From place to decimal place 1: geometrization of space

This book is about time and yet much of the present chapter will be devoted to space. You are entitled to an explanation. The explanation is not to be found in the fundamental postulate of post-Einsteinian classical physics that, as Minkowski put it, “space by itself and time by itself will recede completely to become mere shadows, and only a type of union of the two will still stand independently on its own”. No, it reflects my belief that space and time are equally traduced by the scientistic assumption that the world seen through the eyes of quantitative science, in particular mathematical physics, is the world period. When time is thought of in quasi-spatial terms – due in part to its initially being made explicit through vision, the most spatial of the senses – this is not a triumph of space over time, but the first step towards the triumph of quantification, of number, over both space and time. Reduction to pure quantity finishes off what was started by the spatialization of time: the loss of time as it is experienced in our lives. The reduction of time to a one-dimensional space that can be mapped on to the line of real numbers was made possible by the prior quantification, more specifically geometrization, of space. Time reduced to a dimension – the Fourth Dimension – is ultimately time shrivelled to a quantity, to something which can not only be measured but is that measurement, so that the distinction between the duration of events, of the intervals between events, and the “when” of events is lost in their reduction to mere numbers. The initial focus in this chapter on the reduction of space to pure quantities, to pure extension, is not, therefore, a digression. To understand the fate of time in physics, we need to understand the scientific impoverishment of space, the denigration of the image of habitat as primitive clothing concealing a geometrical reality and, more generally, of the reality of our surroundings to a mathematical volume.

INTRODUCTION

I have been more successful in saying what time is not than what it is. Perhaps this should not occasion surprise. The other side of the idea that time is real is the belief that it is sui generis, and consequently not analysable in terms of other things – as a quasi-spatial dimension, a succession of numbers, the direction of events, or pure change. All interpretations of time that do not translate it into something else turn out to be implicitly or explicitly circular; so that apparently satisfactory definitions turn out on closer inspection to be tautologies along the lines of “time is the temporal relationship between events” or “time is measurable duration”. I shall be content to have arrived at the notion that time is fundamental or primitive – that time is time. There is, however, one final important job to be done, which concerns less what time is than what it does or rather what (human) time permits. In this final chapter, therefore, I want to examine the relationship between time and human freedom; more precisely between tensed time and agency.

(Voluntary) actions seem incompatible with the conventional idea of ourselves as a material part of a material universe, whose events express unfolding processes directed by fundamental physical laws established before we appeared on the scene and continuing after we have left. This vision of the world that brought us into being seems to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of free will, expressed in actions that are not traceable back to the Big Bang but originate with us, manifesting something that is unique to ourselves, deeds that redirect the course of events in accordance with our intentions. To see that this is possible, though perhaps not fully to understand how it is possible, we need to highlight phenomena that do not fit into the physicalist world picture. The items in question are intentionality, and its increasing elaboration in humans, and the temporal depth with which it interacts.

In the investigation that follows into how tensed time makes it possible for (conscious) humans to exercise freedom, I arrive at the fundamental purpose of this book: to rescue the image of humanity from the increasingly common view that what the physical sciences say about the universe as a whole gives a complete and truthful portrait of what we humans are.

While the term “living wage” sounds simple, this book has shown that both its interpretation and its application are far from straightforward.

The basic idea that we should organize society and the economy so that workers can earn enough to live a decent life remains highly pertinent today. As well as being the focus of numerous campaigns for better pay, it expresses a philosophical standpoint that makes excessive appropriation of wealth and income by the economically powerful, without considering the basic needs of workers, no more acceptable than when medieval Christians were writing about “just returns” for a worker’s toil.

Applying this principle in a modern market economy is another matter entirely. Living wage campaigns achieved some remarkable victories in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Whether this will result in a generalized, permanent improvement in living conditions of low-paid workers depends on a wide range of factors. Some are related to political power, including the strength of living wage movements and the positions taken by political parties, influenced by public opinion. More fundamental are factors determining whether it is economically feasible in the long term to produce a sufficient number of jobs paying wages that support an acceptable standard of living, as defined by society. Governments cannot legislate such conditions simply by forbidding employers to pay less, although they can help foster them by contributing to workers’ incomes or lowering their living costs through other subsidies, hence reducing the wage that a worker requires to be paid in order to produce a living income.

The future sustainability of the living wage cannot be taken for granted. It raises a range of issues, dilemmas and choices. This final chapter considers these under four broad headings, with a number of issues identified within each of them:

• • Can the living wage remain true to its brand?

• • How could the relationship between minimum and living wages develop?

