Stat attack!

The people of Tulse Hill should be rich. Some 5,000 or so of you work between 31 and 48 hours per week. That is, Tulse Hill Ward alone is producing a minimum of 155,000 hours of work a week. There’s a further thousand working more than 49 hours. This is a highly educated workforce: over 800 work in education, 700 in Information and communication and nearly a thousand in professional and scientific activities. So, this is an area that would be called by some “middle class”, with professional office based work predominating.

Yet, in such an area, only 600 households own their home outright, and thirteen hundred homes are owner occupied with mortgages. Over two thousand households are in social accommodation, and fifteen hundred rent privately. 2,400 households have one dimension of deprivation (unemployment, overcrowding, lack of education or disability), twelve hundred have two and 490 have three of those four states.

The picture is, that the majority of people in Tulse Hill have to work in order to keep their home, or to keep deprivation away. They may work with their minds or skills, but they are working class non-the-less, selling their ability to work in order to access the means of living. So, they don’t get to use those 155,000 hours of weekly work to make their area better, to look after those unable to work, or anything of the sort. Those 155,000 hours are fed into a system that generates profits for the tiny minority who own the means of living and who demand our labour to get to it.

All statistics from here

The Giant of Idleness...

I read in the newspaper this morning about a new International Labour Organisation report "World of Work, 2012"[PDF]. Here are some key excerpts:

For 2012, around 202 million people are expected to be unemployed, reflecting the downward scenario indicated in the ILO (2012). The unemployment rate will further increase to 6.1 per cent of the global labour force this year and increase to 6.2 per cent in 2013. The number of jobseekers will continue to swell, and is expected to reach 210 million people by 2016, despite a gradual but limited decline in the unemployment rate.

…there is still a deficit of around 50 million jobs in comparison to the pre-crisis situation. It is unlikely that the world economy will grow at a sufficient pace over the next couple of years to both close the existing jobs deficit and provide employment for the over 80 million people expected to enter the labour market during this period.

...In addition, for a growing proportion of workers who do have a job, employment has become more unstable or precarious. In advanced economies, involuntary part-time employment and temporary employment have increased in two-thirds and more than half of these economies, respectively. The share of informal employment remains high, standing at more than 40 per cent in two-thirds of emerging and developing countries.

It is difficult to comprehend the amount of wealth being lost to un-and-under-employment. When we look around the world, and think what can be achieved with 202 million people's labour, and realise that it is just being lost. We need to be crystal clear, on May the first, workers day, capitalism depends on unemployment. It is a key and essential feature of the wages system. Those 202 million are unemployed so that a handful of billionaires can have their profits. We are being robbed not only of our own labour, but of the benefits of the labour of our fellows. That is the case for socialism in a nutshell.

Looking at Wandsworth

Some stats about Wandsworth:

A third of the borough's land area is occupied by residential properties, many within one of the forty five conservation areas. A quarter of the borough's land area is open space, much of this in the form of large areas of heath and common, and the Thames forms the northern boundary. [...]Around 134,095 dwellings are home to a population of approximately 289,600 (2010)[...]The 20-39 year old age group represents 47% of the population compared to 27% nationally and 35% in Greater London. Ethnic minorities account for 22% of the population as a whole and 26% of under 15s [...] There are approximately 99,600 people working in the borough, but of the 142,000 working residents in the 2001 Census, 29% worked in Wandsworth and 46% worked in central London boroughs.

That is, roughly, the borough houses about 5 million hours a week of available labour. the question becomes one of whether the people who perform that labour actually benefit from all that such working time could achieve for them. Anyway, moving on. There are 11,000 firms with 0-9 employees (accounting for about 93% of the borough's employees); 700 10-49 employees; and 100 with 50+.

An theme that should loom large in the election will be housing. In 2010/11 apparently, a net of 481 new homes were built in Wandsworth. Anyway, enough for now, next we'll take a brief look at Merton.

Focus on Vauxhall

OK, so that was the national stats, lets throw in what we know about London:

For October to December 2009:

The employment rate was 68.7 per cent and there were 3.71 million employed people.

The unemployment rate was 9.1 per cent and there were 373,000 unemployed people.

The inactivity rate was 24.2 per cent and there were 1,253,000 working age inactive people.

According to this constituency profile (which I will add to the sidebar) back in June 2009 Vauxhall had a nearly 4% greater unemployment rate than London (which was about 2% over the national average), so we could reasonably infer that Vauxhall will have greater than 12% unemployment, around 9 to 10 thousand unemployed.

What emerges from even these scant glances through the official statistics is the shocking normality of these conditions, that such widespread unemployment (and as we have seen from previous posts) poverty should nt be a burning priority, but an after thought to servicing the wishes of the insanely wealthy.

