Saturday, September 15, 2018

Cause of Poverty


STOP PRETENDING TO BE POOR
By Stephen Wilson


Ivan the Fool

'Pension reform is for the well-being of our citizens. Pension reform is
inevitable! Stop pretending to be poor! Be responsible for yourself!
Don't be lazy and rely on your own strength. Drink less, try to keep
fit, then we can talk about not living to the age of retirement.'

Tatiana Bozhenko, United Russia

Those were the words on a poster by a United Russian candidate for
post of mayor in a town in Russia named Surgul. The words were
uttered at the time when the Russian government is attempting to
push through highly unpopular pension reforms which would raise
the retirement age of woman to 60 , and men to 65. The
problem is that in an estimated 36 regions of Russia, men don't even
live to the age of 65. It is automatically presumed that men on the
eve of retirement age can easily find work. But as organisations such
as Superjob point out, the vast majority of companies don't want to
employ people in their fifties and sixties. Andrei Zakharov, president
of the company Superjob, stated: "I can guarantee that 99.9 % of
people who reach retirement age will never be able to find a new job
again, even if they are highly-qualified specialists, needed in the
labor market ."  In many towns throughout Russia, the unemployment
rate stands between 15-20% and even higher. If young people are
struggling to obtain work, then imagine the predicament older people
face!

This is not a question of laziness. The primitive and childish notion
that Russians are lazy and just prefer to sit around and drink is absurd.
The reality is that there is just very little work available in many towns
where key industries which once offered work have closed down.
Such situations existed in many Scottish towns in the 1980's where there
was just a ratio of one vacancy to 80 job seekers or more. in other words,
it was literary impossible to get work of any kind. Classical economists
even describe this as structural unemployment. Bozhenko fails to even
grasp elementary school boy economics. The idea that people pretend
to be poor is absurd. On the contrary, poor people tend to try and conceal
their poverty because they often perceive it as a sign of shame. It is rather
a few rich people who claim to be poor so that they can evade taxation.
Drinking is not so much the cause of poverty, as the consequence. People
who have lost their job and feel devastated often try to drink away their sorrows.

Attempts to place the mistakes of the government and the banks on to the
shoulders of the poor is not new. in the 1980's the British state claimed
unemployment was caused by the laziness of the British worker. Yet the
British worker performed the longest working hours in Europe!

In Russia, people might actually be misled into believing that most Russians,
are by nature, lazy. Russian Folklore and stories about a lazy hero Ivan the
Fool, who gets everything for nothing might appear to vindicate this tale. But
the tale is simply the genre of comedy. It can't be taken seriously any more than
a 17th century English hero called Lazy Lawrence.

The overwhelming evidence suggests that Russian workers are among the
hardest workers of the top ten hard workers in the world. In terms of working
long hours they do a lot. While the average Russian worker can perform
40-50 hours a week, the American worker does an average of 38 hours a week
and those in the Netherlands work 29 hours a week. That is workers in the
Netherlands are working a four day week. Compare this situation with teachers
who often work a 6 or 7 day week . So are those Russian workers lazy? On
the contrary, many of them are overworking and doing a 60 hour week which
blatantly violates the labor Code of the Russian Federation which insists the
working week should not exceed 40 hours a week. Russian workers are scared
to take sick leave even when they come down with flu because they fear losing
their pay as well as ruining their career prospects. So is it  any wonder that
flu epidemics are frequent in Moscow? A study of the Russian labor market
by Tatiana Vasilouk, from Lomonosov Moscow State University, confirmed that
Russians in deed, work very long hours and that official figures vastly under
estimate how long they work.

Of course it is important to point out that what constitutes hard work can't
be simply measured by how many hours a person does. One hour of very
intricate and complex work on a computer is not the same as doing one
hour as a shop assistant.  It is worth asking: is a long hour culture in the office
such a good thing? Does working longer hours increase performance? A lot
of research tends to undermine this notion. You see the law of diminishing
returns operating. This is especially true when it comes to teaching. The more
hours a teacher performs the more likely the quality of his lessons decreases.
It is also important to observe that many totalitarian regimes made a supreme
virtue of hard work such as the Nazis who proclaimed 'Work makes you free'
and in the Soviet Union where they made you a 'hero of labor' for outstanding
work. Yet all this overwork leads to needless stress, suffering and often
premature death. In one story of Lazy Lawrence he is arrested for playing
pranks! He ends  up in court, but he is acquitted by the jury because some
apprentices turn up on his behalf and argue: "If it were not for Lazy Lawrence
we would be worked to death". The world needs to hear more about Lazy
Lawrence. And the Russian workers should be acquitted of base accusations
of laziness!

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