Source: The Guardian

The solutions to this crisis will not be handed down from a mountain top to the grateful hordes: they will rely on us taking power for ourselves.

Whatever dog-eared platitudes they may recycle for the TV cameras, what grips them is the havoc far below. Just look at the new report from the summit organisers that begins by asking plaintively, “Is the world sleepwalking into a crisis?” In the accompanying survey of a thousand bosses, money men (because finance, like wealth, is still mainly a male thing) and other “Davos decision-makers”, nine out of 10 say they fear a trade war or other “economic confrontation between major powers”. Most confess to mounting anxieties about “populist and nativist agendas” and “public anger against elites”. As the cause of this political earthquake, they identify two shifting tectonic plates: climate change and “increasing polarisation of societies”.

In its pretend innocence, its barefaced blame-shifting, its sheer ruddy sauce, this is akin to arsonists wailing about the flames from their own bonfire. Populism of all stripes may be anathema to the billionaire class, but they helped create it. For decades, they inflicted insecurity on the rest of us and told us it was for our own good. They have rigged an economic system so that it paid them bonanzas and stiffed others. They have lobbied and funded politicians to give them the easiest of rides. Topped with red Maga caps and yellow vests, this backlash is uglier and more uncouth than anything you’ll see in the snow-capped Alps, but the high rollers meeting there can claim exec producer credits for the whole rotten lot. Shame it’s such a downer for dividends.

This week’s report from Oxfam is just the latest to put numbers to this hoarding of wealth and power. One single minibus-load of fatcats – just 26 people – now own as much as half the planet’s population, and the collective wealth of the billionaire class swells by $2.5bn every day. This economic polarisation is far more obscene than anything detested by Davos man, and it is the root cause of the social and political divide that now makes his world so unstable.

No natural force created this intense unfairness. The gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us did not gape wide open overnight. Rather, it has been decades in the widening and it was done deliberately. The UK was the frontline of the war to create greater inequality: in her first two terms as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher more than halved the top rate of income tax paid by high earners. She broke the back of the trade unions. Over their 16 years in office, Thatcher and John Major flogged off more public assets than France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Australia and Canada put together.

Oh, shrug the Davos set, that’s ancient history. It is no such thing. Thatcher may be gone but her ideology keeps on taking cash out of your pay packets. If workers today got the same share of national income as in the 70s, we would be far better off. According to calculations from the Foundational Economy collective of researchers, a full-time employee now on the median salary of £29,574 would get a pay rise of £5,471.

Meanwhile, FTSE bosses enjoy skyrocketing pay, precisely because bonus schemes give them part-ownership of the big companies they run. So Jeff Fairburn of the housebuilder Persimmon took £47m in 2018 before getting the boot, which works out at £882 for each £1 earned by an average worker at the firm.

Where Thatcher’s shock troops led, the rest of the west more or less followed. Political leaders across the spectrum gave the rich what they wanted. It didn’t matter whether you voted for Tony Blair or David Cameron, Bill Clinton or George W Bush, either way you got Davos man. They cut taxes for top earners and for businesses, they uprooted the public sector to create opportunities for private firms, and they struck trade deals negotiated in secret that gave big corporations as much as they could ever dream of.

At last, more than a decade after the banking crash, the regime has run out of road. Hence the popular anger, so ferocious that the political and financial elites can neither comprehend nor control it. I can think of no better metaphor for the current disarray of the Davos set than the fact that Emmanuel Macron – surely the elite’s platonic ideal of a politician, with his eyes of leporid brightness, his stint as an investment banker and his start-up party – cannot attend this week’s jamboree because he has to stay at home and deal with the gilets jaunes. It’s a bummer when the working poor spoil your holiday plans.

None of this is to say that the 1% – holed up in their resort and fenced off from the world with roadblocks and men toting sharpshooters – don’t care about the immiseration of others. At Davos a couple of years ago, the New York Times reported that among the summit’s attractions was “a simulation of a refugee’s experience, where [conference]attendees crawl on their hands and knees and pretend to flee from advancing armies”. The article continued, “It is one of the most popular events every year.”

They care about other people’s problems – so long as they get to define them, and it’s never acknowledged that they are a large part of the problem. Which they are. If they want capitalism to carry on, the rich will need to give up their winnings and cede some ground. That point evades them. Welcoming Donald Trump last year, Klaus Schwab, Davos’s majordomo, praised the bigot-in-chief’s tax cuts for the rich and said, “I’m aware that your strong leadership is open to misconceptions and biased interpretations.” The super-rich don’t hate all populists – just those who refuse to make them richer.

Cutting the ribbon on this new economic order back in the 80s, Ronald Reagan claimed that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” A joke perhaps, but the intention was real enough. The last three decades have seen the political and economic elites hack away at our social scaffolding – rights, taxes and institutions. It proved profitable, for a while, but now it threatens their own world. And still they block the quite reasonable alternatives of more taxes on wealth, of more power for workers, of companies not run solely to enrich their owners.

