THE UK Consumer Prices Index (CPI) inflation rate rose sharply to 3.4% in March from 3% the month before, official figures show. The Retail Prices Index (RPI) inflation rate, which includes housing costs, also rose sharply to 4.4% in March from 3.7%. The RPIX inflation rate which excludes mortgage interest rates was at 4.8 per cent.
The government inflation rate target is 2 per cent!
Next month’s figures are crucial since another increase in the inflation rate will force a rise in interest rates. This will end the fantasy of some ‘export led recovery’, and push up unemployment figures to over three million while causing an increase in mortgage costs that will lose tens of thousands more people their homes.
The fact of the matter is that a trade union cost of living index, which concentrates on the rises in the price of the basic necessities which working class families must have to live, would show a much bigger increase than these three indexes taken either separately or even together.
Workers’ wages are being cut on an hourly basis by rising prices. At the same time wage rates are being held down and even cut by bosses, with governments planning permanent wage freezing in the public sector. Post-general election savage cuts, if not stopped, will see as many as 500,000 public sector workers being made redundant.
The battle for wages and jobs is on, with the leaders of the trade unions proving to be unwilling and unable to defend either.
They see their role, not as doing everything that is necessary to defend wages and jobs, but in doing everything possible to help the government and the employers survive the crisis of capitalism.
Take the crisis on the airports with major airlines in the words of BALPA, the pilots’ union, ‘staring bankruptcy in the face’.
The attitude of the Unite trade union leaders is to carry on from where they left off with the GM crisis. At GM they have accepted wage cutting, speed-ups and redundancies, and have categorically refused to demand the only policy that can defend wages and jobs – nationalisation.
Yesterday, their press statement on the aviation crisis stressed that workers must not pay for the crisis with their jobs, but they again refused to demand the nationalisation of BA and the other UK airlines.
Instead, they say that Unite’s concern is that ‘the grounded industry will need large-scale assistance as it attempts to get back to full operations in the days to come’.
It adds: ‘With the COBRA committee developing plans to repatriate UK nationals home and airlines seeking emergency aid to bridge the heavy financial losses incurred by grounded flights, Unite says concerted action to save jobs right across aviation is needed too.’
What action is this? Unite says ‘some companies, particularly those in the ground services sector who have been hit hardest by the five days of disruption, will look to employees to cut costs, including asking them to take unpaid leave, and that without government assistance jobs will be lost.’
The union states that although it is not opposed to voluntary unpaid leave: ‘Unite will not accept a situation where employees are asked to pay the price with their jobs or wages.’ The union has also written to the secretary of state for transport, Lord Adonis to ask that he takes all possible steps to alleviate the tremendous pressure on the industry, said to be costing the sector some £130 million per day’.
The truth is that government aid to business costed at £130 million a day will bring colossal job and wage cuts, since workers will be made to pay for the donation.
The Unite leaders know well the only way to defend wages and jobs is to nationalise the airline industry, as part of the struggle for socialism. Being one of the main financial and political supporters of the Brown government, the Unite leadership is opposed to this policy on principle.
None of the reformist trade union leaders are willing to fight the Brown government and battle for a socialist programme.
This is why they have to be removed and replaced by a new and revolutionary leadership of the trade unions, which will mobilise the working class to go forward to socialism.
