I’m starting to hate the EU. But I will vote to stay in

George Monbiot in The Guardian

On jobs, health and wildlife, the European Union is often all that stands between us and unfettered corporate power

 

Slurry runoff polluting a river: ‘What Cameron described in parliament as “pettifogging bureaucracy” are the rules that prevent children from being poisoned by exhaust fumes, rivers from being turned into farm sewers.’ Photograph: Alamy



By instinct, like many on the left, I am a European. I recognise that many issues – perhaps most – can no longer be resolved only within our borders. Among them are grave threats to our welfare and our lives: climate change and the collapse of the living world; the spread of epidemics whose vectors are corporations (obesity, diabetes and diseases associated with smoking, alcohol and air pollution); the global wealth-grab by the very rich; antibiotic resistance; terrorism and conflict.

I recognise that the only legitimate corrective to transnational power is transnational democracy. So I want to believe; I want to belong. But it seems to me that all that is good about the European Union is being torn down, and all that is bad enhanced and amplified.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the draft agreement secured by David Cameron. For me, the most disturbing elements are those that have been widely described in the media as “uncontroversial”: the declarations on regulations andcompetitiveness. The draft decisions on these topics are a long series of euphemisms, but they amount to a further dismantling of the safeguards defending people, places and the living world.

What Cameron described in parliament as “pettifogging bureaucracy” is the rules that prevent children from being poisoned by exhaust fumes, rivers from being turned into farm sewers and workers from being exploited by their bosses. What the European commission calls reducing the “regulatory burden for EU business operators” often means increasing the costs the rest of us must carry: costs imposed on our pockets, our health and our quality of life. “Cutting red tape” is everywhere portrayed as a good thing. In reality, it often means releasing business from democracy.

There is nothing rational or proportionate about the deregulation the commission contemplates. When Edmund Stoiber, the conservative former president of Bavaria, reviewed European legislation, he discovered that the combined impact of all seven environmental directives incurred less than 1% of the cost to business caused by European law. But, prodded by governments including ours, the commission threatens them anyway. It is still considering a merger and downgrading of the habitats and birds directives, which are all that impede the destruction of many of our precious places and rare species.

Alongside such specific threats, the EU is engineering treaties that challenge the very principle of parliamentary control of corporations. As well as theTransatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), it has been quietly negotiating something even worse: a Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa). These claim to be trade treaties, but they are nothing of the kind. Their purpose is to place issues in which we have a valid and urgent interest beyond the reach of democratic politics. And the commission defends them against all comers.

Are such tendencies accidental, emergent properties of a highly complex system, or are they hardwired into the structure of the EU? The more I see, the more it seems to me that the EU’s problems are intrinsic and systemic. The organisation that began as an industrial cartel still works at the behest of the forces best equipped to operate across borders: transnational corporations. The commission remains a lobbyists’ paradise: opaque, sometimes corruptible, almost unnavigable by those without vast resources.

People such as the former Labour home secretary Alan Johnson, who claim the EU is a neutral political forum – “simply a place we have built where we can manage our interdependence” – are myth-makers. They are the equivalent of the tabloid fabulists who maintain that European rules will reclassify Kent as part of France, force people to trade in old battery-operated sex toys for new ones, and ensure that dead pets are boiled for half an hour in a pressure cooker before they are buried.

So should those who seek a decent, protective politics vote to stay or vote to leave? If you wish to remain within the EU because you imagine it is a progressive force, I believe you are mistaken. That time, if it ever existed, has passed. The EU is like democracy, diplomacy and old age: there is only one thing to be said for it – it is not as bad as the alternative.

If you are concerned about arbitrary power, and the ability of special interests to capture and co-opt the apparatus of the state, the UK is in an even worse position outside the EU than it is within. Though the EU’s directives are compromised and under threat, they are a lot better than nothing. Without them we can kiss goodbye to the protection of our wildlife, our health, our conditions of employment and, one day perhaps, our fundamental rights. Without a formal constitution, with our antiquated voting arrangements and a corrupt and corrupting party funding system, nothing here is safe.


Though the EU’s directives are compromised and under threat, they are a lot better than nothing

The UK government champs and rears against the European rules that constrain it. It was supposed to have ensured that all our rivers were in good ecological condition by the end of last year: instead, lobbied by Big Farmer and other polluting businesses, it has achieved a grand total of 17%. On behalf of the motor industry, it has sought to undermine new European limits on air pollution, after losing a case in the supreme court over its failure to implement existing laws. Ours is the least regulated labour market in Europe, and workers here would be in an even worse fix without the EU.

On behalf of party donors, old school chums, media proprietors and financial lobbyists, the government is stripping away any protections that European law has not nailed down. The EU’s enthusiasm for treaties such as TTIP is exceeded only by Cameron’s. His defence of national sovereignty, subsidiarity and democracy mysteriously evaporates as soon as they impinge upon corporate power.

