The Passing Show
The pace-makers
The present uproar among those employed in the “public sector”—nurses, teachers, civil servants, and so on—at the fact that they are the chief sufferers from the Government’s pay policy, is particularly interesting to those who remember what the Labour Party and reformers generally used to say on this subject. It was once a settled belief among left-wingers that any industry or service run by the State or by a municipality would give its workers better conditions than any similar private industry or service, and that private employers would have to improve the wages and conditions they offered in order to keep their workers. So that the nationalisation of an industry would not only benefit the workers in that industry: it would benefit those in other industries as well. See, for example, Bernard Shaw in The Transition to Social Democracy, reprinted in his Essays in Fabian Socialism:
“At the very outset of the new extension of municipal industries, the question of wage will arise. A minimum wage must be fixed . . . The worst sort of sweaters will find that if they are to keep their ‘hands’, they must treat them at least as well as the municipality.”
And so forth. When these arguments were fashionable, Socialists were pointing out that since the State, and the municipalities, and the State boards, were and could only be committees representing the general interests of the capitalist class, it was useless to hope that they would give any “better wages and conditions than individual capitalists. And judging by the recent agitation among “public sector ” employees, it seems that not only are those employed by the State and its agencies no better treated than similar workers in private employ—they are actually falling behind in wages and conditions.
But no doubt the nationalizers will still be trotting out their “better wages” arguments for years to come.
Strike in Saskatchewan
When we say that all workers by hand or brain have fundamentally the same interests, we are told that white-collar and professional workers are somehow quite different from manual workers— for example, doctors and the rest would never strike. This theory was never in accord with the facts—doctors and nurses have gone on strike more than once in Continental countries in recent years, and they threatened to strike, and nearly did strike, in this country on the introduction of the National Health Service. Now, of course, the theory has been swept away finally by the events in Saskatchewan. There the great majority of doctors have gone on strike against the Government’s attempt to introduce a medical service having some points in common with the British system. What matters here is not whether one sympathizes with this particular strike (we emphatically do not), but the simple fact that the strike has happened and has continued several weeks. Doctors, in fact, are workers just like the rest of us. In their struggles over conditions of employment they can and do use such working-class weapons as strike action even, as in this case, for the wrong reasons.
Cruel and violent
As a judge recently sentenced a man of twenty to five years’ imprisonment, and other youths to shorter terms, for wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, he is reported to have said: “The iron bars and bottles and other weapons with which some of you were armed show how cruel and violent human beings can become.”
Well, well. There is news for the judge.
Human beings can become even more cruel and violent than that.
An iron bar can kill a man. A high-explosive bomb can kill a thousand. An atom bomb can kill a hundred thousand. And the latest H-bombs, we are told, can kill several millions.
But for these large-scale killings, no one is put in the dock. Violence is only deplored when it is not in the interests of the ruling class.
Yet if five years’ jail is the fit sentence for injuring one or two other men, what sentence can the workers pass on the capitalist system?
The only possible sentence is total abolition.
Top people
A new book Anatomy of Britain, by Anthony Sampson, gives several indications of the wealth of Britain’s upper class. On the distribution of wealth, he says :
“One recent survey has thrown light on capital wealth. Lydall and Tipping, writing in the Bulletin of the Oxford Institute of Statistics in 1961, estimated that the top one per cent of British adults owned 43 per cent of total net capital—whereas in America (in 1954) the top one per cent owned only 24 per cent of personal wealth. The authors estimated that 20,000 people owned more than £100,000, and that their average holding was £250,000. (While at the bottom there are 16 million people with less than £100 each, and an average of £50.)”
Mr. Sampson quotes the Ministry of Labour, I960, figures that 30,000 men and 275,000 women are in private domestic service, among whom (according to one domestic agency) there are 600 butlers. He goes on to quote an estimate of “the cost of service in a well-appointed household”:
Butler: £500
Two footman at £350: £700
Odd man: £250
Head housemaid: £300
Two housemaids at £250: £500
Cook: £400
Kitchenmaid: £250
Lady’s maid: £300
Chauffeur (non-resident): £650
Three daily helps at £150: £450
Total: £4,300
Keep (residents only): £2,000
Total: £6,300
If only someone would mention these figures to the Labour Party leaders, they might stop talking about the “social revolution” they are supposed to have put through after the war.
ALWYN EDGAR