Wage Depression Over the Decades

Many people of my age (mid-Fifties) can still remember a time when a single parent could earn enough to run a family and have the mother stay at home.

Then in the seventies thanks to inflation, if you wanted nice things the second partner had to go out and get a part-time job. The imability of wages to support a family had started.

In the eighties, if you wanted to run a car, have a VCR, etc the second partner needed to go out and get a job. The rise of non-parental childcare in the form of child minders boomed.

In the Nineties, the two parents started to struggle to support a family. When Labour came into power in the late Nineties, they decided that the family needed help and in 2003 introduced tax credits for working families.

All the while, in the background you had non-working families fully supported by the state in the form of very generous benefits.

Over the decades wage stagnation has caused wages to depress so much that now even two people working full time cannot support a family and the government has to chip in with in-work benefits like tax credits. But that's taking money from people without kids and give it to families just because employers won't or can't pay proper wages if they wish to stay competitive. i.e. we all suffer wage deflation, even if we don't have a family.

At the same time, benefits eventually became so generous, there was no incentive to work. The differential is still pretty big. Stay unemployed and you get everything paid for: rent, council tax, National Insurance, prescriptions.... The moment you step into work, the full reality of competing in a global market hits home.Thanks to globalism you are competeing with someone in Vietnam whos housing costs amount to a tin shack with no electricity, water or sewage system. They don't have to pay for any of the utilities that western workers have to pay for.

I've yet to formulate a plan as to how to equalise the playing field. Of course as that Vietnamese worker's life style improves, pressures will increase on his wages so that eventually he will be demanding similar wages to a wesstern worker.

In the meantime the disparity is being exploited by the global corporations. It's this disparity that is causing the rise of populism in the West. The global corporates and western governments have failed to effectively manage the issue and have largely ignored the poor working class in the west. There's a lot of people at the bottom of the pyramid and they are getting increasingly angry and connected by technology.

The poor working class see mass immigration as another attempt to further depress wages, not the advantage or benefit that the elites would have us believe immigrants are.

40 years of wage depression and the various attacks on the ability to raise a family in the West from all side has created an atmosphere in the West amongst the poor that enough is enough. We're already seeing workers on zero hours contracts, workers living in tents, trailers and shacks. The workers of the West can see a future where their families live in Shacks like the Vietnamese guy and the rich get even richer.

There is an overwhelming feeling amongst the poor working class that a red line has been crossed. Especially after the financial crisis where billions of pounds of taxpayer's money was used to bail out the banks rather than allow them to fail, in the process inflating the wallets of the richest 1% of the country. There's also a growing realisation that "climate change" taxes are not being used for the purpose of mitigating the effects, but instead again lining the pockets of the mega-rich.

The past decade has seen the biggest and fastest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in history. Quite rightly the poor are unimpressed, and angry.