I believe that we should remain within the union. But we should do so in the spirit of true scepticism: a refusal to believe anything until we have read the small print; a refusal to suspend our disbelief. Is it possible to be a pro-European Eurosceptic? I hope so, because that is what I am.

Britain Stronger In Europe

Extracts from a pro EU campaign


Stronger Economy

Being part of Europe makes our economy stronger, helping British businesses small and large, creating jobs for British people, and delivering lower prices for British families.

Half of everything we sell to the rest of the world we sell to Europe - and we get an average of £26.5 billion of investment into Britain per year from Europe.

That's why the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) estimates that 3 million jobs in Britain are linked to trade with the rest of Europe.

Being part of Europe also means cheaper prices in our supermarkets, cheaper flights to Europe and lower phone charges when traveling.

The average person in Britain saves around £450 every year because trading with Europe drives down the price of goods and services.

And we get out more than we put in. Our annual contribution is equivalent to £340 for each household and yet the CBI says that all the trade, investment, jobs and lower prices that come from our economic partnership with Europe is worth £3000 per year to every household.

That’s a return on investment of almost ten to one. British families are better off being in Europe.

Negotiating as part of a 500 million-strong economy also gives us clout we could never have on our own. Thanks to our membership of the European Union, we benefit from free trade agreements with 50 countries around the world.

So why would we risk our economic security by turning our backs on Europe? There will be no going back if we vote to leave. And if we do leave, we will be cut off from automatic access to the economic benefits that the EU brings – hitting businesses, risking jobs and threatening families’ financial security.

Saturday jobs ‘can damage exam grades for teenagers’

Tracy McVeigh in The Guardian

There was widespread praise for millionaire parents David and Victoria Beckham when it was revealed that they had sent their eldest son, Brooklyn, to do a few weekend shifts in a west London coffee shop. And Jamie Oliver won approval for insisting that he’ll be keeping his eldest two daughters “real” by encouraging them to work in his new pub on Saturdays.

However, new research suggests that teenagers who take on a Saturday job could be damaging their GCSE grades – an effect especially noticeable in girls – even while they earn extra cash they might spend on risky behaviours like drinking or smoking.

Taking a part-time job – gaining work skills and pocket money for those teenage essentials – while studying for exams has an impact on the end results, according to the study, from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.

In December the Conservative minister for business, Matthew Hancock, urged employers to create more Saturday jobs and said teenagers were missing out, after figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that the numbers of schoolchildren with part-time jobs had fallen to a record low.

The proportion of 16- and 17-year-olds working in shops, waiting on tables or having a paper round had fallen from 30% in 2000 to 15.5% in 2014. “A paid job while you’re in school can go a long way with a prospective employer and makes it easier to get a foot on the career ladder,” Hancock said.

But this latest study, Youth Employment and Academic Performance: Production Function and Policy Effects, written by Dr Angus Holford, has cast doubt on the wisdom of working and studying. It used the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, which followed a cohort of teenagers aged 13 to 14 in 2004. Holford looked at the hours they spent working and the impact this had on the time they spent doing other things – including risky behaviour and sport – as well as their study time and subsequent exam grades at GCSE.

“Around a quarter of all 13- to 16-year-olds in England take some formal paid employment during school term time,” said Holford. “This can be a good thing – they earn their own money and can pick up useful skills, which might help them find full-time work in the future. However, they may spend that hard-earned money on less than useful things, or fall in with a different group of people. We did find that schoolchildren who worked became more likely to drink alcohol regularly, smoke or consume cannabis.”

However, the biggest impact of part-time work was on the school grades of girls. For teenage girls, an additional hour of paid employment per week in school year 10 reduced their final GCSE performance a year later by approximately one grade in one subject. This was in part caused by the girls spending less time studying outside lessons.

Holford said he suspected another factor influencing their grades could be explained by girls in employment becoming less motivated by school and less interested in the work they did in their lessons.

Girls who have a job at the age of 15 work on average six hours a week, which means their part-time work is likely to reduce their results considerably – a grade lower in six subjects.

“The long-term effect of this would be particularly bad for borderline students at risk of not achieving the target for progression in education, of five A*-C grades – including English and maths. Given that academic results at 16 have such a significant influence over our future life outcomes, these findings should worry policymakers and parents who want young people to achieve their potential at this crucial point,” said Holford.

“It’s inevitable that having a job gives teenagers less time to study. That alone might be a small price to pay given the potential benefits of having a part-time job for all-round development. What concerns me instead is how it causes teenagers to lose sight of the importance of their education for their longer-term opportunities.”

Cronyism British Style - A depressingly British tale of friends in high places

From Ofsted and the BBC to the Lords, there’s a strong whiff of cronyism. When will we have the courage to challenge it?

