Employment zones are a local pilot application of the Blairite programme
of welfare to work, modelled on the US precedent. They seek to achieve
full employment but without assigning any power to workers which might
result from that. Full employment is very contradictory for capitalism. On
the one hand it is an enormous social regulator. It legitimizes the system
and also avoids the problem of the devil finding deviant acts for idle
hands to undertake. On the other, given an effective trade union movement,
it empowers workers at the point of production. Welfare to work in the
contemporary UK with a trade union movement weaker than it has been since
the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1829 is all about social control and
not at all about empowerment. To the extent that it does improve workers
wages, by tax credit schemes, it does so by a horizontal transfer within
the working class from real middle income earners who have had limited
real gains from the growth of the last twenty years, and does not touch
the incomes of the top 10% who have collared the bulk of that growth for
themselves, indeed it is probably the top 5% - capitalists and their
lackeys like Blair.
By the way we have a long experience now of 'zone' strategies in the UK.
The one common element is that the people who live in them have bugger all
power in determining what is to be done. It is done to them, not by them.
As for that hero of the working class (which he left long ago) Prescott, I
will reproduce here my grandfather's (a real seaman) doubtless
prejuidiced views on ships stewards, that berk's former profession - he
regarded them as dirty in their persons and their habits and liable to
steal from their messmates. Not much changes does it ?
David Byrne
Dept of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Durham
Elvet Riverside
New Elvet
Durham DH1 3JT
0191-374-2319
0191-0374-4743 fax
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