‘WE would fight any attempts to impose a wage freeze,’ UNISON warned in the wake of Gordon Brown’s call for public-sector pay rises to be pegged at two per cent – slightly below the current figure for the rate of inflation issued by the government, but well below the real rate of inflation that workers and their families are experiencing.
A spokesman for the Public and Commercial Services union said: ‘Our members will certainly be angry if they are being told they have got to take a real terms pay cut.’
This is exactly what they are being told by the ‘Iron Chancellor’. He started off as ‘Prudence’ Brown, then turned into ‘Spendthrift’ Brown, borrowing hugely to drive on the privatisation of health and education. Now he has metamorphosed into ‘Austerity’ Brown. As his economic ‘miracle’ collapses around him he is determined that the working class will bear the full brunt of the capitalist crisis.
He has called on the public-sector pay review bodies to keep pay awards at around two per cent, arguing that this will help stop the alleged temporary rise in inflation becoming permanent. With petrol, gas and electricity prices rising by many times two per cent, what he is proposing for workers is massive wage cuts.
If he was serious about fighting inflation, Brown would make a start by ending the Iraq war. This has cost Britain over £10 billion and has driven oil and gas prices sky high! However, he is only interested in fighting the working class.
Brown also hit out on the issue of pensions.
Yesterday he declared that he would never tolerate increases in the state pension being linked to increases in average earnings, in return for increasing the retirement age to 67.
This is one of the recommendations of ex-Confederation of British Industries chairman, Lord Adair Turner, who has produced Blair’s report into Pensions.
Brown condemned the Turner report as unaffordable. He wants the retirement age raised, and the value of pensions cut by refusing to link them with average wage rises.
For good measure, Brown has also written to Lord Turner to correct one of the financial assumptions made in his calculations, saying he ‘should not assume’ the link between the pension credit and earnings ‘will continue beyond 2008’.
Brown’s Treasury is now spearheading the drive to smash all final salary pensions of workers in the public sector. This is while the current chairman of the CBI is being paid £2.3 million a year and has a ‘pension pot’ of £14 million, and while the directors of the UK’s 100 most important companies have amassed pensions worth a total of £9 billion which, on average, would pay out £167,000 a year if claimed now. This is over 26 times the national average of £129 a week (£6,344 a year) and over 30 times the average public sector pension.
Paul Kenny, GMB Acting General Secretary commented: ‘The last Government that tried to suffocate low paid public sector workers, whilst at the same time allowing unbridled greed from Directors failed and fell. I urge the Chancellor and the Government not to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.’
The trade unions must go further than this. They must tell Brown that they will fight his policies and bring the Brown-Blair government down if it proceeds with them, in order to go forward to a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies to defend the jobs, wages and pensions of every worker.
