Rising unemployment is a national emergency declared the TUC yesterday after the government revealed that 150,000 workers had lost their jobs in the last quarter of the year bringing the total of workless to 1.97 million.
TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said that he feared that ‘worse is still to come.’
He declared that the ‘Government must act as boldly on unemployment as they are on the banking sector. In these tough times, people need to know the Government is on their side.’
However the TUC did not declare any emergency action to deal with this disastrous situation for the working class. They certainly did not call for the nationalisation of industries.
Giving their game away that they are not interested in defending workers’ jobs, Barber added: ‘Benefits and redundancy pay need to be raised to cushion the financial blow to the newly unemployed.
The Government needs urgently to introduce a short time working subsidy to help companies avoid redundancies in the first place.’
This is the TUC programme to allow the employers to sack whom they please while they weep crocodile tears and allow a huge army of the unemployed to be built up to force down the wages of workers who are still employed.
The TUC believes that there is no alternative to capitalism, and that their future lies in being useful to the bosses and bankers in keeping capitalism going.
In a situation where the Brown government is part nationalising banks to rescue the bankers, the TUC refuses to demand the nationalisation of the motorcar, steel and power industries to defend the jobs and the wages of the working class.
The TUC believes that the bosses are indispensable while the workers are expendable.
The UNISON trade union also put out a statement yesterday.
UNISON chief, Dave Prentis, urged the Government to ‘throw a lifeline’ to the growing numbers of unemployed.
He said: ‘The Government has helped bail out the bankers, they must now throw out a lifeline to the growing numbers of workers facing the dole queue.’
In fact the government is not interested in throwing a lifeline to the workers. While it is bailing out the bankers, and buying controlling stakes in the banks, it is actively privatising the public sector to build up the numbers of unemployed, and has broken its pledge to keep the Royal Mail in state ownership.
It intends to privatise Royal Mail and sack as many as 60,000 workers.
Throughout the motor car industry and the steel industry union leaders are negotiating longer hours, redundancies and wage cuts, on behalf of their members and are declaring that these are the only alternatives to closure.
The army of the unemployed could not be built up without their active assistance.
They are accepting a return to the conditions of the ‘hungry 1930s’ that ended up with a Second World War.
In fact, the capitalist system is long past its burial date. Even Schools Minister Ed Balls has pointed out that it is in its greatest crisis for a hundred years. In fact, it is now destroying the productive forces all over the planet.
For the working class and the middle class to have a future capitalism must be got rid of and be replaced by socialism.
What is required to carry forward this struggle is a programme of action by the trade unions. There must be no wage cuts, or job losses and no closures, and where these are threatened by this bankers and bosses government, the plants and factories must be occupied and national strike action begun to achieve their nationalisation under workers control.
Trade union leaders who are not willing to lead this struggle must be made to quit.
The Brown government must be challenged and removed from the left, to bring in a workers government that will bring in socialism and put an end to capitalism.
