Equality even more important than jobs

Despite the total lack of discussion from all the parties, this issue is not just a fixation of loony-left mavericks, writes Vincent Browne.

There is a consensus that the big issue in this campaign is jobs and, in a sense, it is. Jobs are crucial for income, the means to support one's family and oneself.

Jobs are crucial also for identity, for developing and maintaining a sense of self-worth; one of the cruelties of joblessness is not just the loss of income, but the loss of self-esteem.

Jobs alone do not deal with adequacy of income and with self-esteem, though. People in menial, low-paid employment get an income of sorts, but often not enough to live by. Aside from that, many people get little satisfaction or self-fulfilment for those jobs, very little of the oxygen of self-esteem.

A study was done in Whitehall in the 1950s on the longevity of people who worked in the British civil service. It found that those in the lowest rungs of the civil service died much earlier than those in the top jobs, even though it was assumed that those in the top jobs had far more stress and worked much harder than others.

People in the bottom rung of society have less control over their lives. They invariably are deprived of recognition and approval in their working environment.

They have no sense of being equal members in society with an equal voice in the management and decision-making of their society.

They are usually belittled and humiliated, excluded from the arenas of influence and power in business, in the media, in the professions, in the legal system and in politics.

This is why equality matters so much and why the dismissal of equality as begrudgery misses the point. The issue of equality is the central issue, ahead of jobs, ahead of wealth creation, ahead of everything else.

Of course jobs come into equality, centrally, but equality is more than that, it affects all aspects of our lives and, crucially, the length of our lives.

Isn't there something just plain wrong that those of us middle- class people have so many more opportunities for a fulfilled life than working-class people? And by working-class people, I mean people living on very much lower incomes, with very much less wealth, poorer educational opportunities, worse health, far less control over their own lives, more stress, less confidence and lower self-esteem.

Take the following facts of our society. The average net household income in this society was €45,959, as of 2009, according to the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) published by the CSO (net of tax and social contributions).

If all households in the country had €45,959 in net disposable income, we would all be well-off. However, not all households have that net disposable income.

In fact, the lowest-paid 10 per cent of households have a weekly net disposable income of €210, while at the top 10 per cent it is €2,276; at an annualised basis that is €10,920 and €118,352. Most of us middle-class people cannot even imagine how a household could possibly live on a disposable income of €10,920 a year.

Last December, the CSO published data on "Mortality Differentials in Ireland".This showed male professional workers have a life expectancy at birth of 81.4 years, 6.1 years longer than unskilled workers.

There is no discussion in this campaign on equality, almost as though it is a taboo subject, or just a fixation of loony-left mavericks.

Neither is there a discussion on the social vandalism of the professional and business elites who have ravaged the economy and contrived to have imposed on society at large the massive losses of their play-toys, the financial institutions.

The financial and business world has been an engine of inequality, bathed in the mantra about paying peanuts and getting monkeys. Well, we paid millions and millions and still got monkeys.

Monkeys who ran the banks and monkeys who served on bank boards, monkeys in lawyers offices who gave legal imprimatur to what was going on, monkeys in the media who failed to alert the people to what was happening and monkeys in accountancy offices who failed to notice while collecting gigantic fees.

Incidentally, how is it that no case, criminal or civil, has been taken against the auditing firms who misled the markets and public about what was going on in the banks, or is the law just to control the little people?

The consequences of recklessness and negligence of these elites are now visited on society as a whole. This includes those already belittled and disregarded by society and belittled and disregarded especially by those very same elites, without any of those belittled people (along, incidentally, with the rest of us) having any say on this.

Nobody in the establishment parties are saying anything about equality or proposing to do anything significant about it. Nobody is arguing that out of the dismal failures of our recent past, we can build a society that is equal and fair and genuinely democratic.

Pity that.