Switch selling on wages
In the commercial fringe where firms concentrate on a quick turnover before the police catch up with them, switch selling is an accepted method of breaking down a customer’s sales resistance.
It is very simple. A firm advertises—or a shop displays— something at a bargain price. When the customers start pouring in they are told that naturally there was a terrific rush for such a snip and that unfortunately the cut-price stuff has all been sold. But there is another model, a little dearer but still a fantastic bargain . . . Surprisingly, they fall for it.
Perhaps not so surprisingly, they have also fallen for the latest example of political switch selling—which is not confined to any dubious fringe but is openly practised by the most respectable parties. The Labour Party got the voters into their shop by advertising a dynamic, expanding British economy in which everything was nicely under the control of Harold Wilson and his university economics wizards and where wages and production would rise in a planned, consistent curve.
In their 1966 election manifesto, Time For Decision, Labour claimed that under its leadership this country had “. . . fashioned the new instruments of policy with which, under the guidance of the National Plan, a new and better Britain can be built”. This was such an attractive bargain that millions of the electors paid out with their votes to get it.
Now they have had the switch. The government are, of course, very sorry; the National Plan, and all the other alluring things they said they could organise into existence, are not in stock. They forgot to mention in their election brochure that it all depended on the goodwill and the profits of overseas financiers. In the meantime all those expectant Labour voters who came in to buy the latest Wilson bargain will have to be content with something else—the wage freeze, the credit squeeze, government plans for recession and unemployment.
Switch selling succeeds because the customers, whatever their disappointment, still believe that they have got a bargain. The Labour Party’s confidence trick depends on a similar misconception; the voters have to be convinced that the switch is actually, in their interests. They have to be persuaded that we are all together in a desperate struggle for survival and that in this there are no sectional interests, that we are all responsible for our own little bit of what is called the National Interests.
This is a favourite subject of the Prime Minister. At this year’s TUC, after laying about him on all the old bogies of restrictive practices, wage claims and so on, he went on to talk about ‘‘our country” and to ask for “. . . assent to what the national interest requires”. Most of the delegates were too busy applauding the Prime Minister to notice that there has been a change of the Labour Party line. During those famous 13 years of Tory rule Wilson was always sure that the British population was divided into classes, so that some people were privileged to own a lot, receive a high income, live in sumptuous homes, send their children to the best schools, while the rest were condemned to inadequate wages, poor houses, obsolete and restricted schooling.
Now even Harold Wilson does not pretend that his government have done anything to alter the basis of society. In a speech on April 29 last to the AEU national committee, he declared that he had called for local factory committees ". . where each side will put pressure on the other side to get maximum production. . .” which was by any standards an admission that there are still two sides.
But at the same time the Prime Minister wants us to accept that there has been a miraculous transformation and that the strife-racked, divided, class-ridden Britain of Macmillan and Douglas-Home has suddenly disappeared and been replaced by a country where the interests of every clerk, bus driver, miner and scientist are the same as the landlords and the shareholders. This is a remarkable variation on the technique of switch selling, an innovation for which Wilson deserves to be remembered. For his switch results in the customers being offered the goods they are supposed to have rejected in the shop next door.
The best way to beat the switch sellers is to show them up for what they are. The first, basic fact about Britain is that the vast majority of its people depend for their living on getting a job. Even though they may have saved up a bit of money, or even bought some shares in a building society or even on the Stock Exchange; even though they labour with a pen or in a laboratory or at a drawing board; even though they travel to work each day in a dark suit with creases you could cut yourself on; when it comes down to it they have to go out to work for a wage.
There is a very simple, and very accurate, name for these people. They are the working class. We can get a rough idea of their numbers from the Report of the Board of Inland Revenue for 1963/4, which estimated that there were 20½ million people getting an income, before tax, of £1,000 a year or under.
We can get more than a rough idea of the lives of these people—because we are ourselves members of this class. It is members of the working class who live in the 1½ million houses which the 1961 Census revealed as being without an indoor or an attached lavatory, and in the nearly half a million London households which, according to the Milner Holland Report, do not even have a share in a bathroom. Of course not all working class homes are like that; a lot of them are monotonous semis in the suburbs and they have bathrooms and lavatories and fresh painted doors and misty curtains behind which the poverty is a steady ache instead of the short, sharp agony of the slums.
We know what working class life means. The budgeted holidays, clothes, food. The council schools where kids are trained to become future wage slaves. The hire purchase structure of our lives, which only needs the sack—or redeploymcnt, as Harold Wilson called it at the TUC—to destroy it.
What do we know of the other people in society? It may have escaped attention, while the Prime Minister has been thundering and threatening at the TUC “. . . we have the right to ask that each hour worked must be filled with 60 minutes’ worth of work well done”, that there are people who do not need to work yet who live lives which are fuller and more secure than the working class could ever dream of.
There is a simple and an accurate name for these people, too. They are the capitalist class. They own the land, the factories, shipping companies and airlines and so on. They also own, in a rather more involved way, the nationalised industries; because of their ownership they receive the sort of incomes which enable them to live without having to go out to work. The capitalists are a minority of the population; the same Inland Revenue Report estimated that there are about 12,000 people owning wealth worth £200,000 and over.
The capitalists’ wealth, and their incomes, take many forms. The Labour Party promised that their Land Commission Bill would give the land to the people (although surely nobody was expected to believe that). But so far there has been no disturbance of Britain’s massive landholdings—the Duke of Westminster’s 138,000 acres, the Duke of Northumberland’s 80,000, the Duke of Devonshire’s 72.000.
A capitalist can get a lot of money from buying and selling companies; Mr. Wilfred Harvey, once chairman of the British Printing Corporation, was estimated in December last year to have made over £1 million in this way. Or perhaps a shareholder prefers to sit back and simply let his dividends roll in—dividends which, whether they arc held steady under the government squeeze or whether they go up or down, can still provide a capitalist with a very comfortable life.
However the wealth of a capitalist comes to him, there is only one point of origin: the exploitation of those millions of workers. Capitalism lives on exploitation and a firm which cannot produce its profits will quickly die. That is why capitalism concerns itself with the continual refinement of the techniques of exploitation—why it has enslaved man to the methods of mass production, why it has spawned machines like computers to devour costly and repetitive operations, why it sends young men to universities to study the psychology, the mathematics and the logistics of exploitation.
From the proceeds of exploitation the capitalists can live very well. Some of them let us look over their homes at week-ends and, for half-a-crown a head, we can drool over the opulence and ponder upon the startling fact that some human beings actually do have the chance to live a full life. They do not rely on credit accounts on hire purchase debts for their clothes and their domestic equipment. They get the chance to develop their abilities and their talents; their children go to the schools which exist on the comfortable assumption that they are training the future dominant privileged class.
This is Britain today, after two years of Labour rule. When we consider these facts, the panderings and the manoeuvres of the TUC fall into their correct perspective of irrelevance.
Perhaps the trade unionists at Blackpool really thought their decisions were significant; perhaps they really thought they were helping to build the new society. At any rate, it is better to assume they did; unless we grant them sincerity most of the speeches and the decisions of the TUC would be too awful. Yet trade unionists, of all people, are always being brought face to face with the realities of capitalism and now they have once again been shown the futility and impotence of the party most of them helped into power.
Is it too much to expect that such hard-hearted people should realise they have had the switch worked on them, and should stop waiting about for the next fast operator to come along?
Ivan
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