COALITION leader Cameron is considering calls to freeze the minimum wage, with the British Chambers of Commerce advising that ‘Britain cannot afford to price people out of work’, a code meaning that wage cuts are the only way that British capitalism is going to make a profit.
With inflation rampant, the minimum wage amounts to £6.08 an hour for adults, £4.98 for 18 to 20-year-olds, and £3.68 for 16 and 17-year-olds. Freezing the minimum wage would see workers working for subsistence, and would require freezing the Jobseekers Allowance and other benefits to encourage them to carry on.
Already, millions of public sector workers have had a wage freeze imposed on them, and are seeing their wages being cut on a daily basis by inflation.
There is already an agitation under way for the public sector wage freeze to be extended for another year or two years, meaning that the public sector will be manned by millions of working poor.
As well, we have already been told that crisis-ridden capitalism cannot afford to pay the pensions that workers were promised, and have already paid for.
The advice to the elderly is don’t retire (unless you are a banker) and that the best way to avoid loneliness and health problems in old age is to carry on working, even beyond the projected retirement age of 70.
That this policy will see the elderly dying on the job, and retirement effectively abolished is clear, as is the fact that it will deprive the younger generations of the right to work. This is no problem for the ruling class and its servants, who will continue to make profits and enjoy very well paid and early retirements.
But of course the elderly can only do so much. Who is going to do the heavier, more physically demanding work that currently people are being paid trade union rates of pay to do?
It is to be the over one million of youth unemployed. The ones that Tesco was advertising to put on permanent night shift in return for their Jobseekers Allowance plus minor expenses.
Already, tens of thousands are being pressured into becoming slave labourers, to take the UK back a century or more. Refusal will mean no benefits!
Firms and ‘charities’ are already being invited to bid for a contract to make profits out of the youth unemployed being pushed into forced labour for no pay.
For the ‘charities’ it is to be payment by results. The more youth that they keep working for no pay for up to a year, the greater the pay-off the charities will get from the government.
The scheme, part of the Youth Contract announced in the autumn, will invite bids for contracts worth up to £2,200 for each teenager who can be kept as a cheap labourer for 12 months.
The target group will be 16 to 17-year-olds.
The aim is for long-term savings from an early intervention, with the total of 1,163,000 youth without work and training as the target.
The project has rightly been challenged by the ATL teachers’ union, which accuses the government of damaging the chances of teenagers ‘by dismantling the careers and advice service and abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance’.
The scheme offers unpaid work placements in stores such as Tesco to 18 to 24-year-olds who have been unemployed for more than three months. It is an offer that they will not be able to refuse.
With public sector wages frozen, the minimum wage about to be frozen, with pensioners to carry on working and the youth to be conscripted by ‘charity’ gangmasters, it is full speed ahead to slave labour Britain.
The response of workers and youth to this prospect will be a socialist revolution to expropriate the bosses and bankers and bring in a planned socialist economy.
