£10 NOW - outlaw poverty pay!

Poverty scars the face of Scotland. Poverty pay is at the heart of it. And the only thing more ugly than the national scandal of a million Scots struggling to survive on pitiful incomes is the fact there's absolutely no excuse for it. 

We live in a fabulously rich country - officially the 14th richest economy on the planet. A nation with a super-abundance of energy resources; a net food exporter; a leading centre of life sciences, with several world class universities; one of the world's financial centres; home to many advanced industries - and the priceless asset of a skilled, educated working class.
Scotland now 'boasts' its first billionaire, but is shamed by 220,000 kids living in poverty, a thousand foodbanks issuing handouts to the desperately hungry, and one in three households shivering their way through another winter because of fuel poverty - in a nation that has the potential to become the Saudi Arabia of green energy production! 
The ugly twins of poverty and inequality are a national disgrace, and we need urgent action to banish them from the face of Scotland.

Poverty kills
On a global scale, a child dies of poverty every 3 seconds. That's a devastating indictment of the system of capitalist economy we live under, a system that knows everything about profit for the tiny elite and nothing about the needs of humanity. A system where 65 multi-billionaires possess more wealth than half the global population.
A bit closer to home, the capitalist system of markets and profit means the richest five families in Britain have more combined wealth than the poorest 12.4 million people in the UK!
In the case of Scotland, the richest ten fat-cats have grabbed £13billion between them, just short of half the entire annual budget of the Scottish government. 
We live in a brutally class-divided society.

Forms of poverty
There are several sources of poverty in Scotland, all of them easily solved by a government with the vision, courage and political will to carry through sweeping change to the ownership of wealth.
Pensioner poverty needs to be eliminated by a decent level of state pension, in answer to the crime of older people being unable to heat and eat, after a lifetimes' contribution to society.
Fuel poverty is not for lack of resources; it's because the Big Six energy giants that dominate domestic supplies are ripping the profit out of us, jacking up prices to feed their greed for profit. And the green energy sector is equally a source of obscene profit for big landowners granting us a corner of their landed estates for a few wind turbines - paid a fortune through 'green taxes' on our electricity bills - and multinational marine engineering companies. 

Public ownership of all forms of energy, turning our natural resources into a public service, is at the heart of a solution - alongside public ownership of the construction industry, investment in free home insulation and the building of 100,000 new public sector homes for rent in the lifetime of a Scottish parliament, to the highest environmental standards.
The Westminster dictatorship of and for the rich are crucifying people on benefits, with even worse to come after their announcement of another £25billion cuts over the next two years. We need a serious, resolute campaign of resistance to this butchery, demanding a welfare and benefits system that protects people in need, instead of demonising the poorest, as part of their divide-and-rule strategy against the working class.

Poverty pay the biggest cause
But underlying all these sources of poverty is the biggest of them all: poverty pay.
An absolute majority of those below the breadline live in working households. Far from being a route out of poverty, having a job nowadays is one of the chief sources of being poor!
The cold statistics cannot begin to convey the stress and strain of working to stay poor - in a fabulously rich country. Over one in five workers (22%) in Scotland earn less than the so-called Living Wage of £7.85 an hour. That figure rises to 25% of women, and rockets to 43% of us who work part-time, and an appalling 72% of workers aged 18-21.
The wage freeze in the public sector has meant zero pay increases for millions for several successive years. With rip-roaring real-life inflation on the daily essentials of food, fuel, rent and transport, this means an Ice Age of pay cuts. 

On average, wages have fallen by £50 a week for every worker since 2008, when the bankers brought the economy to the brink of collapse and were bailed out from the public purse to the tune of £1.3trillion. It's publicly-funded bonuses for the banking executives, pay cuts and job losses for the rest of us (including bank workers!).

Minimum wage pittance
Back in the mid-1990s those of us who later founded the SSP fought for the introduction of a statutory national minimum wage to banish poverty pay. We welcomed its introduction in 1999. But from day one, the Labour and subsequent Tory governments made sure the national minimum wage was at rock bottom level, and included an outrageous batch of exemptions and exclusions. In particular, the lower youth rates have blighted a generation of workers seen by employers as a source of even cheaper labour to boost their profit margins, bosses' bonuses and big shareholders' dividends.
Right now the levels of legal minimum wage are a scandalous route to exploitation: £6.50 at 21-years-old; £5.13 for 18-20-year-olds; £3.79 for workers aged 16-17; and modern slave labour on £2.73 for Modern Apprentices!

