cluded last week.
A year ago, Harold Wilson predicted a one per cent fall in living standards over the coming year. Under the £6 limit they have already fallen by 5 per cent.
Chancellor Healey is now predicting a 1-2 per cent drop in real incomes over the next 18 months. Multiply that by five, and you get a better idea of what your standard of living won't be in another 18 months.
Healey has got all he wanted. When he originally floated the idea of 3 per cent plus tax cuts in his Budget speech, what he was really aiming at was an increase in average carnings of 6-6½ per cent when wage drift was taken into account - Treasury estimates were based on LAUS SHUT OUT On paper, the TUC pushed the first figure up by 2 per cent - but at the cost of shutting all the back doors by which workers might have tried to increase their earnings:
year's 4½ per cent will not be consolidated into basic rates. Yet it is the basic rate on which all premium. and overtime payments are based. Loss of earnings op such payments alone will total between 1 and 2 DCE CCIEL.
There is no provision for productivity deals. We don't want them anyway, but it was productivity dealing which drove a coach and horses through the pre-1970 incomes policies.
3. Skilled workers who have seen their differentials eroded have no loophole by which to increase their Carlss 4. With the introduction of the £6 limit some groups of workers, like the railway workers and car workers at Rover Solihull, were able to get "transitional agreements allowing them to gain more than the £6. In year two of the pay policy unese are rues out 5. Equal pay deals were excepted from the £6 limit, but the Treasury calculates that their effects on wage drift have been absorbed.
All in all, in the year to July 1976 the effect of the £6 limit has been to cut the rate of wage increases to between 13-15 per cent. But even in March prices were running at a year on year rate of 20 per cent.
FIDDLE This is Healey's sleight of hand. People are suffering the increase in prices before they receive any increase in wages. million workers have received the £6 - but it's still to come for many Similarly, in the period December 1976 to December 1977 Healey aims to reduce the annual rate of inflation to 5-6 per cent. But even if all workers were getting an average 6 per cent increase in earnings, this would still mean a wage cut because the effects of inflation are suffered now, not after a pay increase is granted.
But the biggest fraud in the scheme cooked up between the Government and the trade union bureaucracy is the so-called 'fight against inflation'.
Over the last two months alone, the value of the pound has fallen by ten per cent on foreign exchange markets. The slumping value of the pound has meant an immediate increase of two per cent in food prices.
But when the general rise in commodity prices is taken into account, the situation is evern worse. modity prices are one third higher than this time last year. In just over a month, even measured in dollars, they have gone up by about 7 per cent.
'For my next fraud....!
Last week coffee and tin reached aghan and Healey will agree. But more price increases still are in the pipeline, because Britain at the moment obtains key foodstuffs at over 12 per cent below Common Market price levels. This agreement will be phased out after June, although no time scale has been fixed as yet. WORSE OFF Budget and Healey's other pronouncements, the Government is committed to reducing the subsidy elements in food, nationalised industry prices, and rents. Most City forecasters reckon that the annual rate of inflation will still be around 13 per cent at the end of this per cent at the end of 1977. So Com- much for Healey's five per cent inCIcasc Furthermore, those figures are not based on the real increase in the cost of living for the ordinary person on the Clapham omnibus. but on global figures which include all sorts of luxuries with relatively stable prices that never enter into the realm of working class purchasing power.
union bureaucracy are putting over on the working class one of the biggest frauds ever committed. Every worker will be worse off collectively as a result of the social service cuts, and unemployment is likely to remain over a million and increase to two million by 1980.
are paying for the treachery of the Labour Government they elected, the collaboration of the traitorous bureaucracy of the TUC, and the miserable capitulation of the 'lefts" in the unions and Parliament.
850 -800 -750700 -And just in case you forgot the 4,000year and 8.5 3,80013,6003,400 3,200 3,000 2,800 The Government and the trade That is the price working people 900 - £ per tonne COPPER CASH WIRE BARS 4200 € per tonne TIN STANDAR GRADE LONDON CASH PRIC 1976 The explosion in commodity prices will alone add four per cent to prices This month the policy-making body of the AUEW (Engineering Section)
- E per tonne 300 - 280 LEAD CASH METAL - 240 - 140 -€ per tonne 475 ZINC EUROPEAN PRODUCERS PRICI & CASH METAL empted to organise any opposition to the Executive and Scanion The result is clear to see. Living standards have fallen, redundancies have been imposed without any major opposition, the union leadership has collaborated with employers like British Leyland to push through speed-up and rationalisation, amalgamation of the four sections of the AUEW seems as far away as ever, and the union is still lumbered with the postal ballot.
SHODDY The lack of any fight back by the Broad Left has also allowed the right wing to recapture a majority on the Executive as well as winning important local positions. In the Midlands, for example, the right made a clean sweep of every single post up for re-election in the March ballot The failure of the Communist Party even to acknowledge the rightward swing of officials like Bob Wright and Scanlon, despite their part in such shoddy deals as the Chrysler closure and the British Leyland strikes, has left the union membership wide open to the influence of the TUC, the Labour Government and the press barons
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The Government and the TUC have agreed to cut your wages. That is the meaning of the 4½ per cent plus tax cuts deal con-