THE CONFERENCE called by the Clay Cross Labour Party for London on 8 June will be the first big meeting of rank-and-file socialist and trude union militants since the general election.
Everyone knows that the fall of the Tories and the success of the miners' strike were big victories for the working class, They created a perfect opportunity to put the boot into the bosses and take decisive steps towards socialism. But, as so often in the past, a Labour Government is wasting the fruits of this hard-won victory DISGRACEFUL POLICIES it has adopted on Clay Cross, the Government is allowing warships to he sent to the bloody Chilean dictatorship, and a Labour minister, Michael Foot, has becore the new watchdog of the Tories Pliase 3 incomes policy. The ALEW, laced with a vicious attack toom the NIRC, was advised by this same minister to give in ind attend the court, and the six tade unionists
has become an urgent one for British trade unionists. ective way to protect workers' incomes from inflation. CALE OF WAGES! (especially Belgium) is the complete indexing of the scales of taxation salary is increased to make an adjustment to the rising cost of living, the tax-scale is increased by the same percentage.
For example, if the ceiling on wiges and salaries for which a tax of 15% is paid is 25,000 Francs, it would automatically rise to 27,000 Francs, if the cost of living increased DIFFERENTIALS Il is sometimes objected that through the use of such a common upon salaries. Each time the nominal effects of inflation (and not just workers at work) 1s the extension of the principle of the sliding scale for all those who receive supplementary benefits and other social allowances. Superannuations or pensions, sick and unemployment pay, family and child allowances eto must also be indexed and automatically adjusted to the increase in the cost of living in the same way as wages and salaries should be, This demand is all the more necessary when small wage-earners on lixed incomes are the most hard bit by the rise in prices of essential goods, and are thrown into poverty by inflation.
The Index As soon as workers have gained a sliding scale for wages, the centre of gravity of the struggle to prevent the working-class trom paying the 2. The dishonest selection of real prices. In capitalist society the same articles are often sold at widely divergent prices; this is especiaily so for foodstuffs. To continually select the prices of such goods in places where working class house wives do not on the whole do their shopping (eg. in markets) produces a price-index which has very little to do with the actual expenditure of working class houscholds 3. The manipulation of the overall outcome of the index through holding back the price of certain articles. This is known in Belgium as "the politics of the index' and is only profitable for bosses and the bourgeois State if there are thresbolds beneath which no wage adjustments can take place, If this threshold is fixed at 2%, for example, a government can, by arbitrarily blocking the price of certain widely consumed