It may be ‘this hard’ Laurie because you’re struggling to define your terms particularly clearly…

“As America swings to the left, we’re careering to the right at breakneck speed with no thought for the handful of massive achievements we can chalk up even to this disappointing Labour stewardship. Education and Healthcare spending have soared. We’re just about to feel the real benefits of SureStart.”

Obama’s pronouncements over the last few days call into question that first assertion but even if we take it at face value it’s rather silly - are you advocating the ‘left’ that America is embracing? Private health insurance, minimal union rights etc.?

The question that needs asking is why those progressive goals seem as far away as ever even AFTER that soaring spending on health & education. The left will need something more politically robust than ‘give us another 15 years to see if it works’ if they’re to counter the right-wing charge that maybe spending more isn’t the answer…

Agreed, what Americans consider left-wing, we would probably consider centre-left at the very best, and maybe even centre-right.

The point is that it *has* worked - healthcare outcomes and educational outcomes have significantly, measurably improved.

Just, the dominant right-wing narrative ignores the stats to concentrate on anecdotes like “kid dying of cancer but would receive treatment in America [which'd cost £5m and probably not work, but that never makes the story]“, or “illiterate bored teenager gets spelling wrong on suicide note”, because “gradual rise in healthcare and educational standards” is a dull story.

Hey guys, thanks for posting this, but -

‘talking and suffering with some astounding women’ - this was originally ‘talking cunt and suffering,’ which parses quite differently. Is there any particular reason for editing out the c-word? Is ‘cunt and suffering’ distasteful?

*baitymcbait*

@john b: Your eagerness to deny what’s in front of your face is astounding.

Read some teacher blogs if you don’t believe that educational standards are dropping.

A significant reason is right there in the article - the proportion of people “on persistent low incomes” is about 17-18%. In other words, poverty afflicts one in six people in this country.

That simply isn’t enough to produce an irresistible movement for radical social change, even if all of them were signed up for a left-wing analysis - which they aren’t: some support the BNP’s world-view, if not the BNP itself, while more are wholly disconnected from politics altogether.

To build a majority requires an altruistic, other-directed approach from the comfortable (or more than comfortable) 5/6ths. Nor is it immediately obvious why that altruistic concern should stop at our coasts - far better to live in poverty in Britain than to be part of the masses in Africa, for example.

JohnB - “The point is that it *has* worked - healthcare outcomes and educational outcomes have significantly, measurably improved”

I’d question that. Take waiting lists - it’s a matter of record that the majority of people wait 3/4 weeks longer than they did 10 years ago, median wait times are up. What the spending has achieved is to eradicate the outliers at the top end that dragged the average wait later (that figure has improved). So in short most people’s waiting time for NHS attention has lengthened but Labour has a cleverly crafted ‘health outcome’ which it can tick off.

As ‘Question That’ hints there’s similar sophistry in many of the ‘educational outcomes’.

The point is the investment in schools & hospitals has been of such magnitude that it’s simply not credible to claim it’s only the framing by right-wing media that prevents the country seeing how wonderful it all is. If funding was the answer then after the investment of the last decade the topic should be beyond debate, the services unquestionably better but they’re not and only a blind partisan would deny that there’s some dubiety about the effectiveness of Labour’s investment.

These facts move the debates on to different gound - do we need organisational reform? what place private involvement? what can be done to strengthen family support? The implication of Laurie’s piece - spend more, more, more and keep taxing the wealthy - suggests Labour doesn’t have the intellectual mettle to address these issues.

It will pay at the ballot box if it doesn’t find it…..

“Is it OK to pay below what Rowntree shows is minimum decency, so long as they are all proven to lack potential?”

Worth pointing out that with the coming rise in the minimum wage in October those working full time on it will in fact be getting the Rowntree minimum: if only it wasn’t for the 18% of their income they will be paying in tax and NI.

Raise the personal allowance and we’re done here.

