“It’s working families.” Rosemary Ashworth, deputy chief executive of The Hygiene Bank, is describing the people who can no longer afford the products they need to keep clean. Among them are people who previously felt financially secure.
Working families! The families whose labour keeps society going are finding that their own wages won’t buy its elementary necessities. Their need for toothpaste hasn’t changed. Their ability to pay has. And under capitalism it is the ability to pay that decides whether the toothpaste reaches them.
A survey of 3,042 UK adults by The Hygiene Bank and In Kind Direct found that 18 percent had experienced hygiene poverty in the previous six months, either themselves or through someone in their household. Of those affected, 41% said they had experienced it for the first time this year. Let us remember that figure when we hear of the security supposedly conferred by having a job.
Janice Sedgwick, a volunteer at the charity’s Guildford branch, names the products people need: “toothbrushes, toothpaste, shower gel, shampoo, sanitary pads and laundry detergent”. People are struggling to obtain products to keep their homes clean, too. The household that cannot afford them still has clothes to wash and rooms to clean. These needs recur, regardless of how much money remains after the other necessities have been paid for.
The worker sells labour power to an employer and uses the wage to buy the means of living. Here are working families unable to obtain even the means of keeping clean. Their labour is useful to the employer; their need for soap interests the seller only when there is money behind it. For the worker, cleanliness is necessary. For capital, supplying the means of cleanliness is a business. The same product enters into two quite different calculations, and the seller’s calculation determines whether the worker gets it.
The Hygiene Bank says this deprivation “can create a vicious cycle, affecting health, confidence, education, work and social participation”. Consider what this means. The shortage of money that prevents someone from keeping clean can then damage their health or make participation in work harder. Poverty supplies another obstacle to earning the money needed to escape it. The person already deprived must bear the consequences of that deprivation as well.
In Guildford, Tom May of the mental health charity Oakleaf points to women’s recurring need for hygiene products, while reporting that supplies are “pretty much empty by the end of the week”. A woman who needs sanitary pads can’t put off her period until the next donation arrives. The empty shelf settles nothing; the need remains with the person who has to manage without.
The Hygiene Bank is appealing for donations of products or money during National Hygiene Week, which ends on 11 October. Help given now can spare someone real hardship, and the volunteers collecting and distributing these goods are doing useful work. Yet every household they supply will need the goods again. A donated bottle runs out; another has to be found. The volunteers must continually repair, with whatever resources they can collect, the failure of wages to cover the necessities of life.
We can appreciate that work without accepting such an arrangement for the provision of necessities. Social ownership would allow a workers’ state to plan the production of these essentials and provide them through public services according to need. Labour, materials and transport would have to be organised, of course; the work could be paid for collectively, as part of protecting public health. A household’s supply of toothpaste or detergent would no longer depend on what happened to be left in its purse, or on whether volunteers had managed to refill an exhausted store.
The charity speaks of a changed “face” of hygiene poverty, as working families are drawn into greater poverty. A family that lives by selling its labour depends on what the wage will buy, however secure it felt last year. Capitalism can use that family’s labour and still leave it dependent on donations for soap.