• • Who are the winners and losers from living wages?

• • What will a living wage look like as work transforms?

Can the living wage remain true to its brand?

The imprecision of the term “living wage” can be both a strength and a weakness.

The exchange of a person’s labour for a wage is a voluntary transaction between a worker and an employer at an agreed price. If the price is artificially set at a higher wage rate than the employer is willing to pay, the employee will not be hired. This simple truth causes some free market economists to argue against any “wage floor” (a minimum or living wage) that seeks to adjust wages according to any criterion other than the free operation of the labour market. To do so risks destroying jobs.

While that is the conclusion of neoclassical economic theory (on which prevailing modern economic models are based), many economists have suggested that in practice, the world is not that simple. The way that wages are actually fixed only imperfectly reflects what firms could pay for labour and still make a profit. The bargaining power of workers and employers is unequal. In some cases the ability of workers to move to higher-paying jobs if their work is undervalued (as market theory would predict) is restricted, sometimes because their firm is the only one hiring for a particular job type in a local area. Moreover, even if as the theory predicts, a rise in wages causes a fall in employment levels, the size of these effects needs to be taken into consideration. In 2015, the UK government announced a large increase in the minimum wage for over-25-year-olds by 2020. It estimated that this would eventually result in pay rises for six million workers, but reduce jobs growth by 60,000 (Office for Budget Responsibility 2015: 204). If that proves true, for every hundred people whose pay increases, one job (which does not yet exist, but theoretically would have by 2020) will not be created. Many people might think this is a reasonable way of improving workers’ lives overall, rather than insisting that no pay increase can ever be worthwhile if it means fewer jobs.

This chapter considers the effect of wage floors on the labour market. “Wage floor” is here taken to mean any minimum pay rate that is agreed or enforced outside the context of market bargaining.

Introduction

A living wage is a concept that overlays a market transaction with a social meaning. At one level, a wage is simply the negotiated price attached to the selling of labour by an employee to an employer – part of an agreed exchange like the price paid for eggs or automobiles. Yet the notion of a “living” wage reminds us of a social aspect of this transaction – whether it allows employees and their dependants to reach an adequate standard of living.

The price of labour is also of interest to society because it can reflect the division of economic power. The shares of national income that accrue to labour and to capital, as well as the distribution of wages between higher and lower paid workers, have varied considerably over time. Classical economic theory says that these shares will be determined by the laws of supply and demand, with the price of various “factors of production” (land, labour and capital) partly reflecting their relative scarcity. In practice, they are also affected by a host of imperfections in markets, including unequal negotiating positions of different parties. In some cases, such as a well-organized trade union threatening to call a strike, this may potentially favour workers; in others, such as boardroom executives setting the pay of their peers or distributing profits to favour the better-off, it may help divert resources to managers or to shareholders.

Ever since the advent of wage labour, therefore, two fundamental questions have arisen for ordinary employees: are wages fair, and are they enough for a worker to subsist? These questions overlap, but are not identical. The issue of fairness may relate to whether a wage reflects the true value of a worker’s labour, a difficult to assess, somewhat abstract concept. A more concrete issue is whether the wage is enough to subsist at an acceptable level.

A living wage is one that is adequate for a worker to live on. This is the core concept behind a living wage, although it immediately raises a host of issues including what we mean by adequate, how many hours someone should have to work and the extent to which the wage should cover dependants – issues that will be addressed in this book.

The concept of a “living wage”, originally a response to the appalling pay and conditions of nineteenth-century sweatshops, has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in the early twenty-first century. In the United States and the United Kingdom in particular, grassroots movements protesting against a growing pay divide have taken up the cause of a living wage, arguing that paying workers less than they need to live on is both immoral and short sighted. It is immoral, they say, because workers deserve a fair share of the prosperity to which they contribute, at least at a level that allows them to live in dignity. It is short-sighted because it treats workers as expendable, whereas employees who feel valued show greater loyalty to their employers, and give more value back.

As part of a more general protest against the consequences of present-day capitalism, living wage campaigns have made a lot of noise. But what distinguishes them particularly is their impact. In English-speaking countries, where campaigns have been strongest, millions of workers are getting substantial pay rises under the living wage banner. In the United States, a call for a $15 an hour living wage, over twice the federal minimum, once seemed utopian. Now, California and New York have legislated a $15 minimum, to be phased in over the next few years. In the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party, which had opposed any form of minimum wage until 2000, fifteen years later introduced a “National Living Wage”, set to increase the compulsory minimum by 38 per cent for workers over 25. Thousands of companies in the UK, ranging from Ikea to Nestlé, have adopted a higher, voluntary living wage. And living wage campaigns are being extended across the world, urging multinational companies to assure decent pay for manufacturing workers in poorer countries, particularly through supply-chain agreements.

