from being pushed into poverty this winter.
But like the Resolution Foundation, the New Economics Foundation did no calculations for the bottom 5% poorest people. So, while the negative effects of the budget are stark for some of the poorest people, how it will hit the most destitute in society is still unclear.
The most destitute, forgotten?
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) gave some indication of who would be affected and the scale of it. As it noted:
The position of those out of work, especially those without children, remains precarious indeed. No increase in out of work benefits [so-called legacy benefits like Jobseeker’s Allowance, JSA] for the childless unemployed for half a century leaves their living standards dramatically trailing those of the working majority. The gap between the generosity of the furlough scheme and the meanness of our out of work benefit system could hardly be more stark.
In other words, people on social security like JSA and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) are hit the hardest, and these people may well be in the other think tanks’ missing bottom 5% bracket. It’s of concern that neither the Resolution Foundation nor the New Economics Foundation gave this data. Because as The Canary previously reported, 1.9 million people on these legacy benefits are sick and disabled people – who should be protected by the Equality Act.
More misery to come
It seems that after over ten years of austerity and then the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, the poorest people in the UK will now face another decade of misery. Sunak’s budget has done little for those lower down the UK’s economic pecking order. But it’s done the least for those that are on the bottom rungs of the system through no fault of their own. Sick and disabled people and the country’s poorest individuals have been thrown under the bus by a government intent on pushing people to the fringes of society.
A major report by Labour MP Jon Trickett has called for a wealth tax as part of a major overhaul of the UK’s tax system. It estimates that if the richest paid more in tax, it could raise nearly half a trillion pounds across five years.
A stark divide
The report is called The Nature of Wealth in Britain. It looks at various measures of how wealth is distributed in the UK; how our current tax system affects the richest and poorest, and what could be done to make the system fairer. A press release said that the report’s launch:
comes ahead of the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement that looks set to propose cuts to public services after the Chancellor has asked departments to find “at least 5 percent of savings and efficiencies from their day-to-day budgets.
Trickett launched the report with a video:
Gaping inequality
As the report lays out, the situation is stark.
It notes:
There are now more billionaires in the UK than at any other time in the 33-year history of the Times Rich List. And the richest 250 people have seen an increase of £106 billion in their wealth since before the pandemic.
Juxtapose this with the fact that over 11 million people have had their jobs furloughed, 14 million are living in poverty (9 million of whom are actually in work) and there has been a 33% increase in the use of food banks in the last 12 months.
To add to this, the Tory government is cutting Universal Credit, breaking an election promise by hiking up National Insurance and overseeing a huge jump in inflation.
Moreover, it notes that:
The richest people have seen their wealth increase, by £538 billion between the financial crash and just before the start of covid. Even under covid, the richest 250 increased their wealth by another £106.7 billion.
Unfairness, entrenched
The report also shows just how weighted in favour of the rich the UK tax system is. It details how:
More working families are in poverty than ever before.
Life expectancy in the poorest areas is declining. But in the richest areas, it’s increasing.
Our system of income tax unfairly favours the rich.
Meanwhile, it outlined how:
The London Stock Exchange has increased its value by over £600bn in the last year alone.
UK businesses’ cash reserves have nearly trebled to £909m since 2006.
“The UK is responsible for 558% of tax lost globally to corporate tax abuse – the second worst in Europe. Globally, only the Netherlands, China, Hong Kong and the Cayman Islands are responsible for higher shares of tax loss”.
We’re the 12th most financially secret jurisdiction in the global Financial Secrecy Index. That is, we’re one of the worst countries for letting people hide their wealth.
The report also detailed that:
Corporate lobbying of government is a major problem. Only 1% of lobbyists fall under legislation.
The “revolving door” between politicians and corporations is still an issue.
10 big donors to the Tories have given over £13.6m to the party since Boris Johnson came to power. During this time, these 10 have increased their wealth by over £1.1bn.
Government outsourcing of public services to private companies equates to £3,500 per household.
So, what can be done?
A wealth tax
Trickett’s report proposes four ways to start fixing this gaping inequality:
An additional 5% tax on income over £500,000 as a one-off wealth tax. This could raise £260bn.
Another type of one-off wealth tax would be on wealth over £2m with graduated increases. It could raise £197.6bn.
An annual wealth tax on wealth over £2m with graduated increases. This could raise £22.5bn a year.
The report also proposes a “hybrid wealth tax”. It says that this would include the second tax outlined above, plus a tax on wealth people made after this. It noted that:
Over Covid, the richest 250 people, as listed in the Sunday Times, increased their wealth by £106.7 billion. If we taxed wealth increases at the same base rate of income tax (20%) it would raise £21.3 billion each year.
Closing loopholes
The report says that:
Dividends (like money from selling shares) should be taxed the same as income. This could raise £37bn in five years.
If the same was done for capital gains tax, this would raise £90bn over five years.
If tax loopholes were closed and avoidance and evasion properly clamped down on, this could raise an additional £145.5bn in five years.
Overall the report’s proposals could raise £490.9bn in five years.
Public support appears high for some sort of wealth tax. For example, as the report noted:
In May 2020 YouGov produced a poll which showed that 61% support a wealth tax for people with assets worth more than £750,000 (excluding pensions and main homes)… In October 2020 IPSOS MORI also polled people about a wealth tax, with 41% strongly supporting one.
But what could this fairer taxation pay for?
Where could half a trillion go?
The report noted that just under half a trillion in additional tax could pay for:
15% NHS pay increase (£5.1bn nominal cost).
Making the £20 Universal Credit uplift permanent (£5bn).
Plug the Social Care funding gap (£4.3bn).
Restore Sure Start funding (£1.2bn).
Local Council funding gap (£7.4bn).
Reverse education funding cuts (7bn).
Levelling up transport by matching UK wide spending on transport to London levels of spend (£19bn).
Insulating all homes, reducing energy bills and cutting carbon emissions by 10% through “Warm Homes for All” (£250bn).
Building 150,000 houses a year (£75bn).
So, will it happen? Trickett thinks it must.
Trickett: a “cycle of inequality” that needs to be broken
Trickett said in a press release:
A wealth tax would transform our public finances making money available for our neglected public services…
It is also necessary to address extreme wealth inequality. Our political system is rigged in favour of global corporations and the super-rich. Wealth is turned into political power through donations and lobbying. Political power is used to advance policies that financially benefit the elite at everyone else’s expense. It is a cycle of inequality that leads towards oligarchy and threatens our democracy.
Bringing taxes on wealth into line with those on income is both morally as well as fiscally correct. But it is also a bold policy which will appeal to both voters and the labour movement precisely because it has one of our core values, fairness, at its centre.
Now, it’s up to the political parties to act. The Labour leadership must read and adopt Trickett’s report. Then, its proposals should be tabled as an opposition day debate. Moreover, it should form the basis for Labour policy at the next election. Anything less is missing a golden opportunity to truly ‘level up’ the UK.
Featured image via the Office of Jon Trickett – screengrab
