Socialist Standard No. 1393 September 2020

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New Zealand’s Inequality

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The extent of wealth inequality in supposedly egalitarian New Zealand has been laid bare by figures showing the wealthiest individuals have over NZ$140bn (US$93bn) stashed away in trusts – and overall have nearly 70 times more assets than the typical New Zealander.



 The data show that New Zealand’s wealthiest 1% of adults – around 38,000 people – have $141bn in trusts. Another 150,000 or so people, rounding out the rest of the wealthiest 5%, have trusts worth a further $122bn.



 The 1% have an average (mean) of $3.6m held in trusts, $1.6m in shares and $470,000 in cash. Their debts are on average just $80,000.



 The typical (median) person in the 1% is worth $6.2m. In contrast, the typical New Zealander is worth only $92,000 – 68 times less. 



 Among those in the poorest half of the country, meanwhile, the average person owns assets worth just $46,000 and has debts of $33,000, leaving them with a net worth of $12,000. They have negligible wealth in trusts and on average just $4,000 in the bank, leaving them vulnerable to sudden financial shocks.



 When it comes to the middle classes – the 40% of the country who are above the mid-point but below the wealthiest 10% – have a higher net worth, on average $352,000, most of it tied up in housing.



 Overall, the wealthiest 10% have 59% of all the country’s assets, and the middle classes around 39%. That leaves the poorest half of the country with just 2%.



 The 2017-18 figures represent the status quo inherited by Jacinda Ardern’s government, whose record to date will be revealed by the 2020-21 net worth survey, now underway. Not much change should be expected, however.  On becoming Labour leader in August 2017, Ardern resuscitated the idea of a capital gains tax, 80% of which would have been paid by the wealthiest 20%. But after vociferous opposition from property investors and the National party, she eventually ruled it out under her leadership. She has also been distinctly lukewarm about the Green party proposal for a tax on wealth over $1m. When it comes to the most unequally distributed forms of wealth, such as trusts, shares, bonds and direct ownership of companies, Ardern’s Labour-led government has shown little appetite for redistribution. 



 Trusts are vehicles through which individuals can notionally give their assets to trustees to hold on behalf of named beneficiaries. In practice, the “givers” often retain control of the assets while having superficially ceded ownership. In the past this has allowed wealthy individuals to avoid taxes, hide assets from spouses and creditors, and receive care subsidies to which they are not entitled. IRD research has revealed extensive use of trusts among wealthy individuals who pay relatively little tax. IRD research, meanwhile, shows that more than half the country’s ultra-wealthy individuals – those with over $50m – declare incomes of less than $70,000, an implausibly low figure. They avoid tax, the IRD argues, by taking their income as untaxed capital gains, undervaluing the services they provide to their own companies, and transferring wealth to charities which they control but which make “little or no charitable donations”.



 Some commentators would argue that New Zealand remains the land of the “fair go”, a country where all have opportunities to get ahead. Its wealth inequality is only slightly worse than the developed country average. But it is difficult to see how it can be fair for any individual, however meritorious, to be “worth” nearly 70 times the typical New Zealander. There are also good reasons to think that opportunities are far from equal. Wealthier parents are able to provide their children with many opportunities unavailable to poorer kids, as well as access to exclusive schools and networks. 



 Analysis of the NBR Rich List shows a strong dynastic trend: over one-third of businesses on the list are actively being run by descendants of the fortune’s originator, with the number of family members passively receiving the proceeds of that wealth undoubtedly higher still. While some rich listers are entrepreneurs, developing useful new products, fortunes made in finance, insurance and real estate are predominant. Conversely, the country’s essential workers – including health staff on the front line of the coronavirus pandemic – earn so little that they are often unable to save for a house deposit.  



 The country’s egalitarian image was once memorably described by the historian Melanie Nolan as “a rich amalgam of truth and myth”. These new wealth figures suggest that the latter increasingly predominates.



 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/31/new-zealands-astounding-wealth-gap-challenges-our-fair-go-identity




World Socialist Party (New Zealand) P.O. Box 1929

Auckland, NI

New Zealand

https://www.worldsocialism.org/nz/




Leicester’s Sweatshops

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Leicester’s garment district, which is home to more 1,000 factories, has received fewer than 60 health and safety inspections and only 28 fire inspections since October 2017 despite long-held concerns about working conditions.
The city’s small clothing manufacturers, which employ as many as 10,000 people, were also the subject of just 36 HMRC investigations into payment of the national minimum wage between 2017 and March 2020, according to a freedom of information request filed by the Guardian.
Not only is the rate of inspections low. HMRC has issued penalties to fewer than 10 textile firms that failed to pay the minimum wage since 2017 and claimed just over £100,000 in arrears relating to 143 workers.



