CHANCELLOR Kwasi Kwarteng has unveiled the plans by the Tory government to drive part-time workers back into full employment by cutting their benefits.
Under the new rules Kwarteng intends to introduce next January, anyone working less than 15 hours a week will have the benefits they are entitled to under Universal Credit cut.
Work longer hours or lose benefits is the message Kwarteng delivered in today’s mini-budget.
120,000 part-time workers are estimated to be at risk from Kwarteng’s push to drive them back to low paid jobs, a move he described as a ‘win-win’ policy.
The only winners of course are the bosses who will benefit from being able to fill any short-term vacancies they have without paying anything more than poverty level wages.
The other winner would be the Tory government reducing the amount spent on benefits, money that will help towards the billions being borrowed to bail-out the energy companies.
The losers will be the working class. This war on part-time workers is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the Truss government is concerned. It signals they are shaping up for an all-out war against the entire working class and the trade unions.
Truss made this clear on Wednesday when she arrogantly instructed the thousands of workers striking over pay and conditions to ‘get back to work’ and repeated her pledge to introduce new laws to make strikes virtually illegal within weeks.
Already the Tories have brought in laws allowing companies to use agency workers as scabs to break strikes and the next round of attacks will be aimed at outlawing strikes altogether.
The response of the TUC and trade unions leaders has been to seek a judicial review of this law arguing that it is unlawful on the grounds that the Tories ‘failed to consult unions’ before introducing it.
While the TUC is appealing to the courts to protect the ability of workers to strike, the bosses have made their move, confident of the Tories’ support in smashing the unions.
Yesterday, the Communication Workers Union (CWU), whose postal members are taking national strike action over pay and working conditions, announced that even while negotiations were taking place to resolve the strike, Royal Mail Group bosses announced they would be tearing up national agreements with the union and refusing to negotiate with them, instead merely ‘consulting’.
This is just the start; as British capitalism dives even deeper into the abyss of economic recession, the imperative for the ruling class is to smash any resistance from workers to having the crisis dumped on their backs.
The depth of the crisis was underlined yesterday when the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed that Britain’s soaring debt will be unsustainable following Kwarteng’s tax cuts to corporations, a multi-billion pound increase in military spending for the war against Russia and the £150 billion to recompense the energy companies for the cap on energy bills.
The massive debt burden has driven the Tories into a financial corner where the only way out is to fight to keep wages below inflation, cut benefits, cut spending on the NHS and social services and turn workers into little more than slaves to the bosses. This makes smashing the unions and making strikes illegal an absolute imperative for the Tories.
The position of the TUC to go cap-in-hand to the courts over the failure to consult is a treacherous surrender to the Tories.
Similarly, all those powerful unions that restrict the anger of their members to individual strikes, even mass national actions, are deliberately betraying workers by splitting the trade unions into individual unions each fighting separate sectional interests instead of confronting the real enemy, a bankrupt capitalist system that can only stagger on by driving the working class back to the 19th century.
In place of individual strikes, the issue today is for the working class, youth and the middle classes to be united in a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers’ government and socialism.
Only a general strike can exercise the full strength of the most powerful class in capitalist society and consign capitalism to the dustbin of history where it belongs. Lobby the TUC Congress on October 18th to make them call a general strike at once!
