Editorial of the Socialist issue 1287
When asked in a recent poll what was the best thing Keir Starmer’s Labour government has done so far, most people answered ‘public sector pay increases’. And that shouldn’t come as a surprise after years of austerity, public services at breaking point and a devastating cost-of living crisis that isn’t over yet. Average energy bills are set to go up by around £150 a year in October – just as pensioners will be losing their winter fuel payments.
But let’s be clear, those inadequate pay rises haven’t been given because Labour is a ‘friend’ of the unions, as sections of the mainstream media have been peddling. They are the direct result of workers standing up and taking strike action, 11 times in the case of the junior doctors, who won a 22% rise over two years.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said it herself: better to pay up now than face the ‘cost’ of more strikes down the line.
Striking works
But even 22% isn’t enough to take junior doctors’ pay back to the level it was before austerity kicked in. They would need at least another 12%. Around 5% for health workers, teachers, civil servants and other workers might be slightly more than most were initially expecting but goes nowhere near making up for the last 14 years of pay cuts and freezes. And it’s certainly not enough to reverse the acute staffing crisis in the NHS, schools and other parts of the public sector.
What’s more, in most cases even these offers won’t be fully funded, so will have to come from ‘efficiency savings’ and ‘increased productivity’ – New Labour-speak for cuts, increased workload, deteriorating workplace conditions and public services ending up even worse than they are now.
For many local government workers, who have lost 20% of their pay over the last decade, their pay offer, made to them under the previous Tory government, is well below the 5% made to other workers.
As things stand, Reeves is planning a ‘blood and tears’ budget on 30 October. No extra money for local councils facing ‘bankruptcy’ – sacking more workers and decimating more libraries, children’s centres and other services. Nothing to resolve the crisis in the universities. Forcing more children into poverty by refusing to scrap the two-child benefit cap. The horror list goes on.
But the message that union leaders should be taking from the first few weeks of this Labour government is that when working-class people organise and fight back through strike action they can win. If given a determined lead, workers in the public sector will be confident that they can fight to win increases that go much further towards restoring what they lost under austerity, while defending public services for everyone.
Even capitalist economists have been arguing for some time that Reeves’s tough ‘fiscal rules’ are self-imposed and that there is room for ‘flexibility’. According to press leaks, she is already preparing to bend the rules slightly to release an extra £20 billion, in addition to possible increases in capital gains and/or inheritance tax.
This will be just a drop in the ocean given the scope of the crises. But the fact that she is even considering these measures so soon after the election is yet another sign that this government can be pushed much further under pressure.
Bosses vs workers
The key question is who can push the hardest – the bosses and the super-rich looking to maximise their wealth and profits, or the working class.
The struggle over workers’ rights poses this starkly, with the bosses pressing Labour to water down their electoral promises even more than they already have. The lobby of the Trades Union Congress in Brighton, organised by the National Shop Stewards Network on 8 September, will be an important event in the fight to make sure the weight of the workers’ movement prevails.
Where pay ballots for strike action are being organised – in local government for example – a resolute campaign needs to be waged to convince workers, who know that the pay offer is not enough, that the unions are serious about fighting to win and that Labour can be budged.
The left in the unions need to organise to counter the idea, which some union leaders have argued, that workers should ‘bank’ these ‘better than expected wage rises’ as they are the best that can be achieved given the ‘colossal mess’ that Labour has inherited from the Tories.
The struggle for pay restoration and increased spending on public services and benefits can’t be deferred to ‘more favourable times’. It’s not ok to ‘wait and see’ what Starmer and Reeves come up with further down the line. The advantage needs to be seized now while the memory of the strike wave and the gains made are still fresh in workers’ minds.
It’s not just our starved public services but the entire capitalist system that’s broken. Better times are not on the horizon and working-class people have to fight tooth and nail to hold on to what we have and to force any concessions we can from the bosses and from Labour.
Capitalist crisis
After being bottom of the G7 countries for investment for 24 out of the last 30 years, no amount of pricking and prodding the private sector via deregulation and very limited state funding through a national wealth fund and GB Energy will force the capitalists to invest, unless they have profitable markets for their goods and services. As one top executive of a building company told the Financial Times recently: “The reason we aren’t building 1,000 or 2,000 more homes a year is because people aren’t there to buy them”.
With the world economy set to grow at levels well below the pre-2007-08 financial crash period, and intensifying global instability and rivalry between the main capitalist powers, prospects for capitalism in Britain and worldwide are bleak.
The far-right riots, erupting within just a few weeks of the election of Starmer’s Labour government, are just warning shots of this volatile new era we are in. Even before the election, as the results testify, tens of thousands of workers had already drawn the conclusion that Labour no longer represents their interests. If the unions were to take the first steps towards building a political alternative it could rapidly build into a mass force to challenge Labour, the populist and far right, and to fight for the socialist change we need.
So far, the union leaders have stubbornly resisted such an initiative. But in this changed political landscape, more and more workers will inevitably come into direct conflict with Starmer’s pro-capitalist government as it is compelled to attack them under the impact of economic crisis.
Those experiences will build pressure from below on the union leaders to break with Labour and to form or support a new workers’ party – as the unions eventually broke from the capitalist Liberal Party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in order to create the Labour Party to independently represent their class interests.
Even those union leaders who are today buying into and sowing the illusions of Labour being the workers’ friend will find it difficult to resist the impact of the stormy battles to come.
