THE revelation from the accountancy firm KPMG that their research has shown that one in six people, over 5 million, in work earn less than the ‘living wage’ will certainly come as no shock to most workers.
For years, ever since the onset of the banking collapse in 2008, the drive by the capitalist class has been to force down wages to historically low levels.
The Living Wage is calculated to be the minimum amount of pay needed to sustain a minimum standard of living for workers.
This purely voluntary rate set by the Living Wage Foundation, has been increased by 20p an hour to £7.85 while for London the rate will rise from £8.80 to £9.15.
The National Minimum Wage is currently £6.50 an hour.
Whether workers get this Living Wage rate, of course, is entirely at the whim of their employer and, as the KPMG study shows, not many have signed up to it, leaving over five million people struggling with wage levels that will not sustain even the bare minimum standard of living.
At its annual conference, the TUC unanimously passed a resolution from the Bakers Union demanding a legal national minimum wage of £10 an hour.
This official policy of the TUC did not warrant a mention when the TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, responded to the findings of the study. She said: ‘People deserve a fair day’s pay for an honest day’s work. But low pay is blighting the lives of millions of families. And it’s adding to the deficit because it means more spent on tax credits and less collected in tax.
‘We have the wrong kind of recovery with the wrong kind of jobs – we need to create far more living wage jobs, with decent hours and permanent contracts.’
She added: ‘The fact is there are employers out there who can afford to pay living wages, but aren’t. It is now time for all responsible employers to commit to adopting this standard, which enables workers to earn just enough to be able to live a decent life.’
She ignored the policy of the TUC of fighting for a £10 minimum and replaced it with a grovelling appeal for the employers to give a tiny increase that would just about keep workers from starving.
All the TUC are concerned about is keeping this bankrupt capitalist system going, at the expense of workers’ pay.
They fully accept that workers can only get what capitalism can afford and restrict themselves to pleading for the absolute minimum.
Behind their grovelling is the very real fear that the working class are on the move and not prepared to sit back and accept a future of nothing but poverty.
O’Grady has made it quite clear that as far as the TUC is concerned there will be no fight for a £10 minimum because such a fight would, as the leader of the Bakers Union correctly states, involve general strike action to achieve it.
In its crisis, British capitalism is determined that the only way to maintain its profits is for the wages and conditions of workers to be driven into the ground – if that means workers have to starve, then so be it.
As for O’Grady talking about a fair day’s pay for an honest day’s work, this is a rehash of the old slogan of ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’.
Marx pointed out over 100 years ago that ‘fairness’ under capitalism is all one sided – on the side of the capitalist class.
The employers have never conceded any wage increase voluntarily, every pay rise the history of the working class has had to be fought for by the unions.
Today, when capitalism is in such a crisis that it is unable to provide even the most basic requirements for living, the demand for pay increases has become a revolutionary demand.
This means building a new revolutionary leadership in the trade unions prepared to call a general strike to bring down the government and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
Only under socialism will low pay be abolished for good.
