Jobless Key to Wage-cut Plan

Scan page 1

TORY plans for the next wave of attacks on the working class involve using the unemployed, the sick and the elderly as battering rams to break down living standards. They plan to slash unemployment benefit in order to force a further lowering of wage levels across the board; and they plan to destroy the state-funded NHS in order to pressurise workers towards private medicine and force individual families to shoulder the burden of care for elderly relatives.

Chancellor Lawson has lost no time since the election. With a speed that has caught the breath of even some of his bone-headed monetarist cabinet colleagues he has embarked on a whirlwind series of cuts, postponed by Sir Geoffrey Howe until after the The first round of these cuts - £500 million - was announced last week. In the NHS alone they could mean 20,000 lost jobs and drastic cutbacks in services. -Further cuts - of anything up to £5 billion - can be expected as the Tories try to contain public spending while tax revenues - hit by the recession - fall below expectations.

"Lawson has made no secret of the fact that he wants a chunk of those cuts to come from the £34 billion social security budget and they'd all get jobs. There is a level of wages at which there would be no labour shortages and no unemployment." -Sherman - knighted in Thatcher's recent honours list -makes no secret of the Tory ambition to destroy the living standards established by decades of struggles by the labour movement, in order to drive up profitability for the capitalist class.

It is with this in view that the Tories are so avidly pursuing Tebbit's £25 per week "Youth Training" Scheme which will drive out employed workers and lower the wage expectations of millions of young people.

They have abolished Schedule 11" which provided for rough parity between comparable workers in each locality; and by September they will have scrapped the Fair Wages Resolution which since 1891 has provided comparability in pay between State and private sectors.

The stage is all set for the full exploitation of the unemployed to break down hard won conditions and living standards of those still in work. able workers in each locality: and by September they will have No guarantee Horrific as it may be, the Lawson plan has no guarantee of success even in its own terms. Even under ideal laboratory conditions" - under the guns of Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile - the monetarist theories advocated by the Thatcher cabinet have failed miserably.

Despite a halving of workers' living standards, the actual demolition of state-funded health care, cuts in education which leave 30% of Chilean youth without schooling, the privatisation of 500 state firms and banks and the ruthless suppression of trade union and political rights, the Chilean "miracle" proved short-lived. The economy now faced 30% unemployment, 30% inflation, an impossible $18 billion foreign debts, and an unstoppable tide of imports, with domestic industry in ruins Pinochet's experiment has failed: and it could only have been imposed by vicious military methods.

Plainly some Tory ministers fear that Lawson's draconian plans could provoke a new wave of mass resistance - and have attempted to tone down his proposals.

Our problem remains the fact that the labour movement which should be preparing and organising this resistance is saddled with leaders who would rather crawl to the Tories than wage a fight.

We must insist that the leaders and organisations of the labour movement must break their links with the Tories and stop collaborating with them. But whatever the leaders do, the rank and file of the unions and the shop stewards' committees and the Labour Party must themselves organise now for a fightback. We must go out and organise to mobilise the unemployed against the Tory attacks. We must link them to the employed against whose wages and conditions the Tories plan to use them. And out of the employed, unemployed, oppressed women and youth and all the other victims of this capitalist system we must forge a movement that will confront and defeat Thatcher's vicious class war Tory government.