'comparability' and the Fraud of "fair Pay"

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Public sector bureaucrats-ducking fight OFFICIAL NO WW OFFICIAL NUPE workers fighting for a £60 minimum wage many trade unionists the question of wages is looming ever larger.

With inflation. already running at 16% and spiralling rapidly upwards, working class families face the immediate threat of massively reduced living standards with the much vaunted Tory tax cuts' swallowed by price rises before they arrive.

In this situation it is important to draw up a balance sheet of last year's pay struggles in order to prepare the, way for action over pay in the coming months.

Buried

crucial achievement last winter's wages offensive was the smashing of Callaghan's reactionary 5% limit.

The determined strikes at Ford's, amongst transport drivers, and later in the public sector, buried the last remains of the social contract and the continued actions in the Hospitals and Civil Service ensured that its heir apparent, the 'Concordat" , was stillborn, This was the response of the organised labour movement to 3 years of wage freezing.

This considerable victory was in no way attributable, however, to any change in the thinking of the leadership.

The largest single strike wave since 1926, which saw whole areas like the North West almost at a standstill, came in the teeth of constant opposition from both union leaders and officials to any attempt to make the actions effective.

This was particularly clear in the case of the transport drivers' picketing, where the TGWU attempted to impose a code of conduct, and in the public sector claims where the leadership steadfastly refused to call all-out, united action.

Throughout the winter, in fact, the Trade Union bureaucracy, notably 'lefts' like Fisher, set out to defuse the mounting anger amongst rank and file members by dabbling in the realms of economic mythology .

Central to this was the emergence of the miserable bosses' Trojan Horse of minimum wage, "comparabili, and its fellow exile from the knacker's yard, "fair pay"

Thus the National Union of Teachers' wages campaign, for example, was fought around the meaningless slogan, 'Fair Pay for Teachers'.

Although the idea of 'comparability' had been used before for flag waving in the public sector, it only becamę a smokescreen . for the abandonment of tangible claims when Callaghan's hopelessly compromised rightwing Labour government plucked the Comparability Commission out of their collective political conjuror's hat.

Final swipe

It was their final swipe labour movement.

Under this new innovation, the justice' of individual claims would be weighed by the Commission's "independent' experts-who were appointed by the government!

The public sector union leaders immediately rushed to form a queue at the door.

Here was a means "settling" wage disputes outside of the realms of confrontation with the government, and completely away from the prying eyes of the membership.

Nor would the strength and combativity of that membership, which represents the key threat to their positions as leaders, be the single, crucial determining factor in the fight for the claims.

Faced with a tide of militancy over wages which threatened to sweep them aside, the public sector union leaders gratefully took wages out of the class struggle and into "the academic realms of a debate on 'natural justice' The Clegg Commission was from its beginning nothing more than a new means of selling out each dispute by leaving the final say with paid servants of an anti-working-class government.

That is why the Tories were only too pleased to allow the teachers to follow the council workers into this spiders's lair.

The immediate, rapid hiking up of inflation since Thatcher's election, coming as it did in the company of massive tax and currency transfer concessions for the rich, and coupled with slashing attacks on all public spending have exposed the reality of comparability.

Taken literally it is the right to end up in the same boat as everyone else, or putting it another way, to be comparably WORSE OFF!

Council workers .and teachers cannot claim comparability with the Royal Family even though they are all paid from the public purse, because comparability is no more than the comparison of one exploited section of the labour movement with another.

The 3% awarded to the council manual workers by Clegg speaks for itself-since the 'comparison involved was with the most downtrodden section of workers in the private sector.

There is, however, more to comparability than that. Not only does the concept of. comparability take wages out of the harsh world of economic realities like inflation and cuts, but it also subtly contributes to the sectionalisation of the wages Increasingly, the emphasis is upon differentials, upon higher rewards for special skills (as determined by Prof. Clegg) and upon the Tory philosophy of rewarding "talent" and "initiative' Rifts The divisive nature of this emphasis on differentials is well illustrated in the opposition to the Confed one-day strikes by Roy Fraser, leader of the skilled toolroom workers in British Leyland.

The Tories hope to widen and build on every division that exists now, and create new rifts wherever possible in order to smash the capacity for united action of the working/ class.

Thus the council workers awards ranged from 3% to 23%. And this was, in the words of the Tory economic textbook, "fair pay'.

If you only got 3%, then that was all you 'deserved'. Not only, therefore, do we have in comparability a scheme to Clegg depress wages across the board by referring them to an arbitrary league table of 'who deserves what' while inflation is let rip, but we also have a further lever for playing off one section against another.

In practice, which is what counts, there is no such thing as 'Fair pay'. There is only what you have got, what you want, and what you are prepared to fight for.

A worker is not paid according to the value of what he produceds, for his actual labour, but rather the minimum needed to ensure he turns up each week for production-his labour power.

Surplus value

The difference between what he is paid and the actual wealth he produces is appropriated by his employer as surplus value, part of which reaches the company balance sheets as profits.

Wages received are, therefore, no more than the minimum an employer can get away with paying in order to convince the workforce to come back and do it all again next week.

The amount of wages is determined not by what is 'fair' but by how much the working race ran avtrant from CALIALL. employers by using its industrial strength.

This becomes crystal clear when we consider the miners' strike of 1974.

The miners restored themselves to the top of the so-called 'wages league' not through the generosity of the National Coal Board, nor by any honest recognition of the 'justice of their claim in high places, but rather as the result of prolonged, massive industrial action which defied Heath's government and eventually brought it down.

-It was their willingness to fight for the claim using all-out strike action which extracted more money.

