In the last issue of Red Weekly, we looked at the catastrophic rise in the prices of basic consumer goods. The Tories" "counter-inflation" laws allow the capitalists to pass on rises in the cost of imported raw materials to the consumer, restricting only the grossest profiteering which could cause serious problems in the relations between the capitalists themselves. Capitalist profits are protected by allowing prices to In this article we propose to look at the ways in which the workers movement can deal with nsing prices. As we expisined before, the most effective answer would be a policy of workers control over prices. Instead of a Price Commission based on the capitalist state bureaucracy, workers committees would be set up across the entire economy. These would have a right of access to all company records and information, the right to interview all company staff, and to carry out inquiries into such matters as costs, production, and pricing.
These bodies would impose a total freeze on the price of basic consumer goods, enforced by workers all along the line and checked by organsations of house wives and consumens. Bankruptcies resulting from such measures would be met with a vigorous policy of nationalisations. All these steps would require a workers government basing its authority on workers' organisations, rather than on Parliament and the capitalist state.
GOVERNMENT PROPOSALS The sort of organisations needed for such a decisive policy can only come about as a result of a long period of struggle. The question is, how to launch these struggles. Today, the workers' movement is faced with a Government trying to draw the unions into the jaws of state regulation of wages by offering Wusory soncessions on the question of prices, Smashing any such deal must be the next step forwand for the movement. But, at the same time, a 'You cannot make a strike effective without doing more than is lawful". With these words working class alternative to the Tories' proposals must be worked out.
The Government's proposal is that wage agreements with empioyers showld contain a provision whereby an increase in the cost of living is compensated for by a rise in wages. However, the cost of living index must rise by several points before any compensating rise in wages is paid out.
Such a proposal allows the standard of living of worker to decline before any relief is granted. Even then, taxation will eat into the total amount of any rise. This proposal goes hand in hand with a formula, similar to that imposed during Phase II, whereby overall wage rises could not go above a fixed cling. This will prevent workers from doing anything about the decline in their living standards that has taken place since the Freeze and severely limits any future improvement of living standards, The Government is offering partial rebel of working class incomes from price in creases as a means of trapping the unions into state regulation of wages, This must be rejected. The TUC-Gover ment talks must be brought to an WORKING CLASS SOLUTION However, that does not mean that militants should throw out the whole idea of linking wages to the rise in the cost of living. It is not enough for militants to smash the talks and then simply whack in a big wage claim. This idea, put about by papers such as Socialist Worker and Worker's Fight, is dangerous.
Winning big wage rises through hard-fought struggle, only to see them rapidly caten up by the rising cost of living, is a very frustrating experience. In the short term it may give rise to a bealthy militancy and desire to fight, but in the near future workers faced with this situation are going to get fed-up and start looking for some more permanent answer to their problems than just "more militancy.' If the revolutionaries and militants do not put ment.
SLIDING SCALE OF WAGES Eiving standards from inflation. also demand that such incrcases are not spiralling prices. inflation.
RANGE OF PROBLEMS forward proposals on how to deal with this situation, then the mass of workers will be drawn towards those who do: the Labour Party bureaucrats and even the Tory GovernThe most straightforward way of protecting class in income. wages from the effects of nsing prices is through a siding scale of wages. This is a simple enouph idea: wages are increased to compensate for price rises over a particular period. Dilferent versions of this idea have been put into practice in a variety of trade union agreements made after the Second World War, such as the one still in operation for the shoe industry. Most of these schemes, however, are aguinst the interests of the working class because they are attempts to Bmit orstop regular increaser in real wages by hoiding out the carrot of protection" of present In order to serve the interest of the working ciass such a scale would have to be based on the pringple that the working class is entitled to regular increaser in its standard of Eving. Workers must therefore continue to fight for regular, big boosts in wages, But they should subject to an immediate claw-back through What must be established is not primarily a set of figures or a table relating price rises and wage increases, but a basic principie — all price increases that occur in between two negotiated wage rises must be compensated for at the expense of the employer, and this compensaLion must ensure that no worker suffers the loss of a single penny in real terms as a result of Of course, a table of figures could serve as a preliminary, rough guide to the compensation owing to workers under such an agreement. But a range of problems can occur which no simple table could adequately deal with. For example, the government price index is based of the ruling class. on the budget of an 'average" family. But this is worked out on the basis of all those who earn upto £4,000 a year, and thus includes many families who are well above the working The index therefore underestimates the effect of increases in the necessities of life on the average working class family. A worker whose income depends on social security benefits might end up worse off after a wage rise, because these benefits will he scaled down, or even cut off, as his wage cises. Part of any wage rise will be eaten up in taxation: for workers on lower incomes, who presently pay little or no tax, this could greatly reduce the benefit of any increase under a aliding scale, Some of these problems could be taken into account when working out a säding scale