Back in the 1950s and 60s my father worked on the shop floor of a light engineering firm in Edinburgh. He and other shop stewards from the AEU (later AUEW) organised a “friendly society” that collected contributions from the workforce for a fund that helped those that needed financial assistance because they were off sick. They were all very pleased when their enlightened employer decided to start its own non-contributory sick pay system. Not many enlightened employers around these days. Too many zero-hours contracts.
The latest government ploy to chip away at what is left of the welfare system by suggesting that workers should be paying into savings accounts run by the banks and insurance companies (PM to consider plan for workers to fund their own sick pay, 14 July) demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the plight of the non-millionaires in this country. The Tories must be laughing themselves sick. They conned the country into giving them a majority, and by the end of this parliament they’ll have us out of Europe, society will be back to pre-first-world-war near-feudalism, and economic conditions will be so bad that refugees would rather stay at Calais. Job done.
Robert Ross
London
• Is there no limit to Iain Duncan Smith’s punitive schemes? Now he has come up with another suggestion: workers pay their own sickness benefit. Is that the motive behind the promise of an increase in the “living wage”? If this is compassionate conservatism then the words need to be redefined – or is it simply another way of penalising the vulnerable? Perhaps it is just rivalry to see who can subjugate people the most. He certainly is in the running for the prize, and if George Osborne scraps employment laws they’ll be neck and neck.
Miracles can happen, and he may recall Pope Francis’s concern about poverty. There’s always the confessional box, of course, for the truly penitent.
Veronica Edwards
Malvern, Worcestershire
