By Will Horwitz
The second half of Melanie Phillips’ journey to meet Britain’s ‘Feckless Poor‘, broadcast yesterday on Radio 4, was fascinating for the way her opinion seemed to shift, often unknowingly, as it progressed.
She met a series of people working long hours for very low pay in often-exploitative conditions: a man who leaves the house at 4.00am and doesn’t get back until past midnight, and a single mum who has to leave her children at home eating their dinner while she goes back out to work, and even then is sometimes left with only bread and tea to give them.
Hearing Melanie Phillips actively advocate for trade unions, ask Employment Minister Jim Knight if there should be a watchdog to safeguard the rights of low-paid workers, and even label the minimum wage exploitative for being too low, was incredible. She seemed genuinely shocked, as I’m sure were many of her listeners, by the incredible hardships low-paid workers in abusive jobs have to endure.
Everyone she met had more than their low pay and hard work in common however: they were all immigrants. Having met a series of unemployed white British people last week, she compared the two experiences and concluded that the threat of destitution in their countries of origin gave immigrants a work ethic lacking in the molly-coddled welfare-dependants of the UK.
There might be something in that, who knows, but crucially the two programmes only introduced her to unemployed British people, and working immigrants. She never even got the chance to form an opinion about employed but exploited British workers, of whom there are undoubtedly many. Furthermore, I’d have thought that economic migrants – people who have gone to the incredible effort of moving countries, usually in order to work and provide for their families back home, are by definition going to be quite committed to work. The injustice, as she admitted, is that their commitment is rewarded by exploitation and pitifully low pay, not that some British people don’t share their desire for work at any cost.
She seemed to end up confused, still placing enormous value in a work ethic, but troubled that it led people into jobs that were abusive. Luckily there’s a way out of this confusion: to accept that most people – immigrant or not – offered the chance of a job that doesn’t exploit, that pays enough to live on, perhaps with a chance for progression, will discover they have a work ethic. That the alternative to a benefits system that traps people in poverty is not a harsher regime, but better jobs and a smoother route into them. And that dismissing entire groups of people as feckless is much harder when you actually meet them.
