The government has not intervened to help low-paid workers because it is on these very people that our economic growth depends
They make our cities work. They keep our economy going. They provide companies with their profits. UK workers at the bottom of the pile are usually out of sight and invariably out of mind.
Often from other countries, they are the ones up at the crack of dawn to clean, the ones who guard offices at night or wheel the trolleys in hospitals. Where they do draw attention, it is usually after another of those media-inspired howls of indignation over immigration. The reason the government and the private sector have not intervened is that it is on these very people that our economic growth depends.
Any immigration clampdown is likely to be short-lived, particularly in the more affluent south-east of England. Major developments for the 2012 Olympics in the Thames Gateway, for instance, will require large numbers of workers - and many, of necessity, will be new migrants to the UK.
A report compiled by the Queen Mary college of the University of London and the Unison trade union paints a grim picture of their world. Much of the low-paid economy in London is, it says, characterised by subcontracted services. Rather than working directly for local authorities, big corporations or top hotels, cleaners, carers, chambermaids and others are employed by secondary firms. This enables organisations to undercut whatever terms and conditions may exist for their own employees.
Some of the problem can be traced back to the Local Government Act 1988, passed at the height of the Thatcherite obsession with "outsourcing". This law forbade councils from weighing "non-commercial considerations" when giving contracts to outside firms. In March 2001, frustratingly quietly, Labour rescinded some provisions, but this is only part of the story.
One of this government's finer achievements - in those heady first months when it did have the ability to galvanise - was the introduction of a minimum wage in the face of resistance from employers and the Conservatives. The rate has been raised incrementally and the qualifying age has been reduced, slightly.
Two problems remain to be confronted, however. The first task is to punish severely those companies which flout the minimum wage. Enforcement has been weak. It is also surely unarguable that a level set nationally is too low to ensure even a basic standard of living in some parts of the country.
Pressure has been growing in recent months for the government to turn the £5.05-an-hour minimum wage into a "living wage" of £7 or more - if only to offset rising costs of transport, childcare, food and other basic needs, including council tax. The proposal is at the core of an "alternative manifesto" being drawn up at a conference on 17 June of the Compass pressure group, which the New Statesman is supporting. The meeting is being held in memory of Robin Cook, a man who more than most saw the societal corrosiveness that arose from inequality.
Ministers have pledged a renewed commitment to fight poverty, with the appointment of a cabinet minister for social exclusion. One in six children in inner London is growing up in poverty despite at least one adult in the household being in full-time employment.
Over the past decade, more than 100 US city and state governments have passed living-wage ordinances following pressure from community groups and trade unions. And it is from the bottom up that change will ultimately come. The east London communities organisation Telco forced the HSBC bank to raise the wages of its low-paid staff after a high-profile and imaginative local protest. There are many other such examples (www.livingwage.org.uk). Basic requirements of paid holiday and access to a trade union are hardly out of reach of firms paying executives millions in bonuses.
Several details remain to be agreed, among them: should regional rates be set, and if so how? But the principle is established and must be campaigned for vigorously. Subsistence is one thing, basic quality of life another. There are wages that are minimal and wages that are viable. In a civilised society, only viable wages are acceptable.
A crook, a fraud, a liar and a bully
Not by any means for the first time, but just possibly for the last, Charles J Haughey this past week strained the decorum of Irish politics to its limit. The strain showed best in the words of President Mary McAleese, who remarked that this man who was three times prime minister had played a "significant, central and leading role in national politics".
It would have been difficult for her to say less, but to say much more, even of a man just dead, would have meant either bending the truth unacceptably or opening up an old sewer of venality that she can only wish to keep closed.
Haughey has his dogged admirers but his record is hardly in doubt. He was a crook, a fraud, a liar, a bully and a hypocrite, as disloyal to his friends as he was ruthless to his enemies and as reckless with his country's fortunes as he was careful with his own. The smell of brimstone followed him right through his 35-year career, but it wasn't until the 1990s, when he no longer had the political power to protect himself, that a string of public inquiries began to lay bare the corrupt source of the stench.
It is a record that would not have been out of place in the old eastern Europe. This being the west, the question is asked: what does Ireland owe this man who dominated its political landscape for so long? The truth is that the debt was on the other side, and the ill-gotten millions he was forced to repay in later years can only have gone a little way towards squaring the books.
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