TUC: Wages and planning

When the delegates at the TUC last month discussed wages and planning they managed to get into quite a deal of confusion.

They voted by a huge majority for a General Council report Economic Development & Planning though it contains references to wage restraint, but also voted (by a small majority) against “any form of wage restraint,” after the mover Mr. Ted Hill had indicated that it did not really mean what it said but only meant under a Tory government.

The confusion of some of the speeches is in fact even greater than the Press reports indicate. There was Mr. Hill who declared that his organisation, having had experience, ”cannot trust any Tory government with our wage packets”. Linked up with his declaration about not accepting any form of wage restraint, it presents the picture of Mr. Hill believing in two absurdities: firstly the absurdity of some non-Tory government which has as its aim supporting the workers against the employers on any wage claim they choose to make, and secondly, the equally absurd belief that provided a union rejects wage restraint it can get what it wants without restraint.

The truth is that all governments everywhere resist general upward ‘pressures for higher real wage levels, and when Mr. Hill makes an exception of a Labour Government he has it quite wrong. It just happens that in the post-war years under Labour Government, wage rates were falling behind the cost of living but since then they have moved ahead, a change in which increased willingness to strike has obviously played some part.

Mr. Richard Crossman, Labour M.P, frankly admitted, after the Labour Government had gone from office, that British workers could probably have got more if they had been as ready to strike as workers in America, and when Mr. Hill talks about no wage restraint what he really means is that trade unions must not give up the strike weapon. To that extent he is of course on sound ground, and it explains his reluctance and that of many other TUC delegates to accept the belief that planning by the National Economic Development Council can be a substitute for the strike weapon. But to put this in terms of being for or against “restraint” is quite beside the point, for if the Council’s plans in fact worked as they hope wage levels would be far less “restrained” than they have ever been.

The Council’s plan for expansion envisaged a rise of real wages of somewhere in the region of 3½ per cent a year. The Prime Minister speaking at Cardiff on April 5th put it in definite terms: “If we combine growth policy with incomes policy, the nation as a whole can have a 3½ per cent. growth in real income per head”.

No union, not Mr. Hill’s or any other, has been able to get a 3½ per cent, rise of real wages. (3½ per cent. a year above whatever is needed to cover increased prices), either under Tory or Labour Government: not 3½ per cent or anything like it. In the period since January 1956 average wage rates have gone up by 33 per cent but the retail price index has risen by 25 per cent, so that the rise in real terms has been about 6 per cent in seven and a half years, less than 1 per cent a year.

What then is really at issue for the workers is not whether the National Economic Development Council, or the Prime Minister, or the leader of the Labour Party holds out prospects of an annual 3½ per cent. rise of real wages they are all prepared to promise this–but whether they or anyone else are in a position to plan such a development into certain existence, and whether working class interest is served in that direction at all.

For, taking the last point first, there should be no doubt or ambiguity about what the TUC is accepting, whether with planning or without. They are accepting the world of capitalism and looking at the problem of the ability of British capitalism to survive and expand in a capitalist world.

The TUC report recognises for example the “frightening prospects of potential overproduction” in world markets, and of “competitive expenditure on armaments in the industrial countries where a quarter of the human race lives, and increasing misery for the other three quarter’s of the world’s population”. The Socialist’s reaction to this is to urge the replacement of world capitalism by world Socialism, ending both capitalism and class society; the TUC’s reaction is to consider how to regulate the trade and aid relationships between the countries of the capitalist world and at the same time secure a working arrangement for planning between the classes at home.

This latter idea is not new: always there have been people urging co-operation for increased production between employers and employed. But always the harsh realities of capitalism keep breaking in: markets getting overstocked and the employers who wanted more production now wanting to stop production; and passivity on the part of the workers being taken advantage of to increase exploitation and profits. No one—and this includes governments as well as employers can regulate world .markets so that the normal expansions and contractions of capitalist industry and trade do not take place.

One last point that should be considered is the hope held out of a possible 4 per cent annual increase of production. By past standards this is a big increase, but in relation to the potentialities of Socialism it is insignificant.

Capitalism, irrespective of the political hue of the government, cannot seriously tackle the job of increasing the production of useful things sufficiently to meet all human needs. It cannot escape the consequences of its own class and competitive nature, shewing themselves in armaments, wars, class conflict, strikes and so on.

Yet workers who have tried to weigh up the arguments at the TUC about wages and planning should consider the Socialist proposition. What really stands in the way of a classless, warless world in which production is directly and solely for the use of all, except the reluctance of most workers to think it out? Certainly no-one who looks back over a century and a half of looking for wages policies can argue that Socialism is unnecessary because things are in a very good shape as they are. All the evidence points the other way.
H.