Union Leaders Flout Members to Back Speculators

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Another round of massive wage cuts is almost certain to be agreed at a special General Council meeting of the TUC today. The final formula is likely to provide a pathetically small cash increase and lean on Chancellor Healey's worthless and fraudulent "tax cuts" plan announced in the Budget. This latest step follows a busy fortnight's work by Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon, other union chiefs and TUC Secretary Len Murray.

These men have been energetically defending incomes - not those of their members whom they claim to represent, but the fat dividends and profits of the capitalists and speculators who hold their wealth in sterling.

These speculators who (with a little help from the Bank of England and the government) caused the recent fall in the value of the pound, have been treated by the union bureaucrats as angry and all-powerful gods who must be immediately placated by sacrifices taken from workers' pay packets.

From the day of the Budget, the six-man TUC negotiating committee have been falling over themselves in their haste to assure the world's bankers that the "tough bargaining" with Healey was nothing but shadow boxing to deceive their members.

There would certainly, they chorused, be an agreement close to Healey's 3% demand. Murray even altered a prepared speech to the European Trade Union Confederation to give such an assurance.

This continuing erosion of the value of wages rams home the importance of the fight to defend living standards. This can not be done by reactionary wage limitation, but only through a sliding scale of wages guaranteeing point for point increases in line with the rising cost of living as assessed by trade union committees.

But even while their talks were going on, the further slide in the value of the pound consumed the whole of the 3% increase - since every such fall hits workers through rising food and other prices.

In making their squalid agreement this week the trade union leaders represent nobody but themselves. The secret "bargaining" with the government is over a compromise between Healey's original ofter, which according to the Economist would cut take home pay by 7%, and the TUC's counter demand, which would cut incomes by 6% over the next year.

The union leaders JACK JONESLE well that such a "deal" is utterly unacceptable to all workers. They are consciously betraying the interests of their own members to prop up the profits of the capitalist class.

The employers appreciate the importance of this. The Financial Times this week reports that for the first time in three years a majority of employers anticipate a rise in profit margins.

With wage cuts, speed-up and price rises the policy of Labour and TUC leaders it is easy to understand this confidence.

Indeed the CBI has not felt it necessary to go further than token participation in the wage-cut negotiations: the employers consider their positions have been adequately put by the TUC committee.

But the union leaders know too, that they cannot hope to impose these conditions on workers without the most gross and blatant violations of union democContinued on back TIM

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