Towards a Level Playing Field

by Teresa Baldwinson

In 1963 the average wage in the UK was £12 per week. To get £1,000 per annum was to be well off. It was quite possible, however, to live reasonably comfortably for most of the time on £12 weekly, for the cost of living then was much lower. Today it would be a non-starter.

The immigration laws now do not admit economic refugees as having a legal cause to ask for asylum. So those who would enter on those terms tend to do so illegally.

One man who came in on a forged passport from one of the former USSR states did so because he wanted to send money home to put his two daughters through college, one to a medical school the other to be a secondary school teacher. He took a menial job in an expensive London hotel but found that he could not afford both a place to rent, and to send sufficient money home. He then decided to sleep in the boiler room in the basement. In that heat, he had to strip off each night. One morning he was found dead, dehydrated and malnourished. As his passport did not give the proper identification, it was some time before his identity could be established and his family told.

Many young girls from areas where jobs are scarce and hopes of a career non-existent have been lured, by people from organised crime, into western Europe with the promise of a job as a waitress or a children’s maid and the chance of furthering their education also. Once here, they are taken to some house, repeatedly raped and beaten into subjection and forced into prostitution. Should they try to escape, they are told, their families would suffer. They are prevented from learning the language of the country they are in by being given a menu board for their punters to point to what they wish; they are further told that it would be useless to go to the police as they - the mob - OWN the police (often credible from their home country) and, as an illegal, they would be imprisoned and deported back home as a prostitute to their families’ shame. Organised crime, it has been officially calculated, can net a higher income now from trafficking people - women and children for prostitution, or men also for slavery, being sold on to the new breed of gang masters, or sometimes simply to use their bodies for either voodoo or spare parts - than they can from drug trafficking. Until recently, when drug smuggling would carry more than a ten-year sentence if caught, people trafficking got no more than two years. Though the sentences are equal now, the seizure of property and profits is not always the same.

It is not only because of the misery of the migrants, however, that wealth-perception needs to be adjusted; those remaining in a country with a lower cost-of-living/need-for-income can also be impoverished. Where, for instance, anti-retro-viral drugs are needed to combat Aids, it can be impossible for such people to pay the market price of the producing country which is seen to be richer. When allowed the drugs at a special and affordable rate, if - as is beginning to happen in some places - there is any talk of "re-exporting", it is the sick who will have to bear any brunt of that action.

Though countries with a lower cost of living should be able to benefit in their exports when their production costs ought to be lower than from a more developed country, their perception of wealth can keep the people producing materials unable to resist exploitation by the global industries which now wield more power than any one single country. In the developed countries, too, where the cost of living is high, a family’s shopper can help, inadvertently, in this exploitation, by having keenly to seek the lowest prices on offer.

Then, too, the damage of unemployment here when, say, Dyson could put a whole town into a total slump by out-sourcing his work, laying off all from a factory on which the locals depended not just for jobs but, in the case of near-by shopkeepers etc., for the money it yielded Yet all out-sourcing may not cease. Where the goods produced are to be used predominantly in a developing country, it would be not only economic but also ecological sense to make them where they are most needed.

Older schoolchildren here, too, in their summer holidays, often used to earn extra pocket money by helping with the harvest under a traditional and legal gang master. It is not just the cash which they can no longer get, now that so many decent gang masters have been put out of business by their newer, nasty breed; the discipline of work combined with sheer exercise in the fresh air could often help a young person grow both physically and mentally. Whilst some might lose body flab and gain fitness, others may greatly benefit in mind, enabling them to become more socially aware, when they had been able to gain inside knowledge of the ratio of money to energy and time.