They Would Go Back To Chattel Slavery If They Could

A number of wage subsidy scams are being reported right now, usually involving a worker being coerced into working for free or for discounted wages. Many people seem surprised that employers would be so brazen as to take advantage of a struggling person, especially in times when solidarity is needed. The reality is that employers would go back to chattel slavery if it wasn’t against the law.

The typical attitude of an employer in New Zealand is most accurately summarised by the Magic Talk caller known only as “Mark”. Mark called in to say that Kiwis were lazy and that immigrants made much better workers. This contempt for New Zealand workers is shared by most of the ruling class. John Key spoke for this ruling class when he said that we need to import foreign workers because Kiwis are lazy and on drugs.

As any Kiwi who has worked overseas knows, Kiwi workers are highly sought-after specifically because we are not lazy. If we had been lazy, we would never have survived the challenges put before us in our short history, because those challenges demanded that we shape an entire nation out of almost nothing, and we overcame them.

The truth, as is widely understood if not widely admitted, is that workers who are dependent on their employer for a visa will be much more submissive, and will accept much worse treatment, than those who are not dependent. This is why foreign workers are desired in New Zealand and New Zealand workers desired in foreign countries.

The mentality of the average employer, anywhere in the world, hasn’t changed much from 200 years ago. People from the working class are still considered cattle; their suffering is routinely ignored in the pursuit of profit. The mindset of today’s employer is still to put profit first and to discount human suffering, especially if those suffering are poor. It’s little different to the mindset of a cotton plantation owner.

Understanding the psychology of the employer – and, thereby, understanding why our economies are structured the way they are – requires the realisation that the ruling class would rather pay the workers nothing at all. If society was governed by an employers and landowners union, it would happily go back to chattel slavery.

Because the ruling class can’t get away with that, they can only push the worker as close to chattel slavery as the law allows. This is achieved by taking away as much of their productivity as legally possible. And so, most of the productivity of every worker is taken from them by the three lions of profits, taxes and rents.

The employer in a capitalist system is obsessed with profit. Profit is a matter of maximising incomes and minimising expenses, and the major expense is usually labour. It’s not cheap to get a person to work on your plantation all day when they’d rather be at home taking care of their family and community. So employers usually have to pay big. This has conditioned them to seek out any and all opportunity to maximise their access to cheap labour.

It can be said that cheap labour makes the world go around.

One of the first things that Brazil did after coming into existence was to import slaves – some 5 million were brought to Brazil before 1866, mostly to farm sugar cane. America, likewise, didn’t wait long before importing African slaves of their own. Even though only 300,000 were brought to the United States, it was enough to significantly depress wages in the Deep South. Much of colonial South and Central America operated on the slave plantation model pioneered by the Portuguese.

Australia and New Zealand never operated on this model. The Anzac ruling classes, however, have always been subject to the same temptations as the other colonial ruling classes. The temptation to maximise profit by minimising the cost of labour has always been present, sometimes intensely. We can see this from the fact that the Western ruling class have pushed the workers as close to slavery as possible without calling it slavery.

Rather than import slaves, and maintain them at the employer’s own expense on their plantations, it’s easier for those employers to import foreign cheap labour, and dump them into working-class neighbourhoods to fend for themselves. This is not only as profitable as chattel slavery, but it outsources the mental labour of arranging to feed, clothe and house the workers back to the workers themselves.

The importation and then naturalisation of cheap labour externalises the cost of diversity onto wider society, while keeping all the profits for the employer. The major negative consequence of diversity is lower wages. This occurs because diversity makes it more difficult for the working class to present the united front necessary to force the employer class to share the productivity of the workers.

The net result of 70 years of the mass importation of cheap labour: our wages have fallen so far that the average worker has no hope of owning their own home. The mainstream media screams ‘Racist!’ at anyone who draws the connection, but even high-school economics students understand that an oversupply of cheap labour will inevitably crash the price of working-class wages.

In 1992, the average Kiwi could buy the average house after about 7,000 hours of labour at the average wage. Today, so much of the average Kiwi’s productivity is sucked away in profits, taxes and rents that it takes over 25,000 hours of labour at the average wage to buy the average house. Vast numbers have completely given up hope. It’s already becoming the case that people are working just to stay alive, and some have to borrow money just to be able to do that!

All this was made possible by the working class getting pushed, closer and closer, over several decades, towards chattel slavery.

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