Under the Wilson government- UNEMPLOYMENT UP REAL WAGES DOWN

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slumping.

Even the Confederation of British Industry estimates that real wages have fallen by 7.3 per cent over the last nine months. As the E6 limit begins to bite, conditions will get worse. The five million poor who already live below the poverty line will increase. This is the price the working class is paying for the pro-capitalist policies of the Wilson Government and the betrayals of the TUC.

OPPOSITION

When rank and file workers do fight back they face the stubborn opposition of the union bureaucracy. For seven weeks, workers at Swan Hunters ship yards in Newcastle have been on strike for £8 now and £2 in November. Ever since the introduction of the £6 limit their full-time officials have demanded they go back to work. Whenever workers fight to defend their jobs, they face the assaults of the police on their picket lines and the repression of the Courts.

At Cammell Lairds shipyard at Birkenhead, eleven pickets were arrested last week as construction workers in occupation or on strike for the last six months attempted to stop coaches carrying scab labour enter the yards. Meanwhile, in Newcastle ten pickets arrested at the Eldon Square site in January are now going for trial, charged under the notorious 1936 Public Order Act.

Barely 18 months after the miners' strike swept aside the Tory Government's incomes policy and ousted Heath from office, the working class faces another anti-working class government trying to put into practice an incomes policy. This time it is aided and abetWage-cuts and dole queues. That is what the right-wing leaders of the Labour Government and the Trades Union Congress offer. One and a quarter million people are unemployed - the highest figure for 30 years. By Christmas it will be at least 1½ million. At the same time the real value of wages and social security benefits is JAMES DRAKE ted by the TUC.

The fight back must be started now. Beginning with the coming TUC annual conference, the millions of workers whose votes will be cast against the f6 limit have to be turned into a fighting force to defeat Wilson's capitalist policies. There must also be a fight to remove the right-wing leadership of the Labour Party and the TUC. At every level from strikes and demonstrations, to votes in the Labour Party and the trade unions, united action must be forged amongst all those who oppose the Healey measures.

In the place of these capitalist measures, the labour movement must fight for socialist This means a policy of work-sharing with no loss of pay, nationalisation under workers control of all firms creating redundancy, and a programme of public works to fight unemployment. A sliding scale of wages and benefits and social expenditure is the only way to defend the real value of working class incomes against inflation.

TWIN SCOURGE By uniting in struggle to fight for these demands the working class can beat the twin scourge of unemployment and inflation. It can also throw back the offensive of the Labour traitors. At the same time it can open up the road to socialism. This is the only way to defeat the capitalist crisis. Police drag pickets away at Cammell Lairds shipyard last week - a scene that is

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_ red weekly 28 august 1975

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TUC CONFERENCE PREVIEW QUESTIONS pages 6 & 7