The Sacred Pound
I call them the underclass.
Guy Standing, in his 2011 book of the same title, calls them ‘the precariat’.
We all know to whom he refers – the employee with two jobs serving you at the petrol station, the female cleaner in the men’s toilet at a posh London Club, the Transylvanian carer on a zero hours contract whose services are required 0730 hrs to 13.30 hrs and 19.00 hrs to 21.00 hrs so dependent on public transport as to be condemned to wait between paid hours.
I have met and spoken to all of them.
The petrol station operative told me his wages were going to be docked because the customer before me had filled up and left without paying. The oil company he works for is a household name.
In the finance world there is a similar less obvious class. The nameless legions inputting data for insurance companies or banks. My wife’s nephew is one of these. He works from home. He has not met any of his bosses, and he knows no one above or below him. He does not know the full significance of anything he does and is paid by the hour, with no holiday or medical cover. He is part of an apparatus set up to remedy a miss-selling scandal.
It made me ponder the extent to which we in our metals trade are also reliant on the precariat.
There will be many in our precariati inputting data resulting from the legal claims of the 2022 nickel palaver (when the LME summarily cancelled contracts when nickel rose from $10k per mt to $100k per mt following Putin’s attack on Ukraine). There will be some in the back offices of the commission houses and shipping departments of large commodity traders. But generally, our precariat works for those we work with rather than those who work directly for us.
Members of our precariat are more likely to be merchant seamen (usually from poor Asian countries) and haulage drivers; or miners and auxiliary workers in developing countries at prey to the whims of local and generally powerless labour laws and weak unions. In Zambia for example the precariat is so poor that despite pollution, safety concerns, or machinations in the international market in which assets are bought and sold without reference to those affected, each one craves merely to have a job.
I would like to say that there are solutions – but they are unlikely to be popular. One of them is the idea of faithfully paying tax in the country where the activity takes place. When discussing this with CEOs of mining corporations (some of whom following recent actions by the Singapore government will be questioning why they domiciled in Singapore in the first place) the usual answer offered is that the country in which they mine is corrupt.
It is not an excuse I go along with and is a similar argument to the one often used to justify mitigating tax in UK via offshore entities - the claim that their tax will be wasted by the bureaucracy.
Perhaps it is an unpopular opinion, but to me a public servant in a functioning bureaucracy is one of the highest callings there is. Castigated by Michael Gove as ‘the blob’, it is public servants upon whom we depend. Their service for the common good is perhaps the only distinction I know of between a civilized country and anarchy. They too are part of the modern precariat.
So, may I perhaps suggest at this Christmas time, as some wince at the thought of their tax bill due on January 31st 2025, think not that your pound is wasted but that it is sacred, a duty to the society to which we belong - and one to be used by those to whom we entrust it with utmost care.
This is why any of us whose earnings are above a level of dependency might like to spare the precariat a thought.
Anthony Lipmann
24.12.24
(A version of this was posted on www.lord-copper.com)
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