Mass armies of the low-paid
Instead of being the legal minimum, with higher rates for many workers negotiated by their trade unions in free collective bargaining, these basement level wages have increasingly become the norm.
The biggest concentrations of poverty pay are retail, hospitality and care services. So it's not just a case of small, backstreet sweatshops ripping profit out of super-exploited workers. Huge armies of low-paid workers are producing £billions in profit for multinational giants - who are aided and abetted in their exploits by the government's minimum wage legislation. 

For example, in the pre-Xmas spending spree, with the commercial frenzy of 'must have' advertising bombarding low-paid families, retail workers are pounded into doing extra shifts - part-timers on flat money with no overtime premiums - to feed the tills of a handful of giant firms that could well afford a decent living wage for all. For instance, Tesco's are driving through all manner of cuts to terms and conditions for their workers, whilst paying just above the minimum wage, but whinge about 'only' enjoying profits of around £1.4billion this year! 

Ban Zero Hours Contracts
One of several devices used to maximize profits and minimise wages is Zero Hours Contracts. A brutal system of being at the beck and call of your employer, unsure of what hours, if any, you get next week; a recipe for mayhem in daily life. They should be banned outright - not just amended or reformed as proposed by Labour in their weasel words about "ending exploitative Zero Hours Contracts". Workers need guaranteed contracted hours, part-time or full time, and a decent hourly rate of pay guaranteed, as negotiated by fully recognized trade unions.

Living Wage 
The current minimum wages of £6.50, £5.13, £3.79 and £2.73 are a criminal guarantee of poverty for workers. And although the much-trumpeted Living Wage of £7.85 is a very welcome advance on these paltry incomes for the hundreds of thousands scraping by on them, it is not only still inadequately low, but fatally flawed by one simple fact: the Living Wage is entirely voluntary and not legally enforceable.
It is laudable that the Scottish Living Wage Campaign has helped cajole three times as many employers into becoming Accredited Living Wage Employers during 2014. But to highlight the problem of it not being a legally enforced minimum, that means it has merely risen from 23 to 60 companies in Scotland paying the Living Wage. Not a single one of them is in retail, one of the two big centres of poverty pay. And some of the same outfits might pay the Living Wage to their direct employees, but rely on lower-paid contract workers from firms not paying the £7.85.

£10 now!
Since our formation in 1998, the SSP has campaigned for a legally enforced national minimum wage for all at 16, calculated on the formula of two-thirds median male earnings. In today's figures that is a minimum wage of about £10 an hour. That is also the figure unanimously agreed at the recent British Trades Union Congress.
Some might say it's unrealistic. But nothing is realistic unless you're prepared to fight for it! 

And it's extremely modest compared to the cost of living. It's modest compared to the fact that if even the (paltry) current minimum wage had kept pace with the rise in income for directors of the top 100 companies since 1999 it would now be £18.89 an hour!
But should it apply to workers and apprentices from 16 upwards? Yes! When did you last see special discounts on the price of clothing, food, footwear or rents for the 16-21 year olds?! Abolition of the lower youth rates is a key part of banishing super-exploitation. And of course it needs to be coupled to a crusade to unshackle the trade unions, by repealing all the anti-union laws, allowing free collective wage bargaining by workers' unions, so that additional skills, responsibilities, anti-social hours of work and experience can be rewarded by rates above the national minimum.

Subsidies to low-paying profiteers

What about small firms that say they couldn't afford to pay £10 an hour to the handful of staff they employ? We would argue for open public inspection of their accounts, to look at wages, bosses' bonuses, profit margins and conditions of work. If a small firm is not a backstreet death-trap that deserves to be shut down and their workers redeployed, then the government could subsidise genuine cases from taxation of the rich and big business to help them afford to pay a legal £10 minimum. 

Right now we have the opposite, where it is mostly big, profit-hungry companies who are being subsidized by taxpayers to exploit their workers with poverty pay, through the likes of Working Tax Credits. We should turn this situation on its head, force big companies to dip into their profits to guarantee a living wage of £10 at least, and help smaller, socially useful businesses flourish with decent-paid jobs.

