The great price control'

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been going on both in public and behind locked doors.

The ideas bandied around have all been unacceptable-but one common thread running through many of them is the idea of substituting price controls for adequate wage increases.

There is more to this than the obvious manoeuvre of using talk of prices to draw in the TUC to continued talks on wage controls, The very concept of holding down prices is designed to weaken the wages struggle.

"Cost cutting"

Imposing price controls on the employers would transform their drive towards bigger profits into a pure, unadulterated onslaught on their workforce in the factories through speed-up and rationalisation.

This is what they by cost-cutting"

Also implicit in every form of price controls under capitalism is the notion of a "fair" profit to which the employer is somehow entitled, a "fair" level of exploitation of this workforce.

This has already been the case during three years of the social contract in which every sector of industry has been able to obtain massive price increases to "compensate for inflation"-while workers' wages have been consciously made to lag behind the rise in the cost of living.

Substituting price controls for free wage bargaining also has the effect of taking the defence of working class living standards out of the hands of the workers themselves-who would obtain a strictly regulated pay increase and then be forced to watch, as helpless spectators, while platoons of "special case" employers troop up to the price commission to claim thumping increases.

Workers' living standards cannot be defended through price controls.

Even if prices were to be controlled by elected workers' committees--which is certainly not proposed!the private ownership of manufacturing and retailing industry means that price restrictions are merely reflected in increased exploitation of particular sections of workers.

Sliding scale

The only policy that can defend living standards is one that directs workers to ensuring that wages keep pace with inflation.

This means a fight for the sliding scale of wages, under which every wage contract would include a cost of clause, living providing automatic increases in line with a working class cost of living index, computed by elected committees of trade unionists and housewives.

The experience of three years of wage controls has meant that substantial sections of workers have this year written the demand for a cost-of-living clause into their pay claims.

This is true, for instance, of the Ford claim, where it was included on the prompting of TGWU leader Moss Evans.

Yet these demands are PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report the union bureaucracy, including the Stalinists of the Communist Party remain implacably opposed to such a demand, because it points towards independent working class action to defend wages against inflation.

Moss Evans, falling back from the brave words which hailed the start of the Ford strike, has now become a leading advocate of price controls, and tried to forget his talk of clauses.

But now is these sections whose claims finalised to cost-ot-living the time for of workers are not yet fight most Evans strongly for the inclusion of cost of living clauses, and those who have already demanded them to insist that their leaders fight to win them.

At the same ume the * z 11- -demand must be raised for an immediate end to the treacherous back-stage talks now taking place between TUC leaders and Callaghan.

Sum.

Labour conference delegates