TUC AND CP WILLING COLLABORATORS PHASE TWO DEALS MEAN WAGE CUTS

TUC LEADERS are ready to respond favourably to a government invitation to discuss the next stage of the Tory plan to hold down workers' wages. The trade union 'lefts' and the Communist Party are prepared to back a so-called voluntary Phase Three of state wage controls, due in the autumn.

By accepting Phase Two deals and the dictates of the Tory pay laws, the trade union leaders and the Stalinists are in practice, accepting wage cutting. The Pay Board, in effect, has become the wage-cutting board.

Even official government statistics released in the House of Commons show that while the cost of the most basic food items going into the housewife's shopping basket has increased by about 40 per cent on average since the Tories came into office 30 months ago, earnings have gone up by only 30 per cent.

On top of this, rents and rates have been arbitrarily increased all over the country, in some cases by as much as 100 per cent.

The real rise in the cost of living, however, is even greater than the officially-controlled figures admit.

The inescapable conclusion is that the standard of living of the working class is being steadily driven down.

The state control of wages is the main instrument for this Tory policy of passing onto the working class the burdens of inflation caused by the capitalist system itself.

One of the effects of inflation is the floating pound, termed by right-wing Labourite James Callaghan the 'sinking' pound, which causes the prices of imported food and raw materials to rise uncontrollably.

The chief support for this cynical programme to make workers pay for capitalism's difficulties is the trade union bureaucracy, backed by the Communist Party. That is what the *class compromise implications of the 'peaceful road to SOcialism' mean in practice.

Following on the Stalinists' acceptance at the teachers' conference of the Phase Two deal, Edward Britton, NUT secretary, was able to declare yesterday that wage control was here to stay. (See page 12.)

The next stage in this attempt to sell out the working class to the principle of the corporate state is to abolish the basic democratic right to free collective bargaining for ever. This will come in the summer.

Then the TUC leaders will go back to Downing Street Chequers to discuss Phase Three of the pay laws to be introduced in the autumn with Heath.

At last year's talks, the trade union leaders, including Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, wanted to accept voluntarily the state control of wages. But they could not get a deal which they could put across the working class.

But they plan to conclude such a deal at the next round of talks, possibly by means of a phoney cost-of-living 'threshold' agreeThis would be based on the imposition of a most blatant confidence trick on the working class.

Already the price of food and the cost-of-living generally has rocketed way beyond the means of the average working-class budget. Between now and autumn, the increases in prices will get even worse, leaving far behind the 8-per-cent rise in £100,000 wages allowed by Phase Two.

Then, at a point when the Tories might hope to have got over the worst of the inflationary crisis, they plan to eliminate the *l plus 4 per cent altogether and replace it with no wage increases at all, a 'nil norm', , coupled with BUILDING a threshold clause allowing pay to rise only if the cost of living rises.

But by that time, the price of FUND basic essentials could have risen by up to 25 per cent in 19/3, meaning a real wage cut of 1/ BACK