(NB, the £13,400 Rowntree number is a “pre tax” number. The post tax one is £11,100 and on the new minimum wage that’s what a 37 hour week would pay, or damn close to it at least.)

I’m totally with Question That on education, you only have to look at the situation physics is in right now and the disillusionment in the subject by those that could teach it.

Thatcherism/NewLabour; right/left; rich/poor; win/lose: these are all outmoded and redundant - they are definitions which divide opinion and do nothing to help social progress or move debate forwards. Forget this tripe, everything is conditional and temporary; we are all transient; we must all seek satisfaction within our personal domains while learning to live with imperfection.

I just fail to see how setting people against each other will do anything other than create aggravation and additional friction from which existing power relationships will be further entrenched and the chance to build new coalitions will be pushed off into the distance.

It is childish in the extreme to criticise ‘the market’ for failing us at an individual level as there are plenty of examples to show the benefits that are afforded by the system which counterbalance any contrary evidence. To argue absolute failure prevents legitimate criticism of actual weaknesses, so to try to use strikes as a building block for a political movement of opposition undermines any validity of their actual purpose by subjecting the very real concerns of real people to pseudo-intellectual sophistry and creates the conditions by which the ultimate aims and ambitions of the participants will be defeated.

Revolutionary theory does nothing to challenge the underlying conditions by which change is wrought as it simply perpetuates the existing cyclical nature of dominance and oppression.

Every bubble which bursts is replaced and supplanted by new areas of growth; every picture of failure is muddied by a vision of success; every abrogation of personal responsibility is an admission of failure to recognise and promote the use and application of education as the tool to answer to the complaint.

This article completely accepts social stagnation by romanticising the struggle - nothing Laurie has said suggests the promotion of social mobility is the means to liberate and achieve our individual or collective potential.

Laurie should take note of the argument made by Sunder Katwala previously: a voice is not a veto. She should stop making herself hoarse by trying to return to fight old battles and slay the ghosts of her imagining by engaging with her opponents to some productive effort.

5 - I think that using teacher blogs to try to assess standards now as compared to 10 years ago won’t give much of an idea about how education has changed. There is a reason why researchers actually get paid to do proper analysis of this sort of thing, and that is because it is actually very difficult to make accurate assessments of how things have changed over time.

It is instructive to look at what has happened to the public services where lots of extra money *hasn’t* been spent to see what the alternative might have been - compare the general NHS vs dentistry, or schools vs youth clubs.

On education specifically, I remember that 10 years ago it was widely assumed that existing trends at the time would mean that there would soon be a massive shortage of teachers, with more and more classes being taught by temp teachers, as the number of teachers quitting the profession was far greater than the number of new teachers joining it.

This, of course, didn’t happen, because the government put money into loads of admin support for teachers (new teachers who qualified in the last few years just assume that teachers have always had time off for preparation and assistants to help in the classroom), and things like TeachFirst got many more graduates to train as teachers (it’s interesting, for example, to compare how many Oxbridge graduates went on to train as teachers in, say, 1995 and 2002). Plus, of course, a load of money had to be spent on infrastructure, to replace portakabins with proper classrooms and because the last decade has seen a revolution in IT and all schools need new equipment as a result.

So just to avoid standards from collapsing, the government had to put loads of money in - but anecdotal experience doesn’t and can’t take account of those sorts of factors. The shift in education as a generation of teachers with masses of experience retires and is replaced by new teachers, many of whom will do teaching for a few years and then something else is something that any government in power now would have had to deal with. But there’s never any credit for preventing crises from occurring.

Very good points don, but annecdotal or otherwise I feel it is hard to argue with the progression away from teaching to learn, towards teaching to recite. Couple this with examples of how physics papers have degraded in standards (to the degree of having subjects not at all relating to physics inside the exam) and there’s a worrying trend.

@donpaskini: It’s not about money, it’s about ideology. Take a look at this, for example.

