HEADLINES saying wage growth has “caught up” with inflation reflect a real achievement for the trade union movement.
At the same time they risk being misleading — and being used by champions of a low-paid workforce like Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey to peddle their lie that wages rather than runaway corporate profits are driving inflation.
Office for National Statistics findings that wages excluding bonuses rose 7.8 per cent in May to July compared with a year earlier still fall way short of retail price index (RPI) inflation in that period, which was running at over 11 per cent.
RPI is more accurate than consumer price index (CPI) inflation, since it includes housing costs, a huge part of most household budgets. But because it is higher the government doesn’t like it — and intends to scrap its use by 2030, a move likely to hurt pensioners above all.
But an end to wages trailing even CPI inflation is a real advance. It is tied directly to the enormous efforts of unions to raise pay through the highest level of industrial action in decades.
That effort will need to be built on. Even if real-terms pay cuts can be halted, that doesn’t equate to pay restoration. For typical workers wages have fallen by nearly a fifth in real terms since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.
Pay restoration is key to the ongoing British Medical Association disputes, with doctors pointing out that the government refuses even to discuss how the real-terms losses of the last decade can be reversed.
How to turn this year’s pay wins into a platform for pay restoration over the next few years is one of the key strategic questions facing unions, as both NEU leader Daniel Kebede and PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka have told the Morning Star this week.
In her TUC address Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner sought to reassure unions that a Labour government will help create the conditions for that battle.
She affirmed the party’s commitment to passing its New Deal for Workers legislation within 100 days, and alongside bans on fire and rehire, better sick pay rights and “basic” employment rights from day one, she stressed parts of the deal that would help unions to organise.
A statutory right to access workplaces and secure online balloting are long overdue. Welcome too is the commitment to repeal both the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act and the 2016 Trade Union Act that imposed the current high ballot thresholds on unions.
But Rayner’s exhortation to unions to “come together” with Labour rather than criticising it should not be heeded.
For one thing, it is only under pressure from unions that Labour is likely to deliver any of this.
For another the Labour offer is utterly inadequate given the scale of the crisis across the British economy.
As Unite’s Sharon Graham charges, its “nineties tribute act” is completely unsuited to tackling the problems of the 2020s. Given a stagnant economy, it will not be able to fund investment in public services without taxing corporate profits and the rich.
Rayner talks of working with “trade unions and business” on economic reform as if their interests are aligned. But this “golden era for the super-rich” is tied to the immiseration of working people.
Control of essential resources like water and energy by often foreign-based speculators seeking maximum short-term payouts places the interests of owners and users at loggerheads. There is no way to address problems in either sector while they are privately owned.
Labour policy needs to be changed. And the only way that will happen is through mobilising people behind the policies needed to transform this country, policies agreed at the TUC but still ignored at Westminster.
