In a case that could cost it £4bn, Tesco is fighting an equal pay claim over its hourly rate – £8 for work on the checkout, £11 for work in the warehouse. By startling and, unfortunately for the grocer, actionable coincidence, the checkout staff are mainly women, an army of 200,000, while the warehouse staff are mainly men.
In 2012, in Birmingham, the council lost a landmark case against its care workers, who fought for six years to be paid as much as the bin men. The cases resemble one another but aren’t identical – in Birmingham, care workers and bin men were on the same rate, yet refuse work came with substantial overtime and bonuses, while in care work, weekends, Christmases and overnights were a regular part of what you do when you care. In the Tesco battle, the asymmetry is ascribed by commentators to the fact that, in warehouses, you have to move heavy stuff and operate machinery, and, besides, if women want to work in warehouses, all they need to do is apply.
That is the hot-button pay-gap question of the day – do women choose low-paid sectors because they are more naturally suited to them? Or is this all a gender construct, with the patriarchy putting centuries of graft into persuading one sex that they are hardwired to do the stuff the other sex doesn’t like the look of? Always happy to wade into a fight about gender essentialism, I sometimes forget to reject the premise. It doesn’t matter why women go into female-dominated sectors. The only question that matters is why women’s work is less well-paid.
I once heard a trade unionist describe the skills involved in care work. They are soft (sympathy, empathy, imagination, ability to strategise, pre-empt, lead and plan) and hard (significant medical expertise). The reason these skills weren’t valued was because they weren’t measured, and that was because there wasn’t a guild. That meant no recognised skillset, no career structure and no progression. It was neat, but the same could be said for other, male-dominated fields, where the pay stagnation is nothing like as bad. Childcare is almost universally conceived – by everyone except those who have done it – as the easiest job in the world. In fact, it is so demanding, physically, emotionally and intellectually, that any other work, for years after, feels like an awayday. It is just assumed to be low-skill, because women can do it.
What would the suffragettes make of us today, everyone asked on the centenary of their victory. Would they have wanted to be pardoned, for their acts of terrorism? Prominent Tories squirmed on the fish hook of whether or not to posthumously rehabilitate arsonists on a case-by-case basis for the sake of the sisterhood; the correct answer would have been: “It’s not our place to pardon these women; it would be audaciously irrelevant, like Piers Morgan forgiving Jesus for knocking over some tables.” I imagine them, returning from the grave with the crushing analysis that we had come some of the way on representation and whatnot, but failed to overturn the crucial precept in the maintenance of inequality: that if a woman could do it, a monkey could.
Theresa May’s magic cake trick
You can tell whether a government is in crisis by when the news lands. In a really high-functioning system, everything happens on Monday and Tuesday, because that’s when the leadership lays out the week’s agenda and everyone else responds to it. In a total shambles, nothing happens at the start of the week because the government has no design, then something untoward blows up on Thursday and Friday and it is like five days of news arriving at once. But that is just a garden-variety botch. In Theresa May’s hash (which sounds delicious, like a breakfast side at an independent service station), she trails a speech for the start of the week about Brexit, then gives a totally different speech about the abuse of MPs. It is not that anybody agrees with verbal abuse, except, of course, the people doing it: rather, it is about the unfortunate agenda setting. Any discussion of the looming disaster of Brexit, so oppressive that its only silver lining is that they seem to lack the competence to enact it, could wait, apparently, while we sorted out our language.
On Tuesday, May rallied with a fresh plan, designed to remind her party of its common goals. It was dismissed as a “bromide” by one anonymous Tory source, but, in fact, a platitude is something with which all reasonable people agree. Her points, on the contrary, didn’t even cohere from the start of the sentence to the end. She wants government debt to fall but government spending to rise: NHS funding to rise, but taxes to fall. She wants a Brexit that guarantees “the greatest possible access to European markets”, but that would be not-Brexit. She wants to “tackle the injustices that hold people back from achieving their true potential”, yet she also wants to remain prime minister.
This is so far beyond having your cake and eating it: this is inventing a new kind of cake, which makes you thin while you eat it, then, miraculously, you still have it afterwards, and also it is a rocket. Still, relax: she’s also “backing the innovators”. If anyone can invent this space cake, she can.
The basic problem with luxury communism
Last night, I found myself describing fully automated luxury communism to some young people. Automation is coming anyway; its profits can either be captured by the very few, leaving the rest of us scrabbling in a post-work world for crusts and coins we dropped down the back of the sofa when we had jobs. Or its fruits could be universally distributed, leaving us with nothing to navigate but the luxury of our freedom. It would have to start with a universal basic income, I said, and my audience evaporated. Nobody minds the redistribution of the infinite riches of humanity’s inventiveness. Nobody likes the word “basic”.
