‘That’s the way it is…’
I am currently working as a placement student in the food manufacturing industry. Over the last three weeks I have worked an average of 55 hours a week even though I am salaried minimum wage for 37.5 hours per week.
Last week at a work event, I made a half-joking comment about not being paid overtime and was told “get used to that because it only gets worse.”
I had a conversation with several of the middle management who said they are expected to work 10-12 hours every day, while being paid for 7.5 hours work. The worst part about it is that everyone feels lucky to be ‘allowed’ to do this extra work because the job market is so tight.
“That’s just the way working life is,” I was told. Under capitalism this is the reality for all workers, being squeezed for all the unpaid labour that the capitalists can get their hands on.
Daisy, Peterborough
Sheffield Wednesday don’t pay their workers… again
It’s recently come out that Sheffield Wednesday haven’t been paying their players and their staff on time, including a family friend of mine who has been paid late for the second time in three months
This is disgusting. The owner’s family are worth $575 million, yet they ‘can’t afford’ to pay their minimum wage staff.
This is both a failure of the owners and of the English Football League. There are supposed to be protections against financial mismanagement. Previous owners have been forced to sell their clubs because they aren’t financially responsible.
This isn’t the first time the owner, Dejphon Chansiri, has violated financial rules. In 2020-21, Sheffield Wednesday were deducted six points for this, which lead to their relegation.
The club’s staff have started a fundraiser to make up for their lost wages, I have made suggestions to the group that a portion of what they raise should be set aside for a strike fund, so they can fight for the rights they deserve: higher wages, better sick pay, and a say in how the club is run.
Gareth, Leeds
The real scroungers
Right now, lots of people are facing the prospect of unemployment and will need to apply for JSA which gives them a measly £90 pounds a week (£71 if you’re under 24).
However, if you’re Thangam Debonnaire, recently unseated Labour MP for Bristol West and member of Labour Friends of Israel, you can expect to scoop up a cushy place in the House of Lords, earning £361 everyday for the rest of your life.
It seems that while Starmer is very happy to cut disability benefits for millions of the country’s most vulnerable people, no expense can be spared for rewarding his establishment chums for a lifelong devotion to serving the ruling class. Not to mention stomping all over our supposed democracy after the people of Bristol declared they don’t want a Zionist to represent them.
When we lose our jobs, life becomes strained as we frantically dash about trying to find a new one before the money runs out.
But if you’re a bourgeois party grandee it appears you can put your feet up in Westminster and grow fat on handouts from the state! Clearly this writhing nest of worms needs sweeping into the dustbin where they belong.
Sam Lovesey, Milton Keynes
Cycles of suffering
I was speaking to my mum recently about the maternal side of the family. She began to open up about the suffering her father and his had endured.
My great grandad suffered from severe epilepsy. He was a construction worker, but his livelihood was precarious due to his condition and lack of accommodations in the 50s and 60s. So, he would have to lie about having epilepsy, would have fits on the job and then be sacked and then have to look for employment again.
He got trapped in a vicious cycle of unemployment and instability, completely left behind by society. It got so bad that he got to a point he couldn’t take it anymore and took his own life.
My grandad found him all those years ago and decades on, the position for pensioners has hardly improved. His health is rapidly declining in his old age and must rely on the crumbling NHS.
The barbarity of capitalism will never end no matter how far society comes. I don’t think the capitalists understand the storm they have created. Seeing my loved ones slowly die in front of my eyes whilst billionaires burn the world for profit fills me with a rage that will only subside when their entire system burns to dust and a new world is formed from its ashes.
Netta Hociej, Leeds
‘Making it’
I have worked at a pie shop in Edinburgh for a year and I’ve never met the owner before in my life.
Instead, I have to contend with the manager, a racist, tight-fisted arsehole who gets paid a bit more than us to keep us in line, so the owner can sit back and let the profits roll in.
My manager has spent the last year threatening to fire me around once a month. No matter what I do, he finds, or makes up, some little task I’ve forgotten and uses it to make me feel like my job’s on the line. Everyone who works there knows that you have to put up with this kind of thing as part of the job.
He sees himself as a bootstrapping grafter, proving to the rest of us that the only reason we are not in his position is because we’re lazy.
But in reality, he’s managed to get there only by sucking up to the owner and putting himself completely at her service, cracking down on the other workers and scraping the owner’s pennies together so he can get a slightly larger share.
This is the kind of person capitalism rewards with an incrementally better wage, and a mortgage rather than rent. His next aspiration is to become a landlord. He tells me that he has intentionally sacrificed spending any time with his kids so that he can make more money.
That’s to say nothing of the bins full of the torn-up CVs of South Asian applicants, or the comments that my colleague is “boyish” and “doesn’t bring enough feminine energy” to the pie shop.
Having traded any solidarity with other workers for a few more pence on the hour, my manager is still not raking in the kind of money the owner gets by doing nothing.
This is the kind of lowly dreams that get realised under capitalism, and you get there by turning on other people in your position. I’d rather fight for something better.
Vic Lancaster, Edinburgh