SSP: the workers' party
None of the mainstream political parties are willing to confront the national crime of poverty pay. The Tories and LibDems are opposed to national guaranteed minimum wages on principle. Labour is trying to appease the working class who are deserting their New Tory agenda by promising an £8 an hour minimum - but try to hide the fact they only aim at this by 2020, meaning it would barely sustain the current, pathetic £6.50 rate when you account for inflation.
The SNP say they support the Living Wage, which is very welcome, but also very limited as it's entirely left to the whims and fancies of company bosses rather than enforceable by law. 

And the SNP have belatedly joined the call by the SSP for minimum wage levels to be devolved from Westminster to Holyrood - but in the SNP's case only so that its level "will rise by at least inflation". Based on the bogus official inflation measures of today, that implies a pathetic 13 pence an hour rise on the current 'adult' minumum wage of £6.50!

Act on TUC policy 

The SSP is determined to make this issue the centrepiece of Scottish politics in 2015. We are demanding £10 now - not in 2020 or some distant date beyond that. The fact the TUC has voted "to campaign for a £10 per hour minimum wage for all workers" - with not a single union delegate opposing it - adds powerful potential force behind this battle for a decent living minimum wage.
The SSP stands up for the working class. We are Scotland's working class party.

Join the SSP in the campaign for £10 now, to outlaw the crime of poverty pay and Zero Hours Contracts. We live in a fabulously rich nation, but one scarred by the twins of poverty and inequality. We need to organise and demand a massive redistribution of wealth. The guarantee of secure jobs with at least a £10 hourly rate is a measure that would transform the lives of millions currently swimming in a sea of poverty and insecurity.

DEMAND SCOTTISH £10 MINIMUM WAGE: demand the powers to transform our lives

                                                                    

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", was the memorable satirical line in George Orwell's Animal Farm.
Well the pigs with the biggest snouts in the trough here and now in capitalist Britain would agree. As millions of people work to remain poor, we have a new obscenity on parade: the UK's best-paid boss, Simon Peckham of Melrose engineering investment company, last year 'earned' £31million! 

That means he grabbed 2,238 times as much as the annual wage of a worker on the so-called Living Wage of £7.65 an hour. Put another way, whereas it would take a worker a whole year on £7.65 an hour to earn £13,923, this chief executive only has to spend 49 minutes to get that much.
The mind boggles! And your blood should be boiling, your resolve to fight poverty pay hardened by such examples of the worst levels of inequality ever recorded.

A YEAR'S LIVING WAGE IN 49 MINUTES!
The directors of the top 100 companies in the UK only need spend one single day at work to earn a year's Living Wage; their incomes average £3.195m.
Most companies studiously conceal the facts about the incomes of their top dogs compared to those of the workers they hire to produce their profits. And no wonder! Just one example in retail tells the story they don't want told.
NEXT shops CEO Lord Wolfson last year grabbed a modest £4.6m for himself, which is 459 times as much as the average annual wage of workers in NEXT. They are paid a miserly £6.70 an hour - if they're 'adults'!
And 3 out of every 10 jobs in NEXT are 12 hours a week or less - one of the common causes of crucifying poverty in retail, where profit-crazed employers want workers at their beck and call, with very few guaranteed hours a week, but a reserve army of labour to work additional hours at busier times, without the overheads of holiday and sick pay for longer contracts. And of course many big companies go the whole hog and rely on Zero Hours Contracts, the ultimate in casualised, low-paid labour.

RECOVERY? WHAT RECOVERY?
We are told daily about the economic recovery. "What recovery?" is the universal reply of the army of workers who slave away without the reward of a share of the booming national wealth.
A clutch of charities published figures in March 2014 showing that a devastating 870,000 people in Scotland live below the poverty line. And although it was ancient news for some of us, their Report's most damning indictment of capitalist employers and capitalist politicians was the revelation that over half of those in poverty - 436,000 of us - are in jobs, working to stay poor!
80,000 kids in Scotland in 2014 suffer the hunger, disappointments, and stunted ambitions of growing up in poverty despite having one or more parent in work.
A more recent report confirmed that the root cause of this national scandal is the blindingly obvious: low hourly rates of pay.
372,000 workers in Scotland - 18 per cent of the national workforce - earn below the £7.65 Living Wage, which has been calculated as the bare minimum required for access to a decent life.
93 per cent of these workers are in the private sector: by far the biggest proportions are in retail and hospitality.