The figures highlight the low rate of regulatory oversight of factories in Leicester despite the creation of a multi-agency group to try and tackle their problems in October 2017.
Some buildings, including the former Imperial Typewriter works which houses as many as 40 small factories, have only been inspected once.
There have been nine callouts to factory fires in garment factories in the main LE5 textile district since 2017, including a large blaze that triggered the evacuation of nearby premises in 2018. More major fires have been recorded at garment factories in nearby districts.
Of 58 inspections the Health and Safety Executive has carried out since October 2017, 27 have taken place since 1 April this year, when the coronavirus pandemic renewed attention on Leicester’s garment industry. The HSE has not brought any cases against textile firms in the country as a whole since 2017.
There are only four frontline HSE inspectors in Leicester and three trainees, though the team had managed to visit 45 textile and clothing businesses since March.

America’s Domestic Servitude

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Unlike oth­er work­ers who, regard­less of immi­gra­tion sta­tus, are pro­tect­ed by fed­er­al and state laws, the vast major­i­ty of Amer­i­ca’s 2.5 mil­lion domes­tic work­ers are explic­it­ly left out of these pro­tec­tions.



​“Domes­tic work­ers live in the lega­cy of slav­ery, and this lega­cy con­tin­ues to shape the sec­tor today,” said Alli­son Julien, co-direc­tor of the New York Chap­ter of We Dream in Black and a found­ing mem­ber of the Nation­al Domes­tic Work­ers Alliance (NDWA). ​“Gov­ern­ment lead­ers delib­er­ate­ly carved out domes­tic and farm­work­ers” from any law that could pro­tect their rights, Julien added.



 Domes­tic work­ers were exclud­ed from the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act, the Occu­pa­tion­al Safe­ty and Health Act and the Fair Labor Stan­dards Act because South­ern sen­a­tors refused to grant equal pro­tec­tion to a work­force made up large­ly of black women. That lega­cy is alive and well today.



 Domes­tic work­ers are enti­tled to the fed­er­al min­i­mum wage of $7.25 an hour, but they do not have the right to form unions and are not cov­ered by fed­er­al anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion laws. Employ­ers are not oblig­at­ed to pro­vide safe work­ing con­di­tions or pro­tec­tive gear for work­ers.



 Of  the nine states and the city of Seat­tle which have ver­sions of a ​“domes­tic work­ers’ bill of rights,” most of them lack enforce­able frame­works, accord­ing to Polaris, a non­prof­it that oper­ates a nation­al human traf­fick­ing hot­line, con­ducts research and pro­motes pol­i­cy changes.



 New York has a domes­tic work­er law, but peo­ple who work less than 40 hours a week can­not access its ben­e­fits. Day labor­ers who are hired by the day or by the hour, are sim­i­lar­ly exclud­ed from the law’s ben­e­fits, as are undoc­u­ment­ed peo­ple. Black and undoc­u­ment­ed domes­tic work­ers have been dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly affect­ed by these exclu­sions.



 The vast major­i­ty of domes­tic work­ers are immi­grants, which makes them par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble to exploita­tion and labor traf­fick­ing –when employ­ees are forced to remain on the job through threats, vio­lence or oth­er forms of coer­cion, or brought to a coun­try through fraud­u­lent means. Domes­tic work­ers have often been left to the mer­cy of employ­ers.



 Andrea Rojas, direc­tor of Strate­gic Ini­tia­tives at Polaris, says that this is a form of mod­ern-day slav­ery. This sit­u­a­tion, she adds, ​“sends the very dan­ger­ous mes­sage that since these work­ers have been exclud­ed from pro­tec­tions grant­ed to oth­er work cat­e­gories, they are less valu­able. We are talk­ing about for­eign work­ers who often do not know the lan­guage, who are iso­lat­ed and with­out their safe­ty net­works,” Rojas explains. There’s also a pow­er imbal­ance, she adds, when low-paid labor­ers work in wealthy peo­ple’s hous­es.



 https://inthesetimes.com/article/domestic-worker-labor-covid-slavery

Remembering St Kilda

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On 29 August 1930, the last 36 residents began the evacuation from St Kilda, a group of islands 110 miles off the west coast of Scotland that had been lived on for thousands of years.
13 men, 10 women and 13 children were aboard the ship that would take them away from their homes forever. 
The 90th anniversary is remembered here on the BBC website.

