What is an hour of your life worth? How would you go about deciding the value of an irreplaceable hour of your own life. As living sentient creatures every hour is a part of our individual unique journey through life from birth to death. In the hot spell we’ve just come through maybe you spent time at the beach or did some other activity for fun and enjoyment, how would you value an hour of that time? Or reflect on a bad time you’ve experienced when everything in life seemed uphill and you were downright miserable, would you place a greater value on that time of misery when laughter and enjoyment had disappeared and your quality of life was at such a low ebb?
If you are over 18, how about if I placed the value of an hour of your life at £6.19? Does that sound reasonable or fair or would you perhaps think that’s not even worth getting out of bed for? Would you consider me a mean spirited Scrooge for making such a miserable offer which would not cover the cost of a single prescription item, currently at £7.85?
It is difficult to get a proper perspective on the minimum wage and the national scandal it represents in the lives of millions of people. It’s not a living wage, so it’s not even the barest amount people need to live on especially at a time when food and energy costs are constantly, and exorbitantly, increasing. The minimum wage would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. How does a government that says it wants to make work pay dictate such a risible amount of money for an hours labour and why aren’t workers able to stand up and demand better? The minimum wage is not making work pay it’s a mandate for hopelessness, poverty and despair. As the government strips away workers rights, access to legal aid and focuses on the poor to repay the national debt created by the obscenely wealthy, it is clear that Cameron does not want people to get on, he is not making work pay and as more and more people are driven into poverty necessitating ever greater numbers of food banks, people are in deep, profound, crisis. To top it all the government pursues a vindictive, malicious, campaign of vilifying the poor for not striving hard enough and regards poverty as self inflicted and the poor as feckless scroungers. Such attitudes to the poor have a long history and they are long past their sell by date because they are rotten to the core.
What a minimum wage of £6.19 represents is oppression and companies who could pay more and yet choose to pay the minimum the law allows are acting immorally and exploitatively and robbing workers of dignity and respect as well as a reasonable exchange of money for their labour. In January 2012, Owen Jones rightly called David Cameron, ‘the master of cynical propaganda’. He went on to say, ‘Since Lehman Brothers went under, I’ve watched in awe as the right transformed a crisis of the market into a crisis of public spending. Even as a battery of cuts suck jobs and growth out of the economy, Cameron’s Tories still define the political debate.’ What Cameron and his cabinet are is a bunch of rich boys playing fast and loose with the truth, with the economy and with peoples lives. It is astonishing that such a small cadre of spoilt boys hold such sway over the country using austerity as a weapon of social destruction affecting millions. How we manage to stop them is not yet clear but not being silent about it in an age of unprecedented communication power is the very least we can do to shift the tide of political debate and promote the value of life as a core issue. We deserve better.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/26/feckless-poor-cameron-long-history
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/13/david-cameron-cynical-propaganda
Keith Lindsay-Cameron