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • The Guardian, Monday 4 August 2014

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

One crony is just a crony; it doesn’t – by my reckoning – become an “ism” until there are three. If the chairmanship of the BBC Trust hadn’t come up at the same time as the chiefdom of Ofsted, and if those two things weren’t playing out in the foreground of the peerage announcements to come this week, it might be OK, and the whole of public life wouldn’t look like it could all be such an embarrassing stitch-up. Unfortunately, the three events have come together. David Hoare is the new chief of Ofsted. Seb Coe is not the new head of the BBC Trust, but not for want of begging by the government, which changed the job requirement to make it more appealing to him. Karren Brady and Stuart Rose are reported to be lined up for ennoblement.

In fairness, appointments to the House of Lords are at least meant to be political, even if they shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be distributed on the basis of wealth. The other two posts, however, are supposed to be appointed impartially, with the emphasis on fitness for the post.

So what is David Hoare’s fitness? He is a trustee of AET academies, which is the largest chain, and also one of the worst – in the bottom quarter for results, both its disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged pupils achieving below-average GCSEs. Five schools in the chain had “unacceptable standards”, according to ministers earlier this year, though Ofsted’s verdict, due to be published last week, has been delayed. Not to worry. The other 72 schools may well have acceptable features. The Department for Education can’t see what all the fuss is about, since Hoare appears to be far less unpopular and less irrelevantly qualified than its other candidate, Carphone Warehouse founder (and Tory donor) David Ross.

For me, the main problem isn’t Ross’s relationship with the Conservative party, or even the alleged tax-avoiding practices of Ross and Hoare’s current or past business interests, though I must admit I’m not thrilled to see the highest ranks of public life wedged with people who don’t appear to understand the point of tax. No, worse than any of that is the assumption of the DfE that almost anybody will be better at running education than someone with experience of teaching.

The entry point for a significant post in the academies system is that you should never have set foot in a state classroom. God forbid that you should ever have stood at the front of one, and taught anything to anyone. In years to come, we will look back in wonder at this period, when government worshipped at the feet of industry so fervently that it thought its titans could do anything. But right now, we’re all trapped in the bowels of government delusion, and won’t see the light until Alan Sugar has been appointed chancellor of Cambridge University and Richard Branson is chief medical officer.

These are two sides of the same coin, whether you’re talking about politicians fawning over business leaders, or business leaders casting cash – or the pearls of their acumen – towards politicians. You’d think we’d be used to it, since New Labour was beset by rows such as these. Whether it looks like corruption or cronyism – is it actively bent, or does it merely stink? – depends a lot on whose side is doing the crony recruitment. But this is surely a rare point of convergence between the Morning Star and the Daily Mail: it doesn’t look very transparent or objective when politicians recruit their allies.

They give us breadheads, to run our institutions of oversight, but they also give us circuses: this is the only plausible explanation for the desperate bid to appoint Seb Coe as chair of the BBC Trust. He is a Tory and a national treasure, a man it is impossible to dislike, a recognisable face and acute businessman whose achievements are uncomplicated and demonstrable. He can run really fast, OK? In these turbulent times for the BBC, as its enemies mass on the borders of its charter (up for renewal in 2016) calling for its disintegration, that’s what we need at the helm, clearly. A man who can run incredibly fast.

In the hubbub around the job description having been rewritten to suit Coe, you may have missed the details of that rewrite: it was to reduce the time commitment that the head of the trust would have to make. This said it all about the process – first, that nobody making the appointment was really taking seriously how significant it was, and second, that Coe didn’t really want to do it. He has now come out and rejected it, as apparently have Patience Wheatcroft, Dame Marjorie Scardino, Sir Howard Stringer and Sarah Hogg.

Why candidates should be snatching their hats so energetically out of the ring is open to question. Former Labour culture secretary Tessa Jowell maintains they are put off by the high level of political meddling, but this seems to be an unlikely deterrent for those who agree with the meddlers. I can well imagine, however, that a candidate of any leaning might be put off by the sheer bungling frivolity, the sight of a government desperately grappling for a household name, a bit of borrowed popularity. Anyway, the shortlist is, for today at least, back to one: Nick Prettejohn, City grandee and former adviser to George Osborne. The circus said no, and we’re back to the breadhead.

The phrase “City grandee” cheered me up, however: remember Royal Mail, and remember that it could be worse. They didn’t have to just give these posts to their associates; they could have sold them.

Discrimination UK style: Meet the professional refugees lucky to get the minimum wage in the UK

They were professionals in their own countries – lawyers, doctors, academics. Now, having fled and sought asylum in the UK, they're lucky if they can get a minimum-wage job. We meet six refugees adjusting to a very different way of life

• 
• • Amelia Gentleman
  • The Guardian, Saturday 8 March 2014

 

Wahid Ahmad: ‘The people I work with are very kind. They know I am an educated person.’ Photographs: David Emery for the Guardian

Wahid Ahmad, 33

Was: civil engineer, Afghanistan
Now: shelf stacker, north London

Wahid Ahmad trained as a civil engineer in Afghanistan, where he worked in a senior role for the UN on infrastructure projects, overseeing road- and bridge-building. "I was proud of the job I was doing, helping with the development of my country," he says. It was a well-paid job and very satisfying: the new roads he worked on helped farmers get produce to the markets more quickly and children to school more safely. But his role working for an international agency attracted disapproving attention from the Taliban and after receiving a series of threats, in 2008 Ahmad fled to the UK with his wife and two children.