Nor has the Socialist Party forgotten this community.

Back in 1980 we recalled the evacuation of the islanders, who had been living a way of life that in many ways was an example of primitive communism. 

Later we posted an article on our Scottish branches blog describing the St Kildans in 2012

And later in 2016 the Socialist Standard once more returned to give an account of the St Kilda community.

It described the decision making of those islanders where the men would each morning and talk about was to be done that day

 ”It had no rules, no chairman and participants arrived in their own time. This was a meeting to share information, discuss current issues, resolve disputes, and make decisions, in particular in relation to work that needed to be done. Decisions were reached by consensus. ‘Often the proceedings are anything but harmonious, and the loud talking of the men at one and the same moment is suggestive of anything but a peaceful solution. However, when a decision is arrived at the malcontents readily give way, and co-operate cordially with the majority.’ Never in recorded history were feuds bitter enough as to bring about a permanent division in the community.”


The St Kilda “parliament”




For the New Socialist Movement

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On November 3rd, the American working class will go to the polls to decide who will run capitalism in their country over the next four years. The result will not appreciably alter the conditions of the millions who cast their vote. In four years’ time we shall be reviewing the failures of the man the Americans elect as President this November. In four years the American workers will have yet another chance to reflect upon the futility of choosing between one type of capitalism and another.

The Republicans stand for the system as it is; the Democratic Party for the system as it was; the World Socialist Party is for a new system, the socialist republic.

Economic developments are producing conditions that make the case for socialism more strikingly clear than was possible in the past era of rampant individualism, and collectivist ideas of sorts are floating around and being discussed in the most unlikely circles. But in the building up of a sound and powerful party of socialists,  a very great amount of work remains to be done. It should be clear to all workers that the working class, if they are to escape from the misery of capitalism, must first understand their class position, and must then build up a socialist political party for the purpose of capturing the powers of government in order to introduce socialism. The Democrats and Republicans want the 99 percent to take yet another spin on the reformist misery-go-round.

The most remarkable thing about the Presidential contest was that neither side addressed the most pressing question of all: How is it that in the richest country in the world so many workers are living below the government’s own poverty line? In cities across America vast numbers are homeless, unemployed, without any health insurance and empty of hope.

Neither Trump nor Biden are prepared to go beyond rhetoric in relation to the problem of poverty. Trump has a lousy record of neglect for those in need. His Administration has operated on the callous basis that the market would sort out those whose needs should be satisfied. Of course, the market responds to profit and not needs not backed up by purchasing power. Trump has presided over a nation where the public provision of health care has been slashed; free education has been discredited; whole inner city areas have become crime-dominated, drug-infested wastelands appears unstoppable.

In the light of such a dire state of affairs the Republican rhetoric of sickening Christian moralizing must have offended a lot of American workers. Biden is afraid to make anything more than indifferent noises about “change” in relation to the poverty issue because he feared that any talk of helping the most disadvantaged workers would lose him the support of the less disadvantaged wage and salary slaves. Biden’s campaign exhibited all the lack of commitment or willingness to offend the rich. Millions of Americans are being sucked in by the emptiness of Biden‘s grandfatherly fake-smile reformism. They abdicated their power to control their own lives to a man committed to the continuation of their exploitation — a man advised by well-paid media consultants (i.e. propagandists) whose task was to trample all over their political intelligence. The key to the Biden style is the projection of the man–next–door with the aid of millions of dollars campaign funds. Biden is the biggest bluffer Uncle Sam can boast of.

At the time of writing, the presidential campaign of Donald Trump is veering between tragedy and farce. His contempt for women, Mexicans, Muslims and all those outside his own white, male, billionaire peer group is twisting defiantly into an ugly parody, more grotesque than any fiction. Yet he still carries tens of millions of Americans feeling sufficient affinity with his prejudices to continue supporting him. Meanwhile, Biden, whose own hideous record of militarism and single-minded dedication to supporting the parasites of Wall Street in their exploitation of the 99 percent of the population who are excluded from their club might otherwise have been spotlighted, is allowed to pose alongside Trump as the humane alternative.

