Austerity, Welfare and Work. Etherington, David

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СКАЧАТЬ trade union representation at work and which, in turn, will ensure that claimants moving into employment have rights and a voice. The book focuses on ways in which the welfare system can provide an adequate social safety net and support people into employment without imposing conditions and sanctions. I attempt to provide a voice and recognition of the role of trade unions as well as welfare and social movements in their struggle and resistance to austerity. In mapping out alternatives I draw on my research on Denmark, which has both a redistributive welfare system and coordinated collective bargaining. As I argue, not only does the austerity narrative and ideology need challenging but we need a different economic model. I present some thoughts and ideas in the concluding chapter on this.

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       Introduction: the crisis and austerity neoliberalism

      But in banking, as in capitalism in general, it’s one rule for the elite and another for the rest of us. On the day Deutsche Bank began making thousands of employees redundant, some managing directors at the company’s office in the City of London were being fitted for suits that cost at least £1,200. Tailors from Fielding & Nicholson, an upmarket tailor, were pictured walking out of the bank’s UK office with suit bags. Ian Fielding-Calcutt, the tailor’s founder, and Alex Riley were there to fit suits for senior managers in spite of plans to cut 18,000 jobs worldwide. Deutsche’s chief executive, Christian Sewing, has repeatedly said how much he regretted the decision to scrap a fifth of his global workforce. But it did not stop him paying out €50m in golden handshakes to top executives since 2018. (Roberts, 2019)

      Estimates of the size of the UK bank bailout range between £289 billion and £550 billion – or nearly £10,000 for every British resident – exceeding the £203 billion of tax that the sector paid in the five years up to 2006–2007 … by the end of 2009 the total value of bailouts in the US, UK and euro area equalled $14 trillion, or almost a quarter of the world’s gross domestic product. (Sayer, 2016: 229)

      We know that there’s appetite in the Conservative party for a bonfire of workers’ rights. (O’Grady, 2018)

       Welfare reform employment relations and labour discipline

      The 2008 financial crisis and the near collapse of the financial system brought about a response from nearly all developed and developing capitalist countries that is referred to as austerity; this is generally viewed as a strategy for cutting back public expenditure in order to reduce public debts. This was based on thinking by the dominant elites that balancing finances was a crucial factor in bringing about further growth. Sacrifices had to be made for the greater good. We are now living in an age of austerity. While the term austerity is generally used to mean public expenditure cuts, as will be argued in this book, there is more to it. Richard Seymour defines austerity as comprising several elements (Seymour, 2014: 3–4). First, it is focused on reducing government budget deficits through a combination of public spending cuts and usually regressive tax hikes. Austerity is integral to neoliberalism (see Chapter 2 for a more detailed definition), which can be defined as:

      … an economic policy regime whose objective is to secure monetary and fiscal stability and that is legitimised by an ideology that holds markets are best treated as self-regulating. This has allowed not merely the ‘restoration of class power’ analysed by Harvey, but also a dramatic redistribution of wealth and income in favour of the rich. (Callinicos, 2012: 67)

      Or put in a different way but making a similar point, Mark Blyth observes that austerity ‘is not just the price of saving the banks but the price that the banks want someone else to pay’ (Blyth, 2016: 7).

      Second, the ‘disciplining of labour’ is a key element of the austerity ‘growth project’ in terms of restricting its agency and capacities of mobilisation and resistance. This is facilitated by curtailing the bargaining power of labour via industrial relations and employment regulation. In addition, welfare and labour market policies involve the increasing use of conditionality in terms of reducing access to benefits and restricting the capacities of benefit claimants to negotiate and challenge the welfare system (see Umney, 2018). Welfare conditionality holds that access to certain basic, publicly provided, welfare benefits and services should be dependent on an individual first agreeing to meet particular obligations or patterns of behaviour (Welfare Conditionality Project, 2018a).

      The disciplining of labour in terms of regulation at work and through welfare are often conceptualised as quite separate processes in both social policy and industrial relations debates. They are, however, closely interlinked. Colin Crouch (1999: 437) states the

      term for ‘social policy’ in French and Italian discussion refers to both the welfare state and industrial relations … Historically, both institutionalized industrial relations and the provision of various social benefits were a response to the predicament of the growing new industrial working class, protected from the insecurities of the capitalist labour market.

      This inter-relationship between employment relations and welfare is a central focus of the book. One of the fruitful aspects of the work of Esping-Andersen (1990) on his comparative welfare regime analysis is the way he draws out the relationship between labour movement power/influence and the regime type. For example, the relatively strong coordinated industrial relations systems of Northern Europe have shaped in turn more redistributive welfare systems which are characteristics of the Nordic countries (see Chapter 7 on Denmark).

      Brandl and Traxler (2004) draw out in more detail these relationships:

      •Employment effects of collective bargaining have an impact on the welfare state insofar as unemployment benefits are provided by the state.

      •Collective/individual wage agreements even more directly affect the public welfare system when the level of and change in social benefits is formally linked to wage movements, which in turn impact on in-work benefits.

      •Welfare states influence industrial relations when establishing social protection against the risks resulting from the labour market. For example, unemployment benefits act as a cushion for unemployed persons in order for them to seek work. Where there is no compulsion to take up work they can wait and thus enhance the bargaining power of labour, because there is less incentive to undercut wages and labour standards. However, intensive conditionality can mean that the bargaining power is weakened as welfare conditionality guarantees a ready supply of cheap and compliant labour who can replace workers who are deemed ‘too expensive’, militant or organised.

      •The interrelation of industrial relations and the welfare state becomes most evident when their regulations target the same subject. For instance, provisions for sickness benefits may be endorsed in social policy legislation and/or collective agreements. Negotiation around health and safety, holiday entitlements, maternity rights and other forms of social benefits can ‘spill over’ into areas of social policy.

      •Unions organised in the public sector (employment services, local government and health sector) pursue defensive and offensive strategies to retain employment and services to the benefit of more disadvantaged groups more reliant on the welfare system.

      •Union anti-privatisation strategies and campaigns around welfare and public services in terms of retaining service levels and quality, has an important impact on claimant experience of the welfare system.

      The most coercive influence of welfare conditionality on employment relations as outlined earlier is the way it reinforces contingent work and undermines wage bargaining. In turn keeping minimum wages low will indirectly influence benefit levels and social security СКАЧАТЬ