Are you underpaid? (1985)

From the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July there was a storm of controversy about relative rates of pay. The media, the unions, the politicians and the economists all entered the fray which arose out of the recommendation of a committee, set up for that purpose, to grant big increases of pay for top civil servants, judges and high ranking military officers. The pay of an Admiral and Civil Service Permanent Secretary went up from £45.000 to £60,000 and a High Court Judge's pay from £51,250 to £60,000. This got a bad press, partly on the ground that it was outrageous to give top people increases ranging up to 46 per cent while teachers, civil servants and others were being offered even less than the rise of prices, and partly on the ground (this from supporters of the government) that it had been badly timed. The government narrowly escaped defeat in the House of Commons. many Tory MPs abstaining.

The committee which recommended the increases gave as their reasons that, while the top people in the government service did not expect to get into the £100.000- £200.000 levels of some of the highest paid directors of companies, the gap had become too large; they were being disheartened and demoralised and the recruitment of suitable people was falling off — reasons which the critics found unconvincing. A telling point made by the government was that similar big increases had been given by the last Labour government.

Unions currently engaged in pay negotiations made the most of this situation. How could it be justified that already well paid top people should be given these big increases while teachers were being offered only 6 per cent? The teachers' unions argued that at their present pay, teachers are "grossly underpaid". But this does not single teachers out from all the other workers. Every one of the nearly 400 unions will maintain with equal vehemence that their members, too. are "grossly underpaid".

It would be entertaining if the opinion pollsters were to take time off from failing to forecast accurately the results of by-elections and conduct polls about what people think of their pay. To the first question. “Do you think you are underpaid?", the answers would surely be an overwhelming "Yes". The answers to a second question. "On what do you base this belief?" would be more interesting.

The list of reasons would be long and varied. That pay is not enough to live on. It does not take enough account of our skills and qualifications, or of our conditions of work, of our having to work at night or at the weekend. We have to work underground, or in the open-air, or at heights above ground. Our work is dangerous, or boring or exhausting; our pay undervalues the quality and quantity of our output, or our responsibility for human life, or for health or large sums of money. It has not kept up with prices and so on. Of course the pollsters should include the people receiving sick benefit, unemployment benefit or pensions. It is certain that large numbers of the replies would be concerned with comparisons — women's pay and men's, rural pay and pay in the towns, industrial workers' pay and that of office workers. Naturally everybody 's pay would be compared with that of the top people.

Ever since the government started publishing information on average pay in different industries, and average pay in all industries combined, the workers receiving less than the combined average have claimed that they ought to have their pay brought up to that average. (Agricultural workers recently asked for their pay to be doubled on that ground.) If ever such an adjustment was accepted for general application it would end up with all industries receiving the same pay. If no industry remained below the average there could be no industry above the average either.

The idea of the same pay for all has had well-known backers. Marx alleged of Proudhon that his idea of the aim of social revolution was "equality of wages". At one time Bernard Shaw advocated it, as did Lenin in Russia and Attlee, Prime Minister of the 1945-51 Labour government in Britain. Lenin, in his State and Revolution, published in 1917 before the Communists seized power, wrote: "The whole of society will become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labour and pay". A year later he announced that this idea was unworkable and had had to be abandoned. It has, of course, never been resumed. Attlee in his The Will and the Way to to Socialism (1935) rejected the Tory belief "that society must always be divided into classes of rich and poor", and promised that a Labour government would abolish social classes and introduce "an equalitarian society", the method being to raise wages and cut down the incomes of the rich. "There would be no little cottages and no large private houses. All would be reasonably housed."

No political party now treats seriously the concept of equal pay to all as a practical way to run capitalism, but much has been written about, and much effort applied to. schemes for fixing relativities between the wages paid in all occupations, by means of "job evaluation". The late Lord Brown, a Labour Party supporter (not Lord George Brown) claimed that it would be possible to fix the "proper" rate of pay for every job in the country from the lowest to the highest. The requirements of each job would be assessed and points awarded for each factor; for qualifications and skill, for initiative and responsibility and working conditions, and numerous other factors. According to Lord Brown's scheme, this would result in an objective and scientific measure for comparing one job with any other and fixing pay accordingly.

This, and other proposals for fixing comparative rates of pay on some ideal standard. come up against practical difficulties. Any trade union which found itself in a position to enforce higher pay than the one awarded would ignore the assessment, as would any employer who could get all the workers needed at a lower rate of pay.

But the theory behind such schemes is also flawed. The assessments can never be objective, depending as they do on who makes them. There would always be disagreement between the people actually doing the job and the outside assessors. Although the Royal Commission on the Civil Service 1953-55 recommended that some use might be made of job evaluation in the fixing of the pay of civil service grades, their Report (page 149) admitted that objectivity is impossible, as indeed it is:

In this and in other fields where it is necessary to compare and to add together factors, which are, strictly speaking, unmeasurable, the use of the points system may well facilitate consistency of judgement-, though it must be recognised that the judgement itself remains essentially subjective.