For six months, while his asylum application was being considered, Ahmad was not allowed to work. He studied to pass high-level English language exams, so he could take a one-year post-graduate certificate in construction management. While studying, he worked part-time in a cafe, making pizzas, kebabs and burgers, and delivering takeaway meals.

When he started applying for engineering jobs, he was so discouraged by the constant rejections that he was prescribed antidepressants. Most of the time he gets no response to his applications, just an automated email that tells him to assume his application has been unsuccessful if he hears nothing back within four days. When he calls to ask why, despite his excellent qualifications, he has not been invited for an interview, he is told he has no UK experience. At this point, he often proposes that he volunteers with the company, but the offer is always rejected. "How am I to get experience if they won't even let me volunteer?"

He took on a job in a food shop, working first as a halal butcher and later on the shop floor. "For a while it was very new to me. I would be preparing the fruit and vegetables, and it would keep coming to my mind what I was and what I am now. To be honest, it made me cry, but I have no option but to continue. The people I work with are very kind. They know I am an educated person. They tell me, 'Please don't be sad. You will find a job in your own field eventually.'"

He has been getting support from a charity, Transitions, which helped him work on his CV, try to get work experience and stay positive. On his CV, under the section detailing his civil engineering experience, he summarises the skills he has gained in his new job: "Be attentive to customers' needs; handle the payment for any purchases; make the customer aware of any special offers."

Iftikhar-ul-haq Khan, 46

Was: supreme court lawyer, Pakistan
Now: volunteer, Citizens Advice, Liverpool

In March 2010, Iftikhar-ul-haq Khan was dropping his children off at school when his car was stopped and he was kidnapped by a group hostile to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community to which he belongs. He was held for 19 days, in brutal conditions. As soon as he was released (upon the payment of a substantial ransom by his family), he made preparations to flee to England. It was clear to him that he and his wife and children would be in danger if they were to remain.

The transition was stark: "In Quetta, we had maids, a garden. We had a smooth life. In London, we shared one room in a bed and breakfast." It took almost two years before his asylum request was granted, during which time he was not allowed to work. "That was very difficult for me, particularly from a professional point of view." Once he was granted refugee status in October 2012 and began trying to find work, he was told that, without UK qualifications, his professional experience in Pakistan counted for little. "I was a legal adviser to the UN, to the National Bank of Pakistan." He worked on amending the Pakistan constitution and ran a private legal practice. To work here, he has to do an expensive legal conversion course. "After the course, I would need to start from scratch. People will still be asking what experience I have in this country. I achieved the highest level in my profession. Here I am at the beginning again."

The jobcentre is encouraging him to apply for work in the admin sector. "It feels a bit ridiculous. I had status, my own law firm, my profession. After three years here, I am in no man's land. I want to stand on my own two feet. I don't like being on benefits. I'm more used to helping others than taking help."

Khan has volunteered for Refugee Action and for the local Citizens Advice bureau. He enjoys it, but feels occasionally frustrated about the gulf between what he does now and what he once did. "I don't always think of myself as a supreme court lawyer. I try to give what I can. But sometimes it is in my mind that maybe I'm not doing the work I really should be doing."

His eldest daughter, 15, completed a two-year GCSE course in six months and got A*s, and a local newspaper interviewed her. "She made a contribution," Khan says. "We all want to give things back to this country. That makes me happy. I have no regrets. No complaints."

Agnes Tanoh, 57

Was: senior government adviser, Ivory Coast 
Now: destitute asylum seeker, Birmingham

Agnes Tanoh, former government adviser on financial and social affairs in Ivory Coast, fled her country because she faced arrest and long-term imprisonment, after regime change pushed her to the wrong side of the political divide. Before the government fell, she worked for the first lady, as her aide, then as head of her administration. Three years after fleeing to England, Tanoh has swapped a five-bedroom house in Abidjan for a flat paid for by the charity Women for Refugee Women in Birmingham. Her initial claim for asylum has been rejected, which means she has no entitlement to benefits and gets only £20 a week from the Hope Projects, a local asylum charity; £15.50 of that goes on her bus pass, which allows her to travel to language classes; she feeds herself by picking up basic supplies once a month from a food bank.

Most of her family have fled Ivory Coast; her husband of 33 years is in Ghana, her four children scattered in different countries. But for the moment, what makes her unhappy is the enforced idleness: the UK Border Agency stipulates, in emphatic capitals, in correspondence with her, "You are NOT allowed to work."

