Just Work It Off

“Work as if you were to live a thousand years, play as if you were to die tomorrow.” – Ben Franklin

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Sir Keir Starmer, Knight of the Realm and Man of the Working People, has declared again that thou shalt work or thou shalt starve.

It’s becoming an increasingly common political line in the UK that the economic woes are all caused by people not working hard enough and there is particular ire being levelled at those who are neither employed nor unemployed (a quite narrow measure of people who are not in but who are actively looking for work) but who are “economically inactive” – who are neither working nor who are looking for work. The other line is that work is the only thing that gives someone’s life purpose and that if you’re not working then you’re a lesser kind of person than someone who is – a failure, or an immoral shirker.

I want you to consider someone who is “economically inactive”. What is the image in your head? According to some, it’s a sofa-lout – someone who would rather persist on benefits than actually do some honest labour or might even earn MORE through those benefits than someone who does work (they almost certainly don’t and when they do, often that number is padded by housing benefit that goes to their landlord to pay for an inflated house rent – who are the real spongers off the taxpayer in that scenario?).

Or it’s a disabled or long-term sick person – except they’re not REALLY ill, are they? They’re playing things up to avoid work, or they’re outright faking being ill, or they have a mental illness and everyone knows that’s not a real illness so they should just buck up and stop sponging off the taxpayers. Just work it off and it’ll be fine.

I wrote about this quite recently in terms of who is actually not working and why but it bears repeating because Starmer’s plan is so badly wrong on all levels. He has misidentified the problem in the economy as ‘too many sick people not working’ and misidentified the solution as ‘and therefore we need to force young people to ‘work or starve’.
When we actually look at the numbers and reasons for people being both out of work and not actively looking for work, a very different picture emerges. Yes, the number of long term ill people has risen since the pandemic – and I’ll come back to that group – they make up less than a third of the total number of people not working and not seeking to work.

The next largest group in that category are students who are focusing entirely on their studies (an increasingly difficult thing to do in this era of increasing fees, costs of living and lack of the kind of support that the people increasing those fees got when they were students). The next largest group are carers – who really should be paid much more than they are for providing that care given the amount of unpaid benefit they PROVIDE the state in terms of services. As I’ve mentioned during discussions of UBI vs Job Guarantee Schemes (short version: do both), not everyone who cares for someone wants to turn that into a “job”, particularly if there’s even the hint of a risk that they could be reassigned to care for someone else – on the other hand, so many unpaid carers make do with so little support that both their and their cared for experience unmet needs that should be dealt with (perhaps via a National Care Service…) but in any case I can’t imagine that situation being made better by telling unpaid carers that they have to work or lose their benefits, especially when so many of them lose their benefits when they DO work.

We also see homemakers and early retirees in this “economically inactive” group which really shows the lie that this whole exercise is based on. We simply do not count the work of looking after a home as work and thus we devalue the existence of anyone who has spent their life doing that (usually women. Almost always women.). The very concept of GDP is based on the idea that a woman’s unpaid homemaking has a value of zero. Literally zero. The illustration I use is that if I clean my house and you clean your house, GDP is unaffected. But if you pay me £100 to clean your house and then I pay you that same £100 back to clean my house then no one has profited, the same houses are just as clean but now GDP is somehow £200 higher. Forcing homemakers to take a job instead might push the GDP line up but will it really result in more work being done?

All in Starmer is about to discover what previous governments did – that people are actually on the whole a pretty good judge of their own position in life and that the vast majority of people who aren’t working aren’t working for a very good reason. There just aren’t that many people in the “economically inactive” group who aren’t working, can work but who don’t want to work (in fact, that group is SO small in the dataset that it’s subject to sample size issues).

There may well be people who want to work but can’t. Someone who is ill but will eventually recover could well be supported back into work AFTER they recover and that recovery could well be sped along by improvements to health and care – but this isn’t a moral failure on the part of the person who is ill. Someone else might be able to work but not able to get that work (a job vacancy for a farmhand in Dumfries isn’t likely to be much use to a former oil engineer in Aberdeen) but that’s an economic rather than moral failure too.

And in neither case will they be helped by Starmer cutting their benefits as if he can continue previous Conservative government policy of starving people into submission or that any help folk are given has to be carefully micro-managed because the “fact” of their poverty is already evidence of their poor moral choices and judgement.

The solution is the same one as I’ve presented before. Trust people. There hasn’t been a Universal Basic Income study yet that has shown that it discourages people from working EXCEPT the people we probably would PREFER focus on something other than work if it was us (students, carers, parents). Nor has there been a case where giving people money resulted in them “wasting” it on things we think are only acceptable to spend on if we’re rich (and thus moral) enough. The case for a UBI is now beyond arguable and is now a moral imperative. In fact, a world of a UBI flips the “moral” case for work presented at the start of this article on its head. Rather than forcing people to find purpose in life through their labour like life is an open air work camp, UBI allows people the freedom to find purpose in their life – purpose that may include working (please donate to Common Weal to allow me and my colleagues to keep doing precisely that) but it equally may involve finding purpose in doing something other than work or doing something that someone else doesn’t consider to be work. Once we’ve done that, we can add in a Job Guarantee Scheme (as I say, we need both) to allow people to turn that freedom to work into an opportunity to work WITHOUT it becoming, as the Conservatives and now Starmer’s Labour would want, an obligation to work.

The Labour Party was founded on a principle of supporting workers but I think they’ve forgotten that that means they were founded to support working people (even as they’ve tied themselves in knots trying to include the “right” (read: morally upright) people in that definition and exclude others but not themselves), not to support people to work. They need to stop thinking of people as units of production who push the GDP line up (or who fail to do so). Once that happens, maybe they’ll start to understand where the problems really lie with the economy and will be able to actually start fixing them.