Behind the widespread complaint of workers that they are underpaid is the belief that, as distinct from the pay they are actually receiving, a "fair", or "just", or "equitable" rate for the job would be something more. (None of the replies to the pollsters would say that the subject is overpaid, though plenty would say that of other people's jobs.) This is quite meaningless and irrelevant, arising out of the refusal to face up to the fact that we live in a capitalist society. Capitalism is not concerned with distribution on some principle of "equity" but with making as much profit as possible. It is as true now as when Marx wrote in Value, Price and Profit over a century ago. that capitalism is a class-divided society, the two classes having opposing interests:

The capitalist class constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum; and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction. The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.

In this struggle trade union organisation and strikes are the workers' only weapons. For the employers, including government departments and nationalised industries, the "proper" rate of pay is the lowest that they can get the workers to accept and yet recruit in sufficient number the workers needed. This is the background against which the great mass of the wage and salary earners get their living. It is another matter entirely for the propertied class who depend for their living, not on working, but on profits, interest and land rent, based on the exploitation of the working class. What way out is there? Marx provided the answer. He did not urge the workers to carry on with the endless struggle for "fair wages" but the reverse:

Instead of the conservative motto, "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work”, they ought to inscribe on their banners the revolutionary watchword "Abolition of the wages system".

Before leaving consideration of the people with fancy and quite unrealistic ideas about reforming the wages system under capitalism. Woodrow Wyatt (Times, 27 July 1985) provides an interesting sidelight on the MPs. Roy Hattersley, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, was very angry about the big increases for top people. So were many Tory, Labour, Liberal and SDP members. Wyatt had this to say:

However, despite their sudden conversion to "social justice" most were among those MPs who in July 1983 voted themselves to be linked by January 1988 to 89 per cent of a Senior Principal's pay. A very nice bonanza with no examination by an independent review body. MPs' pay is now £16.900 a year. Already 89 per cent of a Senior Principal's pay is £20,404 and by 1988 will be around £23.000 giving MPs an increase of some 36 per cent to look forward to.

The MPs' pay of £16,900 is supplemented by what Wyatt says are very generous allowances.

Perhaps the pollsters will ask MPs if they too think they are grossly underpaid and if so why. particularly in view of the fact that all of the several thousand who have been in Parliament since 1945 were committed to hold down prices and maintain "full employment". They can hardly base their claim on their performance in these two fields.

Edgar Hardcastle

The Socialist Forum: The Post Office and wages. (1931)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1931 issue of the Socialist Standard

A reader sends us a cutting from the Daily Herald (April 16th), in which it is stated that the Post Office has helped a Trade Union to obtain increases in wages totalling £4,000 a year for the employees of a firm engaged on Post Office contracts. This has been done under what is known as the “Fair Wages Clause,” which requires contractors engaged on Government contracts to pay the recognised Trade Union or other standard rates of pay. Our correspondents asks, “What about it?” We do not know whether we are expected to offer a bouquet to the Labour Government on this account. If so, we shall have to disappoint the expectation. The Labour Postmaster-General might very well turn his attention to his department. Civil servants, including the Post Office staff, have lost hundreds of thousands of pounds through the reductions in their cost-of-living bonus since the Labour Government came into office. Then there are the thousands of part-time workers in the Post Office, fully dependent on their Post Office pay for their living, many of whom are getting less than they would get as unemployed pay. Perhaps the firm of contractors concerned would like to give the Postmaster-General some points.

[Comments]. (1907)

From the October 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Riotous living for sailors.

Another great reform has been carried out by the Liberal Government. In future the value of the total messing allowance for sailors will remain at 10d., but they will have a smaller ration, equivalent to 6d., and will be allowed to spend the remaining 4d. in luxuries as they please. We may now expect them to participate in banquets at frequent intervals, just as if they were “Labour” M.P’s.

___________

How Will Thorne fought. 

Addressing the Forest Gate Ratepayers’ Association on September 2nd, Councillor Duncan Best, of West Ham, declared that Mr. Will Thorne, “in order to obtain the salary given by the L.R.C., was quite willing at the general election to furl the red flag—quite willing to tuck it away and appear purely as Labour man.” But Councillor Best is late—we pointed this out long ago.

___________

Labour members sold again.

An example of the extent to which the Government is being “forced” by the existence of a ”powerful Labour party” may be gleaned from some notes by J. Ramsay MacDonald in the Belper News of August 23rd. He claims that the Fair Wages Committee was appointed on the initiative of the Labour party. After many months “pressing” the Government and “negotiating” with them, a Committee was appointed consisting of those officials whom the Labour party had accused of making the Fair Wages Clause a dead letter.

What else could he expect ? When the Labour members fight the Government instead of being so anxious to dine and drink expensive wines with its members something different may happen.

___________

Birds of a Feather.

The first number of The Woman Worker has appeared. It contains letters wishing success from many Labour M.P.s, and also from H. G. Wells, George Cadbury, Chiozza Money, H. Quelch, Herbert Gladstone and other reformers.

The Passing Show: Is He Really So Greene? (1966)

The Passing Show Column from the March 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is He Really So Greene?

At the time of writing rail union secretary S. F. Greene has a lot on his mind. Even though the rail strike was called off at the last moment, there is still plenty for Mr. Greene and his lads to do round the negotiating table.

