Low Earnings, Wage-stop Major Cause of Poverty

Last week's issue of New Society had an editorial note about the Government survey on poverty: Circumstances of Families (HMSO 17s. 6d.) This is extremely useful because it analyses the main facts which come out of the report. The editorial also draws attention to Margaret Herbison's statement that the government will tackle the hard-core problem "so far as is possible in the light of other competing demands on national wsources," This underlines the point made by The Week in its last issue that the fight against poverty is a fight against the whole Government's economic and social policy. "Competing demands on national resources" have to be given an order of priority, that order of priority is determined by Government policy. The most important parts of the article read: "Circumstances of Families broadly supports the case of those who have argued so tenaciously that poverty among large families is one of the major deficiencies of our society. It is all to the good that the arguments of a pressure group should be reinforced by these official findings. It only remains now for officialdom to offer a solution... On the basis of a sample of approximately 2,500 families with two or more children and drawing family allowances, the survey suggests that, last summer, some 280,000 families had resources, excluding national assistance, which were less than their requirements as defined on the basis of national assistance scales. These families included 910,000 children. I¢ the supplementary benefit rates now current are applied, the number of families rises to 345,000 (out of a possible total of some 3.9 million), and the number of children involved goes up to 1,110,000. If you take into account the total of seven million families with one or more children, half a million families were below what is now the supplementary benefit level. Margaret Herbison points out, in her foreword to the report, the by now familiar paradox that every time you raise the benefit rate the number of people below the poverty level automatically increases. But this doesn't alter the force of the findings. Yet it is not so much the general picture as the breakdown which is really significant. Of the 345,000 below-scale families, 125,000 had fathers in full-time jobs. ‘Some 60,000 families had sick fathers at the time of the survey, 40,000 had fathers unemployed, and about 75,000 were fatherless., The remainder included some 20,000 with fathers on holiday and a variety of other categories. Of the 135,000 families receiving national assistance last June and July, 15,000 did not receive full allowances because of the wage stop, and about 70,000 could not be paid assistance at all because the fathers were in full-time work. The survey therefore makes it more than ever clear that the poverty problem is dominated by low full-time earnings, coupled with the wage-stop philosophy. The only cast-iron solution to it would be some sort of minimum-income guarantee." At the TGWU conference this week, Frank Cousins' line of the £15 a week minimum wage carried; it is significant that the same conference went on record for a whole series of nationalisation measures and for industrial democracy. These points are all facets of the beginnings of an alternative policy to Wilsonism in the Labour movement.