Take on the cash-grabbing bosses
Join the fight for socialism
Profits are rising and bosses’ pay is soaring. At the same time, energy bills reached record highs this winter, hospital waiting lists are at record lengths, and mortgage rates are surging.
Official government figures will tell you that wages are now growing quicker than prices. Believe that when you feel it in your pocket – the figures they use underestimate costs for working-class people.
CEOs of the largest FTSE100 companies have had a 16% pay rise. Their average salary is now £4 million – 118 times that of their workers.
A very small proportion of the population is doing very well indeed out of the cost-of-living crisis.
Hundreds of thousands will have received notification this month of another rent rise, many thousands more will be facing mortgage increases. Meanwhile, the big four banks have made combined profits of £29 billion for the first six months of 2023, up 77% on last year, according to a Unite the Union investigation.
2.1 million people used foodbanks in the year to March. Meanwhile, Tesco made £3 billion profits in the last two years as food prices rose 23%.
The rich just keep getting richer, at our expense. But the decades-long wealth transfusion from the working class to the super-rich bosses won’t just simply stop.
The heroic strike wave has slowed the flow – millions of pounds have been won back from the bosses and the government. Rail workers, now over a year into their dispute, continue to fight on to defend our services and their livelihoods from the profit-seekers’ attacks. And doctors too continue their determined strikes.
According to bosses’ newspaper the Financial Times, Labour refused to comment on the fat-cats’ inflation-busting pay rises. The working class needs its own party that demands real pay rises for workers, and backs up trade unions striking to win them – that’s not Labour under Keir Starmer. We need a new mass workers’ party.
A universal, lasting transfer of wealth to working-class people means ending profit-driven capitalism. It means bringing the top 150 companies and banks that dominate the economy into public ownership, under the democratic control and management of the working class, with no compensation to the fat-cat bosses. That way, production and distribution of all the things we need – energy, food, homes, transport – can be planned to meet the needs of all.