Which perhaps explains the very terse letter one of our members received from him at the beginning of February. You may know that it is the practice for the Socialist Party to send speakers to put our case to other organisations where possible, particularly trade unions. No strings attached, incidentally, except perhaps payment of the speaker’s fares. So one of our branch organisers wrote to the N.U.R. headquarters asking for a list of their branch addresses, intending to write to some of them direct.

Nothing very difficult about that, you might think? Well, you’d be wrong. “Dear Sir,” came back Mr. Greene’s reply of February 3rd. “1 have received your letter ... but regret 1 am unable to supply you with the information you require.” That was all, leaving us to draw whatever conclusions we liked. For example, was it that he just did not have the information? Is it possible that the N.U.R. is a union whose general secretary doesn’t know where its branches are? How on earth did he let them know whether or not to strike?

Maybe Mr. Greene is just not allowed by his executive to tell us what we asked, which seems pretty daft when you think that any railway porter could probably tell you the address of his union branch without a second thought. No, we can only think that perhaps he doesn't want us to speak to his branches, and that maybe the word has got around that the Labour Party doesn't like us very much (it’s mutual, by the way). After all, the N.U.R. is affiliated to that body. Let us then suggest a rewrite of Mr. Greene’s reply for hint: -

I have received your letter, and have the information you require, hut if you thing l'm sending it to you you're jolly well mistaken. I'm not having any incitement to disaffection—we've supported the Labour Party for more years than I care to remember (and a lot of them I don't care to remember), and we’re going on doing it, never mind their anti-working class actions and the stand-up fight we’re having with them over pay and conditions.

Which, when you think of it, seems to typify the sort of logic behind the thinking of most Labour supporters.

The ''Mirror" Again

And while we're talking about railwaymen, I suppose it was inevitable that they would get precious little support from the rubbish mongers of the capitalist press in general, and that the Daily Mirror would wade into them with two-inch headlines. ‘‘Chaos — Or Commonsense?” yelled the front page on February 10th, while the centre pages of the same issue carried on the attack with an article by that very rich friend of the workers, Labour M.P. Woodrow Wyatt.

The Mirror has always prided itself on its plain speaking and down-to-earth attitude, but this does not make it really a very original newspaper. It says mainly what the others are saying but in a brasher and coarser manner, and, of course, it specialises in large headlines and meagre reading content. In the past it has made a practice of picking out certain strikes and condemning them because they were small and petty. Now the N.U.R. gets it in the neck for precisely the opposite reason.

Because of the Mirror’s deliberately cultivated COR-BLIMBYness, many people think it has working class interests at heart, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is, as ever, firmly on the side of British capitalism, even though it may niggle some capitalist politicians and at times land itself with a libel action. It deals always with superficialities, never scratching under the surface of any social problem. This is not surprising—all newspapers distort facts and pander to ignorance and prejudice to a greater or lesser extent. But the Mirror must truly be the envy of Fleet Street in having developed the technique to the nth degree and built a circulation of many millions on a veritable mountain of bewilderment and bigotry. Therein perhaps lies its only claim to originality. It ran true to form over the railmen's strike.

How Much Are You Worth?

"What sort of—um—salary were you thinking of, Mister—um—?" I was asked by the lean, sharp featured, fussy little personnel man. I was a fresh-faced school leaver, determined to start to start as I meant to go on, and really get somewhere in the world. I swallowed hard.

‘Two pounds a week?” I suggested in a squeaky voice which belied my attempts to sound bold and confident. He wrote it on his pad, ringing the figure round slowly and heavily with his pencil, simultaneously shaking his head and drawing in a long slow breath through rounded lips. “Frankly, you’ve gone down in my estimation,” he confided. “I was hoping that you would be different from the usual run of money-grabbing youngsters we have coming to us for jobs. We can offer you (pause for effect) twenty-five shillings a week (this slowly and deliberately, savouring every word). You must be prepared to work hard, plenty of opportunities here for advancement . . . show what you’re worth . . . etc., etc.”

Obviously his idea of “getting on” was a bit different from mine. I bid him a polite goodday and got a job elsewhere —at two pounds a week. When I look back on that first encounter (there have been a few since then) I’m inclined to wonder if  the mincing little man is still with his firm, so diligently guarding his boss’s interests. Certainly he was only putting a line which is as old as the hills and which is trotted out just as much today as ever it was. Many workers do believe it, however, and spend their lives trying to show their boss what they are worth; only the boss’s assessment invariably falls short of theirs. Which is a big snag and shows that the strength of your bargaining position is what matters, not the strength of your moral arguments.

But now look at the other side of the coin. William Davis, Guardian financial editor and a man prone to moralising lectures in his column, on how much harder we must all work, has been asking “How much is a company chairman worth?” On February 5th he gave a table showing the average payment to directors of various big firms, the figures ranging from £9,800 to £38,500 a year. But the thing to notice was the absence of any moralising sentiment in answering his own question, thus:

Business men should he made to feel proud of high salaries. The ambition of lower-paid people should be to equal them, not to show jealousy. 

