Cuts and Strikes

Governments and universities alike attribute the cuts to the financial meltdown, essentially turning these measures into acts that are not political, that this is what needs to happen to pull the country and the world out of the pit of doom that it just happened to fall into. Political pundit, or car enthusiast and television host, Jeremy Clarkson righteously proposed that the strikers should be taken out and executed in front of their families. As if the people on strike are the cause of the problems.

The truth is that the cuts here in the UK and elsewhere are extremely political. What gets cut, and by how much, is not a simple response to a bad situation. There is a reason that health care, teaching and other public works are the hardest hit. There’s a reason that Clarkson, who does little but drive cars and scoff at environmentalism, feels like he has the authority to say that they should all get over it, since he has to work for a living when they just get their gilded pensions.  Personally I would like to see Mr Clarkson get off his high horse and spend some time dressing bedsores or trying to teach mathematics to a large class of seven-year-olds.

These cuts are often framed as eliminating wasteful spending. Could anything be more apolitical? No one wants waste; we all know that it is, well, wasteful. However, it gets curious when what is labelled as such are services that are beneficial to society. Health and education are up there on lists of ‘good’ things. Of course there are important measures needed to ensure that these services are run in an efficient way, but widespread cuts don’t seem to be the way to go.

In the US, more so than here in the UK, this issue of what is considered wasteful is highly politicised. This past summer, when the Republican party took the country hostage in order to promote ‘fiscal responsibility’, tax increases were absolutely off the table. We seem to live in a world where it is acceptable to call on a pay freeze for the public sector until 2017, but not possible to abolish tax cuts that cost much and seem to contribute little to the state of the economy.

A healthy and well-educated public is important, even when looking at it from a detached, economic point of view. Cuts on services that serve the public show a trend in a society that devalues the work of some of the more important positions in that society. In a capitalist world, money often indicates the worth that is placed on a position. (Let’s leave the discussion about whether this is a useful measure for another time.) If you are considered valuable to a company, that often translates into a nice Christmas bonus. So if we, as a society, keep cutting spending and salaries for the public sector, that can be seen as a lack of commitment to the work that is done by those employees. That includes the teacher that is supposed to inspire the next generation of politicians, entrepreneurs, doctors and teachers. It includes the doctors and nurses that are supposed to care for you when you need it the most. It includes several of the jobs that we as a society need, and take for granted.

The austerity measures, and the strikes that followed, are signs of the debate that is raging in our society about how be attribute worth and what is considered necessary. In Jeremy Clarkson’s world, public workers are clearly not important, but is that the world we want to live in?