THE working class is now facing the fastest and biggest rise in the cost of living for four decades. At the same time, many bosses are benefiting from higher inflation and posting bumper profits. There are billions being made by the bosses in the business of drilling for oil, trading in wheat, or selling armaments.
Businesses which extract and refine fossil fuels are now making the biggest profits ever!
Saudi Arabia’s Aramco posted record profits between April to June, while BP cleared £6.9bn in that period and Shell topped that with its profits of £9bn worldwide.
Wholesale gas prices have soared on international markets and oil prices have hovered around $100 per barrel, while wheat prices have rocketed following Russia’s intervention in the Ukraine, where the US-UK decision to supply the Ukrainian fascists with billions of pounds of the most advanced military equipment has led to fears of a new World War.
Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, has seen profits rise five-fold due to its oil, gas and nuclear assets. Amongst the biggest of the North Sea producers is Harbour Energy which has grown by acquiring oil and gas operations and returned to profit this year.
Meanwhile, private-equity backed Neptune Energy, which produces around 12% of the UK’s gas, saw profits double last year, allowing for $1bn in dividends to be returned to its owners. Israeli-owned Ithaca and Norway’s Equinor are other big producers.
In the face of this monstrous attack on the working class – with the bosses’ record profits while working class families are starving and capitalism gets ready for a massive nosedive – the Trades Union Congress has brought forward a programme for a £15 an hour minimum wage.
The TUC is also calling for the minimum wage to be uprated by at least inflation this October – as opposed to April next year when the uprating is due.
The TUC plan is to work to deliver a return to normal pre-crisis wage growth! This is at a time when the capitalist system is in its greatest crisis ever and bringing with it a huge slump and a drive to war. Workers are, in fact, living through the longest and harshest wage squeeze in 200 years. While the capitalist world is gripped by the greatest economic and political crisis in its history, the TUC is calling out that ‘The government must deliver a return to normal wage growth so workers get proper pay rises for the first time in over a decade.’ It is calling for ‘order’ in the capitalist mad-house!
It says: ‘We need to see sustained pay growth, year-on-year, so that median wages reach £20 an hour as soon as possible. This will underpin our £15 minimum wage.’
Further: ‘Workers in unions will see bigger pay rises. And in sectors with good collective bargaining coverage, a £15 floor will be implemented earlier. Fair Pay Agreements should be rolled out, and anti-trade union legislation should be repealed, so workers can win higher pay ahead of the minimum wage. Unions are already fighting for £15 in workplaces up and down the country and it’s time employers paid up.’
As capitalism plunges into the greatest crisis in its history, the TUC is ‘ordering’ a return to normality so that there can be a planned wage growth in the capitalist ‘mad house’.
Meanwhile the capitalist world explodes, as the UK and US bosses declare war on their own workers and get ready for a war with Russia. In these revolutionary times the trade unions must use their power to insist on ‘a sliding sale of wages’ so that wages automatically rise with inflation based on a working class cost-of-living index.
The unions must also campaign for a ‘sliding scale of hours’. There must be no sackings and hours must be cut with no loss of pay! These policies set the scene for a showdown with the bosses and government.
The TUC Congress is to meet on Monday 12th September. There, the TUC must take action to defend the jobs, wages and basic rights of the working class.
It must call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bring in a socialist planned economy based on satisfying the requirements of the working class, not enlarging the fortunes of the capitalists.
A workers government will be based on Councils of Action in every city and town with workers having the right to recall if their delegates do not carry out their pledges.
Many millions of workers can now see that the capitalist order is bankrupted. Only the working class can carry society forward to socialism to complete the replacement of bankrupt capitalism with the World Socialist Republic.
The TUC must call a general strike on Monday September 12th at the TUC Congress. The working class has the power and now it must use it to dump capitalism into the dustbin of history! There is not a moment to lose!
