Pay - official figures and working class reality
by Brian Durrans
The UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) released its latest cost of living figures just before Christmas, when the festive spirit comes at a price few can easily afford. At first glance, the news seemed good: the annual inflation rate in October 2023 of 4.7% was less than half that of 2022, and in November 2023 it had fallen further to 4.2%. From August to October 2023, real total pay – i.e., ‘real’ in the sense of adjusted for inflation and ‘total’ meaning it includes employer-discretionary bonuses - rose 1.3% over the previous year, or 1.1% excluding bonuses. (1) The previous ONS figures reported an average annual pay hike of 8.1% for June-August 2023, said to be the highest since comparable records began in 2001 (i.e. over two decades before). (2)
On closer reading, however, the news was less cheery. The high June, July and August figure registered one-off pay settlements, including back-pay, in the NHS and civil service, rather than a broader uplift in basic wages. The favourable comparison with 2001 was also a Christmas cracker joke because those were 20 years of austerity when wages trailed the rising cost of living. In terms of purchasing power, therefore, the 8.1% pay increase left employees on average a mere 0.7-0.8% better off. Since it takes far more low earners to reduce the average than it takes high earners to increase it, for most workers this 0.7-0.8% average wage rise represents a continuing decline in their standard of living. The last two ONS reports record over 40% of surveyed respondents saying they are struggling to pay energy bills
HANDLE WITH CARE
ONS statistics are freely accessible online and offer useful information for those engaged in the struggle to maintain or improve their standard of living, and for anyone wanting an overview of the condition of the UK working class or how the economy is doing; but the reports need careful interpretation, especially their overall summaries.
Caution is needed, for example, when interpreting figures for average pay according to whether bonuses are included. Even when bonuses seem to make only a small difference, this obscures the very uneven role of non-regular pay supplements across the workforce and between different sectors, again underestimating the relatively greater burden of the cost of living for those on lower pay in lower-paying occupations or industries. More generally, the establishment prefers average measures of how people are doing that paper over the cracks in class society.
The basic lesson from all this, taken together the falling rate of profit and companies’ unsustainable largesse to shareholders, is that the best the organised working class can expect within capitalism is to run faster up a down escalator.
SUPPRESSION OF STRIKE ACTION
The ONS and other monitors of economic life report on how things were a month or so ago and try to identify trends. Capital, however, has its own agenda and plans ahead. Not all its plans are well thought-through – it can miscalculate, and when it does so, as with the Brexit referendum, there may be an opportunity for radical change. Some of its plans are of course confidential, but others are set out for all to see.
The ruling class knows that the labour movement will contest its strategy of continuing to enrich the few at the expense of the many during the coming austerity. That's why the anti-strike bill - the Minimum Service Levels Act - which was passed into law in July has been described as one of the most significant attacks on working people for a generation.
The minimum service regulations apply to certain fields of employment with a "life or death" aspect potentially affecting members of the general public. Stated examples are fire and rescue, health, education, transport, nuclear decommissioning and border security. Designated employees can now be legally required by their employers to report for work during a strike even when it has been lawfully decided by officials complying with all the rules which employers and governments have imposed to make striking as difficult as possible.
In other words, there is now legalised scabbing, even though, in recent NHS disputes, for instance, patients in a critical condition have been safeguarded by volunteers among qualified specialists, and it is hard to imagine that workers in other affected sectors would willingly expose others to death or injury if that could be avoided. The legislation is obviously meant to intimidate workers, not save lives. Employers have legal authority to sack union members if they don't work on strike days, and unions are expected to police members' attendance at work.
LIVES AT RISK?
One clue to the strategy behind this move is that although strikes in fire and rescue, health, transport, border control and education public service sectors can be quickly disruptive and costly to employers both within and well beyond those sectors themselves, these are also sectors in which workers have been able to build public support for their case. By framing striking firefighters, bus drivers, nurses or teachers as sociopaths, our legislators are trying to make them harder to love and hence their strikes harder to win. This attempted character-assassination could, however, seriously backfire.
The extent to which workers in these sectors really could put lives at risk by going on strike is highly variable. Firefighters and medical staff save lives directly as part of their job descriptions, and border control operatives are supposed to exclude terrorists at ports and airports.
On the other hand, train drivers might endanger passengers if they fall asleep in the cab but hardly if they take the day off. As for teachers, it's inconvenient for parents and carers when they go on strike; but hardly life-threatening. So, the life-and-death shorthand version of minimum service levels is a broad brush meant to coerce more than just front-line workers from defending their living standards.
STRUGGLES AHEAD
The strategy is unlikely to stop there. If it proves effective, governments and employers will be tempted to apply it to other sectors such as manufacturing or construction where profits from downward pressure on wages are more bankable than the claim to be safeguarding public safety. No doubt the terms of the exercise would be recast as avoiding damage to competitiveness or national interest rather than to life or limb. Picking on just a few sectors for now is obviously meant to reduce the scope for a collective response from the unions. It remains to be seen how far such a response can be developed. The 1971 Industrial Relations Act was weakened and eventually defeated by determined, united action, including the imprisonment of strike leaders and a successful campaign to release them. The example is worth recalling as the fight for union rights intensifies.
Although Labour, the Scottish government and the TUC have expressed strong opposition to the anti-strike law, conditions are not promising for the organised working class to ensure its defeat if (or when) verbal opposition alone proves insufficient; but it has no option but to try. Organised workers not only have an interest in getting decent pay and conditions but also in improving the social value and effectiveness of what they do. This can help broaden public support for strikes and other actions.
Two recent examples of this approach are the successful RMT/TSSA actions around ticket offices, and the FBU's call in October for a Labour government to restore flood defences to 2010 levels in its first terms of office. Floods in several parts of England in January, the worst ever experienced by many of those affected, were a reminder not just of the climate crisis or of decades of neglect by the ruling class, but of the scope for the labour movement to champion the many over the few.
(1) https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/december2023
The pound in your pocket pic by Wikitropia
By framing striking firefighters, bus drivers, nurses or teachers as sociopaths, our legislators are trying to make them harder to love and hence their strikes harder to win.