I never really understood why there was so much fuss about the £24,000 a year paid to Dr. Beeching ... on simple business grounds alone, it was a good price.

To which every capitalist politician will say Amen. I don't think they will be saying quite the same thing, though, in the next few weeks when some of those "lower-paid people." like bus and railway workers, push for higher wages. That's not quite the sort of equalising ambition Mr. Davis has in mind.

Up, Up, Up It Goes

I have before me some cuttings taken at random from newspapers over about one week in January. They are all about the same problem—crime in its various forms, crime major or petty, but crime nevertheless Over two thousand London telephone boxes wrecked by vandals, gang attacks on transport lorries, drug peddling, robbery with violence. The list is as long as your arm. and very depressing.

“We are determined to stamp this out,” says a magistrate to a phone box wrecker. “You may expect long prison sentences," says the Lord Chief Justice Lord Parker, in a blanket warning to dope peddlers. How many times have we heard this sort of remark? And still the crime situation worsens. Home Secretaries have come and gone, but crime, it seems, goes on for ever. Mr. Roy Jenkins is the latest to try his hand. “I intend to mount a sustained and effective attack on crime," he is reported as saying at Hull on January 17th.

He proposes to "give the police every support, best equipment." etc, which may make them more efficient at crime detection, but will never solve the problem itself. And what of the criminals themselves? They will be modernising their methods, just like the police, using the means which current science puts at their disposal, so that in a few years time yet another Home Secretary will be saying he is going to wipe out crime.

Why is it so persistent, and defiant of efforts to end or even check it? Basically it is a fight over property of some kind. Even the apparent senseless hooliganism of ripped train seats has behind it a blind resentment towards property owned by someone else. And since no Home Secretary ever aims to remove private property society, crime stays stubbornly with us.

Gaspers

“Before independence we ensured that our army, civil service and judiciary were insulated from politics." (President Azikiwe of Nigeria. 16.1.66—just after seizure of power by Major-General Ironsi.)

Eddie Critchfield

Are You Satisfied with Your Pay? (1956)

From the March 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ask any body of workers if they think they are getting enough pay, the pay they think they are worth, and it is safe to say that nine out of every ten would answer No! They nearly all think they ought to get more, and would get more if things were run properly. They nearly all have a vague feeling that things aren’t run properly. They are annoyed that nobody—this includes the trade unions, the employers, the political parties and the Government—does anything about it and they all have some notion about what ought to be done. Some point to the impossibility of keeping themselves and their families “decently” in face of the cost of living—in their view it ought to be the duty of the employers or the Government to see that everybody has enough to maintain this “decent” standard of living.

Some think that things would be all right if wages were raised and their employers' profits lowered. But if they happen to work in a firm or an industry where sales are falling and profits are small or non-existent they look to the Government to give subsidies or do something to improve the sales of the article they produce. Lots of workers blame or envy other workers. The labourers envy the craftsmen, while the craftsmen and foremen complain that they do not receive wages sufficiently above the labourer’s rate to compensate for their skill and responsibility. Many teachers have a special resentment because, as they allege, they receive no more than do dustmen. University graduates think that a proper wages policy would recognise more the importance of having a degree, and scientific workers think that the scales are unjustly weighted in favour of administrative workers. Feminists clamour for the male “rate for the job” and provoke some of their male colleagues into demanding “justice” for the married man with dependents. The queue of the disgruntled stretches indefinitely and encircles the globe.

They are all there, the bank clerks and postal clerks, the parsons, the lawyers, the doctors, the dentists and nurses. The shopkeepers, too, have their grievances against the manufacturers and are looking with envy now at the furore created in France by the shopkeepers' dingy saint M. Poujade. Then there are the pensioners, the police the soldiers, the prison warders—and the Red Dean’s revolting choristers at Canterbury. At the end of the line are the non-workers the small unhappy band of surtax payers and millionaires who swear that high taxation compels them, if they are to live the lives of conspicuous wastefulness fitting to their station, to overspend their incomes and eat up their capital; a practice as loathsome to a Capitalist as is cannibalism to a missionary.

And for every group of complainants there is an aspiring trade union official, politician, or economist with a glib solution. The solutions are too numerous to list here. They are seemingly as varied as the occupational groups from which they spring but they all have one thing in common. They all assume that there is, or could be, in the world of Capitalism a defensible social principle by which wages could be fixed at a “proper” level. They all ignore the facts of Capitalist life. As practical solutions they are all so much trash.

The Law of the Jungle

Capitalism knows no social principle of distribution according to need, or responsibility, or skill, or training, or risk, or so-called “value of work,” or “usefulness to the community.” If Capitalism has anything that' approaches a principle it is that income shall be in inverse proportion to work. If you own capital in sufficient amount you never need work at all, and the more you avoid work in order to enjoy luxurious living the greater the esteem and attention you will have bestowed upon you.

