Another victim of the minimum wage
There’s something we all need to know to make sense of this story:
The mother of a severely autistic man who volunteered at Waitrose for four years has said she is “heartbroken” that he was stopped from working there after the family asked for him to be paid.
Frances Boyd, a charity worker from Stockport, said her son Tom Boyd, 27, spent more than 600 hours carrying out work experience at a store in Cheadle Hulme in Greater Manchester since 2021, emptying stock cages and stacking shelves.
He built up his hours to eventually work from 9.30am to 2pm two days a week. He was always accompanied by a support worker to ensure his safety and won praise from staff at the store, some of whom said he worked harder than others paid to be there.
Supermarkets employ people to stock shelves. This lad stocks shelves. Why shouldn’t he be paid? Because his labour isn’t worth it.
Or rather, the minimum wage insists that his labour needs to be paid £110 and up a week and that’s before all the other costs of actually employing someone. We know that his labour isn’t worth anything because he requires a support worker - it would be entirely possible to leave laddie at home and the support worker stocks the shelves. And no, he can’t even work for free. Because you can only do that free of the minimum wage if you’re working for: a charity, voluntary organisation or associated fundraising body, statutory body.
Which isn’t, of course, the point at all. There are those who simply aren’t going to deal with this modern world thing. There have always been those who could not deal with the world as it was. We now take care of them. We can argue about whether it should be families, or charity, or government and taxes that do but that we do and will is unopposed. None are reliant upon whatever wages they might make for their food, clothing, housing and so on. They never will be either - there are just those of whom this is true.
But humans like agency. Dominic Lawson has written about his daughter and this point several times. We have mentioned it over the decades more than once and when we do we tend to get comments from those whose daughter, niece, son of a friend and so on get so badly served by this current dispensation. You can work for the full minimum wage but not for less. Which is to wholly miss that point about agency.
The point isn’t to gain the labour from laddie. It’s also not so that laddie can pay his heating bill. It’s that laddie has something that is his. It is not a gift, an allowance, it is something worked for. Maybe it is only £30 a week - or whatever - but it’s mine. I worked for it, I earned it I get to spend it, ‘s mine. Anyone who does not think that is of value to humans clearly hasn’t met many. It’s also of more value to those more dependent upon others for the basics of life. If everything comes as an allowance, a gift, then the value of that tiny part of agency left rises strongly.
The point of giving low paid work to those who cannot handle - or produce enough value to merit - the full minimum wage is not to extract their labour nor is it so they can pay their bills. It’s to provide them with that cherished nugget of agency, of power over some part of their life - however phantasmal that agency actually is in the overall scheme of things.
Sadly this is illegal now. Which is why Remploy closed. Which is why this laddie doesn’t get to do 9 hours a week at something he enjoys. And why tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, are denied the chance to achieve that minimal sense of independence and agency.
Because the self-righteous think it better to preen about having stopped the exploitation of the disabled. Well done them, obviously.
Now, when do we get back to an actually sensible system where those incapable of working for a living are still able to achieve that sense of agency?
Tim Worstall