On the eve of Tory chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn budget tomorrow, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published figures revealing that the number of working days hit by strikes has reached over half a million in the two months of August and September.
The ONS places the cause for this explosion in workers taking strike action firmly on the fact that wages have been held down while the cost-of-living has soared.
Public sector workers have borne the brunt of this cost-of-living crisis with the annual rate of pay growth in the public sector at 2.2% at a time when inflation is officially recorded at over 12%.
When confronted with these figures, all Hunt could say was that he ‘appreciated that people’s hard-earned money isn’t going as far as it should.’
With millions of workers and their families relying on the charity of foodbanks – which are rapidly running out of supplies – to feed their children, and foodbanks now a common sight in workplaces including hospitals, Hunt’s ‘appreciation’ of the starvation being inflicted by the Tories is an expression of the arrogance of a government committed to drive workers into the gutter.
He made it clear saying: ‘Tackling inflation is my absolute priority and that guides the difficult decisions on tax and spending we will make on Thursday.’
For the Tories and the capitalist class, any increase in workers’ wages is inflationary – the so-called wage inflation spiral theory – so to hold down inflation it is necessary to suppress wage increases meaning workers have little to spend therefore bringing down inflation.
The fact that workers’ wages have been held down for over 12 years by successive Tory governments while inflation is spiralling out of control is deliberately ignored. Instead, nurses are told the country can’t afford a pay increase of 5% plus inflation and will have to accept a miserly 4%.
The imperative for a British capitalist system, that even the Bank of England has been forced to admit is the deepest period of recession which will last for years, is to hold wages down to below poverty levels while at the same time cutting back public spending, laying waste to the NHS, social care, education and all public services.
With thousands of nurses poised to take strike action before Christmas, an action that has the overwhelming support of the working class, the Tories are making meaningless gestures to show they are ‘listening’ to workers.
Tory health secretary Steve Barclay, who denounced the nurses’ pay claim as ‘neither reasonable nor affordable’ and would only make inflation worse, has invited six health unions to a ‘round table meeting to discuss workforce issues’ – but not about pay.
The Tories have their own plans for workplace issues boasting they have ‘well-rehearsed contingency plans in place.’
In place of nurses and doctors, the Tories are promising to run the NHS without them, doubtless drafting in the military to act as strike breakers.
The use of the army to break the strike by Border Patrol workers, members of the PCS civil service union, along with the Tory laws that legalise the use of agency workers as a scab force to break strikes is proof, if any were needed, that this weak Tory government is prepared to fight it out with the working class using the full force of the capitalist state.
The working class is more powerful than the Tories or the capitalist state.
Instead of round table meetings with Tory ministers, the trade union leaders must be forced to organise this strength of the working class in a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
British capitalism in its death agony is fighting a war to the finish against the working class.
The time has come to resolve this war by demanding the trade unions call a general strike going forward to a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and build a socialist planned economy.
Only the WRP and Young Socialists fight for this revolutionary policy and perspective.
Come to the News Line 53rd Anniversary Rally on November 19 and join the WRP and YS today.