The Socialist knows why this is and how the system works. Society’s means of living are owned by the propertied class, the Capitalists who are in business to provide themselves with their kind of income, profits. They employ the working class in order to make profit out of them, a proceeding the working-class are forced to accept because they are propertyless. The Capitalist pays as little as he can for the kind of worker he needs. All the worker can do is to bargain and struggle to get as much out of the employer as circumstances permit and what circumstances permit depends on whether the Capitalist needs the kind of skill the worker has to offer. If the employer needs a certain kind of skill and if the number of workers having that skill is limited the employer will1 have to pay accordingly for it, he will have to pay more to the skilled than to the unskilled worker. But if owing to the decline of a given trade, or the invention of a machine, which replaces craftsmanship, skilled operatives are not in demand their wages will fall.

In the depression of the nineteen thirties apprenticed engineering craftsmen, skilled coal miners, university graduates, and agricultural labourers, were a drag on the market. Capitalism had no need for all there were of them and their wages fell. During the war Capitalism had need of coal and food, of engineering and chemical products, and all these groups had their chance to push up wages beyond the rise of the cost of living. “Merit” and “human needs” and “usefulness to the community” and all the other fine-sounding phrases, have nothing to do with it. What counts is whether the worker is useful to the Capitalist, and the only usefulness the Capitalist knows is usefulness in making profit. The only argument he has to listen to is the fact of inability to get sufficient of the workers he needs, and the amount of strike pressure trade union organisation can bring to bear to prevent him getting enough workers at the wage he offers.

Is it crude, callous and inhuman? Of course it is. It is the law of the jungle, the only law Capitalism knows.

And has Socialism any alternative to offer? Indeed it has, but by Socialism we mean the Socialism of Socialists, not the spurious State Capitalist nostrums offered by the Attlees and Bevans and the clique who run Capitalism in Russia.

All over the world the cut throat Capitalist wages system operates and only Socialists have as their aim the replacement of Capitalism by a Socialist system of society in which there will be no wages system, no propertied class and working class, the one living on income from property and the other on wages. Under Socialism people will work cooperatively to produce what all need and all will freely take what they need out of the products and services cooperative effort achieves.

Of course the pseudo-Socialists named above all pay lip-service to the ideal of abolishing Capitalism and the wages system but whether or not they understand what they are talking about they show by their actions and programmes that they do not intend to seek that solution. They all in their time bleat about the need for bold, far-reaching action but all with one accord recoil from the Socialist objective they profess to desire.

For the working class of the world the choice is simple, either to take the organised political action necessary to introduce Socialism or to continue with Capitalism. The one thing that cannot be had is to impose on the Capitalist jungle some socially acceptable and satisfying wages policy.

Edgar Hardcastle

Greasy Pole: Plain Words (2003)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nobody in their right mind – that is to say nobody who has an inkling of how this social system operates –would have been impressed by the assurances that the Bain enquiry into the firefighters’ pay claim was really “independent”. (There are a number of words in this article in inverted commas. This may irritate some readers, much as it does the writer. The purpose is to encourage scepticism about the use of such words.) As a start, let us assert that the whole concept of “independence” is false, just as the popular idea of a “fair” wage, a “deserved” pay rise are false. These are delusions resting on the assumption that wages are fixed by how useful the wage earners’ work is and that somewhere and somehow out there there is a wage which is “fair” because it exactly reflects that usefulness, or how strenuous someone’s work is and how it compares to other, similar, jobs. There is no way that any enquiry, no matter how “independent”, could make any sense of this, no way it could untangle such a mish-mash of delusions.

So they don’t try. Enquiries into wage claims have a number of other uses. Firstly they are often a ruse by which employers and governments representing the employing class to postpone the time for a decision, allowing them to strengthen their defences. When the firefighters called their first, two-day, strike they were denounced by ministers from Tony Blair downwards for acting with unreasonable haste when they should have waited for the Bain report in the confidence that it would be “fair” to them because it was “independent”. The firefighters were right to be sceptical because what Bain had been set to do was to lay down the case for a lower pay rise while the Fire Service was “modernised” – in other words while it co-operated in cutting its work force.

Firefighters and Bankers

There was much anger during the strike because of the feeling that the firefighters’ pay did not properly reflect their “worth”. In fact this anger, although it was supportive of the strikers, was misplaced. Wages do not rely on the worth of what a person does. If they were measured in that way firefighters and nurses and sewage workers, instead of bankers, currency dealers and royals, would be turning up for work in Rolls Royces. The only way to make sense of this apparent anomaly is to recognise that all wages are essentially determined, at any one time, by the relationship between the forces of supply of, and demand for, the labour power of the workers concerned. If the demand for nurses’ working ability outstrips the supply of it (always providing that the nurses assert their bargaining power) their wages will rise. If the opposite applies there will be a downward influence on their wages.

This reality is often used to justify companies offering big money to their higher management. “We have to do this,” runs the argument, “in order to attract people of the right calibre to run this great company of ours.” And it is used when MPs are debating whether to accept a proposal (from another, but rather different, “fair” and “independent” enquiry) to give themselves the kind of rise firefighters can only dream about, to attract highly qualified and capable people away from industry, commerce or the law or wherever to govern this great country of ours. This was how it was put by Robin Cook, Leader of the Commons, on 5 July 2002 when the Members were discussing (it was hardly a debate) the suggestion that they award themselves a 42 per cent rise:

“I do not think we impress the public if we set too low a value on our own worth . . . if we believe our work here is important we should not shrink from putting a proper value on it.”