Biden is being compared to Franklin Roosevelt, who so dominated American politics during the thirties. We may rely on it that, if the interests of American capitalism demand it, Biden’s election platform will be ignored in the same way as that of his famous predecessor. Faced with a situation which must be judged in terms of the interests of American capitalism, Biden will find in many cases that he has no more power to keep his election promises than any one of his predecessors. This will cause him no lost sleep. Presidents have to be even harder and more cynical than car salesmen.

It is depressing that American workers should be impressed by—indeed be part of—slick, high pressure salesmanship and cynical drives for power. For after the shouting and the ballyhoo have died, capitalism, in America and the rest of the world, remains unscathed. Therefore it is apparent that whatever may be the result of the presidential election in the United States the working class will be in the same predicament— wage laborers. The workers of the United States and the rest of the world will not arrive in Easy Street by giving their allegiance to politicians of the caliber of either Trump or Biden.

 This social system produces the horrors of war, poverty, insecurity and racial hatred. The Democrats and Republicans, like the other capitalist parties, can offer no end to these. Only the establishment of socialism can give us a world of peace and plenty. And for that we do not need stage-managed ballyhoo. We need knowledge and the social responsibility that goes with it. What the workers must do in every country of the world is to form socialist parties whose only object is the common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing wealth. The only party in the United States worthy of working class support is the World Socialist Party.




Black Lives Matter Goes to Washington

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Tens of thousands of sincere people went to Washington to express their anger at the continued racism that happens across the United States. They did so in 1963 and they do so in 2020. Martin Luther King made his famous “I have a dream” speech in 1963. The family of George Floyd still live in the 2020 nightmare. 


Just as they did many decades ago, the liberals of the Democratic Party shed crocodile tears and the conservatives of the Republicans tells its supporters to look the other way. 


It has become pretty much of a cliché among members of the World Socialist Party of the United States to declare that there is little, if any, difference among the presidential candidates. When you get right down to bedrock, how can there be any difference? Capitalism is, essentially, the wages, prices, profits system and whatever designation the candidates in the 2020 election run under — Republican, Democratic, Green or Libertarian none advocate the immediate, or even the future, abandonment of the relationships of wage labor and capital. All argued for a better operation of the present social structure.

The election of politicians to power in a capitalist state is a business in which the expectations of the electorate play an important role. To begin with, the working class like to feel that their leaders are strong men who can control and influence events, even if for most of the time they are not sure of how this is to happen. In many ways this means that something is expected to happen simply because a politician says it will; it is enough for one of them to spout a catchy slogan for the problems of poverty, bad housing, social despair, to melt away like snow in the sunshine. At the same time the workers prefer their leaders to have some contact with what they, rather selectively, see as reality; only in extreme situations like wartime will they accept what they call extremism. Thus it is established now for politicians to fight over the “middle ground” of policies, which means over which party can distort facts and fashion its deceptions successfully enough to appeal to a wide majority of workers. This is the party which usually wins the election. The American workers will take their pick of the promises offered them. Listening to their candidates, how many of them will recall the many disappointments in the past, of promises gone sour, of a smooth-tongued President who uses his oratory to explain away the unpleasant realities of capitalism. Like workers everywhere, the American voters have had plenty of this. Sadly, there can be little expectancy that in 2020 they will show that they have had enough.

The question of how to bring back “prosperity” is foremost in the minds of the electorate, and both parties frame their platforms accordingly. To a large section of the working class “prosperity” means being able to get jobs again. For the capitalist class it means the promise of more profit. Another reason why the various capitalist groups are so anxious for political power is their desire to have a say in raising taxes.

With millions of wage slaves without means of selling their energies, and thus being deprived of the necessaries of life, there is always a danger that these hungry hordes might attack capitalist property. The capitalists realize this, and are compelled to make some sort of provision for these potentially dangerous slaves, by taking part of the wealth they have stolen from the slaves and giving it back to them in the form of food-banks, welfare relief, and the like. When private charity proved insufficient, the authorities had to step in and make provision, out of resources already depleted owing to the declining yield from the existing taxes—a feature of every business recession.

There are, of course, superficial differences that bear examination if only that they indicate the bankruptcy of capitalist ideologists. There has not been a solitary instance, in American politics, of a candidate entering the arena to advocate world socialism. It is truly time for a change!