"Work is health," she says, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes. "I started working when I was 21. I am an active person. When you have nothing to do, you look on your situation and start to think. You say to yourself: 'What am I doing? What will become of me?'"

Although she is not a qualified teacher, in Ivory Coast she founded and ran a secondary school. For a while, when she was in a hostel in Bolton, she volunteered with a charity and taught French to retired people. "I enjoyed it a lot. I felt I was bringing something to people."

Hasan Abdalla, 58

Was: academic and artist, Syria
Now: jobseeker, London

Hasan Abdalla had a well-equipped studio in the garden outside his Damascus flat; every morning he would walk past orange, apple, pear and pomegranate trees, to paint inside or in the open when the weather was fine. Now he paints in the bedroom of the south London bedsit where he has been living since he was granted asylum. It's much noisier, and he finds that the sounds from the Iceland loading station in front of the house and the railway tracks behind are often distracting. He has tried listening to music or singing to himself to drown out the noise, but on the whole it has been a difficult period for painting. He misses his wife and three sons, whom he hasn't seen since his hurried departure from Syria in July 2011. He finds London an inspirational place, but he also feels disoriented and alone.

Every stretch of wall in his small flat is covered with the artworks he managed to bring with him, and a few that he has done since arriving here. Beneath his bed he keeps rolled-up 3m canvases. The small kitchen table is covered with old newspaper, ready for him to start painting, but at the moment this happens rarely.

When you are dependent on jobseeker's allowance, painting is an expensive habit. In Syria, Abdalla regularly exhibited with two galleries, and made a good living from selling his work. But his reputation has not travelled with him, and although he has had pictures exhibited in three galleries here, he has sold very little. For three months he went by bus every Sunday to Bayswater Road, with as many paintings as he could carry, to try selling them on the park railings. It was a dispiriting experience, since the pictures got battered on the journey; and although passersby made appreciative comments, they rarely bought pictures.

In Syria and Libya, Abdalla sold his work for around £2,500. He has sold only four pictures since coming to England, each for a fraction of that price. Despite these difficulties, he knows that fleeing Syria, and paying an agent £20,000 of his savings, was the right thing to do. Two of his friends, who had been with him on a protest march in 2011, were shot by the authorities. He had spent time in prison in 2010, and been badly beaten. He was sacked from his job as a university lecturer because he failed security checks. Following his departure, his flat was searched and one of his sons arrested.

He has been supported by the Red Cross and thinks he is lucky to have ended up in England. "People are friendly. They try not to make you feel like a stranger."

Tiegisty Kibrom, 27

Was: IT graduate, Eritrea
Now: hotel cleaner, London

Tiegisty Kibrom graduated with distinction in her computer science degree and hoped to open a computer business. "I wanted to have my own shop, which would be open for people who had no access to computers – I could train people on them. There's a real need for places like that in Eritrea."

She fled after being persecuted for her religious beliefs. When she was gone, her mother was arrested and held for three weeks. She thinks that it would not be safe to return.

With her excellent degree, she thought it would be easy to find work here, but when she realised how hard it would be to get a job, she enrolled on a BSc in internet computing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Even after completing the course, she has not found work in computing; last autumn she took a job cleaning rooms in a five-star hotel near Hyde Park. She works an evening shift, is responsible for cleaning 45 rooms and is paid £6.31 an hour. "I was expecting I'd get a better job. I am not ashamed to do a cleaning job. It just embarrasses me that, with all my skills, I can't find a single opportunity to work in my field." The work is hard. "Sometimes you feel abused. They say: 'If you don't do this, we will sack you.' I have enough stress in my life. They say: 'You know, girls, you have to be more grateful. Some people don't have any jobs.'"

She has volunteered as a computer instructor in a refugee centre; ultimately, she would like to be a database assistant, but mostly her job applications are not acknowledged. "I'm a fast learner, I know I could do it if they gave me a chance," she says.

Helal Attayee, 30

Was: doctor, Afghanistan
Now: healthcare assistant, London

Before qualifying as a doctor, Helal Attayee worked for a US charity, Samaritan's Purse International Relief, as well as the British army and for the International Security Assistance Force as an interpreter and project manager in his home town, Mazar-i-Sharif.

He was repeatedly targeted by local fundamentalists, who branded him a traitor and threatened his family. He decided it would be safer to leave the country for his medical training, and went to Turkey. Once he had qualified, he returned to Afghanistan to work as a doctor, but quickly realised his life was at risk. "The local fundamentalists, who became Taliban later, told me that I was helping the infidels," Attayee says. "They warned me that I should stop."

He was forced to flee to the UK. He has been supported by the Red Cross while he studies for a number of exams he must pass before he can take up his old career, including a very demanding English exam. His English sounds flawless to me (as you would expect from a former UN interpreter), but he has failed the exam three times already. Each time he has to retake it, he has to pay £145. His bedroom, in a shared flat in north London, is filled with books and test papers, and ahead of his next test, he has covered a whiteboard on the wall with words that he finds challenging.

