In 1941 George Orwell proposed a maximum wage to create a more stable and equal society.
He claimed that “a man with £3 a week and a man with £1,500 a year can feel themselves fellow creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers on the Embankment benches cannot”.
Seventy-five years later, the streets of Dalston have put Orwell’s theory to the test.
Last weekend St Paul’s West Hackney Church hosted The Maximum Wage Event to highlight wage inequality in the UK.
Hackney artists and authors inspired by Orwell
The Henningham Family Press present The Maximum Wage – a Performance Publishing Extravaganza @ S Pauls Wst Hackney pic.twitter.com/gClnbTzjxP
— Niall Weir (@niallweir) February 22, 2016
Those at the event worked on a live printing press to produce a mass of “Orwell notes” which could be spent on the day at participating local businesses.
Hackney-based authors and artists Henningham Family Press (HFP) ran The Maximum Wage Event which was funded by the Arts Council.
In order to demonstrate the inequality of income distribution in the UK, attendees carried out equal amounts of work but were paid differently.
Instead of any meritocratic measure, each player’s “wages” were determined by spinning a wheel.
Income equality
David Henningham from the HFP was the brains behind the experiment and he was satisfied with how the it played out.
He told Hackney Post: “It was very well attended by an unusually diverse crowd who created a positive and energetic atmosphere.
“It raised a difficult issue in an entertaining way without being cathartic, which maintains an audience’s appetite for change.
“It was fascinating to see how impossible it is to discriminate against strangers face-to-face.
“When you take away all of the invisible structures that allow us to pay wildly different amounts for the same period of work it just feels wrong.
“One team even created a co-operative and split it all evenly.”
The project is designed to question the ethics of income inequality rather than campaign for a direct policy change.
There are currently plans to tour the UK and eventually publish journals on how income inequality affects the UK.
Featured image credit: ThatThingYouPluce
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