It is not only how much money is spent that matters, but how it is spent. People throw around figures but tend not to discuss what was done with the money. We’ve got to remember it is our money that is being spent, and often it isn’t spent effectively.

‘I just fail to see how setting people against each other will do anything other than create aggravation and additional friction from which existing power relationships will be further entrenched and the chance to build new coalitions will be pushed off into the distance.’

Thomas - what are you on, brother? Of course people in this instance set themselves against each other - that’s what strike action is, innit? You’ve got a bunch of low-paid people organising themselves into formal protest about their wages and terms and conditions, as they are legally (just) entitled to do. Are you saying that the poor ought to put their frustrations aside and focus on the altogether more romantic notion of building new coalitions? What? Hello?

Can’t see how Laurie’s post is childish - she’s dead-on if you ask me. The market only favours some individuals. The rest go hang. The privatisation of public services has led to real suffering and an obliteration of decent terms and conditions and salaries for a whole raft of people - and they’re often women, as the OP observes. Go and read some of my stuff on the Fremantle Trust careworkers if you want a case study of the effects that the imposition of market conditions has on staff and service users. The careworkers in that instance were forced to accept pay cuts, sick leave cuts, and annual leave cuts. Their only option has been to strike - they have no other means of influence. They ain’t trying to be revolutionaries - they’re trying to get their money back, keep their houses and feed their kids.

Grrr. At least Laurie’s out there talking to some of these people.

To argue absolute failure prevents legitimate criticism of actual weaknesses, so to try to use strikes as a building block for a political movement of opposition undermines any validity of their actual purpose by subjecting the very real concerns of real people to pseudo-intellectual sophistry and creates the conditions by which the ultimate aims and ambitions of the participants will be defeated.

Ok, there may be an element of exaggeration there (I’m not against capitalism or markets per se), but it shouldn’t go without noticing that the system is actually stacked against allowing these people a decent standard of pay and living. Why should they even have to strike to make such an obvious point?

I think that Thomas’ point was that the individual cases often are justified, but turning them into crusades for a left-wing cause actually makes a successful outcome less likely. Pseudo-intellectual attempts at re-framing simple demands for better pay and conditions as being revolutionary battles for worker’s/women’s/whatever’s rights just make it less likely that they’ll get the better pay and conditions. It’s a distraction from the real goal. This would be OK if the intellectuals (and really, anyone who is writing blog posts about this kind of stuff is an intellectual, whether they admit it or not) could mobilise genuine new support, but they can’t. They just confuse things, narrowing support rather than broadening it.

Unfortunately this somewhat undermines the whole point of blogging, so I feel almost apologetic for agreeing with Thomas. But really, what’s the point of this discussion? All we’re really doing here is trying to work up some excitement so that we can cheer our ideological team on from the sidelines, now that (through forces nothing to do with us) it seems like we might actually win something. Nowhere is it suggested that there’s anything that we (ordinary people) can really do anything much to affect the outcome.

Yes, there is always a case to be made for talking a good fight - it keeps people’s spirits up, keeps the home fires burning and all that, but I think we’re past the point where there’s too many home fires burning and not enough trees.

OK, I accept I indulge in casuistry, but isn’t it true that Laurie is talking ideology-in-action rather than practical politics?

I’ll take the market analysis on for the purposes of description: cleaners do themselves no favours regarding pay. It is a low-skill, low-status role for which there is an oversupply of potential applicants. There are few qualifications for entry and there are minimal performance indicators (and fewer objective ones).

In comparison unionised tanker drivers are successfully able to strike over unsatisfactory increments to their £32k pay (excluding overtime) because they are able to leverage their power both within their industry (large petrol suppliers are hugely dependant on the services provided) and within the wider economy (by tying their concerns to the concerns of the public and thereby winning a willing media audience).

Kate, you make an obvious category mistake: striking should be seen as the ultimate tool at the disposal of an employees organisation, not as any purpose of creating the organisation itself.