If you had to ‘sell’ the idea of capitalism to people on a socialist planet they’d laugh at you. There’d be nothing in it for them except misery and slavery. Most people don’t support capitalism because they think it is perfect or even particularly pleasant. They support it because they think they’ve got no choice, and they think that because they are hypnotized by its bogus ideology, its bogus values and its bogus leaders. Capitalism is adaptive and very clever at whitewashing itself. Our hope is that, in a new climate of radical skepticism which even conservatives can’t be immune to, perhaps the whitewash won’t wash for much longer.



 For more see

https://www.wspus.org/2020/06/against-police-violence-and-racism/



 https://www.wspus.org/2020/07/when-the-looting-starts-the-shooting-starts/




A Poem

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Inspired by Ian Drury and the Blockheads

There aint half been some lairy leaders
Shady scoundrels, stupid scumbags
There aint half been some lousy leaders
Rotten rascals, vicious villains

Are you a blockhead?
No?  Why then be led
by the nose and suppose
that those who smirk and lie
and narcissism personify
know what’s best for thee and me?
A leader’s decree might suit
the cowardly petty bourgeoisie
but dialectic materialism
should teach us that
we do not bend the knee
for any Tom, Dick or Harry
calling themselves leaders
who are really silly bleeders.

When O When their Waterloo?
“Ye are many -they are few!”

DC

Unhappy Children in Britain

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Children in the UK have the lowest levels of life satisfaction across Europe, with “a particularly British fear of failure” partly to blame, according to a major report into childhood happiness.
More than a third of UK 15-year-olds scored low on life satisfaction, the annual Good Childhood Report from the Children’s Society found. They also fared badly across happiness measurements including satisfaction with schools, friends and sense of purpose compared to children in other European countries.
The UK has also seen the sharpest drop in childhood life satisfaction in the past five years, according to the report, which compared the UK to EU countries for the first time in 2015. It was 19th out of 21 countries in 2015 with a score of 6.98, just above Italy (6.89) and Greece (6.91). But while there was a slight increase in life satisfaction in these two other countries, in the UK it fell substantially.
The rise in UK child poverty and school pressures were cited alongside the fear of failure as reasons why only 64% of UK children experienced high life satisfaction – the lowest figure of 24 countries surveyed by the OECD. Fifteen-year-olds in the UK had the greatest fear of failure across 24 European countries assessed by the OECD’s Programme for International Assessment (Pisa). 
The report adds that UK has some of the highest levels of school work pressure reported by 15-year-olds, according to data from the 2017-18 Health Behaviours in School-Aged Children Survey (HBSC). England came third out of 45 countries, with 74% of girls and 62% of boys reporting feeling pressured by schoolwork. 
“Children and young people talk a lot about the pressure that get placed on them to do well,” said Richard Crellin, one of the authors of the report. “We reflected this could be linked to a pressure in British society to take things on the chin and have a stiff upper lip. Young people across the UK told how they feel judged if they don’t succeed first time.”
Mark Russell, chief executive of the Children’s Society, added: “As a society we can’t be content with children in the UK being the most unsatisfied with their lives in Europe. It has to change…Even before the pandemic, which we know has taken a huge toll on our children’s wellbeing, many felt their life didn’t have a sense of purpose. We believe it is not only a fear of failure – which in previous research we found was higher amongst those living in poverty – but also rising child poverty levels that could partly be to blame,” said Russell. 
Prof Tamsin Ford, from the faculty of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the report’s findings were very worrying, particularly as 2020 had been especially distressing for lots of children.
In July a survey by the Children’s Society found that nearly one in five children aged 10-17 in the UK – the equivalent of 1.1 million – reported being unhappy with their lives as a whole during the coronavirus lockdown, up from an average of 10-13% over the last five years.
Between 2015 and 2018, the UK had the largest increase in relative child poverty – around 4 percentage points, while average levels of child poverty fell by around 2 percentage points across the 24 countries.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

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One thing is clear though: companies on the Chinese mainland believe that whoever is in the White House – the tough stance on China is here to stay.
“A Democrat, whether in the White House, Senate or Congress, would have little reason to roll back Trump’s toughness on China without some concession in return,” said Tariq Dennison, a Hong Kong-based investment adviser at GFM Asset Management told me. “One thing both parties seem to agree on in 2020 is to blame China for any of America’s problems that can’t be easily blamed on the other party. That’s not going to change anytime soon.”

Promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

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