This was not the kind of argument which the government would allow for the firefighters. And it was not how Bain saw the situation:

“Even allowing for the risks and dangers of the service, firefighters compare well with similar jobs in the public and private sectors . . .When holidays, pension arrangements and job security are taken into account, they are even better placed. This is borne out by the recruitment and retention figures, which show large numbers of applicants for each Fire service vacancy, even during a period of steady economic growth.”

In other words, the firefighters’ claim was undermined because the supply of their labour power outstrips the demand for it.

Candidates

There is, however, a contradiction here, which goes some way to illustrate the implacable way in which the wage labour economy of capitalism works and the cynicism of the system’s rulers. Because if there is one job in which there is a surplus of supply over demand, it is that of an MP. To begin with there is the matter of the number of candidates standing for each seat; lots of competition there. In the 2001 general election it was a rare constituency which had less than five on the list. Seven or eight was not unusual. There is no record of any heckler suggesting that, as there was such competition in the matter of aspirant MPs, whoever won the seat should take a cut in wages. Then there is the fact that, at least in the bigger parties, there had often been a fierce struggle to get the nomination in the first place, with a large number of runners whittled down to a short list.

This process was illustrated in the case of Ted Heath, who after the 1945 election scratched around from one seat to another in Kent before he was adopted for Bexley. The Tories in Ashford rejected him because he would not agree to give up his command of a Territorial Army regiment and to refuse the offer of a ministerial job in a future government. (The successful candidate later told him that he lost the vote because he turned up for his crucial interview on a Saturday morning improperly dressed, in a dark blue suit and a stiff collar. Heath grumpily recalled that he did not then possess either article.) At Rochester and Chatham they said they wanted an MP who would make it into the Cabinet and “I am afraid,” said the Tory chairman, “that we do not think that you will ever hold an office of any kind.” At Sevenoaks it was rather simpler; Heath turned up late and made a bad speech.

Heseltine and Clark

Michael Heseltine had to show willing by contesting some safe Labour seats – Gower and Coventry North – before he got the chance of a safe seat at Tavistock. Even then the decision hung in the balance because he upset the straighter-laced Tavistock Tories when a men’s fashion magazine he owned – Town – featured that month an Ursula Andress lookalike on its cover. After he had won the nomination he heard from some women that they had voted for him because they liked his wife’s hat. When Tavistock disappeared under the knife of the Boundary Commission in 1970 he failed to get the nod at Mid Oxfordshire, where he was not even short–listed and then Mid Sussex before the Tories of Henley took him – and perhaps his wife’s hats – to their bosoms.

The odious Alan Clark tried to get himself selected from the late 1960s, trawling through what he called “a Litany of constituency names” in his notebook before he succeeded in Plymouth Sutton. This success required his attendance at a cocktail party with his wife – sorely tried, ever supportive as Tory wives are supposed to be. Let us hope they let him off lightly in the subsequent question-and-answer session for it must have been a grave affront to the conceit of that callous, arrogant man who seemed to despise and hate a considerable mass of the human race including – especially including – those in his own party. “That shower” was how he described the Tories at Ashchurch. “Imprisoned . . . by their own guilt” was how he saw the local party executive at Langstone. For the Tories in Plymouth Sutton he reserved some special venom: “Total shits . . . no purpose in life other than to bicker and back bite – degrade everything above a certain level of mediocrity.”

Modernising

It is not only in the matter of failing to accept that their wages should be set by the forces of supply and demand that MPs fail to keep to the standards they try to set down for the rest of us. Nick Raynsford, the minister responsible for the Fire Service, is a man who has outraged some of his former admirers who never thought him capable of the breathtaking cynicism he displayed in his transformation into an ardent Blairite. He was notably brutal and overbearing in his verbal assaults on the firefighters. A recurring theme of his comments was what he saw as the FBU’s refusal to move to “more streamlined, focussed and flexible” working arrangements. Coming from an MP, that was a bit rich. The House of Commons cannot move to its business, which is supposed to be so vital to the interests of us all, without the security of a load of archaic symbolism and rituals – like bowing to the Speaker, going in procession to the House of Lords after someone in knee britches called Black Rod has knocked three times on the door of the chamber – or perhaps he is called Black Door and knocks on three rods – unable to do anything unless the Mace is in its place on the table, never using each other’s names because they must address people they know to be ruthless scoundrels as “Honourable Members”, never calling anyone a liar because they can only refer to “misleading the House”. For outdated practises the FBU has nothing on Parliament.

We can stumble around this maze of apparent contradictions, blind alleys and deceit (which is what wage negotiations often do) for a long time when the matter is essentially simple. This social system depends on wage labour – on the exploitation of one class by the other. The “worth” of what we work at, what we produce or organise, is simply not in the equation of how much we are paid. Neither are “justice” or “fairness”. These are concepts introduced to cloud over the basic fact that capitalism exists in the interests of only the ruling class and that obscure language is too often used to that end.

Ivan

Letter: The Pay of Civil Servants. (1930)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

A letter from a reader.

