Caritas has forgotten that children are true luxuries
This was my column in The Malta Independent yesterday.
Caritas has given government politicians the research details on which it has based its request that the minimum wage be raised. I have read the news reports, though not been privy to any details other than that, and it seems to me that we are here in dangerous living-wage waters.
The Caritas report speaks of one or two adults living with two children, and then gives the minimum amount of money that they need to keep body and soul together – an amount which does not make allowance for, Caritas was wise to point out, mobile telephony, holidays and the like.
I do not know the specifics of the items which Caritas considers essential, or how much it allows for each of these, but the basic requirement it suggests, at €10,634 for two parents with two children and €8,581 for one parent with two children, seem not just reasonable but, to my mind, far too low.
Yes, it is quite possible for two parents with two children to stay alive on €886 a month, if at least one of them is a clever cook and knows how to shop for food. And clothes and household items are now quite cheap compared to the price levels and lack of choice only just a few years ago.
But this kind of hand-to-mouth existence means that there is literally no money for extraordinary expenses or for the little things that make life worth living and elevate us beyond a soul-destroying peasant-in-a-shack existence where the life of the mind and spirit are totally neglected and every day is a struggle for survival and a nightmare of worry.
And I haven’t even begun to consider making the home a pleasant and comfortable space, which is completely impossible on that level of income, and this only serves to compound the hardship.
Yes, I do know people, with families, who earn wages no higher than that, but in all cases they moonlight at something else and bring in a certain amount of additional income, some of it undeclared perhaps, or the other parent does so. Typically, what happens in these situations is that the wife uses her income – and wives in this socio-economic group generally work in the black economy – for food shopping and anything related to the children, while the husband’s official wages go on the monthly overheads like water and electricity, household repairs, maintenance and the like.
But whether adults with children can survive on €8,000 to €10,000 a year, still less on the minimum wage, is not quite the point. And this is where the Caritas proposal and the genuine concerns of the organisation itself miss the mark.
The minimum wage is not intended for the purpose of raising a family, still less is it meant to be sufficient income on which to support a wife without an income of her own. The minimum wage is compensation for work undertaken by a single individual, and it is there to ensure that there is no abuse by employers who will pay as little as they can get away with.
With no minimum wage, where people are desperate the situation will invariably degenerate into a slave-wages scenario as it does already with refugee workers who are too frightened or intimidated to argue for their rights, even if they know in the first place that they have those rights at all.
People on the minimum wage are wholly unrealistic to even think of setting up home. They have no business getting married and expecting to support a spouse, still less bringing children into the world. It is nothing short of hideously irresponsible.
Yes, accidents will and do happen, and it is a good thing to see parents now keeping those children rather than dumping them in their legions in the care of priests and nuns as they did only as recently as a generation ago. But they shouldn’t expect their employers to pay for the upkeep of their children, which is what it amounts to if those employers are ordered to pay more than the market value for the work or services they receive.
It is the parents’ responsibility to work all the hours they can – both parents, that is – to find the money to pay for the upbringing of the children who they, and they alone, created. If this means taking on three or four jobs, or training at night to get a better-paid job during the day, then so be it.
For those who have children and really do have no means of keeping the household together without help, there are social benefits and free training opportunities designed to wean people off a dependency culture.
The key difference between social benefits and the ‘living wage’ idea, or raising the minimum wage as Caritas has proposed, is that the burden of social benefits is spread among all taxpayers, which makes it just, while any mandatory rise in wages for the specific purpose of allowing a man to keep a wife and family is a specific and unwarranted burden on employers, and so it is socially unjust.
It is rooted in left-wing ideas which are now seriously outdated. Contemporary left-wing thinking has been reflected in the policies of the Nationalist Party for the last generation at least: free access for all to education and training (and in Malta’s case with the added incentive that you are paid to train, rather than paying to train) and a varied job market. This helps ensure that people are motivated and able to look after themselves, rather than continuing in the dependency mentality fostered by the policies of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, and now resurrected by Joseph Muscat.
Caritas was careful to rule out all luxuries and non-essential items from its list. But by starting its calculations at one step further ahead than it should have, it has made a series of grave miscalculations and based much of its reasoning on a false premiss. The greatest and most expensive luxuries and non-essential items are, in the first place, children themselves. Caritas starts out from a false premiss because it is a Catholic organisation and in Catholic thought having children is not a luxury but a duty and an obligation in marriage.
