COLUMN LEFT : Too Many Work Too Hard For Too Little : Thatcher and Reagan are gone, but their attitudes toward cheap labor linger on.

John Major, Britain’s new prime minister, is the son of trapeze artists, so at least he’s a politician for whom the words “safety net” have real meaning. Young John learned at an early age the importance of social safety nets, too.

His parents had retired from the circus by the time he was born in 1943 and 11 years later his father’s small business of selling garden ornaments failed. The family had to move from the demure comfort of a suburban villa near Wimbledon to a two-room inner-city tenement flat with a cat burglar as a neighbor.

Sudden slides from security into ruin mark a family, particularly an adolescent. Major seems to have derived at least some of the right lessons. When he was carving his political career as a city councilor, he worked hard to get housing for poor people. And Major said not long ago that the National Health Service had saved him when he was a boy and again later when he nearly lost his leg in a car accident.

Thatcherites usually bare their teeth and snarl when people bring up the National Health--Britain’s medical safety net--so Major’s rhetoric on this score is positive as Britain heads into recession.

Across the advanced capitalist world over the last decade, politicians, particularly admirers of Thatcher or Ronald Reagan, have mostly finessed basic social responsibilities by seeing everything through the prism of growth. No matter how horrifying the statistics on the malnourished, untaught, homeless and sick, the argument was somehow that growth would take care of things.

It became the last resort of liberals, too. The great dilemma they faced was that as the rich and the middle class built their defensive parapets--Proposition 13 and kindred stratagems--redistributive politics became just about impossible. So the only answer became a complex system of trade-offs: let the developer build his skyscraper, give him the zoning variance, air rights and tax abatements, but exact some dollars for the public purse in return.

The trouble with this strategy is that it assumes that growth goes on forever, just as the U.S. economy, most luridly in California, assumes that growth will keep the all-important serf population of cheap labor from vanishing through the floor.

Rarely has a society (at least this historical side of the old slave states stretching back to Athens) enjoyed such unjust blessings. Just as California’s aerospace industry flourished on tax transfers from the rest of the country, particularly the Midwest, so too has everything depended on the low cost of immigrant, undocumented labor: the food, the construction, the thousand-and-one jobs done at a sub-minimum wage.

The injustice comes at the precise moment that the Haves enjoying the fruits of this cheap labor deny that they have any responsibility for the Have Nots; they assume that this labor force can be ignored in terms of basic rights to shelter, education and social service, and believe that cheap labor will miraculously reproduce itself without any external support.

A story by Jill Stewart in the Los Angeles Times Nov. 24 disclosed that 1.3 million people are now living below the poverty line in Los Angeles County. The reporter eloquently described the extraordinary shifts to which desperate people resort in order to get by. But what made the story particularly ominous was the fact that a recession is gathering force.

Fabian Villa, a cook described by Stewart, gets $240 for a 66-hour week, which works out at an illegal $3.60 an hour, below the California minimum of $4.35. The Villa family budget now runs exactly in balance: not a dollar to spare. In recessions, restaurants start closing. People like Fabian Villa lose their jobs. And all those hundreds of thousands of other low-wage jobs tucked in the interstices of the regional economy start disappearing, too. The people heading into El Norte from far greater desperation farther south find at the end of their journey that there is nothing.

After the Nov. 6 elections--whose rhetoric was mostly about locking people up--politicians like Jerry Brown said that the Democratic Party must rediscover its sense of identity and mission. But for any politician of decent social instincts, the fight is a very basic one, without the verbal bric-a-brac about “vision” and “new horizons.” We need a human-rights strategy, an elementary line of defense drawn in the dust against the punitive sanctions enforced by hard times.

Just as John Major knows that post-Thatcherism means talking about safety nets, so must the coming hard times here produce political voices in defense of those too many poor people working too hard for too little, to support too many people consuming too much and giving too little in return.