Dear Editor,
In last week’s edition of the Newton News, I read two articles which taken together signal grave concern to me. The first article celebrated the inauguration of a recruitment agency. The second article celebrated the first birthday of the local food bank.
I am outraged that both recruitment agencies and food banks have become normalised within our culture. Our local industries are saturated by recruitment agencies in stiff competition with each other. The effect of these parasite employment proxies sees the minimum wage become the average wage.
Moreover, restricted by the minimum wage, some recruitment agencies resort to underhanded tricks to make them more competitive, such as requiring workers to work part of their contract unpaid under the guise of work based training.
In these local employment conditions it is of no surprise that, facing rising living costs, hard working people resort to food banks.
Our constituency M.P Phil Wilson has taken great trouble to ensure that he is the face of the coming Hitachi contracts. We have not had any assurances from him that, these coming skilled industrial jobs will be offered to workers as permanent contracts with decent pay and conditions, employed directly by Hitachi. It would be an abhorrent disgrace if our M.P, a member of a Democratic Socialist Party should permit these contracts to be farmed out to recruitment agencies offering temporary contracts for minimum pay.
The working class cannot assume the support of Phil Wilson; he has let us down badly in the past. He fell silent when the Tory government voted to overturn the legal ruling that they had unlawfully withdrawn benefits from people who refused to work for free. He remained silent as did most of his Party when calls came to abolish the bedroom tax.
We have just returned three Labour County Councillors to the wastrel inefficiency of County Hall, where absenteeism is double the rate of any other industry. None of our representatives have made it their priority to abolish or block obscene privilege such as the 12k clothing allowance, paid for by the taxes of low paid workers. Meanwhile, our representatives offer platitudes and sympathy to their hard pressed constituents, all the while watching their living standards erode, without offering any radical solutions to this problem.
In my view, our local, county and national political representatives are a milieu of sycophants, joining the established order of politics. They lack the courage to call for reforms to the structure of politics which has proved highly ineffectual at representing the needs of ordinary working people. Bevan would turn in his grave if he saw what had become of Newton Aycliffe’s aspirations and ideals; and all on the watch of the supposedly democratic socialist Labour party.
Warren Saunders