Have you ever been sat on the train to work at seven in the morning and been struck by the utter injustice that your two hour daily commute, although solidly part of your “working day”, is not remunerated in the slightest? Not to mention the fact you have to pay for the privilege of getting to work in order to be exploited. But what if we got paid for our travel time and expenses? What if our employers had to pay for the privilege of bringing in labour from a distance, and this cost wasn’t foisted onto the individual worker?
In our current state of declining wages and working conditions, it seems pretty absurd to be thinking about forcing our employers to pay us for time when we aren’t even in the workplace. It even seems to go against the longstanding dictum of the workers’ movement: “fair wages for fair work”. But really, this demand is not without precedent. However, for this lesson we can’t simply look back to the halcyon days of social democracy. We have to cast our gaze back to the 15th Century, an age that Marx noted to be “the golden age of the English labourer in town and country.” The population of Europe had recently been decimated by the Black Death plague – meaning that the working poeople were suddenly a scarce commodity. The proletariat and peasantry found themselves in a position of incredible bargaining power, and soon began to demand some of the highest wages, benefits and lowest work hours that workers have ever seen.
One of these many radical demands won was the viaticum: a provision of everything needed for a journey. Originiting in ancient Rome, it consisted of a mode of transport (horses or oxen), food supplies and warm clothes, to be given to Roman officials when making journeys on state business. Silvia Federici explains that in the 15th Century it came to be a pay package given to the worker, in addition to the wage, as remuneration “for coming and going from home to work, at so much per mile of distance.”
If they had to do this, you know that affordable housing starts would suddenly boom just so employees wouldn’t have to be exiled to the suburbs.
Wages for Commuting
Published
Meg's Mumbles 