TORY CLASS WAR
Throughout the Referendum campaign we in the SSP warned of the horrendous consequences of remaining under the heel of Westminster Tory dictatorship for the working class majority population. We warned a No vote would usher in assaults on pay, benefits and public services on a scale unprecedented. 

But even we underestimated just how swiftly this revenge attack would be unleashed. Within a week of the No vote being achieved by a cocktail of lies, scaremongering and false promises for 'far more powers for Scotland', the Tories launched full-scale class war on workers and working class communities.
The obnoxious George Osborne declared war on benefits - including child benefits, working tax credits, income support and other in-work benefits - robbing an average of £480 a year off a million Scots, ten million across Britain. He further announced plans to rob people under 21 of Housing Benefit, and of all Job Seekers Allowance after six months unemployed.
In shameless contrast the same Cameron-Osborne Tory dictatorship slashed taxes on the rich, awarding the well-off at least £1,900 a year in tax reductions, and even more outrageously announced what Osborne boasts is "the largest reduction in the burden of Corporation Tax in our nation's history." 

CASH PILES STASHED AWAY
Corporation Tax is to slump to 20 per cent next year, the lowest in the G20 richest capitalist nations. That will mean £8billion less in big business taxes in 2016; £8bn less for vital services, job creation or - god forbid! - a decent minimum wage.
And it's not as if the big companies that hire the majority of workers - often on pitiful pay - are in need of a handout. Just the FTSE 100 companies alone have already stashed away a monstrous £53.3billion in what is politely termed 'cash piles'; wealth they refuse to invest in jobs, or modernization of their business, or improved wages. That's close to twice the annual budget of the entire Scottish government, salted away in the vaults of a mere 100 companies, waiting to be added to when they have to pay even less in Corporation Tax next year.

THE HUMAN TOLL
Reams of statistics fail to convey the human misery and insecurity caused by this ocean of poverty pay and rocketing inequality.
People in work are amongst those who have to swallow their pride and traipse to Foodbanks for a handout in this rich, food-exporting nation. People are literally starving whilst those at the top of the pile of wealth gorge themselves shamelessly, grabbing a year's Living Wage in a day, or in 49 minutes in the case of Simon Peckham.
We face another winter where many elderly people will suffer a cruel, avoidable death through hypothermia because they can't afford to eat and heat their homes. Because their pensions are the worst in Europe compared to average wages, whereas the chief executives of the supermarkets and the Big Six energy companies rake in utterly immoral levels of profit and personal perks.

POWERS TO TRANSFORM OUR LIVES
Others have reported the crime of poverty amidst plenty: the point however is to challenge it, fight to banish the root causes, fight fire with fire in the face of the Tories' class warfare.
For most of this year, the SSP campaigned on the streets of the west of Scotland with the slogan "Vote YES for a decent living minimum wage", arguing that independence would open the door to organise and demand such a central anti-poverty measure. We didn't get independence - yet! So now we need to link the battle to banish rock-bottom wages with the debate over what powers are to be granted to the Scottish parliament.
The Smith Commission on this issue speaks of "financial powers". The trade union movement, including the STUC, should join the SSP in demanding that Holyrood must have the powers to set the level of guaranteed minimum wage in Scotland; that's a key financial issue!

LIVING MINIMUM WAGE OF £10
There's a lot of confusion around terms like Minimum Wage and Living Wage. 

The National Minimum Wage is legally enforceable by government legislation - and the vigilance of the trade union movement, to outlaw wage-dodging cowboy employers. But it is set at a pathetic level: £6.50 an hour for over-21s, and the slave-wage £2.71 for Modern Apprentices. It is a recipe for poverty - and brazen profiteering by employers, who are more than happy to let taxpayers subsidise their low pay through Working Tax Credit.
As a reminder of the class-divided society we need to change, if the national minimum wage had kept pace with company chief executives' pay rises since it was introduced in 1999, it would now not be a miserly £6.50, but £18.89 an hour!

