Why we should all support the creation of a National Social Care Service

With people living longer who are sick, funding social care is very hard. One of the actions of the current government which is very controversial is the way that they propose to fund the care of the elderly. According to The Telegraph 340,000 people entitled to home help will soon get none.

It doesn’t surprise me when I hear horror stories about the way people in care area treated. When the state cannot afford to provide a public service they often sub-contract it out to a for profit agency, usually the one who claims they can do it while charging the government the least. The result of this is people working for private care providers aren’t properly trained because the company operates on a ‘for profit’ basis; so any training beyond the bare necessities is in their eyes a waste of money, and cuts into their balance sheet.

This is also why people working for private care companies are often not paid well. I am personally aware of 3 legal loopholes that are used to avoid paying the national minimum wage to people working for private care companies in the area where I live.

The first is regards to agency work, a care home will need people to cover a shift and will ask a temp agency to provide the cover offering the NMW to the worker sent, of which the agency wants a ‘finder’s fee’ which they deduct from the already minimum wage.

The second is regards to community care; a care worker is working an 8 hour shift (for example), but they are informed that they are only ‘at work’ when they are actually inside a client’s home, the time spent travelling from 1 clients home to another counts as travelling to work, not work itself – so the worker gets paid a fraction of what they actually work. When the cost of keeping a car on the road is factored into this equation such employment becomes almost pointless, earning a few pounds per week above what they would be entitled to on state benefits.

The final one is regards to working night shifts at some elderly residential homes. At night most people would expect a worker to get a wage enhancement for working anti-social hours, but no… there are some care homes which don’t do this, in fact they don’t even pay night staff a ‘wage’, they pay them an ‘on call rate’ after the residents have gone to bed which is a fraction of the minimum wage and enhance their pay to the NMW for each our that a resident is disturbed or in need of assistance.

So I cannot help but wonder if any subcontracting of state care to private companies will inevitably result in abuse or mal-treatment due to poor training, and poor conditions. Care is a high-responsibility job, yet many carers are paid low wages… well no: the minimum wage of for minimum responsibility jobs, the major high-street supermarkets pay people a few pence an hour above the NWM to stack shelves, some of the smaller chains pay over a pound an hour above the minimum wage. And yet if someone wants to work in care, they have to have the lives of vulnerable and sick people put into their hands for a pittance? Where I ask in the incentive to do that I can’t help but wonder?

It's the economy stupid: why capitalism is reliant on a high minimum wage

You know I think it’s absolutely stupid claiming that increasing the minimum wage would increase unemployment: Which western nation managed to cope with the global recession the best? Australia; and what is the national minimum wage in Australia? AU$16 per hour or AU$20 for casual staff. When translated into British currency that equals £9.42 per hour for contracted staff and £11.79 for those of us on those highly exploitative Zero-hour contracts, quite an increase on the £6.19 we get over here in Blighty.

For American readers; there is only about a 10-12% difference between the Australian and American dollar so after doing a currency conversion check: if you American readers were living in Oz you’d have the equivalent of a $14.59 minimum wage if you had contracted hours or $18.25 if you’re a casual worker.

Poverty makes a recession worse because in a capitalist system there is a reliance on spending power to improve the economy, if people don’t have spending power then the economy can’t grow. So if an economy exists where poor people are allowed to exist it will always have a fragile economy, subject to crashes and recessions. This means that the rich need to learn that economic stability is reliant on money exchanging hands – not being horded in a bank account that is full beyond any possibility of it ever being needed, yes people should have a reserve and money for retirement, but not to excess.

All that does is take large amounts of money out of circulation, which means it’s not actively being used to support the capitalist system. This means that there needs to be a fundamental change in the way we view money: we need to look at money as resource first and not as private property. Don’t get me wrong people who work hard should be rewarded for it. But that should mean that NOBODY who works for a living is living in poverty. It means that keeping excess money once you’ve got it should be just as hard as earning it in the first place.

I think we’ve all heard the phrase that money is the root of all evil, well thanks to capitalism it’s the lifeblood of western if not global civilisation: and who ever heard of someone being able to buy and hoard dozens of times more blood than they could ever need from a blood bank and keep frozen somewhere ‘just in case’ while clinic operations ground to a halt: well that is what is being done with low minimum wages and excessive wealth in the hands of the top 1%, because people are suffering a level of poverty in the west not known for decades, and there are people going hungry while a very small minority receive each year more than some earn in a lifetime.