Attayee is currently working as a locum phlebotomist, taking blood for testing. "To become a doctor, you have to study for six or seven years," he says. "For phlebotomy, you just have to complete a four-day course. Anyone can do it. It was very, very difficult to find a job, so I was lucky,. Phlebotomy is fine. I know that it is only temporary."

Technology didn't kill middle class jobs, public policy did

The story is that innovation rapidly reduced the need for factory workers and other skilled labor. The data just doesn't support it

• 
• • Dean Baker
  • theguardian.com, Monday 25 November 2013 15.17 GMT

Unionisation has shrunk in the US from over 20% in the 1970s to less than 7% today. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

A widely held view in elite circles is that the rapid rise in inequality in the United States over the last three decades is an unfortunate side-effect of technological progress. In this story, technology has had the effect of eliminating tens of millions of middle wage jobs for factory workers, bookkeepers, and similar occupations.

These were jobs where people with limited education used to be able to raise a family with a middle class standard of living. However computers, robots and other technological innovations are rapidly reducing the need for such work. As a result, the remaining jobs in these sectors are likely to pay less and many people who would have otherwise worked at middle wage jobs must instead crowd into the lower paying sectors of the labor market.

This story is comforting to elites, because it means that inequality is something that happened, not something they did. They won out because they had the skills and intelligence to succeed in a dynamic economy, whereas the huge mass of workers that are falling behind did not. In this story, the best we can do for those left behind is empathy and education. We can increase opportunities to upgrade their skills in the hope that more of them may be able to join the winners.

That's a nice story, but the evidence doesn't support it. My colleagues Larry Mishel, John Schmitt, and Heidi Sheirholz, just published a paper showing that the pattern of job growth in the data doesn't fit this picture at all. This paper touches on a wide variety of issues related to technology and wage inequality, but first and foremost, it shows that the story of the hollowing out of the middle does not fit the data for the 2000s at all.

Since 2000, the increase in employment has occurred almost entirely in low-wage occupations. There has been a decline in relative employment for both workers in middle wage and high wage occupations. If this "occupational shift story" explained trends in wages we should expect to see sharply rising wages for retail clerks, custodians and other workers employed in low-paying occupations.

Of course, we see the opposite. Workers in these occupations continued to lose ground in the 2000s as they did in the prior two decades. Their wages barely kept pace with inflation over the last three decades.

The paper makes an impressive case that technology is not the main explanation for the rise in inequality that we have been seeing. In fact, even MIT economics professor David Autor, the leading proponent of the occupational shift story concedes this point. He was quoted in a New York Times column saying of the view that technology explains inequality:

It can suck all the air out of the conversation … All economists should be pushing back against this simplistic view.

Given the evidence compiled by Mishel et al, it would be difficult to maintain that technology has been the main culprit in the upward redistribution of income that we have seen.

It is not difficult to identify other potential culprits – trade would certainly rank high on the list. A trade policy that quite deliberately puts factory workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while protecting doctors and other highly paid professionals, would be expected to redistribute income from the former to the latter.

The weakening of unions is likely also an important factor. The private sector unionization rate in the United States has shrunk from over 20% in the 1970s to less than 7% at present. In the same vein, the deregulation of major industries like airlines, telecommunications, and trucking has been another factor putting downward pressure on wages. The higher unemployment rates we have seen, not just in the last five years but in the last 35 years, compared with the early post-war decades, has also weakened the bargaining power of workers at the middle and bottom of the pay ladder.

We have also seen big changes that contributed to growth of income at the top. The highlights in this category would be deregulation in the financial sector and the changes in corporate governance that pretty much allow top management to write their own pay checks.

The big difference between the items listed above and the occupational shift story is that this is a list of items that involve policy changes. If this list (which could be extended) explains the growth in inequality over the last three decades then, it means that inequality was a result of policy. It was not something that just happened; it was something that we did or was done to us.

That presents a very different policy agenda for addressing inequality. No one would quarrel with the idea that our children should get a better education, but if a lack of skills was not the cause of inequality, more skills will not be the solution. Rather, we might look at an agenda that would rein in finance and CEO pay, restore the strength of labor unions, and include a more balanced trade policy.

This agenda wouldn't just mean empathy from those on top, but also lead to them losing some of their gains from the last three decades. Therefore we are likely to keep hearing stories about technology destroying middle wage jobs for some time, even if the evidence doesn't back up the stories.

In the digital economy, we'll soon all be working for free – and I refuse

The digital economy operates as a kind of sophisticated 
X Factor: someone will make it, but most won't – and the real loser is society

• 
• • Suzanne Moore
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 5 June 2013 20.00 BST

Mary Portas, whose company offered a week-long internship at a Westminster school auction. Photograph: Richard Young/Rex Features

Never mind checking your privilege. Flaunting those enviable privileges is where it's at. Go to any of our big cities and cash will be flowing through ponced-up restaurants nestled between Poundland and the nail bars. They even wave it in our faces.

