There's not enough unemployment

This evening North East Tonight (ITV) featured a story of business success. The reporter visited the Greyfriars UK mushroom farm in Wath, near Ripon, North Yorkshire, where the proud owner was interviewed. Business was booming, so much so that the farm sought to expand its output. The problem being, the reporter told us, that there were not enough unemployed people in the region looking for this kind of work.

No mention was made of the reason for this shortage of applicants. This work is low-paid, low-status and low-security. The solution to this problem, in any responsible, humane economy, is to raise these conditions. In any reasonable, humane economy, this remedy should hardly ever be required, as all workers should be guaranteed decent pay, decent status and decent security, enough to be confident, equal members of a democratic society. This report highlights that, for some, high unemployment is a desirable economic characteristic. It can be said, with confidence, that these people have an entirely de-moralised understanding of economics. And when such a de-moralisation is taken without comment and without rancour, what do we have left?

To solve their business problem the company had opened an employment office in Riga, Latvia. This office received a phone call from a Latvian jobseeker every 15 minutes and the company had assembled a large database of potential workers.

This effort to keep wages down is taken in preference to a smaller expansion with higher wages, or a similar sized expansion with smaller per-kilo profits. In other words, as we should know, the imperative is to drive down pay, conditions and security. High unemployment becomes a resource to be exploited to this end.

The featured worker had been a journalist in Latvia. The reporter told viewers that now she could exercise her freedom and had come to Ripon to earn more money picking mushrooms.

There is no reason why a journalist should necessarily earn more money than a mushroom picker. However, employing the 2nd and 3rd world’s professional class to be as Britain’s agricultural labour force is not a progressive development strategy. The report highlights the hollow freedom of many capitalist economies, where university educated people find that they have to travel across Europe to take the lowest jobs in Britain.