The Cost Of Living: The National Minimum Wage On Its Own Is Pointless

This is the transcript of my YouTube video "The Cost Of Living: The National Minimum Wage On Its Own Is Pointless".

Welcome back to the channel.  I realise that the title of this video is going to cause some ire but I ask you to watch it to the end otherwise you’ll miss the point I’m trying to make.

So, my assertion that the minimum wage is pointless in and of itself sounds a pretty bold thing to say because no one wants to sell their labour cheaply, everyone has to survive, but it’s also a very common-sense position to hold.

I’m not against the minimum wage per se but I am against it being the only thing a government will do to supposedly help the working class in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.  Since the Blair administration introduced the National Minimum Wage in April 1999, successive administrations have increased the minimum wage to great fanfare and self-congratulatory applause as if they’ve just something wonderful.  The problem is that no administration has ever increased the minimum wage at the rate it needed to be raised to keep pace with the cost of living so wages kept on falling behind, becoming worth progressively less in comparison with rising food costs, energy costs, etc.

Can anyone help being enraged at Iain Duncan Smith’s double fist pump and excited cheering when the Tory administration announced the sadly ill-named National Living Wage that was nothing like an actual living wage?  The mentality behind the slightly larger than usual increase in the minimum wage was that if they flung the working class a few breadcrumbs they’d be placated and distracted from the cuts the Tories were making to vital public services.  The great British public can be extremely easily distracted by a little bit of money and why wouldn’t they be when money is necessary to survive and surviving requires full time concentration.

The so-called National Living Wage is still nothing like enough to really live on but no administration has done what’s necessary to address the fundamental problem and that’s to take steps to help reduce the cost of living.  Steps like renationalising the most vital services that people rely on so that the people of the UK aren’t price gouged by energy companies, phone companies, water companies, etc.  Companies that provide varying levels of competence and service at the cheapest possible outlay at the maximum possible price to the customer so that shareholders get their profits.  How many companies have run their service into the ground and expect to be bailed out by the State while still paying their shareholders massive amounts in profits?  Nationalised companies that are run by the State may have their problems but at least they sell their services, etc, at a reasonable cost to the customer and invest any profits into maintaining the network that their company relies on to deliver their service.

Successive administrations could have brought in rent controls so that people who have to rent privately aren’t being forced to pay increasingly larger percentages of their income just to keep a roof over their head.  They could have stopped the practice of individuals or companies buying up properties that they refuse to use themselves or be used by others to push up the prices they can charge for rent by starving the market until it’s advantageous to themselves.  They could have enacted legislation to ensure that private rental properties are actually fit for human habitation so that tenants aren’t paying out to make the property liveable. None of that has been done.

Successive administrations have done nothing to rein in supermarket chains who could reduce their markup on the most essential items to bring down the cost of feeding the household even if they were only made to do so during the most desperate financial times.  They wouldn’t even have to reduce everything, just the essentials.  It would be nice if a government decided to help people eat more healthily by putting a cap on the prices of healthy food, making it affordable to eat well and eat healthily.  None of this would stop any supermarkets earning profits or from being competitive in their respective markets.

All governmental administrations ever do is increase the minimum wage, thinking that it’ll solve the problem.  It doesn’t.

And, before someone brings up the cost-of-living payments that the Tories gave out to lower income households as an example of working-class people being helped out by the government, take a moment and think about it carefully.  Was it really helping out working class families or was it helping out price-gouging companies?

The Tories could have made energy companies, to take them as an example, lower the prices they charged their customers when the cost of oil or cost of energy production went down but they didn’t.  They just let the energy regulator raise the energy price cap and rarely reduce it because it seems as though the regulator is under the control of the companies it is supposed to regulate.  Regulators are meant to work in the interests of the consumer, not the companies that exploit them.

So, instead of making the regulators do the job they are supposed to be doing, the energy prices kept going up and the cost-of-living payments went straight into the coffers of the energy companies so they could continue to rack in the obscene levels of profits that they did.

There’s nothing wrong with companies earning profits but there is something wrong when those profits are as obscenely large as they have become and essential services shouldn’t be run for profit because they vital for the smooth running of the country.

Let’s use some absurd numbers to demonstrate my original point.  You could set the minimum wage to £25 an hour, giving you £1000 for a 40-hour week.  Sounds great, doesn’t it?  However, if your costs come to £999 per week, you’ll never get anywhere.  You’ll never be able to afford an unexpected emergency such as needing to replace a broken fridge freezer.  You’ll always be working to tread water, never being able to get ahead.

We still need to have a minimum wage so that workers feel that their labour isn’t being sold cheaply and give them a feeling of worth but we also need a government that’s willing to take the action necessary to really tackle the cost-of-living crisis and not one that throws the working-class crumbs from the table.