You have no choice but to eat, wash and get dressed. But you do have a choice about having children, and if you can’t afford to have one because you’re on the minimum wage, then wait until you’re earning more, and in the meantime, train and study and work on ways to achieving that end. Nowadays, there’s absolutely no excuse for not doing this.
In the not-so-olden days, people used to have children and dump them in orphanages because they couldn’t afford to look after them. Now they have children and expect to dump the cost on their employer or the benefits office.
It seems to me that what Caritas really needs to do here is remind people that ‘terms and conditions apply’, to use the language of special offers, to the right to have children, and this means ensuring that by having those children you will neither become a burden on others nor serve those children ill.
It is quite obvious that contraception is not an issue here, because as Caritas itself said, everybody seems to have two children. Family-planning, however, seems to be a different matter entirely. People who plan to have children, with one of them staying home to look after them, on the minimum wage, deserve to be seriously reprimanded and not encouraged in their unthinking selfishness.
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“…‘terms and conditions apply’, to use the language of special offers, to the right to have children, and this means ensuring that by having those children you will neither become a burden on others nor serve those children ill”.
This should be explained in mandatory pre-marriage courses.
If we were to leave it up to Daphne, all couples attending these courses should be given a sort of conversion table to work out the number of children they should have.
8000Eur = 1 child
10000Eur = 2 children
Apart from controlling the population, and considerable savings on social security payments, it would have another benefit, which is assuring that we will always have a Nationalist Party in government, the reason being that the well off, who usually vote PN, will be the only ones having lots of children.
According to the above conversion table, a P.N.couple earning 100000 Euros will be allowed 20 children, and that’s a lot of votes.
It’s not a matter of ‘allowing’ or ‘not allowing’, as you know full well it isn’t. It’s a matter of budgeting your income and your time.
No 100,000 euro earner would be stupid enough to have 20 children because the women in that income bracket usually have some degree of self-respect and want a life to call their own.
Even with two pay cheques considerably higher than the minimum wage, I opted to pay off the house loan first so that I’d have more disposable income once we had started our family. We also tried to further our education which had been denied us under the Mintoff/KMB regime.
We’ve never left any stone unturned to better our situation. So, if we are living comfortably off today, it’s because we haven’t been sitting on our backsides waiting for handouts. We’ve worked hard, experienced what they mean by life-long learning, and continue to look for ways to improve our lot.
What minimum wage earners (especially with dependent families) really need are guidance counsellors to help them draw up strategies to improve their worth in the labour market.
Education, not handouts, is the answer to eradicating poverty.
You heard him, children. The well-off usually vote PN. Is that why Labour has a well-off leader? So PN voters will vote Labour instead?
Banali Silvio, mela ghadna is-seklu l-iehor fejn l-ulied jivvotaj bhal genituri?
Silvio, that’s exactly the kind of mentality such a course would try to discourage. Children are not objects that adults have a right to, but persons.
Yes, people who cannot afford (financially, physically and mentally) to have any or more children should not bring them into this world – not through coercion, but because doing otherwise would be highly unethical.
People who bring into the world children they cannot afford would be treating them as objects they have a right to, and not as persons that come loaded with responsibilities for their welfare.
It is generally (and rightly so) considered cruel to bring into the household a pet one cannot afford to properly take care of. Why should it be any less in the case of bringing into the household a new human being?
High time the state started organizing compulsory pre-marriage courses.
As I interpreted that study, Caritas is not actually proposing anything. It simply took a snap-shot of the situation as is.
It came to the conclusion that for the families taken as an example to have a “decent life”, the minimum wage level should rise.
But there are other ways of achieving this. And the foremost method is by getting the goverment to come up with ways which push prices down instead of up.
It is encouraging to note that, after years if rubbishing Labour policy that there should be a lid on how high utility prices should rise, this PN government has now taken a U-turn and declared that, however high the price of oil goes, it will not increase tariffs.
For years the same government claimed it was powerless as regards utility bills, since “the prices are fixed abroad”. A welcome change of tone.
An idiotic change of tone. Enemalta lost four million euros this year, because of the government’s refusal to raise electricity tariffs. That money will have to be found somewhere. That’s right. It’ll come from taxes, which take no account of electricity use. It’s times like these that Gonzi’s social policy background really comes through.
Excuse me for shouting, but this ignorance really gets me all worked up: THERE IS PRACTICALLY NOTHING THAT WE (MALTA) CAN DO TO INFLUENCE WORLD PRICES.