The solutions to this crisis will not be handed down from a mountain top to the grateful hordes: they will rely on us taking power for ourselves. Three decades after Reagan, the nine most laughable words in the English language are: “I’m from the elite and I’m here to help.”

See also:
• Do we really need billionaires?
• How depraved individuals like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos rise to the top and rule over us

Source: The Guardian

That almost half of Britain’s children are trapped in poverty is “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one”.

Britain’s government has today been held up in front of the world and comprehensively damned for the misery and chaos it has inflicted on its own people. Its defining policy of austerity is revealed to the international community as callous, as ineffective, and even as un-British. These judgments do not come from some well-known foe of Theresa May and David Cameron – but from a UN envoy.

The profound importance of today’s report from Philip Alston derives from three factors. First, as the UN’s special rapporteur on poverty, he has an international authority. Second, the former law professor has been thorough in his research, visiting all four countries of the United Kingdom and meeting government ministers and those directly affected by their policies. Over 12 long days, he has conducted the kind of listening exercise that Esther McVey could and should have done at the Department for Work and Pensions. And finally, what the UN envoy has seen in this country evidently fills him with fury.

The government, Alston says, is “determinedly in a state of denial” over the national collapse that has been caused by its defining policy of austerity. Whitehall cuts have “gutted” local councils and the legal-aid system. Residents of the fifth-richest country in the world have testified to his team about how a lack of money has driven them to starvation, contemplating suicide or selling sex for shelter.

Over the past few days, Britain has been exposed to the world as possessing an arrogant and incompetent ruling elite, Westminster as a palace of courtiers more focused on their own tacky careers than the country they are meant to be governing. But because Alston has seen what damage this vainglorious ruling class has done to the poorest, the picture he paints of our government takes on much deeper shades of condemnation. For almost half of Britain’s children to be trapped in poverty is, he writes, “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one”. If these are indeed the dying days of Theresa May’s government, then its epitaph has been written by a man from the UN.

Rightwing politicians and their allies in the press have closed their eyes and blocked their ears to the devastation caused by austerity. When a debacle such as the one over universal credit becomes unignorable, the right will normally tut and claim it is a failure of implementation; nothing that can’t be put right with a few more quid and some tweaks. But the UN’s special rapporteur on poverty rightly sees something far more sinister at work. The Conservative government’s policies towards the poor have not been driven by economics, he says, but “a commitment to achieving radical social re-engineering”. The Tories want to demolish the last pillars of “the postwar Beveridgean social contract” – and never mind the human collateral damage.

At his press conference this afternoon, Alston delivered this verdict with evident anger and even sarcasm at the wretched ministers. Experts have testified that the system of paying universal credit to one partner in a household exposes women to bullying and abuse – but when Alston put this to McVey, a possible contender to be the next Tory leader, she replied that women “should get counselling and if it gets really bad they should leave”. It is the kind of sentiment even Donald Trump might not voice as being too lacking in human understanding.

Alston has authority but, as he put it to me, “not one iota of power”. But his report is nevertheless a vital tool for the rest of us in holding our government to account and in conveying how a bunch of professionalised, cosseted, smart and cynical politicians have strewn the wreckage of human lives across the country.

And the Australian has spotted something of how Britain has changed this decade. George Orwell is among those who once sang of this country’s “gentleness” and its sense of fair play. What Alston has seen is a society now visiting tremendous violence on its poorest members: those with disabilities, women in poverty, asylum seekers and children. The connection between the brutality of our economic system and the callous, careerist chaos of Brexit Westminster is all too easy to see.

Source: The Guardian

A couple of days ago Tyrone showed me his home. We walked out of Cambridge station, past the new parade of smart takeaways and into a housing estate, through a front door, along a corridor full of plump plastic bags, and upstairs to his mate’s bedroom. Then he pointed to the floor at the foot of the bed – and a deflated air mattress.

Home, for a homeless person.

He has been sleeping here for the past few weeks. The mattress was donated, and it’s already got a puncture, so he has to wake a couple of times each night to blow it back up. Still, “it does the job”. Sharing someone else’s bedroom isn’t too bad, until his mate’s girlfriend comes over and they need some time alone. But it’s a lot better than the park bench Tyrone (I’m leaving out the surname to prevent Google defining his adulthood) slept under before.

He told me this on a day off between shifts. Because through all the rough sleeping and sofa-surfing, he has been employed by one of the biggest and best-known companies on the planet.

Tyrone works at a local McDonald’s. If you live in Cambridge, he may well have served you your Happy Meal. He comes in from another night on the carpet and handles all of it – the kitchen heat, the impatient queues, the constant aggro – for up to eight hours a shift, four shifts a week. “I’ll come home and my T-shirt is dripping wet from the sweat of working at McDonalds.”

