Minimum Income Standard - 8 comments

I might have a bit of a track record on minimum-income proposals, but this one sounds just great (via).

I complained a couple of weeks ago about the Government's targeting of the official '60%' poverty line, and the lack of criticism of that target by bloggers and commentators. Don Paskini mentioned in the comments that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (et al.) had something in the pipeline, and here it is.

A single person in Britain needs to earn at least £13,400 a year for a minimum standard of living, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has claimed. [...]

According to the report, which took two years to put together, the spending power needed to pay for a basic but socially acceptable standard of living was higher than the official government calculated poverty line. [...]

"It is about having what you need in order to have the opportunities and choices necessary to participate in society," it said. [...]

Jonathan Bradshaw, professor of social policy at the University of York and co-author of the report, said that this was the first time the question of how much income was enough had been addressed.

Just suppose the Government committed to guaranteeing the relevant minimum income to each single person, lone parent with child, pensioner couple, etc. so that nobody could/need fall below, remodelling the tax and benefit system as necessary. Isn't that a strategy socialists ought to be supporting?

For me, the minimum wage - while useful on its own - doesn't carry one-tenth of the moral weight that a minimum income does, not least because it benefits the poorly-paid, not the poor. If I took an evening job that would normally have paid £4.00/hour, at the legal/going rate of £6.00/hour, then I'd (a) be earning a wage premium I didn't personally need; and (b) deny that premium to someone poorer. I'd also observe that if the wage rate was reduced to, say, £3.00/hour, two vacancies could be opened, not one.

It's all very well to call that an 'obscene' wage. It would seem so to me if those who took the two jobs could not then hope to earn the minimum acceptable level of income the JRF have identified. I wouldn't be so concerned if one applicant was a middle-class student with a comfortable family income, while the other was somebody topping up their income with a second job. They're down our list of priorities, surely.

This is why a minimum income is much more important than a minimum wage. Incomes (I'm excluding the effects of benefits, dividends, etc.) are the basis of a human being's existence. The battle against low wages is only a rough approximation of the real battle, and distract us from those for whom even minimum wages are insufficient, and those for whom minimum wages pay an undeserved benefit.

Once people have the imperishable safety-net of a minimum income, there's no longer any need to control wages. People will be able to take the jobs at the price employers are prepared to pay, or else tell them to get stuffed. Sure, there are 'dependency' issues here, but while they might decrease employment, uncontrolled wages ought to increase it. Nevertheless, those on the lowest incomes have bargaining power they didn't have before.

And just think what we could do to the benefits system, and tax rates...

*

I really think the Labour Party should seize the opportunity to champion the Minimum Income Standard campaign. It won't do for the Department for Work and Pensions to say:

"This government is committed to a fairer, more inclusive society, providing opportunity for all. We have lifted 600,000 children and nearly a million pensioners out of poverty. [...]"

when - on that definition of poverty - those children and pensioners could slip back just because of a change in the nation's median income, and when the benefits of the Government's anti-poverty strategy are buried within those figures.

This looks like an opportunity to enact some really radical change: to reject the conservatism of those politically to our immediate left and right, to simplify the tax and benefit system, and to provide the kind of safety-net that our 'Welfare State' has patently never really provided.