“We need to reverse the shift in our national income back towards people’s wages.”
We’re in the middle of the deepest cost-of-living crisis in generations, which has become a permanent cost-of-living emergency for millions. Yet the whole political establishment seems intent on never-ending austerity.
As a new Government approaches, we need to mobilise for policies that could address the depth of the crises we face, including the 10 Workers Can’t Wait demands. To help build this campaign initiative, we are publishing a daily blog on the importance on each of these demands. Today, Ben Folley looks at why “Britain needs a pay rise.”
The first demand of the Workers Can’t Wait petition is that Britain needs a pay rise with good reason.
TUC analysis has repeatedly shown more than a lost decade of pay stagnation with real wages below their pre-2008 financial crash level. Staggeringly, the average UK worker would be £10,400 a year better off now if wage growth had continued at pre-2008 levels. The Resolution Foundation backs this up – estimating the average worker would be £14,000 a year better off.
For fourteen years, the Tories have carried out an ideological agenda of aggressively cutting public sector pay in real terms and in the wider economy they have nurtured insecure work as part of ‘austerity’. Yet at the same time, a few at the top continue to make millions, with CEO salaries and bonuses continuing to rise far outstripping their workers’ pay deals.
This has been an unprecedented period in lost wages – but should be seen within the context of how over the past fifty years a growing share of our national income has been transferred from wages to capital – or from people’s pay to private profits over the past fifty years.
The scale of the drop off in pay has enormous consequences for people’s standard of living and our society as a whole. The numbers living in poverty have grown, and the level of poverty has deepened, with the majority in households where someone works. As well as real levels of pay being cut, the sharp climb in the use of zero hours contracts and the spread of increasingly precarious, insecure and ever more exploitative forms of work has left many workers without even a reliable or consistent level of pay to meet rent and bills.
Our sick pay is so low that during the pandemic it was directly linked to our high death toll as workers were left unable to afford to isolate, and so caught and spread the virus. Rather than learn that lesson it remains at just £116.75 a week.
Summer 2022 saw the start of a significant increase in working days lost to industrial action, over the subsequent twelve months, as many workers took action to try and turn around the long period of real pay cuts they had suffered, made more acute by surging inflation – particularly in energy and food bills.
The Tories countered the upsurge in industrial action with yet another attack on people’s collective trade union and individual employment rights with the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023, the purpose of which is to effectively take away people’s right to strike.
Scrapping the restrictive legislation on trade unions and strengthening people’s employment rights is urgently needed. This would help to ensure a floor of decent work, pay, terms and conditions for all of us and enable people to enforce their rights and to improve their working lives. Poverty pay and exploitative work is damaging our society. As Larry Elliott said recently, the fact that labour is so cheap discourages firms from investing and in developing the skills of their workers so that they are truly flexible rather than easily dispensable.
Properly funding better pay, and pay increases, across our public services has become not just an urgent matter of achieving decent living standards for these workers, but one of a recruitment and retention staffing crisis for services such as health, education and social services and care. Some left MPs have called for an inflation-proofed rise and a commitment to pay restoration over the next term of government. Despite that, there has been no commitment on pay restoration – even in principle – from the Labour frontbench, as Rachel Reeves sticks to her own fiscal rules that risk entrenching Tory austerity. The past fifty years has shown us it is not enough to just achieve economic growth – what matters is who benefits from that growth. We need to reverse the shift in our national income back towards people’s wages.
The Workers Can’t Wait campaign initiative is somewhere everyone can start. Sign it. Share it with friends. Take it to your local meeting. We need to raise its demands now and build, saying no to never-ending austerity.
- You can find the Worker’s Can’t Wait demands – and join over 22,000 in adding your support here.
- We’re publishing a series of articles for each of the Workers Can’t Wait demands, you can find them as they are published here.