On the other hand, we can naturally decide to subsidise prices locally – but any discussion on subsidies that does not mention the costs thereof (i.e. increased taxes and/or decrease in services/subsidies) is an exercise in denial.
The full report has been available on Caritas’ website for 2 weeks and No it is not about the minimun wage
http://www.caritasmalta.org/?m=news&id=44
In fact “Caritas Malta is offering this study to stimulate a national debate and encourage policy makers to establish a minimum benchmark for a decent standard of living”.
[Daphne – That’s exactly what it’s about.]
Try telling that to the “contemporary left-wing” Nationalist government, which provides fiscal incentives for married couples.
I have no choice but to have a roof over my head, a bed, a basic hob, a toilet and a shower, and pay for everything myself.
Married couples get to share them all, so they can split the expense, AND they get to pay less income tax. How’s that for retrograde Christian-family-incentive-bollocks policies?
Simple: get married.
if you feel so hard done by, get married Baxxter . . .
Oh yeah I’ll put out an advert.
I don’t know…. The idea that a married couple, both on minimum wage, can’t actually afford to have children seems a little drastic to me.
Like you said I completely agree that one parent’s salary can’t or shouldn’t support an entire family, but two minimum wages should. I mean thats a sizable chunk of the population.
[Daphne – The report is not about two minimum wages supporting two adults and one child. It is about one minimum wage supporting two adults and two children. Yes, you can bring up one or two children on two minimum wages, but it’s going to be dire. And no, it’s not the majority of the population. Most moonlight.The grey economy is huge.]
Seems you are going down the ‘selective breeding’ route; you have been been reading too much Franco.
[Daphne – It’s got nothing to do with selective breeding. It’s about understanding that children are not dogs or canaries. And even with dogs and canaries, the message has long been out that you don’t first get one and then see how you’re going to look after it. Couples with reliable and decent incomes plan their children, largely because the mother generally works, they have school fees to take into account, and they have more bills and overheads all round. That’s not selective breeding. That’s common sense.]
Daphne, you know more than I do that having children is driven by an emotional desire and emotions are powerful motivators. It is not just about not having children; that is crude, but making do with what you have while constantly aiming to achieve your optimal performance in life.
My father was a civil servant and my mother is a work-at-home mother. We were given the best education that my father could afford and got on with life. They were religous, so we were also made to be part of the church but we were taught the right values. I learnt that I couldn’t have certain toys or even designer wear but I was always dressed warm and also learnt not to be bitter about it and appreciated other things in life like reading and listening to music, passively and eventually joining a band. We all grew up and went our separate ways but we are grateful for what a lot we got out of the little there was.
The point of my ramble is that yes, life today requires a basic understanding of money to live (or survive, a matter of perception). Teaching children to appreciate the fact that life is about people not possessions holds much more water and this is where Caritas should be paying attention to not the financial aspects of modern day life. The rest comes and goes and will not accompany us beyond the grave.
“Daphne, you know more than I do that having children is driven by an emotional desire and emotions are powerful motivators”.
And that’s precisely what makes education of paramount importance. It is the welfare system that makes it possible for people to let their emotional desires go unchecked, while responsible people subsidise the irresponsible behaviour of others.
I’m not saying that we should do without a welfare system, but it is a well known fact that far too many people abuse the system.
And I’m not saying that people who can’t afford designer clothing shouldn’t have children. But certainly, people who can’t seem to make ends meet and would have spent all their income a week in advance of their next salary cheque, surely cannot afford to have loads of children – and shouldn’t expect the rest of us to pay for their irresponsible behaviour.
Kenneth, education is provided free by the state; obviously paid by taxpayers. You cannot educate a person to deny emotions, but you can teach control.
The welfare system is there to stay and so it should. What is not tolerable is that we are forking out E2M per day in social services alone. Let all those who really deserve it get it, but that is where one should draw the line. After all, just like taxation, generous welfare is a disincentive to work and adds no value.
@ Logikal:
“Kenneth, education is provided free by the state; obviously paid by taxpayers. You cannot educate a person to deny emotions, but you can teach control”.
That’s exactly what I meant. It is evident that not enough is being done in this department.
“The welfare system is there to stay and so it should. What is not tolerable is that we are forking out E2M per day in social services alone. Let all those who really deserve it get it, but that is where one should draw the line. After all, just like taxation, generous welfare is a disincentive to work and adds no value”.
That’s precisely what I said in a more concise form. We’re in perfect agreement.