Similarly, the high wages achieved in the car industry in the 1960s owed nothing to metaphysical concepts like 'justice', but a great deal to the shop floor organisation and Thus, in preparing for the coming pay struggles, it is important that the lessons of last winter are learned and taken into the formulation of each claim.

Fundamental to this must be the rejection of all talk both of "comparability" and of pay awards which are 'self financing' -whether through cuts in manning or services, or through productvity schemes which extract more work as a price for workers hoping to compensate for inflation.

If any "comparisons" are to be made, they should be between what was earned last year, and what is needed this year to make up for current inflation and to keep pace with rising prices.

Nor should wage claims be based on spurious arguments about the 'viability' of the employer.

While Plessey workers over the past two years have faced continous redundancies, the police have been called in to investigate massive financial irregularities in the company. That is 'viability' in a nutshell.

The task of trade unions is to look after its members, not the employers.

What is vital now is not the maintenance of differentials between boilermakers and fitting out trades in the shipyards, or between semi-skilled and skilled in engineering, but the maintenance of ALL wage levels in the face of the attacks upon living standards.

Basic rates

Alongside this the lowest paid layers must organise to fight for the improvement of basic rates.

To do this, the central demand must now be for basic rate increases linkedto a sliding scale of wages tied to the real rate of inflation.

Inherent in such a claim is the need for a labour movement index of prices compiled on a local tevel by elected committees of trade unionists and housewives, which takes account of the real rise in the cost of living facing workers and their families.

Only around such demands can the Tory offensive be

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NDUSTRIAL Hull trade unionists have obtained copies of a confidential memo from the city's Director of Education that lays out a strategy for slashing expenditure in the current year by £2,469,000.

At risk are the equivalent of 565 full time jobs-but cuts that will in practice affect up to 1,000 part-time workers.

Exclude from meals The plan would cut shoot cleaning staff by 5% with the loss of 60 jobs. It would involve a reduction of the number of children taking school meals "either voluntarily or by a system of exclusion" , and a 3% cut in staff.

A 3% cut is also planned for school ancillary staff, and nonteaching college staff, while the Adult Education and Youth service is to be clobbered by a 10% cut, on top of a 35% cut in part-time teaching hours and 35% cut in Youth Leader sessions.

School teaching staff is to be slashed by 185 fult time posts. while the nursery building programme will be abandoned: yet all these and many others still fall short of the cuts target by some £385,000!

Similar plans

The revelation of the Education Committee document is a clear warning that similar plans for savage cuts are being drawn up by other sections of the The Hull Trades Council has recently formed a special subcommittee with the task of It is essential that this subcommittee which is well placed to coordinate action in the city gives the lead in spelling out to trade unionists throughout the area the scale to which these, and the next, even more devastating, round of Tory cuts, will demolish public services that have previously been taken for granted.

With thousands already on the dole in the Humberside area NEWS , Hull trade unionists cannot afford to stand idly by while union officials collaborate in the axing of hundreds more public sector jobs.

Public sector unions must unite in action alongside. trade unionists in the private sector to halt this attack.

The scale and scope of the Tory government's offensive against the working class has made clear that traditional forms of non-political trade union • militancy are inadequate to offer any way forward in the coming struggles.

Workers need a political programme of demands that not only correspond to the problems of the present Workers at Talbot's Ryton plant last week voted with only 10 against to continue their strike, already in its seventh week, until the company offered worthwhile talks on pay.

At the mass meeting TGWU Convenor Pat Fox described the company offer. as an insult. 'We won't go back for 52%» he said.

The management had sent personal letters to all the workforce, arguing that the 5½% was all that could be offered and that any increase would need to be based on an incentive bonus scheme.

The mass meeting was followed by a march 'on Talbot's Research and against the employers and the Tory government is combined with their bureaucratic attempts to head off militant resistance from the rank and file.

The fundamental problem contronting the working class is one of an absence of principled leader. ship capable of analysing and combatting the manoeuvres of the trade union and Labour leaders.

Social contract

With this in view the Management at Whitley.

Some three to four hundred joined the march which ended in a picket.

The Convenors were told that management was at Linwood and that no discussions could take place.

Since Wednesday's mass meeting and march there has been a regular picket at Whitley.

The pickets turned away from the gates a van bringing in wages and as a result management refused to pay out the tax rebates due to strikers this week.

• Management's reaction to the mass meeting and xtension of the picketing has been to threaten loss of jobs.

It had been intended to assemble the C6-a fourmass struggles that are already breaking out against the Thatcher government.

The conference, to be held in Birmingham on 3 November (10.30 am to 5 pm) will discuss the fight in the workers movement for the following policies:

*No talks with the Tories, prepare to force them out! Remove the Labour and trade union leaders who won't fight!

*No Tory laws on the trade unions! Prepare mass strike action!

door version of the entirely at Ryton.

Now Peugeot/Citroen have decided that half the production will be in These sort of moves should not intimidate Talbot strikers.

The claim is for 25% and that is what must be fought for.

There should be no weakening in relation to management's proposed 'incentive scheme'.

The way to fight for the 25% is to turn towards other sections of workers coming into struggle.

Played around

The Convenors at Talbot must take steps to impose the blacking of Talbot cars coming in from France.

The officials have played around with this since the beginning of the strike. Talbot workers must make a direct approach to the docks. building councils of action.

Union branches and labour movement organisations are invited to elect delegates to this conference, which will. also be open to all union members and unemployed. Credentials are £1 per delegate, 50p for unemployed.

The Conference Secretary is Godfrey Webster, 99, Barclay Road, Warley, West Midlands.

More details including

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CONSES Fishin low pa PHOTO: Laurence Sparham, IFL

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