So the idea of a living wage has allowed multiple campaigners to unify around an apparently simple idea and make a real difference to people’s lives. Yet its exact meaning, measurement and implementation have been far from uniform. In fact, things called “living wages” have taken so many different forms that to speak of “the living wage” is itself an oversimplification (but one that this book occasionally indulges in, when referring to living wage movements as a whole).

How much do you earn? Many of us would like to ask this question of our friends (though it is often a taboo), for two main reasons. One is because we are curious about how highly they are valued by their employers. The other is because it gives us a clue to what kind of living standard they can afford. When we think in these terms, we often consider wages, earnings and incomes as interchangeable concepts.

In fact, they are not, and it is helpful to distinguish each, and to think about how they relate to each other. My hourly wage rate perhaps best represents how much my employer values my work (I may not be paid hourly, but an annual salary expresses something similar – the full-time rate for my job). On the other hand, my earnings over a week, month or year depend on both my wage rate and on how many hours I work; and my family’s earnings are the result of how much we work collectively, as well as the wage rates of each of us who work. This helps determine our overall household income, which expresses how much money we have coming in. However, what we earn is not the whole story, since income is best thought about net of taxes, and includes “unearned” elements such as benefits, pensions and investment returns. Another feature of income is that it can be adjusted for household size when thinking about whether it is high enough to meet people’s needs, or whether it is too low to escape poverty (see Box 4.1).

As a consequence of all these steps from an hourly wage to a household income, two people working side-by-side on the same wage rate may enjoy very different living standards. This makes the concept of a “living wage” far from straightforward. It is at best a simplified approximation, using methods described in Chapter 2, of what wage tends to produce adequate income levels, given prevailing family and working patterns.

The imperfect relationship between wages and incomes raises three key questions, which this chapter considers in turn. First of all, to what extent do people who are low paid live in low income households? This sets the context in which better pay can be used as a tool to help workers avoid low income and poverty.

Living wage movements have been growing in prominence around the world. This chapter reviews the characteristics, objectives and achievements of these movements. It starts by giving a brief characterization of how they have developed in different countries. The chapter then looks thematically at three key aspects of living wages in practice: how they are calculated, how they are advocated and how they are implemented.

Living wages around the world

Most countries around the world have some form of minimum wage, either general or by industry or occupation. In many countries, there is an implicit aspiration that these wages should be sufficient to allow workers a decent standard of living. However, much fewer countries have explicit “living wages” or living wage campaigns. These have emerged in particular in English-speaking countries in recent years.

United States

Across the United States, hundreds of local living wage campaigns have sprung up since the early 1990s. These campaigns, often driven by community action groups, many supported by faith-based organizations, and also involving trade unions, were typically founded to improve pay for specific groups of low-wage workers in local areas. Such a bottom-up approach has had many different strategies for achieving change. Its most widespread success has been in getting cities to pass ordinances establishing a living wage rate for any employer receiving public contracts to deliver services. Within a decade of the first such ordinance in Baltimore in 1994, over 100 cities had done the same.

The plight of workers providing public services at very low pay rates via contracted employers thus gave impetus to the contemporary US living wage movement, not least because public authorities had leverage over these employers as their clients. However, this revival of the living wage concept, combined with growing wage inequalities and the continuing fall in the value of the federal minimum, has stimulated wider efforts to extend wage floors. Various employers such as corporations, universities and employers within defined areas such as airports have been encouraged to adopt a living wage.

More broadly, campaigns to impose a higher minimum for all employees within cities and states have enjoyed considerable success.

THE POWER OF HAUTE FINANCE

Over seventy years ago, Karl Polanyi identified the relationship between finance and politics in his observation on the Concert of Europe, the loose coalition of European powers that took over from the Holy Alliance of interbred kings and aristocrats, supported in southern Europe by a bureaucracy staffed by Roman Catholic clerics. That Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia, the Russian Empire and the United Kingdom had put down the revolutionary social movements unleashed by the French Revolution and Bonapartism. The Alliance’s successor, the Concert of Europe maintained relative peace in Europe during the near-century after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The concert, he observed, “lacked the feudal as well as clerical tentacles” of Metternich’s Holy Alliance (Polanyi 1944: 9). “And yet”, he went on,

