You are right to attack low pay and stress that "devolving employment policy - and with it, the capacity to implement a living wage - must be at the heart of [the Smith Commission's] deliberations" (Bad bosses must be tackled, Editorial, November 23).
However, your editorial overlooks the role played by the government's workfare programmes [Help To Work] in keeping down wages and conditions.
Workfare reflects the underlying claim that unemployment is caused not by lack of jobs, but by the deficiencies of the unemployed. Thus the lack of jobs is not tackled.
Workfare normalises unpaid work, introducing a generation to the idea that workers must prove themselves by a period of work for subsistence benefits, in the hope that some day an employer will reward them by actually paying them a wage. It also de-motivates and de-incentivises employers to pay their workers anything at all, let alone a living wage.
The Scottish Government should refuse to have anything to do with workfare in its own departments, and should not allow workfare to take hold if greater powers should materialise. Workfare is the enemy of living wages, and any effort by Holyrood to promote the latter while tolerating the former will be like trying to bail out a leaking boat.
Katherine Perlo
Prestonpans
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