There is an inverse relationship between utility and reward. The most
lucrative, prestigious jobs tend to cause the greatest harm. The most
useful workers tend to be paid least and treated worst.
I was
reminded of this while listening last week to a care worker describing
her job. Carole’s company gives her a rota of, er, three half-hour
visits an hour. It takes no account of the time required to travel
between jobs, and doesn’t pay her for it either, which means she makes
less than the minimum wage. During the few minutes she spends with a
client, she may have to get them out of bed, help them on the toilet,
wash them, dress them, make breakfast and give them their medicines. If
she ever gets a break,
she told the BBC radio programme You and Yours, she spends it with her clients. For some, she is the only person they see all day.
Is
there more difficult or worthwhile employment? Yet she is paid in
criticism and insults as well as pennies. She is shouted at by family
members for being late and not spending enough time with each client,
then upbraided by the company because of the complaints it receives. Her
profession is assailed in the media as the problems created by the
corporate model are blamed on the workers. “I love going to people; I
love helping them, but the constant criticism is depressing,” she says.
“It’s like always being in the wrong.”
Her experience is unexceptional.
A report by the Resolution Foundation
reveals that two-thirds of frontline care workers receive less than the
living wage. Ten percent, like Carole, are illegally paid less than the
minimum wage. This abuse is not confined to the UK: in the US, 27% of
care workers who make home visits
are paid less than the legal minimum.
Let’s
imagine the lives of those who own or run the company. We have to
imagine it because, for good reasons, neither the care worker’s real
name nor the company she works for were revealed. The more costs and
corners they cut, the more profitable their business will be. In other
words, the less they care, the better they will do. The perfect chief
executive, from the point of view of shareholders, is a fully fledged
sociopath.
Such people will soon become very rich. They will
be praised by the government as wealth creators. If they donate enough money to party funds,
they have a high chance of becoming peers of the realm. Gushing profiles in the press will commend their entrepreneurial chutzpah and flair.
They’ll
acquire a wide investment portfolio, perhaps including a few
properties, so that – even if they cease to do anything resembling work –
they can continue living off the labour of people such as Carole as she
struggles to pay extortionate rents. Their descendants, perhaps for
many generations, need never take a job of the kind she does.
Care
workers function as a human loom, shuttling from one home to another,
stitching the social fabric back together while many of their employers
and shareholders, and government ministers, slash blindly at the cloth,
downsizing, outsourcing and deregulating in the cause of profit.
It
doesn’t matter how many times the myth of meritocracy is debunked.
It keeps re-emerging, as you can see in the current election campaign.
How else, after all, can the government justify stupendous inequality?
One
of the most painful lessons a young adult learns is that the wrong
traits are rewarded. We celebrate originality and courage, but those who
rise to the top are often conformists and sycophants. We are taught
that cheats never prosper, yet the country is run by spivs. A
study testing British senior managers and chief executives
found that on certain indicators of psychopathy their scores exceeded
those of patients diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders
in the Broadmoor special hospital.
If you possess the one
indispensable skill – battering and blustering your way to the top –
incompetence in other areas is no impediment. The former Hewlett-Packard
chief executive Carly Fiorina
features prominently on
lists of the worst US bosses:
quite an achievement when you consider the competition. She fired
30,000 workers in the name of efficiency yet oversaw a halving of the
company’s stock price. Morale and communication became so bad that she
was
booed at company meetings. She was forced out, with a $42m severance package. Where is she now?
About to launch her campaign as presidential candidate for the Republican party, where, apparently, she is considered a serious contender. It’s
the Mitt Romney story all over again.
At
university I watched in horror as the grand plans of my ambitious
friends dissolved. It took them about a minute, on walking into the
corporate recruitment fair, to see that the careers they had pictured –
working for Oxfam, becoming a photographer, defending the living world –
paid about one fiftieth of what they might earn in the City. They all
swore they would leave to follow their dreams after two or three years
of making money; none did. They soon adjusted their morality to their
circumstances. One, a firebrand who wanted to nationalise the banks and
overthrow capitalism, plunged first into banking, then into politics.
Claire Perry now sits
on the frontbench of the Conservative party.Flinch
once, at the beginning of your career, and they will have you for life.
The world is wrecked by clever young people making apparently sensible
choices.
The inverse relationship doesn’t always hold. There are
plenty of useless, badly paid jobs, and a few useful, well-paid jobs.
But surgeons and film directors are greatly outnumbered by corporate
lawyers, lobbyists, advertisers, management consultants, financiers and
parasitic bosses consuming the utility their workers provide. As the
pay gap widens – chief executives in the UK took 60 times as much as the
average worker in the 1990s and
180 times as much today – the uselessness ratio is going through the roof I propose a name for this phenomenon: klepto-remuneration.
There
is no end to this theft except robust government intervention: a
redistribution of wages through maximum ratios and enhanced taxation.
But this won’t happen until we challenge the infrastructure of
justification, built so carefully by politicians and the press. Our
lives are damaged not by the undeserving poor but by the undeserving
rich.
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