Already at a private school that charges £7,000 a term? Then you must need a hand up the ladder. So let Mater and Pater bid as internships for Mary Portas or Fabergé are auctioned off. Not so much getting a foot in the door as crowbarring it in with money. Theirs is a world in which austerity remains an abstract idea.

Meanwhile, we have more than a million Neets in the country – young people not in work, education or training. They could do with a helping hand but they have somehow missed the boat. It hardly matters to them that the boat was the Titanic. Their older brothers and sisters have gone to college but are still in a world of part-time pub jobs. They don't have proper salaries and therefore no chance of mortgages. And, of course, in other European countries the situation is even worse.

At this point it is customary to blame the banksters. Or at least the politicians. But there is another group partly responsible for the parlous state in which we find ourselves: the digi-heads of Silicon Valley who told us everything could be kinda free. And easy. In some virtual paradise.

But it's not lovely being asked to work for free, whether you are 18 or 48. On the popular free app known as Facebook, the great music writer Barney Hoskyns put up a manifestothat struck home: he asked "freelance content providers" – be they actors, writers, musicians or photographers – to withdraw from unpaid labour. (I did that a while back – except, of course, for causes I believe in.)

But this is about more than that. It's about technology taking jobs, about what it can and can't provide. Hoskyns quotes Jaron Lanier's new book Who Owns The Future?, in which he argues: "Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be customers." Lanier, a computer scientist and a musician, is rightly called a visionary because he sees what is happening, when everything is live-streamed but no one knows the name of the person who made the music any more. Content is free.

Governments play up the idea that a digital future creates jobs rather than eats them up. Culturally, there is now a fantasy world of start-ups and blogs and YouTube TV where a very few people manage to make money but most work simply for "experience".

In an interview with Scott Timberg for Salon, Lanier gives a potent example: Kodak used to have "140,000 really good middle-class employees. Instagram has 13 employees, period." He describes a winner-takes-all world, with a tiny number of successful people and everyone else living on hope. "There is not a middle-class hump. It's an all-or-nothing society."

We can shrug and say it's just another industrial revolution, a move from formal to informal work, the whole "portfolio" number. But where is the social contract, then, if it "doesn't tide you over when you're sick and it doesn't let you raise kids and it doesn't let you grow old"?

The implosion of the middle class produces instability. We cannot all be freelancers for ever. Freelance work, like interning, is fine if you have the funds to manage without a regular income. That is, if you are already wealthy. But the digital economy operates as a kind of sophisticated X Factor. Someone will make it, sure. For more than 15 seconds even, maybe. But most won't. This is why Lanier says the internet may destroy the middle classes, the people who can't outspend the elite. And without that middle group, we cannot maintain a democracy.

He sees musicians and artists and journalists as canaries in the mineshaft of this new economy. Who will pay them? "Is this the precedent we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because, eventually, technology will get to everybody."

Education and healthcare farmed out to the bright-eyed tech nerds? It's already happening. We are already missing the human touch in our hospitals and schools. Gove'snew iPad-levels still cut out the creative subjects from the core – and just when we need the innovations they bring the most. Growth – the holy grail, with nearly half of all European youth unemployed – is impeded when technology eats into job security and therefore has repercussions for pensions and benefits. Those without salaried work cannot hope to support an older generation.

The creative industries, first music and now journalism, saw these changes coming too late. My children have been brought up in a world where they have to compete with those who will work for free. It is only a matter of time until we will all be asked to do the same. And I refuse.

For what is being eroded is not only actual wages but also the very idea that work must be paid for. Huge profits are being made from these so-called opportunities for our youth. But they are, in fact, the exploitation of insecurity. This is not about being anti-technology. It is about being pro-human. Technology is here and it's often great. But we must find a sustainable way of using it so that the stuff we do or make is paid for in living and not virtual wages.

In truth bosses want cheap labour - People are told EU migrants steal jobs

 

The Conservatives are determined to be seen as the anti-Europe party, but an EU referendum that took Britain out of the union would be a disaster for the party

• 
• • Deborah Orr
  • The Guardian, Friday 17 May 2013 20.01 BST

Island nation … leaving the EU won’t isolate the UK. It will isolate England. Photograph: David Parry / PA Wire

Having a referendum on membership of the EU is a bit like having a referendum on membership of the moon's gravitational pull. You can vote to leave it all you like, but it will still be there, exerting the natural influence of its mass. Even China has EU regulations on its statute book, because it needs them to trade with Europe. The best that can be said of a possible withdrawal is that at last Westminster will have only itself to blame. Oh, and of course there will be an end to the regular convulsions of drama over the possibility of having a referendum on membership of the EU. Which admittedly does sound nice.