All for £4.75 an hour, a touch above the legal minimum for a worker his age. Under Britain’s minimum-wage rates, an employer can get away with paying someone of 17 as if they need almost half as much food or clothing as a 27-year-old – even while making them work side by side.

Tyrone left his unhappy family home a few months back. However hard he slogs, those wages from McDonald’s will not put a roof over his head, or enough food on the table. The restaurant worker often has to skip meals. He certainly can’t go out. What he has instead is depression, and bad pains in his kidneys and liver that mean he sometimes clocks on after a night at A&E.

Older colleagues aren’t much better off. Twenty-four-year-old Tom works full time at the same McDonald’s for £7.55 an hour. The money isn’t enough for him regularly to visit his four-year-old, Zac, who lives with his former partner west of London. The choice is stark: either he misses seeing his boy grow up or he skimps on food. To be a father, he sometimes lives on one meal a day – the one he gets free from his employer.

When I put this issue to McDonald’s UK, its press office said: “We have committed to investing in our people, from great training and development opportunities, to competitive rates of pay.” It added: “We have also never used exclusivity clauses, so if our people want the flexibility to work with other employers they have the option to do so.” Which sounds like: our people should work two jobs.

Tom and Tyrone know what their ghostly critics will say: if it’s so bad, they should quit and go elsewhere. But as Tom points out, most jobs on the high street are now like this. I have written before of how homeless shelters in London now serve as dormitories for the low-paid, zero-hours army that get up in the morning and serve your grande lattes and sandwiches. The problem isn’t one company, but the system of which it is part.

McDonald’s is flush with cash – it just doesn’t give much to the people who actually earn it. Instead, the company prides itself on handing money to its stockholders. The firm’s own investment calculator shows that if you’d bought 1,000 shares on the day Tyrone started working there – 1 December 2016 – by now you’d have racked up a gross profit of £34,025. A whopping 37% return simply for sitting on your backside. Granted, you’d need big savings in the first place to buy that many shares, but as Thomas Piketty could tell you, that’s how capitalism works – the lion’s share goes to those who already have the lion’s share.

Working flat out over those same nine months, Tyrone would have earned a maximum of £7,410. He and his colleagues scald themselves to earn the profits that are pocketed by people who never go near a grill or an overflowing toilet. The wealth of McDonald’s shareholders is built on the poverty of its workers.

Among those shareholders is company boss Steve Easterbrook, who last year took a total pay package of $15.35m (£11.82m). Assume, for the sake of argument, he does a 40-hour week: that works out at £5,684 every hour – 1,196 times what Tyrone makes. While Tom agonises over whether he can afford the train down to his son, Easterbrook gets personal use of the company aircraft. The hospital that Tyrone depends on runs on taxes – yet McDonald’s is under investigation from the EU for running a complex tax avoidance scheme that, it is alleged, saved it over €1bn in tax.

The professionally earnest in academia or thinktanks often turn inequality into an abstraction – something to do with globalisation or technology. But it is not abstract. Inequality has hard edges and they hurt, such as when poor people are forced to starve so that the wealthy can gorge themselves.

None of this is lost on Tom. “Each of us is pushed harder and harder to generate profit.” He and Tyrone can tell you what that looks like. Shifts changed from hour to hour. When they ring in sick, managers will tell them to come in anyway. Both men allege endemic bullying in their store. Tyrone recalls a store manager gripping his arm so hard that his nails went through his T-shirt, before dragging him off to the storeroom, away from the security cameras, to be screamed at. McDonald’s UK says: “We do not comment on individual HR cases, but would … take any accusation seriously and investigate accordingly.”

Which is why Tom and Tyrone are about to make history. On Monday, they will be part of the first ever strike at McDonald’s UK. What they want is wages of £10 an hour, and union recognition. What they want, says Tom, is “respect” from a company that they feel shows them none.

It will be a small strike, but it is nonetheless remarkable for two reasons. First, it is a globalised industrial action, influenced by the Fight for $15 movement in the US – even down to the strike date of 4 September, US Labor Day – and the successful campaign by fast-food workers in New Zealand to ban zero-hours contracts. Activists from both those fights have flown in to advise their British counterparts. McDonald’s is an emblem of globalisation; now the protest against it is globalising too. Second, it is one of the first industrial actions that is distinctly Corbynite in character. At the last election, the Labour leader suggested that workers of all ages should be entitled to £10 an hour – his proposal is now the McStrike’s demand, and he and John McDonnell have met the strikers.

Tyrone starts talking about what £10 an hour would do for him. “It’d mean I could get a proper bed. It’d mean I could get out of my mate’s house. That’s all I want: a place and a bed, and I’d be sweet as sugar.” Such basic things. Such fundamental things. Yet, in one of the richest societies in history, the young now have to strike to get them.

