this manoeuvre.
Far from being fair", this Report underlines once ugain the planned reduction of raal wages being organised by the Goverument. After robbing workers of money under Phoses 1 and 2 the Goveriment now proposes to sort out some of the anomalies thus created by robbing other workers under Phase 3. This makes it all the more necessary to smash Phase 3. Otherwise; the trade union movement will simply become entangled in divisive arguments about who can get the most from the Pay Board, rather than uniting in struggle against the whole principle of State regulation of wages.
APEX CE thing which will release them from this schizoid atmosphere. The management know that a workforce confident of their own power will not accept speed-up and job flexibility proposals, and the strike must therefore be But the Catch-22 for the Adwest bosses is that the workers have nothing to lose. Rather than go back on the manngement's terms, most of the workers will go elsewhere for a job.
The militants understand the importance of the / issues at stake, and will keep up. the fight. In the course of the struggle it has become clear that the motive behind the management's actions is the growing land speculation by companies with factories in the Reading area, where land prices are sky-high. A victory at Adwest will be a sharp biow at this profiteering af the expense of workers" livelihoods.
Pat Robinson One result of the economic crisis through which British capitalism is passing is the Inereasing employment of women relative to men, Since 1967 the number of men workers in the labour force has fallen by more than half a million, while the number of women employed has risen by over 200,000, The reason why capitalists are employing more women is obvious: their labour power is very much cheaper. Average weekly earnings of full-time male workers are still about twice those of women (E36.20 compared with $18.34). In 1970 the Labour Government passed the Equal Pay Act. If Implemented, it would do little to end this differential. All it does is to legisiate for equal pay in the same or broadly comparable jobs by 1975. It leaves unaffected those jobs which are done only by women. But even in similar jobs the Act is full of loopholes: capitalists hava been busy changing job specifications by inventing new grades for women or men only so as lo provint comparability. The unions can challenge chis, but only at the cost of a fullscale work study which can be used also to increase the exploitation of the workforce in general through rationalisation. Bal even the extremely limited improvement for some women workers which the Act represents is being progressively sabotaged by Tory Government manoeuvres and by the Indilference of union leaders, The Tories refused to implement the provision of the Act that wornen's rates should be 90 percent of men's by 1973-which the TUC meekly accepted. In comparable jobs women's rates remain about 84 per cent of men's, Under Phase 2 of the pay laws, women's pay can rise by more than the &l + 4 per cent formula; but only to close one third of the gap with men's rates. So any firms which had been foreed by union pressure to implement the Act more rapidly are now prevented from doing so. Or rather, any faster implementation has to be at the expense of men workers.
In any case, in industries where men workers are badly organised, capitalists are already implementing the Act at their expense by hold. ing male rates constant and raising only women's, or even, as in the case of Retail Cooperatives, by reducing men's rates. Even the 1972 engineering pay agreement, in which women's pay was raised by more than men's, followed a period in which women's rules had fallen seriously behind.
If the trends of the three years since the passing of the Act were maintained, then it would be another aine years before even this very limited notion of equal pay was achieved. In other