Should we condescend to focus on the cleaners dispute because they are overwhelmingly women and put-upon, or should we criticise them for failing to understand how to exert the power of their position to their own best effect?

I’m sorry I dislike the futile and patronising nature of this crap which is described as ‘feminism’. Don’t try to play my sympathies: to say women *are* weaker is a cheap and shoddy exuse of an argument - shall we debate responsibility within the context of victimology instead?

I think we should give Laurie every encouragement she can get as a writer as she can clearly think, however she is yet to reach the stage where she can think clearly.

12 - Lee, I agree that moving from teaching to learn to teaching to recite is a bad thing. Interestingly, at primary level, standardising the way kids get taught does seem to have had real benefits (increasing the number of kids with basic reading and writing skills, for example), but at secondary level - not so much.

13 - your evidence that standards are declining is an article about a head of a fee-paying school complaining about social engineering? Twenty five years ago, people like him were saying that ILEA were brainwashing our children with wicked Marxist propaganda. Let alone what they used to get up to in the 1970s!

If we’re going to use the metric of ‘what do right-wing headteachers in the independent sector say to the Daily Telegraph about state education’, then I reckon moving from teachers being Marxist propagandists to social workers in just one generation is pretty good going!

I’m a bit baffled by the responses to Laurie’s article - in that it seemed to be well-written and obvious common sense. (btw, thomas - giving advice on good writing, I’m not sure you want to go there). Some of the comments seem like a kind of Pavlovian response to words like ‘workers’ rights’ and ‘women’.

But just on this ‘market analysis’ of cleaners’ pay, that because it is low skill and labour supply exceeds demand then we should expect wages to be as low as possible - it’s worth remembering the experience of the big City bank, KPMG.

After campaigning and action by their cleaning staff and other campaigners, they agreed to pay their cleaners a ‘living wage’ of £7.20/hour and other rights such as sick pay, and 20 days holiday plus bank holidays. And their experience was that productivity went up, and absenteeism, staff turnover and sickness absence went down. So both employers and workers ended up better off.

Boosting the income of the lowest earners isn’t just good for those people, it’s beneficial for their employers and absolutely vital for the economy. So if you won’t support the campaigns that Laurie writes about from of a sense of social justice and workers’ solidarity, do it because you personally will benefit.

‘Kate, you make an obvious category mistake: striking should be seen as the ultimate tool at the disposal of an employees organisation, not as any purpose of creating the organisation itself.’

Well, Thomas - do you think employers who cut wages, leave and sick leave allowances are creating the organisation, or just sweating the assets? I think they’re sweating the assets myself, and returning as great a share of income to shareholders as they can.

I don’t know if striking is the ultimate tool at the disposal of an employees’ organisation - I rather think striking is the last refuge of the desperate. I also think that people who are finally forced in desperation to take strike action can also be concerned with the integrity of the organisation. Careworkers, for instance, worry about the standard of care they’re able to give people in their care when they’re forced to work extra shifts to make up income lost by way of pay cuts, etc. It’s possible to strike for yourself AND a service.

19. That’s fair enough, and that’s a good thing. But the amount of work done for children at primary level is for nought if at secondary school potentials aren’t reached. The reality is that if kids know how to pass exams when they’ve finished their GCSE’s, but don’t necessarily know how to learn, to adapt and to apply knowledge then they could be literate at the age of 1…it wouldn’t make a difference. That’s got to be the real priority for the future, but it seems to be going in reverse at the stage it’s most important.

Kate, if a person is desperate enough to go on strike, they ought to be motivated enough to improve their qualifications and change sector. To start from a bargaining position of desperation is to court failure.

Don, I’m quite happy to admit bad style, as I’m hardly spending hours composing my responses. But I’ll counter any suggestion that common sense directly equates to good sense - there is a natural symmetry in that what is obviously right for one person is just as obviously wrong to another, that’s why it’s called controversy.