Source: The Guardian

At the height of the Greek crash in 2011, staff at Viome clocked in to confront an existential quandary. The owners of their parent company had gone bust and abandoned the site, in the second city of Thessaloniki. From here, the script practically wrote itself: their plant, which manufactured chemicals for the construction industry, would be shut. There would be immediate layoffs, and dozens of families would be plunged into poverty. And seeing as Greece was in the midst of the greatest economic depression ever seen in the EU, the workers’ chances of getting another job were close to nil.

So they decided to occupy their own plant. Not only that, they turned it upside down. I spent a couple of days there a few weeks back, while reporting for Vice News Tonight on HBO, and it now looks like just an ordinary factory. Behind the facade, it has become the political equivalent of a Tardis: the more you look inside, the bigger the implications get.

For a start, no one is boss. There is no hierarchy, and everyone is on the same wage. Factories traditionally work according to a production-line model, where each person does one- or two-minute tasks all day, every day: you fit the screen, I fix the protector, she boxes up the iPhone. Here, everyone gathers at 7am for a mud-black Greek coffee and a chat about what needs to be done. Only then are the day’s tasks divvied up. And, yes, they each take turns to clean the toilets.

Let that sink in. A bunch of middle-aged men and women who have spent their entire careers on the wrong end of barked orders about what to do and when to do it have seized ownership of their own workplace and their own working lives. They became their own bosses. And they immediately align themselves to principles of the purest equality possible.

“Before, I was doing only one thing and had no idea what the others were doing,” is how Dimitris Koumatsioulis remembers the factory when he started in 2004. And now? “We’re all united. We have forgotten the concept of ‘I’ and can function collectively as ‘we’.”

The other massive change that has taken place is between the factory and its neighbours. When the workers “recuperated” their workplace (to use the local term), they could only do so with the help of Thessaloniki locals. Whenever representatives of the former owners came to requisition their equipment, as a court had given them permission to do, hundreds of residents would form a human chain in front of the plant (I contacted lawyers for Viome for comment but, despite assurances, no statement was forthcoming).

When the workers consulted the local community about what they should start to produce, one request was to stop making building chemicals. They now largely manufacture soap and eco-friendly household detergents: cleaner, greener and easier on their neighbours’ noses.

Staff use the building as an assembly point for local refugees, and I saw the offices being turned over to medics for a weekly free neighbourhood clinic for workers and locals. The Greek healthcare system has been shredded by spending cuts, its handling of refugees sometimes atrocious; yet in both cases, the workers at Viome are doing their best to offer substitutes.

Where the state has collapsed, the market has come up short and the boss class has literally fled, these 26 workers are attempting to fill the gaps. These are people who have been failed by capitalism; now they reject capitalism itself as a failure.

Another old-timer, Makis Anagnostou, talks of how their factory is proof “that an alternative economy is feasible”. Contrast this with the way we normally think about work. At any large factory or office, security guards keep the outside world at bay. You check your politics at the door, and listen to your line manager. We even talk about work-life balance as if the two were polar opposites. At Viome, they are combined. One of the results is a strong bond of loyalty between the workers and their community.

The evening I arrived, swarms of people turned up for a fundraiser. They sat on plastic chairs in the middle of the storage warehouse and watched a play by Dario Fo, enacted by a national theatre company. The lead actress altered some of the lines to refer to this place and its business: “They sell their soaps everywhere. And everyone is buying it!” Cheers broke out among audience members, alongside some fervent dabbing of eyes.

Viome is precious. It is also precarious. From the roof of the building, you can see the huge site owned by the parent company. It used to employ about 350 people; now the 26 men and women operate out of one small corner of the lot.

They earn the same amount as they would receive in unemployment benefit. And when night falls, one of the workers stays on to stand guard – just in case the old owners come back. During the day, a line of empty barrels acts as a barricade.

For all its fragilities, Viome still offers a lesson in politics to any British visitor. In the year since the EU referendum, Britons have entered an era of bullshit sovereignty. Sofa-loads of politicians claim they “get it”. They pretend to listen – yet hear only the answers they want. Dissenters are told they are “talking Britain down”. Any actual outbreaks of democracy, such as members of the Labour party wanting more of a say over their representatives, are leapt upon as an instance of mob rule.

Meanwhile, politics in Britain is retailed as what one would-be alpha Tory said to another at some champagne reception.

From Thessaloniki, you see all of that as the lie it is. Take back control? Just a means of allowing Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson some prime-time gurning. Referendums? Stuffed with lies and alarmism. If you’re tired of ex-public schoolboys playing at populism, come and see what democracy looks like when exercised directly by the people themselves. Come to Viome.

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