The Tories like to beat Labour with the "class war" stick. We, though, are calling for class war, for a struggle for the thousands and millions abused and held down by the wages working to organise themselves to abolish that condition.

The statistics speak

According to National Statistics' Labour Market Statistics Statistical Bulletin - February 2010 (PDF) there is an interesting employment picture in the UK.

The number of people in full-time employment fell by 37,000 on the quarter to reach 21.22 million, the smallest quarterly fall since the three months to July 2008. The number of people in part-time employment increased by 25,000 on the quarter to reach 7.67 million. There were 1.04 million employees and self-employed people working part-time because they could not find a full-time job. This is the highest figure since records for this series began in 1992 and it is up 37,000 on the quarter.

That is, on top of the 2.46 million actually without jobs, 663,000 of whom have been out of work for over a year. they are included in

The inactivity rate for October to December 2009 was 21.3 per cent, up 0.2 on the quarter but below the record high of 23.3 per cent recorded in 1983. The number of inactive people of working age increased by 72,000 over the quarter to reach a record high of 8.08 million. This increase in inactivity was largely driven by the number of students not in the labour market which has increased by 62,000 on the quarter to reach 2.26 million, the highest since comparable records began in 1993.

3.5 million people comprise the make-up of the reserve army of labour that is essential to capitalism, our system of society could not exist without thse 3.5 million. A great many more re hunkering down and taking themselves out of the jobs market as long as they can until things clear over.

Of course, these figures are dwrfed by the 21.22 million who are actually in full-time employment. But for every seven people who have a proper job, one person is un-or-underemployed. That would be true, if unemployment were scattered around, but we all know it concentrates, in communities like Lambeth, which have high levels of unemployment and low pay generally.

Mute inglorious Milton.

According to the BBC, poverty is linked to poor language acquisitiion among poor children.

Children from the poorest homes are almost a year behind middle class pupils in language skills by the time they start school, research suggests.

Now, as of 2008, according to the Lambeth State of the Borough report:

The proportion of children and young people living in poverty is higher than average, as is infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, childhood obesity, primary and secondary school permanent exclusion levels and the proportion of 16-18 year olds who are not in education, employment or training.

Lets put this into perspective with some detail

Two in five (41%) London children live in poverty compared to 28% nationwide. This rises to 51% in Inner London. Borough level figures are not available, but Lambeth can be expected to exceed the Inner London figure. Just over a third (33.8%) of children in Lambeth live in families on key benefits compared to 24% in London; Lambeth ranks as the 11th highest in Great Britain and more children live ‘in care’ in Lambeth than across the capital and the rest of the country (110 per 10,000 children under 18 were looked after, compared to 70 in London and 55 in England).

Over half of children in Lambeth are living in poverty. That's half who will be robbed of their potential to achive by the cumulative drag on life chances created by poverty. So much for Labour's pledge to end child poverty. They've barely dented it.

Where we stand

Well, I was going to kick off our campaign by, well, kicking off and giving some of our opponents a good slagging off. That is to come, though. Instead, let me try and tell you about Lambeth.

In the sidebar, you can see a link to Lambeth Statistics.

Here are some interesting facts about Lambeth (the borough where the Vauxhall Parliamentary Constituency lies).

Only 67% of Lambeth's working age residents were classified as employed in 2006/2007, compared with 69% across London and 74% nationally and in May 2007 17% were benefit claimants.

In 2007, there were around 10,000 businesses in Lambeth; but more than three-quarters of these had fewer than five employees (ABI 2007). In fact according to the 2007 Lambeth Economic Digest 99.65% of businesses in the borough are Small or Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Conversely, in the north of the borough there is a cluster of large firms, 48 of which employ more than 200 employees; among these are the national headquarters of IBM, Shell, and the ITV network. Nearly all employees employed in the borough work in the service industry (94%), with roles in public sector, education and health particularly prevalent.

There are around 270,000 people who live in Lambeth. There are 117,000 jobs (obviously, not everyone employed in the borough lives in the borough, and vice versa). Of the residents, 122,000 are in employment. 19,000 are self employed. 7% are retired. 13,000 are unemployed.

Median gross annual income is £32,000 - and they calculate that added value across the borough is £25,000. So, in this overwhelmingly working class borough, if (in an imaginary land) the workers secured the fruits of their labours by hand or by brain, they'd be living on an income of about £50K each. Of course, such a thing couldn't be achieved within the market system, but it is that base inequality of all that hardwork, and the massive gap between the efforts and the fruits that forms the ground we stand on. We hope the workers of Vauxhall will look at their situation, and decide enough is enough, and signal to their fellow workers the world over that they are prepared to do a something about it.