Between both of your descriptions of KPMG’s increased productivity and the ’sweated assets’ of this strike I think there is a happy medium to be found in understanding the behaviour of the company in this case in their specific economic circumstances. They clearly aren’t KPMG with resources to burn, but why should any defiition of their self-interest be assumed without evidence to be aggressive and confrontational? Surely we ought better to understand the reality of their economic situation before we start using undiplomatic language.

“Kate, if a person is desperate enough to go on strike, they ought to be motivated enough to improve their qualifications and change sector.”

Hmm, now in all fairness it’s not really that simple is it? Aside from the working hours being potentially on the unsociable side, the pay is too meagre to be able to really take advantage of improving qualifications, the employment market is still very much set on ability and experience which requires a lot of the motivation you talk about to pick a path and stick to it, and all of this is assuming the person has enough free time (I’m generalising when I say I assume these sort of staff have families or dependents) to actually do it in the first place. It’s never as simple as just lifting yourself out of low-endjobs, otherwise no-one would be doing them.

‘Kate, if a person is desperate enough to go on strike, they ought to be motivated enough to improve their qualifications and change sector.’

This is a staggering misunderstanding. So when those ‘motivated’ people move - with ease, of course, because, not being working women, poor or from an immigrant background, every door is open to them - to a new sector, who are you proposing takes their place?
It follows from your argument that people in undervalued jobs are deservingly undervalued, because they ‘aren’t motivated’, because these jobs don’t matter, because ‘women’s work’ deserves to entail long hours, low pay and apalling conditions. Instead of expecting to be treated like human beings, they should do their best to climb the social ladder so that some other poor sod can suffer in their place - and if they can’t, that’s their own damn fault? Right?

Let’s look at this from the other end - rather than the people, let’s consider the jobs for the moment. Do we accept that certain low-status jobs must necessarily exist? I’ll take cleaning, whether of homes or workplaces, as an example.

As Laurie implies, unless we look at it rom this end we’re on a treadmill.

The options would appear to be:

(i) to call for a cultural paradigm shift so that all necessary work has high status. Since status is largely linked to earnings this would amount to a call for a cleaner to be paid the same, or nearly the same, as a surgeon… which in turn leads to the question of what level of income differential is acceptable… another treadmill (or perhaps a roundabout) to which none of us can produce consistent answers;

(ii) to identify certain types of labour as inherently degrading within our cultural paradigm and call for their abolition - e.g. that all cleaning should be done by robots (the technology is allegedly not that far away). Then of course all the women who clean for a living will be out of work altogether;

(iii) to insist that everyone does a share of both high and low status work - perhaps Kate and Laurie would support a tax break for merchant banks (for example) which could both show that their male and female staff earned the same average wage and required all their staff to spend half-an-hour a day doing their own cleaning… or perhaps I wilfully misunderstand them and they’d prefer to abolish merchant banks altogether…

Instead of expecting to be treated like human beings, they should do their best to climb the social ladder so that some other poor sod can suffer in their place - and if they can’t, that’s their own damn fault? Right?

Wrong, technically. If enough people ‘climb out’ of these jobs, employers will have to offer better pay and conditions to attract replacements or retain the existing staff. The problem here being that there is never likely to be a great shortage of people willing to and capable of doing these jobs, unlike Mike’s example of surgeons, but the point remains that if you want a better deal, your best option is to find some way of improving your bargaining position. Of course, that’s also what strikes are meant to do, so the debate is simply about which method is most effective.

@Mike: YES, completely agree; assuming you’re doing what I think you’re doing - i.e. delineating these options to show how absurd they are.

(i): Surely anyone but the most fundamentalist socialist would realise the absurdity of paying a cleaner (very low skill job that just about anyone could do) the same as a surgeon. Sorry, ultra-egalitarians, but that way lies madness.

(ii): Some work is already too ‘low status’ for it to be possible to find people to do it in the UK.
The public sector can handle wage inflation much more easily than the public sector, because no matter how much money the Government spends outside its means, it has a bottomless pit to resort to. A business will go bust.

