UNEMPLOYMENT is set to rocket, over and just after Christmas, when up to 100,000 public sector workers are to get their redundancy notices so that they can be legally sacked at the start of the new financial year on April 1st.
In fact, unemployment has now risen to 2.5 million, 7.9 per cent of the workforce, with 33,000 public sector jobs figuring in the latest unemployment surge from August to October.
Even the government’s ‘independent watchdog’, the Office for Budget Responsibility, predicts around 330,000 public sector jobs will go over the next four years.
Up to 140 councils have not yet disclosed their full austerity measures, meaning the news will be broken to workers over the Christmas holidays.
The continuing rampant inflation, the impact of the 2.5 per cent VAT rise and the fact that private sector firms reliant on public sector contracts will also be sacking thousands mean that unemployment will hit 3.5 million next year.
It is in this crisis situation that the trade union movement must go to war for the jobs of its members, and take action, otherwise the working class is heading for decades of extreme hardships and new wars that will make the hungry 1930s and the warlike 1940s seem like a tea party.
There must be an immediate emergency meeting of the general council of the TUC to review the capitalist catastrophe that is threatening the future of tens of millions of people, and to decide on action to deal with it.
There is only one cure for the crisis of a capitalist system which is, in fact, well into its death agony.
The cure is to put this dying system out of its misery and replace it with socialism, and a socialist planned economy, where production to satisfy people’s needs and not the needs of anti-social profiteers, drives society forward.
The trade unions and the TUC must adopt a programme of action.
At its centre must be the calling of an indefinite general strike to bring down the Tory-LibDem coalition and bring in a workers government.
This will expropriate the banks and the major industries, under workers’ control and guarantee jobs for all, as well as free education and NHS healthcare for all.
A workers government will draw up and launch a national plan to rebuild the collapsing infrastructure and to build the millions of new homes that are required.
This will resolve the housing crisis and provide work for the unemployed, and a training in skills and trades for the masses of youth, at trade union rates of pay.
Trade union leaders who refuse to launch this programme of mass action to resolve the crisis must be forced to resign and be replaced by new leaders who are prepared to fight to put an end to the capitalist order.
Only the Workers Revolutionary Party is fighting to resolve the crisis of leadership in the working class through building up the new and revolutionary leadership that is prepared to lead the way forward, to prevent the working class being dragged over the precipice of slump and imperialist war.
The sharpening class struggle in the UK is part of the worldwide class struggle. Workers are pushing forward all over the world to insist that they are not going to pay for the world crisis of the bankers and the bosses.
On the contrary, they are fighting for socialist revolutions in the capitalist states, as part of the struggle to put an end to capitalism and imperialism and to establish worldwide socialism.
The international movement that leads this struggle is the Fourth International, the WRP being its British section. New sections are now being formed all over the world.
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