14.09.1995

Labour ready to hammer workers

The TUC conference has been dominated by Labour’s modernisation and the demand - or not - for a minimum wage. So can we win a living wage? What is a living wage? And what is ‘fair’ anyway?

OVER three quarters of workers responding to a TUC survey said they feared for their jobs. One third fear penalties for being ill. Only 35% of the workforce have full-time jobs on permanent contracts, compared to 55% 20 years ago.

These statistics only state the obvious for how most workers feel today. So when Jack Straw attacked the homeless and squeegee merchants last week he really was missing the point. His liberal pundit supporters also quite staggeringly miss the point. Suzanne Moore in The Guardian (September 7) demonstrates just how Victorian ‘liberal’ opinion has become. It now accepts the inevitability of the destruction of the welfare state and reduces the resulting ‘life on the streets’ to a question of the “personal safety” of the respectable and oh-so-benevolent liberal bourgeoisie.

Those on the streets are just the tip of the iceberg. They represent general social decay that affects all workers and threatens them with the same fate. Wages, benefits and job security are being driven down to ever more inhuman degrees.

Now every section of the workforce fears for their job. The progress from a semi in Surrey to an archway in Waterloo is not so unimaginable as it may have been a few years ago.

The bosses would make us work for 24 hours a day for nothing if they could. Those that keeled over and died would simply be replaced. The only thing which stops them is our organisation.

The rights that we have today, which are being steadily eroded, have been won through struggle. They have not been given by the bosses’ philanthropic nature.

As working class combativity declines, the bosses are ravenously clawing back the rights we had won, steadily reducing the whole class to a state of long hours, low pay and insecurity. Steadily widening the gap between the highest and lowest paid, so that any technological advances in society are not used to benefit society as a whole, but to further enslave the mass of workers and reduce the whole of society to a general state of brutality and savagery.

Rather than being a ray of hope in all this darkness the TUC conference only served to emphasise our beggarly state. The Labour leader and Philip Gould’s leaked strategy document came in for some criticism. But Blair was not shaken. His triumphalist speech, promising to show the unions no favours when in government, indicates how little he is threatened.

The Labour Party is not making any concessions to workers, because it knows, in the absence of any alternative, they have no choice but to vote for Labour.

The left has tied itself to getting the Tories out and so to Labour. Every day one Labour shadow minister or other opens their mouth to promise to viciously attack workers. They are clear this is not a cynical ploy, but a commitment to rescue the bosses’ profits at the expense of the working class. And every day the cry goes up from the left to ‘Vote Labour, but ...’

Almost to an organisation the ‘left’ is being dragged to the right with Labour. The lobby of the TUC chanted in unison, “Hey, Hey, Tony Blair, £4 an hour is only fair”, or was it £4.15 or the EU’s decency threshold? The Trotskyite Workers Power is typical of the left in demanding the “highest possible figure”.

Is £4 an hour fair, when Douglas Hurd has just landed himself a nice little £200,000 package on the side? When multi-millionaires and sweatshop workers on £1.50 an hour live in the same society? What an earth is this concept of ‘fair’ supposed to mean?

In the space of a few short weeks the left has been knocked down from the EU threshold of £5.86 an hour, to the unions’ ‘median average’ of £4.15, to the revised £4 figure. How low can they go? Will they eventually bargain away workers’ living standards altogether?

Communists demand what we need to live, culturally as well as physically. In this society £275 per week for a 35-hour week is a bare minimum. What the bosses say they can afford is not our starting point, because they will only ever give us as little as they can get away with.

Workers need to unite around demands for what we need. Only through independent revolutionary political organisation can we put the unions and our class back on the offensive. Building that organisation must start now, because Blair already has his sights trained on us.