Tories Turn Screw on Public Sector

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Plans to impose a 10% wage limit on workers in the public sector are just the latest indicators of an intensifying Tory attack on public services and nationalised industries.

The Tories are plainly determined to use the public sector as the centrepiece of a drive by the ruling class to drive down real wages in the midst of a rising tide of inflation, Last winter saw steelworkers and BL carworkers singled out for attack: public service Heseltine manual workers, too, have been forced to settle for far less than the rate of inflation.

Even now nurses' unions are debating whether to take action to improve their insulting 14% pay offer. But already Tory ministers are proposing to inflict a further cut in their living standards.

Meanwhile, Tory Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine has sent out a blunt order to local authorities to cut back their spending by £700 million -and stressing the need for this to be reflected in cuts in manpower.

Recognising that : their proposed increased powers to direct council spending will not take effect until next year, the government is using the threat of a wholesale cancellation or moratorium on building, programmes in order to bludgeon councils into cutting other spending and axing their workforce.

Backers It seems likely that Thatcher has only pulled back from such steps because they would harm her backers in the big building monopolies.

So far Tory cuts have ensured a historic slump in the construction industry, with new starts in both public and private sector housing plunging ever downward.

But for all their qualms the employers continue to support the Thatcher government, seeing it as offering a determined lead in their struggle to drive up the rate of exploitation of workers throughout industry.

Key to this are the vicious speed-up and productivity proposals being rammed through in the Post Office, in British Rail, in British Leyland, British Shipbuilders, the British Steel Corporation and now proposed in the National Coal Board.

Even Civil Servants now face the prospect of their annual pay awards being replaced by a "payment by results" system dreamed up by Marks and Spencer whizz-kid •Sir Derek Rayner.

For workers employed in the public sector, and for the countless millions that depend on public services, the answer to these attacks must be to prepare for a confrontation with the Thatcher government.

This means strike action and occupations to defend jobs, services and working conditions, fighting for supporting strike action from other workers in the private and public sectors.

It means extending ad-hoc and single issue cuts struggles and pay battles into the formation of councils of action, drawing together delegates from trade unions, working class political parties and other labour movement bodies, and fighting to prepare for general strike action to bring down the Thatcher government and wage the struggle for the removal of Labour's right wing leadership.

Only a workers' government committed to the construction of a planned socialist economy through the nationalisation without compensation of banks and basic industry, can today offer protection to workers in private industry or the public sector or hope of employment to the growing army of workers on the dole.