Forest Gate.

Dear Sir,

As a regular reader of the Socialist Standard I should like to take exception to the article appearing a month or two ago on “Nationalisation,” in which the low wages of various Governmental employees were quoted.

As a Socialist, I am aware of the defects of Nationalisation, but would like to point out that though some employees of the Government do very badly, some do very well.

Under the term Government I include the Local Councils of Boroughs, etc.

In the first instance we have policemen receiving, after 10 years’ service, £4 10s. wages, plus 15/6 rent aid, for a constable ; sergeants, inspectors, etc., get more; much more in the cases of the higher ranks.

Firemen, I believe, receive the same wages, less the rent aid, as it is termed.

Teachers in the Elementary Schools appear to do very well when compared with industrial workers.

Lady Teachers commence, I believe, with £3 per week, and get somewhere about £5 a week after a few years, as one instance.

School Attendance Officers as the school board man of our school days is known, start at about £4 16s., and rise to £5 5s.

Also we have Local Government Board Officers as the clerks employed by Municipal Councils term themselves, with others such as sanitary inspectors, etc., receiving in many cases anything from £4 10s. to £7 or £8 per week, coupled with three or four weeks’ holiday.

Most of the above have no more training than a skilled mechanic is required to have, and in many cases they have considerably less, but compare the wages and conditions and they are vastly different, as you already know.

I hope I am not taking up too much of your valuable space, but I am afraid I could not state my case in less words. 

In conclusion, I wish the S.P.G.B. and the Standard the best of luck in the future, and hope you will receive this letter in the spirit of helpful criticism that is intended by myself, as full facts are and must continue to be the essential feature of the S.S.

Best wishes from

“SOCIALIST.”

Reply:

Our correspondent misses the point of the article he criticises. The contention made in that article was that there is “little difference from the workers’ point of view, between State capitalism and private capitalism, whether under a Conservative or a Labour Government.”

To say, as our correspondent does, that an elementary teacher is paid more than an industrial worker, has nothing whatever to do with the question discussed. He must compare like with like; for example, compare the pay of industrial workers in the Government service with the pay of industrial workers outside. If he does he will find that our contention is correct.

But the whole question is easily settled by the statements of Civil Service authorities themselves. The Civil Service Industrial Court which fixes the pay of civil servants has laid it down when dealing with lower grade civil servants that

“the broad principle which should be followed in determining the rates of wages of Post Office servants, is that of the maintenance of a fair relativity as between their wages and those in outside industries as a whole.”

The Industrial Court takes into account the civil servant pension rights and any other benefits he may receive, and fixes his cash wage accordingly.

But whereas the Civil Service bases the pay of lower grades on the rates of pay in comparable occupations outside, the higher grades in the Civil Service are definitely paid less than the rates of pay in comparable occupations outside. This has long been a complaint of the grades concerned. In evidence given at the Royal Commission on the Civil Service (now sitting), Sir Evelyn Murray, Secretary of the Post Office, was asked if the Post Office pay as much in their higher grades as is paid outside, and replied :—

“I do not think that is a principle that the Government have ever accepted as regards the higher grades of the service.” (See Minutes of Evidence. Question 4618.)

—Editorial Committee

What Are Your Wages? (1965)

From the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do you suffer from that common ailment: too much week left at the end of your money? Most of us do. The doctors, the teachers, the shipworkers, the provincial busmen and many others are all struggling, at the moment of writing, for higher wages. In a few weeks’ time other workers in other jobs will be engaged in the same sort of tussle. As a matter of fact, we have become used to this pattern, since the war, of “rounds” of wage increases. The economy of this country has been “booming” fairly steadily, and unemployment keeps fairly low. But it is rather a strange fact that, in spite of all the increases that have been won in that time, our wages are still inadequate. There is plenty of evidence of this. The fact that the hire purchase debt in Britain passed the £1,000 million mark in 1964 shows just how much people can not buy without getting into debt.

Why is it that this struggle for higher wages is always going on, even in countries like the U.S.A. where workers are the highest paid in the world?

If it weren’t for the money, most of us would stop work tomorrow. After all, wages are the common means of getting work out of men and women. You can hear some of them call it “bloody slavery”. They are not trying to be accurate-only to express their feelings. There is very little real slavery in the world today. It is a very old-fashioned and inefficient system of getting work out of people. The big empires of the past were built up on slave labour; and there was a brief flare-up of it again in America when the virgin land of the new continent was being opened up to agriculture. The slave was caught or bought, like a horse or a machine; and he was fed or flogged when necessary in order to get the maximum of work out of him. Slaves were not really regarded as people: they were denied citizenship; and their owners usually had power of life and death over them. But the quality of work they could do was generally very low; and there is a snag to owning slaves: they have to be fed and housed even when there is no work for them to do.

Although there has always been a certain amount of it, getting work out of people for wages is fairly new as a universal system. Almost everywhere in the world the slave empires were overthrown by the much less highly organised system of feudalism. The feudal serf was a “free” man owning his own bit of land; but to protect themselves from attack serfs clustered round the strong-arm men, the lords of the manor; and they paid for their “protection” by working on the land or fighting the battles of their lords. In the time that was left over, they were able to work their own strips of land. A tenth of what they produced was demanded from them by a highly organised church, which operated in league with the lords to prevent serfs from running away. It is debatable, therefore, whether serfs were much better off  than slaves.