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines the scenarios facing the UK workforce given the “Brexit” referendum vote on 23 June 2016 which resulted in a vote to leave the EU. Focusing on freedom of movement and the European Working Time Directive, the chapter considers the regulation of the employment relationship and what the impact of Brexit on this could be. We argue that the overall effect on the UK workforce will largely be dictated by what type of trading relationship the UK is able to obtain with the EU and the rest of the world. If the UK wishes to retain access to the single market then it will probably have to accept continued freedom of movement and abiding by the EU social chapter of workers’ rights. However, if it wishes to restrict freedom of movement, as public statements to date by the UK government have indicated, then a more limited relationship with the EU would most likely ensue, but potentially allow the UK government more room to make changes to regulating the employment relationship. Attempts to restrict freedom of movement could also have wider implications for sectors of the UK economy reliant on EU migrant workers or those that export into the EU.

THE EU AND THE REGULATION OF EMPLOYMENT

During the referendum campaign, one of the key themes articulated by Remain campaigners was that a vote to leave the EU was a vote to drastically alter (i.e. reduce) the scope of protective employment regulations in the UK workplace. In response to this, the Leave campaign argued that freedom of movement and consequent migration of workers from Central and Eastern European member states was depriving British workers of jobs (and access to school places, doctors’ appointments and social services) and was lowering wages in the economy. A vote for Leave was a vote to “take back control” of the UK border and reduce immigration. That the vote for Leave was significant in the traditional Labour-voting areas of the old industrial Midlands, north of England and Welsh valleys suggests that arguments around migration and low-paid workers had more traction with voters than any nascent concerns over employment rights.

A few months after the EU membership referendum, governments in London, Edinburgh and elsewhere are still struggling to find a way through the mess that an ill-considered referendum and a notably mendacious campaign have created. In so doing they should most obviously pursue the national interest, but partisan interests remain on the agenda in both London and Edinburgh. This chapter offers advice to both the UK and Scottish governments, and focuses particularly on the challenge the vote has produced to the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom.

WHAT THE VOTE MEANS, AND WHAT IT DOESN’T MEAN

The Leave vote was as much protest as proposition, like the campaign which promoted it. It cannot be ignored, but it must also be understood. Support for leaving the EU was strong among those, especially older voters, long suspicious of European entanglements and influence, but also among economically disadvantaged communities and poorer people. Together they (just) added up to a majority. There is a striking resemblance to the Scottish independence referendum. Not just that both were nationalist in tone, though Brexiteers were for “taking back control”, while “decisions about Scotland taken by the people who care most about Scotland” was the SNP’s best argument, but in the composition of the vote. In Scotland, long-standing nationalist support, ideologically committed to leaving the UK, was supplemented by the votes of those who thought the present economic and constitutional setup did not serve their interests and had left them behind (e.g. see Curtice 2014); they thought change could make things no worse for them, and were told it would make them better. Similarly, in the European referendum those with a long-standing ideological opposition to or discomfort with Europe were bolstered by a group of voters whose alienation from the political process and dissatisfaction with their economic situation made them receptive to a message that with one bound they would be free. Voters who think things can’t get worse are not persuaded by warnings of risk. The relative proportions of voters in each case is the subject of reasonable argument, but in both a substantial share of the vote for change was a negative, dissatisfaction with the status quo – and that’s what delivered the narrow Brexit majority, not endorsement of a particular plan for the UK’s international status.

Actually, Rumsfeld was talking about different types of risk and uncertainty; the former being a process of assigning probabilities and the latter an environment in which no probabilities can be assigned. At present, Brexit is in the realm between “unknown unknowns” and “known unknowns” in respect of its possible outcomes. Statements by the UK prime minister to the effect that the UK will invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty that triggers the start of the two-year exit process in early 2017 notwithstanding, it is unclear what the outcomes will be or the time it will take to complete. Of the alternative trade scenarios, that may configure post-Brexit, most alternatives to EU membership appear difficult and challenging for the UK economy and its constituent regions and devolved nations.

In respect of the duration of these changes, one is reminded of former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s comment on the impact of the French Revolution that “it was too early to tell”. The great unravelling of the global economy following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) having not yet abated, in combination with the great uncoupling of Brexit, compounds these uncertainties. The multi-dimensional and multi-scalar nature of the great uncoupling means that its impact varies across the UK and the rest of the EU. In the case of the UK, the challenges are at their most sharp and complex for Northern Ireland and its economy. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the impact of Brexit on the Northern Ireland economy and the progress of its development as an internationally focused region.

This chapter examines the recent performance of the Northern Ireland economy, its relative performance to the UK and in comparison to that of the Republic of Ireland (ROI).