Just wrote to the EDP about a leader warning about our low pay society:
Your excellent leader (September 5) precisely defines one of the serious underlying problems hindering any sort of economic recovery - low pay. The causes are many; from zero hour contracts which are indicative of employers' attitudes, through part-time working with little or no benefits, to out-and-out abuse of workers through unpaid internships and criminally low wages in the black economy.
But if the cost of these affronts to the victims is bad enough there is, as your leader writer implied, a bigger issue that affects those actually earning enough to pay proper taxation - taxes rise to subsidise these low wages. In fact the situation can be even worse where employers effectively use this subsidy from the taxpayer to prop up their bottom line profits - and then fail to opay their own proper tax burden.
That doubly whammy is at the heart of the problem that the international banking crisis bequeathed to the nation when it robbed us of our fiscal base.
What makes this worse of course is that to a very real extent the drivers of this low wage/low tax exploitation are the investment banks who caused the problem and their allies, the institutional investors. For it is they who have been encouraged to demand ever higher returns on their investment while seeking to diminish their contribution to the society which supports them.
All this has its origins in the policies of successive government of all persuasions - the laissez-faire, growth driven policies have spawned our "me ,me, me|" society. Until these evils have been addressed and moderated our expunged the chance of a real recovery is minimal. Am I hopeful? Need you ask?
Your excellent leader (September 5) precisely defines one of the serious underlying problems hindering any sort of economic recovery - low pay. The causes are many; from zero hour contracts which are indicative of employers' attitudes, through part-time working with little or no benefits, to out-and-out abuse of workers through unpaid internships and criminally low wages in the black economy.
But if the cost of these affronts to the victims is bad enough there is, as your leader writer implied, a bigger issue that affects those actually earning enough to pay proper taxation - taxes rise to subsidise these low wages. In fact the situation can be even worse where employers effectively use this subsidy from the taxpayer to prop up their bottom line profits - and then fail to opay their own proper tax burden.
That doubly whammy is at the heart of the problem that the international banking crisis bequeathed to the nation when it robbed us of our fiscal base.
What makes this worse of course is that to a very real extent the drivers of this low wage/low tax exploitation are the investment banks who caused the problem and their allies, the institutional investors. For it is they who have been encouraged to demand ever higher returns on their investment while seeking to diminish their contribution to the society which supports them.
All this has its origins in the policies of successive government of all persuasions - the laissez-faire, growth driven policies have spawned our "me ,me, me|" society. Until these evils have been addressed and moderated our expunged the chance of a real recovery is minimal. Am I hopeful? Need you ask?
