Real pay rise now – linked to rising cost of living
£15-an-hour minimum wage for all
Mihaela Ivanova, Tower Hamlets Socialist Party
As another year of crippling austerity begins, by the morning of Thursday 4 January, a FTSE 100 chief executive will have been paid more on an hourly basis than an average fulltime UK worker’s annual salary of £34,963.
This disparity in wages is a glaring symptom of a system responsible for decades of increasing income inequality. Protected by the Tories, big business CEOs pocket absurd pay rises and bonuses at the expense of working people who have suffered through the longest wage squeeze in modern history. A City boss’s average pay is a staggering 157 times higher than that of the average worker!
Many hope that things under a Labour government led by Keir Starmer would be different. But there is little chance that the ‘iron-clad’ fiscal discipline promised by Starmer will bring the desperately needed investment to the NHS, and other public services, and fund a pay rise for public sector workers.
Expect the continuation of what Tory rule has been – a government acting in the interests of profit.
Workers and young people have taken incredible steps to fight back against the rotten system that protects the interests of big business and profits over working-class interests. The resistance in 2023 is not lost as we walk into 2024 with more strikes, including junior doctors who have just concluded the longest strike in NHS history, and continued anti-war protests.
We need to fight for wages that rise at least with the cost of living and a minimum wage of at least £15 an hour, with no exemptions. We need a new mass workers’ party to back up our fight for pay rises and to fight for socialist change.
