25.04.2001

What we need ... not what capital can afford

Low pay - pay below what is required to maintain and reproduce yourself as a cultured human being in today's conditions - remains a heavy burden for many workers and their families. Affecting in particular women, part-time employees, unskilled routine workers, and migrant labour (legal and illegal), the scrimping, penny-pinching life on below-subsistence incomes is a daily reality for millions in Britain - and hundreds of millions across the planet. It is unacceptable. It is an abomination.

Low pay - pay below what is required to maintain and reproduce yourself as a cultured human being in today's conditions - remains a heavy burden for many workers and their families. Affecting in particular women, part-time employees, unskilled routine workers, and migrant labour (legal and illegal), the scrimping, penny-pinching life on below-subsistence incomes is a daily reality for millions in Britain - and hundreds of millions across the planet. It is unacceptable. It is an abomination.

In the week of Unison's activity, culminating in the Manchester demonstration against low pay and the nationwide May Day demonstrations - in particular the actions and protests in London - socialists must show the way forward in campaigning for a living wage.

For communists it is more than a moral issue. Our fight against low pay, and for a minimum wage that allows everybody a full role in 21^st century society, is fundamentally political. It is about fighting for what workers need to become a self-activating class for itself and about taking this struggle to the heart of the way we are ruled: a struggle against the state and the entire system of exploitation.

The present - albeit muted - campaign against low pay has been forced on the Unison bureaucracy from below. It has to be remembered that the first Unison demonstration for a living wage in Newcastle in 1999 resulted from a conference decision the leadership fought against. Since then, it has attempted to keep the 'campaign' on the back burner, channelling it into friendly pressure on the Labour government to inch up the official national minimum. Last year, Unison's 'activity' consisted of a lame 'workers' day at the Dome' of all things. And of course the union tops also see this weekend's event as an opportunity to promote New Labour in the run-up to the general election.

For us in the Socialist Alliance, the Unison demonstration in Manchester and May Day events in London and across the country are opportunities to put forward our demands - not just on wages, but to rally thinking workers to the banner of socialism, to the fight for a new workers' party and for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism: for the abolition of the wages system.

The struggle around pay can be used as a barometer of the class struggle and is an important area of intervention for communists. However, while struggles for a wage increase can galvanise groups of workers, while successes can breed confidence, they do not and cannot in and of themselves qualitatively transform the political outlook of the working class. True, with the introduction of a national minimum wage, the issue of the lowest wages became one for the government, not simply this or that employer. But it still remains within the sphere of trade union politics.

The approach of socialists to the wages issue is of importance and has been of some controversy in the Socialist Alliance. The SA policy for the forthcoming general election is "for a minimum wage of £7.39 per hour (the European Union decency threshold) with no exemptions". What do communists say about this? Our basic approach is that we need to fight for what our class needs, not what the bosses, the UK government or the EU says capital can afford.

At the SA policy conference in Birmingham on March 10, the Communist Party of Great Britain argued: "For a minimum net wage for a maximum 35-hour week to be set at the level of what is required to physically and culturally reproduce a worker in today's Britain. In today's society that equates to approximately £300 a week, or £8.57 an hour. The Socialist Alliance will not advocate a minimum wage that is below subsistence levels." For communists, the amount is not so important as the method.

The CPGB motion was lost by a margin of about five to one and the formulation based on the EU's decency threshold carried the day. Exactly why socialists should base their demand for a minimum wage on the calculations of the EU bureaucracy has never been fully made clear. Duncan Morrison of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty has though offered a defence:

"The level should be defined by what is most likely to grab the attention and imagination of the class at large and allow the more advanced sections of it to mobilise and fight for this" (Weekly Worker April 12). Why the EU's decency threshold is "most likely to grab the attention and imagination of the class" is not explained. The most widespread demand for a minimum wage in the trade union movement is for £5 an hour. That is what the TUC demands, what Unison demands and, incidentally, what the Socialist Party in England and Wales demands. At least the SP approach is a consistent echo of the bureaucracy: fight in a militant manner for what the bureaucracy itself tamely puts forward.

