In thinking about Mum’s last weeks on Earth (UMN10), I want to recount a profound economics lesson she taught me:
I too could grow my bank account if I chose to starve my most frail child.
Born in Holland, a teenager during WWII, Mum never completed high school. Poverty and hardship were the norm for her community but not an indicator of an absence of hard work, intelligence, frugality, or concern about the common good.
Absence of opportunities in Holland inspired my parents to migrate to Aotearoa in 1961, seemingly solving labor issues in both jurisdictions. A job for my father and a home for our family of seven did not eventuate in the ways my parents were led to believe. They worked hard and did without, as did many families. The reality of living on the brink of poverty and its implications was never far from Mum’s mind.
Mum’s keen eye on the day to day lives of her family, friends, and community noted the amplification of demands on the working classes to ‘tighten their belts’ and to ‘increase productivity’ - especially from the 1970s. She noted too the orientation of policy makers and media mouthpieces in the 1980s and 1990s: “The poor should be more frugal, resilient and appreciative. They should make less demands of the state. They should get a job. They should….” Mum was incensed. She knew how hard so many of her community were working and how many doors closed to opportunities they faced.
Mum’s attention to the stresses on the working classes and the marginalized intensified. She read Jane Kelsey’s and Tim Hazeldine’s exposures of systemically generated inequality.[i] Neo-liberalism was on a global growth spurt. Mum could see that the outcomes of this regime would benefit the few and damage the many. Subsequent research demonstrates the actuality of the damage.[ii]
Treasury (2015) however, appears in denial:
It is about time that people recognise that, despite the growing number of headlines and stories about inequality, the statistics point strongly in the other direction. It makes sense to think about policies to address poverty and especially about the effects of housing affordability for the poor. But New Zealand simply has no problem of rising inequality.[iii]
The women who cared for Mum in her last weeks of life are not the only workers still subject to persistent systemic inequality. Employment insecurity and poor working conditions continue to characterize the current form of globalization. For a while, New Zealand was proud to be seen as a leader in the normalization of this global regime.
In the news this week are reports of the distressing work experiences of more people – mostly women – who provide the support for children with significant personal needs so that teachers can focus on the class as a whole.[iv] Even the most compassionate person in this drama – politician, policy maker, teacher, parent, child, principal - is being sorely tested. How sickening then, in a world of great disparity, to have the income levels of CEO’s put under our noses…[v] “Disgusting” is a response I get in my newsfeeds.
The women who worked extra shifts to meet the needs of their families and ours seem locked in the ever-tightening grip of their commitment to human integrity, their own income needs, and the needs of their employers for staff in an impossibly tight labor market. This continued turning of the screw was predictable as the neoliberal doctrine took hold. The associated systemic degradation must not be presented as an unintended outcome of an economic doctrine that promised that, after a time of sacrifice by the workers (and systemic marginalization of the superfluous), the rising tide of the new economic regime would lift all boats. It has not happened, as Rashbrooke[vi] so clearly explains. It will not happen now.
Should I be more optimistic than I am about the future? The dominance of the prophets of the profit motif was and is still disguised in the necessary (naturalized) dynamics of [capitalist] markets as arbiters of and means to justice – albeit markets with a few more legislative constraints. The economic growth rhetoric remains dominant. Social aspirations are still to be achieved through free markets that are anything but emancipatory to those who suffer the degrading consequences of the espoused gospel.
What is the [hidden] grip on the managers who must meet the seemingly insatiable desire for [economic] growth rhetorically promoted as productivity gains [getting more for less] – the constant in the story of capitalism and its defining imbalance of power? As an intensification of the ‘gig economy’ is being broadcast,[vii] concern about the outcomes of its predictable systemic degradations needs a much more radical response than the [necessary] adjustments to the conditions of service won of late by nurses, teachers and similar cases. Non modo sed etiam?[viii] Perhaps.
[i] - Kelsey, J. (1995) The New Zealand Experiment. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books - Hazeldine, T. (1998). Taking New Zealand Seriously: the economics of decency. Auckland: Harper Collins.
[ii] https://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/journals-and-magazines/social-policy-journal/spj20/assessing-the-progress-on-poverty-reduction-20-pages197-222.html
[iii] http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1506/S00282/inequality-falling-despite-rising-headlines.htm
[iv] https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/teacher-aides-calling-job-security-and-pay-equity
[v] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/
[vi] Rashbrooke, M. (2013) Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books.
[vii] https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/life/115751435/benefits-of-the-gig-economy-will-not-be-shared-by-all