CAPITALISTS DON'T VOLUNTEER LIVING WAGES!

The Living Wage is the product of research and laudable campaigning by the Living Wage Foundation, Poverty Alliance and others. It is calculated as the bare minimum required for a basic standard of decent life, currently set at £7.65 an hour.
But it has two fundamental flaws: it is still far too low to match the mounting cost of living, and it is entirely voluntary, relying on the whims and fancies of employers. Employers are under no obligation to pay it; they can volunteer to do so and win 'Living Wage Accreditation' from the SNP government-funded Poverty Alliance/Living Wage campaign. But to highlight the problem, a mere 23 companies in Scotland have signed up so far!

What is needed is a legally enforced national minimum wage, set at a level to guarantee a decent life. A decent, living minimum wage. Which is why since 1998 the SSP has fought for such a minimum to be set at two-thirds male median earnings - about £10 an hour in today's figures. And that £10 an hour was agreed as the national minimum wage demanded by the recent TUC congress in Liverpool - unanimously!

POWERS TO TRANSFORM OUR LIVES
The recent STUC march to 'challenge poverty' needs to be urgently built upon with a systematic campaign in workplaces and on the streets demanding the powers to implement a £10 Scottish minimum wage - for all at 16, with abolition of the lower youth rates, and equal pay for women. Further rallies, demos, pickets of low-paying companies and support for workers who strike for better pay needs to accompany the demands on the Smith Commission.

And alongside that central demand we need a drive for other powers and policies to tackle poverty in 21st century Scotland. Powers to transform our lives. The power to implement a living level of state pension in Scotland, linked to a £10 minimum wage. Full powers over welfare and benefits to reverse the savage assault on the sick, disabled and unemployed by the millionaires' Westminster bootboys. 

SCRAP ANTI-UNION LAWS

And a critical issue is repeal of the battery of anti-trade union laws implemented by Thatcher, retained by 13 years of Labour governments, and made even worse by the current Coalition. Handcuffing workers and their unions was a central strategy in the fundamental redistribution of wealth and power to the rich and big business by successive Tory and Labour regimes. As recent academic reports confirm, inequality in Britain was at its lowest, its least obscene, in the years when 58 per cent of workers were in trade unions and 82 per cent of wages were covered by collective bargaining. Now, by 2012, only 26 per cent are in unions, and a mere 23 per cent of wages are determined by collective bargaining, by the combined efforts of workers banded together through their unions. And the gap between the highest and lowest incomes is the greatest it's ever been since records began.

DON'T PLEAD - ORGANISE!
The link between poverty and the most repressive anti-union laws in the whole of Europe is glaringly obvious. And the position needs to be reversed, if we are serious about banishing the poverty and inequality that scars the face of Scotland.
Likewise, the leaders of the 630,000-member trade unions in Scotland need to face up to a simple truth: begging and cajoling employers for a decent wage doesn't work! There's no excuse for poverty pay, or poverty pensions, or skinflint benefits. There's oceans of wealth surrounding us - but it's in the hands of 'the 1%'.
So those who fought for independence, plus those who didn't, should demand the power to tax the richest minority and big business by Holyrood, to fund decent pay, benefits, pensions and public services.

TAKE SIDES!
The Tories have launched ruthless class war on the rest of us in defense of the rich. That's in their political DNA, so no surprise there.
Labour has joined them at the hip in pursuit of profit for the millionaires and poverty for the millions. It's time the trade union leaders woke up to that reality too, and stopped funding a party that declared their own war on workers with plans for cuts of £27billion by 2017.
And those who have rushed off to join the SNP should pause and ponder some fundamentals: you can't appease the profit-hunger of the multinational corporations - including with pledges of even far lower levels of Corporation Tax than the Tories' 20 per cent - and at the same time hope to banish the crushing poverty of nearly a million Scots. When the rich and their political puppets unleash class warfare, you can't stand in the middle, or take both sides.
The SSP has no hesitation in taking sides with workers, their families, people on benefits and pensions, the millions in open conflict with those in charge of the massive wealth created by nature and generations of working people. Join us in a crusade against poverty and inequality, here and now, as part of the struggle towards an independent socialist Scotland.