“WE ARE all in it together.” After the bankers’ crash, this was the mantra deployed by the Tory-Lib Dem government to justify “austerity” — a sustained attack on ordinary people’s living standards by keeping wages down and cutting public spending.
It was a lie. As we learned through the Panama and Pandora papers revealing how the elite stash their ill-gotten gains abroad, as we saw in the annual ritual of the Sunday Times Rich List noting the ballooning fortunes of the wealthiest, we were not all in it together. There was no austerity for the ruling class.
Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey’s claim that workers shouldn’t ask for pay rises because we need to get inflation under control is similarly dishonest.
Pay rises are not causing inflation. In fact pay has been falling in real terms for a decade. And now, as Unite leader Sharon Graham warns, the Establishment’s bid to impose “pay restraint” at a time of soaring inflation “is nothing more than a call for a national pay cut.”
A pay cut that will follow the pandemic years in which millions of working-class people have made huge sacrifices to try to keep communities safe, while those making the rules were brazenly ignoring them.
A period when key workers have risked infection to keep the streets clean and the buses running. When teachers have kept children learning despite unprecedented disruption and chaotic government policy. When health workers have battled to treat successive waves of a deadly virus despite severe staff shortages.
Their reward is a pay cut when British billionaires have increased their wealth by more than a fifth since the pandemic began. A pay cut when energy companies are raking in record profits because our bills are going through the roof while their costs stay the same.
It’s an old lie that pay rises cause inflation. Inflation is caused by the decisions of business owners to raise prices.
If energy companies are going to the wall because of soaring commodity prices, all this points to is the absurdly fragmented energy market in Britain, where the firm you pay for your gas and electric has nothing to do with producing it (or even maintaining the infrastructure that delivers it to your home) but is simply buying and selling on its own account. The answers are price controls, and ultimately nationalisation of the sector.
Not only will pay “restraint” mean millions more people forced to choose between heating and eating, even greater reliance on foodbanks, a further rise in in-work poverty.
It ignores the serious recruitment and retention crises gripping public services such as health and education, and services which should be public such as the care sector.
It makes it harder to fill vacancies in the NHS, which means the huge backlog of cases built up during the pandemic will not be addressed, despite Boris Johnson’s claim that hiking National Insurance payments (another raid on our pockets) is designed to do this.
It entrenches the income insecurity of millions of people who live pay cheque to pay cheque, so — as we have seen throughout the pandemic — public health is undermined by the precarity of a workforce who cannot afford to take time off sick.
Once again, the rich want us to swallow the bitter pill of pay cuts in the name of the common good — a decade ago to pay down the deficit, today to control inflation.
The truth is their prescription is bad for living standards, bad for public services and is designed purely to protect corporate profits by lowering wages.
It calls for a co-ordinated fightback across the trade union movement as we build on initiatives like Unite’s sector-wide combines to take the fight to the employers on pay.
Working people deserve better — but won’t get it without a serious fight.
