Horror of horrors, Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca has said the unthinkable. It seems to be her opinion that there might be some link between poverty and income, and that one way to help poor people would be to increase their income.
Coleiro Preca, incorrigible Socialist that she is, thinks it is not quite right to describe €700 a month (a bit less actually) as a minimum wage. To her twisted mind, that amount is simply not enough to provide one with a decent standard of living.
In other words that it leads to what have been described as the ‘working poor’ – people, that is, whose income from a full-time job is so meagre that they find it hard to keep body and soul together.
As expected, the Chamber of Commerce went into red alert within seconds. In a nutshell, their argument is that it is wrong to assume that poverty has to do with low income. Rather, the proper way to help the poor is to make the rich richer. We would then have a competitive and successful economy. Sure enough, enough crumbs would fall to make Lazarus a well-rounded and contented man.
I am not an economist. I do realise that things like increases in the minimum wage are technical and tricky arguments which require a competence I don’t have.
I shall therefore limit myself to a general opinion on what Coleiro Preca said, with or without proposed changes to the minimum wage. In principle, I agree with her fully.
My premise is that poor people exist (though not in the daft numbers that the faqar brigade like to peddle), and that they may be divided into two types. The first consists of those who are simply too lazy to work, whose expenditure is unrealistic and exceeds what would otherwise be a decent enough income, and such.
It is quite possible to earn, say, €2,000 a month and still be in poverty. I’ve personally known individuals who held middle-income jobs but whose penchant for whisky kept them and their families in long-term and crushing poverty.
There are also those who would probably make ends meet if they didn’t smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, fritter away tens of euros a week on lotto tickets and run up three-figure cell phone bills.
The second type consists of people who work full time, typically in fairly back-breaking jobs. No matter how carefully they budget and how much unnecessary spending they refrain from, their income is just too low and/or unreliable to guarantee them a life of basic material comfort.
Two caveats are necessary. First, I am not moralising. Nor am I talking about blame. As with addicts of various kinds, alcoholics and gamblers are not necessarily immoral or reckless. At least one of the whisky-guzzlers I mentioned earlier was actually a very good man who would have done anything for his family.
I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t empathise with this type or that we shouldn’t help them if and when asked. In any case, I’d be inclined to listen carefully to Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone.
The second caveat is that the two types are not as separate as all that. Lotto has been described as a tax (a bane, when privatised) on the poor, for example.
It is clear that bumbling budgeting and circumstances that would be difficult in any case are often related. My typology, in other words, is for analytical purposes only.
Coleiro Preca is a government minister. It follows that she might focus on structural ways of addressing poverty – ways, that is, over which government has some control. Notwithstanding all the ‘skills’ and ‘empowerment’ fodder (and the equally vacant industry of ‘professions’ that feeds off it), there is in fact very little she can do about someone whose budgeting is about as prudent as a tomcat’s love life.
On the income front, Coleiro Preca is in good company
It is, therefore, the second type of poverty she should properly try to do something about. As I said, this includes those whose income is just too low and/or unreliable to guarantee them a life of basic material comfort.
With respect to the lack of reliability bit, the obvious suspect is precarious work. I have in the past written about cleaners, for example, who are set weekly working hours that are just shy of the national standard, and whose income and conditions are devilishly unfair as a result. My opinion is unchanged and so is their predicament, despite all the lip service.
On the income front, Coleiro Preca is in good company. In 2012, Caritas Malta came up with a thoughtful and solid piece of research called ‘A minimum budget for a decent living’. It showed that the ‘minimum wage’ was a misnomer of the first order and that people earning €700 a month could not reasonably be expected to make ends meet – that what was officially acceptable was nothing of the sort in practice, in other words.
Mgr Victor Grech (and I most certainly wouldn’t include him among the faqar blah-blah brigade) had gone on to suggest that the minimum wage ought to be ‘revised’ (read ‘increased’ – the Monsignor is also a diplomatic man).
Whether or not he was right that we should throw in a few extra tenners where it matters, is a decision for the technical experts to argue over. In any case, Coleiro Preca herself turned out to be (rightly) cautious when pressed at an event held at University last Thursday.
That said, I still think she’s right in principle. The surest route to lower poverty rates is for government to look into the income and job security of workers whose jobs are on the margins of what is fair and acceptable. Whether or not Dives’s (the rich man in the Lazarus parable) objections are reasonable, they are neither biblical nor necessarily the truth.
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