What do you call a society that has
thousands of people forced to work without any salary, for the
benefit of the rich? Remember the Romans with their slaves, then in
the not too distant past we had the imperial slave trade that built
empires by taking hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people
from Africa and using them as unpaid beasts of burden across Europe
and America. Well that's all in the past now, or is it?
According to the latest Labour Market Statistics, here in the UK we have 168,000 people being
forced to work for no salary, a jump of 8,000 since last year. This also chops 168,000 off the unemployed list, more dodgy accounting. As in
the past, these slaves are building empires, they are benefiting the rich.
These slaves are friends and family of people like you and I, they
are ordinary folks, who are being used by this system to undermine
the wages and conditions of us all. Our lords and masters, the
Oxbridge millionaire cabal, in The Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy
and Corruption, call it “workfare”, we should call it by its real
name, modern day slavery. This is not just an attack on the
unemployed, it is an attack on all our wages and conditions, it is an
attempt to force our conditions low enough to compete with the
eastern sweatshops, to create a European sweatshop economy that will
give the financial Mafia a better return on their ill-gotten plunder.
It is not a civilised society that forces people to work for nothing,
leaving them in poverty, while their efforts benefit those with
unimaginable wealth.
We live in a country under a
system that hasn't enough jobs for everybody and punishes those who
are unemployed. I say “not enough jobs”, not that, there isn't enough
to do to improve our society. In a socially organised society we would utilise everybody's efforts for the common good, we would all
gain from each others efforts and nobody would be superfluous to
requirements, as in this society. As long as profit is the aim,
people will be exploited, used and abused, the wellbeing of the people
and profit for the few are two completely incompatible aims.
The list of companies and
charities that have or are using “workfare” is like an A to Z
phone directory. All of these companies should be boycotted,
picketed, and publicly shamed. As long as they can pull in free
labour, they will refrain from looking for new paid employees, they
will cut the hours of existing employees, and so the downward spiral
of our conditions continue. The system isn't broken, it was built this way, it's how capitalism works.
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