(iii): This combines the worst elements of (i) and (ii)! To borrow from PJ O’Rourke (’Eat The Rich‘ - a book which I wish half of the people who post on this site would read), a surgeon’s skill*time is worth much more than that of a housepainter. If doctors are painting their own houses because it’s too expensive to hire a painter, society loses out both ways. The doctor isn’t healing people; and the housepainter ends up out of a job.

Correction: Under (ii), it should read: “The public sector can handle wage inflation much more easily than the private sector”

I should add that for a related reason wage inflation tends to have a somewhat more deleterious effect on small businesses than on corporations, which both have economy of scale in their favour and can take advantage of ‘corporate welfare‘.

Too much employment legislation really rigs the deck against small businesses.

@25 Sorry Laurie, you’re applying false logic to other people’s arguments to try to disprove them, because you disagree, for whatever reason (you haven’t made that clear yet).

Do you really think that all doors are open to non-immigrant rich men, or that they have taken advantage of the opportunities which presented themselves? Isn’t getting a job the first step out of poverty, out of social isolation towards full integration with society and the principal (though not the only) reason why people migrate in the first place?

Underrewarded jobs are so because the workers who fill those placements don’t value themselves highly enough. Instead of encouraging a feeling of self-worth in themselves (through education) you promote the idea of expectation. Instead of encouraging participation in their own success (through personal growth) you propose confrontation at the collective expense as the easy way out.

How do you tolerate the word ‘can’t’ in your vocabulary? There are many people who say they *can’t* read - so should we celebrate illiteracy and let them off the hook from trying when support is available in every direction if a person is prepared to reach out?

Striking is an antediluvian form of industrial relation - it is what warfare is to diplomacy, or divorce to child rearing. It is an admission of failure and it is A Bad Thing To Be Avoided And Discouraged.

[28] I wasn’t necessarily proposing those options as absurd, QT. The replacement of human cleaners by robots in the not-so-distant future particularly.

O’Rourke is perhaps the Tariq Ali of the right - he rarely fails to amuse, but isn’t necessarily a model of rigour.

I would wish for a decoupling of status from income level - there are already examples of that in our society (city traders and priests, perhaps): this is of course problematic for market fetishists, who need to get out more.

Mike: “I would wish for a decoupling of status from income level…”

Income and status aren’t perfectly correlated (as you suggest) but are never going to be decoupled as long as money brings power (which it has to as long as it is used as the medium of exchange). You don’t have to be a “market fetishist” (what sort of insult is that?) to realise this.

In effect, you’re either calling for communism or you’re wishing for the impossible - which is it?

[32] A market fetishist is anyone who ascribes goodness (in a more or less Paltonic sense) to market outcomes. If you don’t know my opinion of economists yet, you will…

And you are right to infer that wealth is a measure of power. Let’s not tell the feminists that a possible reason for women to be paid less than men is that women prefer happiness to power!

Nonetheless, given that we know some decoupling exists, we can fairly debate whether it is either possible, desirable or both for there to be more of it.

“Let’s not tell the feminists that a possible reason for women to be paid less than men is that women prefer happiness to power!”

Don’t mix average pay with like for like pay, it’s insulting enough that ministers do so, we don’t have to here.

[34] What is like-for-like pay? I genuinely don’t know - I’m familiar with the concept but I don’t know how the comparisons are made - a link to an explanation would help me.

Mike: This is the problem, there is no concrete information. The nearest there is existing is measures of pay for women vs pay for men in the same sector at the same level of responsibility. No-one seems interested in doing a real study when they can take easy to obtain figures and twist them to their own means.

Lee, equality in pay is a difficult one to answer, but when it comes to power the facts stare us in the face because the evidence is entirely visible. Whether we accept the conclusion of inequality between genders depends entirely on whether we accept the terms of the link between money and power.