Fintan O’Toole: Pandemic has shown foolishness of taking cheap workers for granted

A spectre is haunting Europe, and much of the rest of the developed world. It is not communism. But it is a force that was once strongly associated with it: the working class. It’s back.

Rumours of the death of the proletariat are turning out to have been highly exaggerated. As a consequence, people who have been exploited, disempowered and (as immigrants) often demonised now have more potential power than they have had for decades.

We are seeing across the Irish Sea the dramatic effects of a severe shortage of the old-fashioned grafters who do tough physical jobs. The invisible people are now all too conspicuous by their absence.

Without enough HGV drivers, supply chains break down and supermarket shelves are unstocked. Without enough fruit pickers, crops rot in the fields. Without abattoir workers, pigs have to be culled on farms. Without care workers, nursing homes struggle to operate.

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This is not just a British phenomenon. Both Brexit and governmental incompetence have exacerbated these problems and made them harder to manage – or even, in the Johnsonian language of bumptious uplift, to acknowledge.

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Britain’s travails are, however, merely the most lurid and extreme expression of a much bigger shift. Ireland’s plans for a massive building programme are thrown into doubt by a potential dearth of builders.

In the European Union between 2013 and 2019, the proportion of businesses indicating that the availability of labour was a factor limiting their ability to produce goods or services increased nearly fivefold in construction, quadrupled in industry and more than doubled in the services sector.

The reasons for this are complex and vary from place to place. But some of them seem to be common to most countries.

One is the ageing of the population. As older workers retire, they must be replaced. In Germany, for example, about 400,000 new employees are needed every year just to replace those who are becoming pensioners.

Another factor is the breaking of the promise of gender equality. There’s a reason why the participation of men in the paid workforce is still much higher than that of women (12 per cent higher across the EU). Women who are stuck with the bulk of the responsibility for providing care for children and ageing parents have to opt for part-time jobs or stay at home.

And then there are the long-term consequences of poverty, neglect and discrimination. The effects of generational poverty on physical and mental health leave many people unable to work.

People with disabilities have an employment rate that is 25 per cent below the average. Ethnic minorities and migrants who experience discrimination are much more likely to become unemployed or to drop out of the workforce altogether. England is finding out that, if you create a “hostile environment” for migrant workers, you should not be surprised when they take the hint and go elsewhere.

But there’s surely another, more intangible but no less powerful reason for the crisis in the labour market: disrespect.

There was no proletarian idyll in the past, but workers did have real collective clout. Organised labour was a force to be reckoned with, both economically, through trade unions, and politically, through social democratic parties that could win elections. Especially for male manual workers, physical muscle translated into social muscle – and pride in its power.

They fell downwards into what Guy Standing accurately named as the precariat

The breaking of that power as a result of the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s coincided with the shrinking in size and status of the western industrial working class. The great hubs of pride and potency – the mines, shipyards, steelworks, textile factories – withered away. Their work was exported to China.

The children of the old working class either managed to scramble up the ladder into higher education and got jobs that used more technical and intellectual than physical skills, or they fell downwards into what economist Guy Standing accurately named as the precariat.

It became much easier to exploit ordinary working people. The feral form of capitalism that took hold did so ruthlessly: bogus self-employment, zero-hour contracts, the stripping away of rights and protections, the profound insecurity of the euphemistically-named gig economy.

As a result, workers got a smaller slice of the pie. The big underlying economic story of our times is the shrinking of the share of resources that is going into wages.

In the UK, for example, the share of GDP going to wages was, for almost all of the 1960s and 1970s, between 58 and 61 per cent. It peaked at 64.5 in 1975. But in Margaret Thatcher’s revolution, it fell to the low 50s and has never recovered.

The same broad pattern has repeated itself in most of Europe (including Ireland), in the US and even in China. And this tells only half the story.

While the share of wealth going to wages has decreased, much more of that share has gone to the highest-earning workers. So, for those workers deemed to be “low skilled”, the relative fall has been much harder. They’ve got a declining share of a waning proportion of the world’s income.

The smug assumption was that the system could keep doing this to these people because they have little choice but to suck it up – and they will all be replaced by robots anyway. Or, in the case of the fantasy world of Brexit Britain, they could be told to bugger off back to where they came from.

Then came the pandemic. The invisible people suddenly became “key workers”: drivers, meat packers, crop pickers, care assistants, cleaners, the hidden army of warehouse staff who fulfil all those online orders. They were all suddenly, and in many cases literally, vital.

If you combine that demonstration of the importance of physical labour with a structural shortage of the people who supply it, you get a moment of truth. These are not disposable and interchangeable units of economic input. They are people who keep societies functioning.

And they are not “low skilled”. Caring for someone with dementia or navigating a huge truck through a 2,000km round trip and a labyrinth of paperwork, or turning plants and animals into food, or providing childcare, are not easy or mindless tasks. They are, or at least have been, merely thankless ones. “Low skilled” is just a propaganda term for “low paid”.

In the past, pandemics have given ordinary workers a lot more economic power

And it is no good telling these workers that they would be doing fine if it wasn’t for the bloody migrants – very many of them are the bloody migrants. Who else works in Irish slaughterhouses now?

In the past, pandemics have given ordinary workers a lot more economic power simply because horrendous death rates made them a much scarcer commodity. This time, we have been spared that scale of human destruction.

But the scarcity of labour after this pandemic is real nonetheless, and so is the heightened awareness of how foolish it is to take the endless availability of cheap workers for granted.

It is the old matter of supply and demand. The supply is squeezed. It is time for ordinary workers to make their demands: for proper wages, for decent conditions, for a fair share of the fruits of economic growth. And for that indispensable thing they have been so carelessly denied: respect.