Businesses paying employees poverty wages are costing taxpayers eleven times the amount benefit fraud cost last year
esearch published last week by Citizens UK found that companies in the UK are paying their workers so little that the taxpayer has to top up wages to the tune of £11bn a year. The four big supermarkets (Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys and Morrisons) alone are costing just under £1bn a year in tax credits and extra benefits payments.
This is a direct transfer from the rest of society to some of the largest businesses in the country. To put the figure in perspective, the total cost of benefit fraud last year was just £1bn. Corporate scrounging costs 11 times that.
Worse, this is a direct subsidy for poverty pay. If supermarkets and other low-paying employers know they can secure work even at derisory wages, since pay will be topped up by the state, they have no incentive to offer higher wages.
None of this makes sense. We are all, in effect, paying a huge sum of money so that we can continue to underpay the 22% of workers who are earning below the Living Wage – the level at which it is possible to live without government subsidies. The only possible beneficiaries are business owners.
Britain is an increasingly unequal society. Inequality here has risen more rapidly than in any other major economy over the last three decades. Piecemeal adaptations in the benefits system have attempted to cope with this. One of the larger measures was the introduction of tax credits by Labour after its election in 1997, intended to lift the low-paid out of poverty.
However, the labour market has become increasingly polarised as manufacturing employment has shrunk. Manufacturing has traditionally been better able to provide moderately well-paid, reasonably secure work. Its replacement by services employment (now over 80% of the workforce) has meant a “hollowing out” of the labour market. A few at the top do very well, but growing numbers are pushed into low-paid, insecure work. This tendency has accelerated since the crash, with record numbers on zero hours contracts, for example.
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www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/apr/20/taxpayers-spend-11bn-to-top-up-low-wages-paid-by-uk-companies?CMP=share_btn_tw