The poor old Tories – Europe drives them so bonkers. They're like cartoon characters whose eyes turn into pound-signs, except their pupils are shaped like crosses, for votes. The Conservatives are keen to be seen as the anti-Europe party. But Ukip has stolen their thunder. This is a disaster for the Tories for two reasons.

First, it destroys a carefully cultivated Tory image, whereby they can make tough-looking gestures to play to the grassroots.

Second, it destroys the second most important electoral advantage the Conservatives have left (the most important being the first-past-the-post voting system). The coalition has weakened the left's long-standing electoral problem, which was that the leftish vote was split while the rightish vote was a one-stop shop. Ukip has provided a protest vote for disenchanted Tories, just as – up until the moment when David Cameron promised Nick Clegg a rose garden – the Lib Dems provided an alternative to Labour. Now, they are more likely, if anything, to provide another alternative to the Conservatives. Oh, the irony.

Beyond party politics, however, there is not much logic in Conservative Europhobia. In fact, it runs contrary to many of the Conservatives' other long-cherished beliefs. How can people who were so against devolution for the UK's member states be so determinedly in favour of devolving away from Brussels? That's an easy one, isn't it? Devolution within the UK takes power away from Westminster, while leaving the EU will, the poor darlings imagine, give it more. But Scotland will want to stay in Europe, as Nigel Farage's short shrift in Edinburgh this week demonstrated. Wales will want to stay in Europe. Northern Ireland will want to stay in Europe. Withdrawal from the EU won't isolate the UK. It will isolate England, making lukewarm support for full independence, especially in Scotland, a great deal more attractive. The Conservatives, despite their interminable resentment of Europe, really haven't thought this through.

More intractable is the Conservatives' supposed commitment to globalisation and free trade, and supposed horror of protectionism and restrictive practices. Europe, for all its reputation as some kind of dastardly machine for the promotion of crypto-communism, is really just a hothouse environment in which the promised fruits of neoliberalism are forced into ripening more quickly. Whether or not it was right to huddle under the glass with so much of the rest of the continent (and at the risk of labouring a metaphor to death), the process of hardening off out in the global garden is likely to kill a few tubers.

Not Conservative tubers, though. The most deep hypocrisy of the right is seen in its attitude to immigration. The Conservatives are keen to promote themselves as the anti-immigration party, and shake their heads in disgust over the mass immigration that took place under Blair and Brown. However, Labour policy on immigration dates back to the "prawn cocktail offensive", under which New Labour persuaded the City of London that it would look after its interests. Look after them, Labour did, not only turning a blind eye to all kinds of tax dodges, but also obliging the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors, both of which are institutions stuffed with Tories whose political views took a poor second place to their passion for keeping wages down. Were the Tories to manage to get a referendum on Europe, win it, and put a curb on EU immigration, then, yes, there would be British jobs for British workers, probably alongside a nice non-EU regulation setting the minimum wage at the same level as universal benefit in order to make employing someone pay. People are told that immigrants stole their jobs. In truth, it was employers who wanted a ready supply of workers unused to the living conditions that it took the second world war for the ordinary people of Britain to achieve. The goal of neoliberal globalisation is supposedly a redistribution of wealth around the planet. It also, as the EU itself is discovering, redistributes poverty.

There can be no doubt that the EU is not an entirely successful experiment. It most definitely went too far, too fast. Certainly, there can be few people in Britain who are not now relieved to be outside the eurozone. But, even within Britain one can see the trouble with having disparate parts of the country, with disparate economic needs, all dancing to the same economic tune. Only too well.

The truth is that what's needed is for devolved and local government to be strengthened, and given more fiscal powers. But although the Conservatives like to proclaim their hatred of centralised and distant government, they are not too keen on that. Again, of course, it's all about power. If local government were to become more powerful, then Westminster would find itself either the government of the home counties or simply a mini-EU, passing legislation that allowed the regions of Britain to trade fairly and equally; legislation that would no doubt look uncannily similar to EU legislation. Because it's not the EU that is an extra layer of government that no one really needs – it's Westminster. The European parliament is an institution with a democratic deficit precisely because it exists only to enact what the heads of member states have agreed. Local government in Britain is similarly hampered by the directives of Westminster. Across Europe, national governments are struggling against the advent of their own irrelevance, desperate to stop the leak of any more power either above or below, even as countries fall to government by technocrat. The nation state itself is in crisis, and the denizens of Westminster are the people least likely to see or accept that.

A Britain outside Europe would be governed by multinationals, who would be attracted by low taxes and a population compelled to work, however disabled or ill or elderly they may be. Of course, the Conservatives are keen on a referendum. But they fail to understand that if they got their way, it would be a pyrrhic victory. All those who believe that mass immigration was some sort of politically correct leftwing conspiracy would soon get wise to the fact that they'd been had. In the end, if the Conservatives got their wish, and took Britain out of Europe, they'd be finished.