HENRY FOWLER, assistant general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU), reports on Day 2 from the GFTU’s residential Summer School at the Workers’ Retreat, Quorn Grange Hotel
CAPITALIST economics maintains that cost increases, particularly wage rises, have to be passed onto the consumer as if it’s a law of physics.
They never ask why profit margins have to be maintained and real wages suppressed. Prices only have to go up to maintain the profits that go to capital. Inflation is like anything else in capitalism, a function of unequal power relations and the drive to accumulate, “profit-pull”, not “cost-push”.
The Economic Policy Institute in the United States showed that since mid-2020, 54 per cent of price rises were attributable to fatter profit margins, only 8 per cent to increased labour costs.
Trade unions call for windfall tax hike to fund social energy tariff to public’s energy bills
If the government really wanted to address public finances, improve living standards and begin economic recovery, it would increase its borrowing for investment, argues MICHAEL BURKE


