WHETHER the biggest drop in economic output on record leads to prolonged recession, record unemployment and shrinking pay packets depends on our response to it.
The Prime Minister declares that we can look forward to his announcements in coming weeks on “levelling up on infrastructure, technology, education, investment in our future.”
But it would be unwise to wait and see what Boris Johnson pulls out of his hat. Attacks on jobs and incomes are hitting working people already.
The headline figures from giant companies are shocking enough: 12,000 redundancies at British Airways, 9,000 at Rolls-Royce, 5,000 at British Gas.
The backdrop to that will be even greater numbers of jobs disappearing from smaller employers, with fewer than half of small businesses confident they will still be trading in a year.
This has the potential to be a catastrophe for ordinary people in Britain. We have just experienced a lost decade for wages because of the decisions by Conservative-led governments from 2010.
Huge losses of skilled jobs went alongside the growth in insecure, poverty-pay placements for a rapidly growing “gig economy” where workers are denied rights — to defined hours, sick pay, holiday pay and more — won over many decades of trade union struggle.
It also fundamentally weakened public services — most dramatically the NHS, which was forced to confront a global pandemic while suffering chronic shortages of staff and protective equipment.
The Tories claimed there was no alternative to austerity, but this was a lie. David Cameron and George Osborne used the opportunity presented by an economic crisis to pursue their aim of shrinking the state.
Similarly cynical calculations are at play today. British Airways’ decision to axe 12,000 jobs and try to force the bulk of its remaining staff onto worse pay and conditions is a case in point.
We can already see the vicious circle of the last 10 years playing out again on an even greater scale: job losses creating mass unemployment, forcing down wages, increasing poverty and reducing demand, leading to further job losses.
Those who claimed our bailout of the banks must be paid for by taking an axe to the public sector will make the same argument about the cost of furlough.
In the case of Osborne, who today stepped down as editor of Evgeny Lebedev’s ever meritocratic Evening Standard to be replaced by Cameron’s sister-in-law Emily Sheffield, they are already doing this.
But this doesn’t have to be our future.
There is a huge public appetite for the opposite. Those have been clapping for the NHS every Thursday do not want to see key workers return to being treated like dirt.
Millions forced onto universal credit during lockdown now have first-hand experience of the cruelty and injustice of the benefits system and can be won to a battle for proper social security that protects us all.
And Britain’s lack of preparedness for Covid-19 makes the case both for better funded public services and the revival of our manufacturing base through public investment and planning.
We have the arguments, but a government of the rich is not going to adopt them on their merits.
This agenda has to be won through a tremendous labour movement campaign to fight for jobs, pay and social security.
It must be rooted in the streets of towns and cities whose economic and social life stands to be devastated by large-scale job losses.
It has to target policy-makers at all levels from the council to No 10 and apply pressure directly to business.
It’s a huge task but the only option if we are to avoid another decade of immiseration.
As the People’s Assembly’s Laura Pidcock says, “our pressure and our activism can shape the course of history.”
