Jack Jones's version of incomes policy - a flat rate increase of £6 for all workers - is a particwaty divisive and vicious scheme The claim that it would defend the low-paid if the higher paid made sacrifices is a fraud. With inflation running at an annual rate of about 25 per cent a vear. a £6 increase would only maintain the living standards of a worker grossing £28 a week, already £2 below the TUC minimum wage, and £10 below une minimum wage Jack Jones himself favours.
A worker on £30 a week gross would require an increase in take home pay to £33.95 to compensate for 25 per cent inflation; a £6 pound flate rate increase would give a take home pay of £30.73 - a 9½ per cent wage cut. However, as the average wage for manprices and reduced the real value of wages and social benefits - an even more savage attack on wages was launched. The Government's policy of 'no increase in wages unless there is more production' was replaced with no increase in wages even if there is an increase in prices. The TUC's abject capitulation to Government threats bore very hard on many sections of the working population. ers, for example, had had no pay rise since October 1947 while the cost of living had risen 11 per cent.
It was not till May 1950, when in a single week six union conferences rejected the wage freeze policy, that resistance crystallised. Bit before the TUC annual conference met the Labour Government had used wartime Order 1305 to break strikes in the docks, at Smith field meat market, and in the gas industry.
It was still another year before Aneurin Bevan, followed by Harold Wilson (!) and John Freeman, resigned from the cabinet. Like Benn and Foot will do today, they sat ual workers is around £45 a week and for all workers around £55 a week, Jones's plan means a significant drop in living standards s for most sections of the working class.
And Wilson has already made it clear that the f6 figure is not an ennuement but a maxeman He told the House of Commons on 11 July: 'It is not a requirement on employers who simply cannot afford to pay it. ply cannot afford it will inevitably be the low wage employers, not least mose un me puduc sector.
What makes the Jones plan even more pernicious - even if it is rejected by some unions as part of a voluntary package - - IS 1121 it does the bosses' job for them:
policies of the Government The minit sets the low paid against the rel atively better paid by suggesting that the cause of the present mess is not the anarchy of the capitalist system but the small gains achieved by years of struggle by the better organised sections of the working class.
As these latter are likely to be the first to challenge wage-cuts, Jones's plan serves the function of isolating them from the rest of the working class, allowing the employers, the Government and the press to mount a tremendous witch-hunt against them.
This will make it more difficult to moduse support for suca surug gles - struggles like those of the miners, which smashed two sets of Tory pay laws to the benefit of every worker.
- the question of charges within the NHS after the working class had been thoroughly confused and demoralised by their failure to lead any sort of fight against the right wing Not surprisingly, Labour staggered to electoral defeat in October 1951 after having won a larger parliamentary majority in 1945 than any previous single party government.
'SEVERE RESTRAINI The Labour Government of 1964-70 introduced a battery of incomes policy legislation. Up to July 1966 the policy was 'voluntary and had little effect on the wage rates of a working class which had successfully defeated Tory attempts in the early Sixties at wage restraint. But the period from July 1966 to 1967 was one of savage restraint. The total wage bill rose by only two per cent between the second quarter of 1966 and the second quarter of italist politicians and press are again telling us is essential if unemployment is not to soar? Between the time Wilson's freeze came in and the winter of 1967, unemployment rose from just under 300,000 to nearly 600,000 and it has never been below that since.
The effects of incomes policy under this Government, statutory or not, will be no difUnemployment-is certain to go well over the million mark, and the Labour Government's fake concern for the low paid has already been exposed by the Social Contract. From the day it took office after the miners smashed the Tories, it resolutely campaigned against the extension past November 1974 of threshold agreements - which had done something, however inadequate, to defend the living standards of the low paid. A Government acting in the interests of the working class would have transformed the threshold system into a genuine sliding scale of wages, giving automatic 100 per cent protection against inflation to all workers incomes.
LESSONS
But then, as the history of Labour Governments since the war has shown, incomes policies have never had anything to do with protecting workers' incomes.
red weekly 17 july 1975 miners/economy_