Being held to ransom

While banks and other City institutions are setting aside billions of pounds for distribution in bonuses to the select few, workers' spending power is plummeting.

Private-sector male workers have lost 3.1 per cent a year over the past three years while their colleagues in the public sector have seen a decline of 2.1 per cent.

These figures should put an end to efforts to set workers in both sectors at each other's throats over which is doing better during the ongoing economic crisis.

Only a complete mug or determined splitter could fail to draw the obvious conclusion that workers across the board are being stuffed to the benefit of the capitalist class that is holding us all to ransom.

Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King, who is on the final furlong of his tenure, claims to detect signs of economic recovery, which will be news to most people.

His comment is on a par with the "light at the end of the tunnel" and "green shoots" that politicians always claim to discern while workers struggle from pay day to pay day or, increasingly, from P45 to dead-end Community Action Programme non-job.

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More worrying is that King expects the government's grossly underestimated CPI measure of price inflation to rise to at least 3 per cent by the summer and then stay above 2 per cent for the next two years.

If the real value of average pay has already slid to 2003 levels, it should be clear that preventing the situation deteriorating still further requires resolute action to reverse the trend of working-class impoverishment.

The governor washes his hands blithely of the increased cost of tuition fees, together with gas, electricity and water charges, being keen to stress that these are not linked to Bank of England monetary policy.

He could have added travel costs and rising food prices, since the rail privateers, oil companies and supermarket moguls have all done their bit to push the cost of living through the roof.

It's not our fault, they declaim in chorus, but we need the extra income for essential investment and to "remain competitive."

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Workers also need to be paid more for their labour power that provides the national income expropriated by others, but that case will not be conceded lightly.

The parliamentary consensus from Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling to David Cameron and George Osborne is that, although private banks laid the basis for the financial crisis, the cost of resolving it should be borne by workers' pay and public services.

That explains the financial attacks on our NHS and other essential services, the cuts imposed on wages and benefits and grotesque injustices such as the bedroom tax on Housing Benefit claimants.

The ongoing pay battle by transport cleaners on the Tyne & Wear Metro should be emulated across the country. Starvation wages must be ended.

But the pay struggle must be waged in conjunction with a political perspective that challenges the bankers' agenda.

Trade union organisations, community groups and single-issue bodies should support the People's Assembly Against Austerity in Westminster Central Hall on Saturday June 22 and unite to build a real alternative to neoliberal orthodoxy.