In its submission to the Low Pay Commission (the body which recommends the level of the minimum wage to the government) last year, Unison argued that the minimum wage should be a "living wage". Remarkably it says that the "living wage" should be based on "what people need to live" and not on what "businesses can afford". Unison maintains this can be calculated on the basis of "half male median earnings as an immediate benchmark" and has the long-term aim of the "threshold" being set at "two thirds average earnings". This target is in fact equivalent to the EU decency threshold.

Where does the decency threshold come from? I rang the European Union in Brussels and the Council of Europe's representative office in London. They had never heard of it. I searched the EU's website at length. Not a dot. I searched the internet: only references to the threshold (mainly from local councils and the left press in the UK); nothing about where it came from.

The UK Low Pay Unit, a quango in Birmingham, was of most assistance. The basis of the EU decency threshold lies in the European Social Charter. Adopted in Turin in October 1961, article four of the charter is for "the right to a fair remuneration". It states: "With a view to ensuring the effective exercise of the right to a fair remuneration, the contracting parties undertake to recognise the right of workers to a remuneration such as will give them and their families a decent standard of living."

Within the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the EU exists a body called the Committee of Independent Experts, variously charged with interpreting aspects of EU policy/targets. In a paper What is low pay? the UK Low Pay Unit reports that this committee of bourgeois academics and bureaucrats "takes the position that any definition which seeks to mark the boundary of a decent living wage must take 'into account the basic economic, social and cultural needs of workers and their families in relation to the state of development reached by the society in which they live'." Doesn't sound too bad.

Compare this with the CPGB's proposals: "For a minimum net wage for a maximum 35-hour week to be set at the level of what is required to physically and culturally reproduce a worker in today's Britain." Quite similar really. Yet there is a crucial difference. How is this amount calculated? The Low Pay Unit says: "The committee has to this end defined the decency threshold as the equivalent of 68% of the mean earning of full-time men and women."

No reason is given for this proportion. Why 68%? And, more importantly, why should socialists meekly accept it? It has no mass purchase on the working class, as sections of the left like to imagine. It is an arbitrary figure decided on by bureaucrats and adopted by the voluntary sector and - unfortunately - also by the majority in the Socialist Alliance.

Some of our SA allies have dismissed the Communist Party's demand as "a number dreamt up by a small leftwing group". Yet it is actually the EU decency threshold which is a figure plucked from thin air - conjured up in the corridors of Brussels and Strasbourg, not forced upon them by any movement of the working class.

Of course, in one sense the figure arrived at by the CPGB is itself inadequate - it is the outcome of our calculations to determine the minimum required for workers to reproduce themselves physically and culturally. But, as we have said, for us, the figure is not the main thing; it is the method. Socialists need to fight for this method to be adopted by the working class. We urge that the organised working class formulates its own minimum wage demand, not rely on EU recommendations.

We argue for the formation of an authoritative workers' commission on the minimum wage which calculates, through a process of mass consultation and education, what we actually need in order to participate fully in modern society. This calculation then becomes a figure which must be explained on the widest scale and then actively fought for. In the absence of such a commission, it is perfectly reasonable for the socialist left - and its components, including the CPGB - to calculate a minimum ourselves.

Such an approach is not without precedent. It was the method of the First International of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The programme of the Parti Ouvrier (Workers Party) in France contained the following formulation: "Legal minimum wage, determined each year ... by a workers' statistical commission." This was written by Karl Marx and Jules Guesde in May 1880, and many other examples could be cited.

But at the heart of our difference is not history. It is working class political independence and working class self-activity. One approach relies on alien class forces to formulate our minimum wage demand; the other relies on the conscious self-appraisal of the working class. One is a form of opportunism, the other consistent class politics.

As Unison members, militant workers and the left take to the streets of Manchester, as thousands demonstrate in London and elsewhere on May Day, the fight for working class independence on all issues - wages, the monarchy, globalisation, Scottish self-determination, the state, the police - is of central importance.

All partisans of the working class should vote Socialist Alliance in the general election. All partisans of the working class should join the Socialist Alliance and fight for it to become a party based on the politics of consistent working class independence.

Marcus Larsen