With the rise of capitalism, however, the serfs were gradually freed entirely-by having even their strips of land taken from them. They were no longer forced to work for anybody—except by the pressure of starvation. As it was, they offered themselves for work eagerly, even desperately at times, for there was no other way of getting food, clothing and shelter, except by wages. At last, in capitalism, the system of buying and selling became universal. Everything was for sale. Anything could be bought. The problem for the great mass of humanity was that they had nothing left to sell except their ability to work.

Most of us feel we have the right to live. The trouble is that hardly any of us have got “private means”. We can only get the means to live by “selling ourselves”. It is rather like prostitution; but we have no choice. Because of this, a lot of workers talk about the “right to work” almost as though it were the same thing as the right to live. They take part in marches and demonstrations when jobs are scarce, insisting upon their right to work. They feel offended if they are told that they are demanding the right to prostitute themselves. Actually, of course, workers have no legal right to work. Nor will they ever have. All they possess is a commodity—the ability to work. Millions of people throughout the world own nothing else.

This is what distinguishes them as a separate economic class, the working class. They constitute about ninety per cent of the civilized population of the world. Of course, in the more advanced countries they may own their own house and their own car; but economically their class is determined by the fact that they have to prostitute themselves throughout their useful lives in order to keep these things and live from day to day.

Obviously, if workers are sellers of the ability to work, there must also be a class of buyers. Occasionally and briefly, one worker may buy the services of another to do a job; but as he only has his wages with which to pay wages it cannot be general. Only those who possess the wealth which can be worked upon to produce more wealth, can really afford to pay wages. But why should anyone want to hire us—especially if they already have the wealth, and we have none? Why should anyone pay us wages for the use of our mental and physical energy? There can only be one reason: to increase their  wealth further by our work. And not only that: to increase it by more than the cost of our wages.

Wealth used in this way to make more wealth is called capital; and those who use it in this way are called capitalists. So the bulk of humanity is divided into two classes: sellers and buyers of labour power; workers and capitalists.

So wages are really the price paid for our ability to work. The very existence of wages proves the division into classes, wherever it is found. Every week or every month our pay packet or cheque reminds us of the fact that we belong to the class which can only secure the right to live by offering themselves for work by prostituting themselves to those who find it convenient to buy their abilities-the world’s capitalists.

Such a situation inevitably produces conflict. In buying and selling, the seller always tries to raise the price, while the buyer tries to reduce it. There is no let-up. And the very point of conflict is the wage packet itself. The quickest and surest way for the capitalist to increase his profits is by cutting wages. And yet the worker’s wage is his only means of living, so that he has no choice but to struggle-not only to raise his wages, but to prevent them being depressed.

A Fair Day’s Pay

There were times in the nineteenth century when some wages for adult men with families were as low as sixpence a week; and it meant, of course, that the women and children were forced out to work as well to keep alive. All this is gone now—at least, in Britain. Similar things are still found in the newly capitalist countries, and in places like Hong Kong; even, surprisingly enough, in the U.S.A. But here, for the last few years, the talk has all been of “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”  Harold Wilson has been the most recent public figure to use it, in a demand for greater effort from the working class of Britain. By this, he identifies himself with all other politicians, whether they claim to represent the working class or not, because this is a slogan used purely on behalf of the capitalist class.

There is really nothing “fair” about the wages system at all. It is always loaded overwhelmingly in the capitalists’ favour. Although they often do increase their profit by fighting off wage demands, this is not the main method of making profit. Capital finds it profitable to employ labour even when wages are not depressed. And this is generally the case in Britain today. Wages are inadequate, of course, but they are relatively about the highest that they have ever been.

How, then, does the capitalist make profits? Purely by using the wages system. Actually, the wages swindle is very simple, but very effective. And, what is more, it is perfectly legal. If you can get hold of enough capital, you can start operating it tomorrow-if you can get hold of enough capital.

This is the way it works: the capitalist simply hires a man’s abilities for the day, or the week, or the month; and then he gets as much work out of him as he possibly can during that time. Now, ever since the dawn of civilization it has been possible for a man to produce more than he needed for his own keep. That is what made slavery a possibility in the first place. And, since factory organisation, and then mechanisation, and now even automation, the possibilities have risen. But the capitalist does not pay for the actual value that the man adds to the raw materials by working on them. All that he pays for is the man’s keep. Loosely speaking the worker may have produced enough by Monday or Tuesday, to pay for his keep; but the capitalist keeps him turning out wealth until Friday, simply because he has bought the worker’s labour power for that period.

If the workers complain that this system is not fair at all, it is easy to point out to them that this is a buying and selling arrangement. They have something to sell: their ability to work. And the capitalist is prepared to buy it. Profit is simply the difference between a man’s wages and the value of what he actually produces. All this vague trade union talk about the workers having a right to a share in the profits simply shows a total lack of understanding of what profits are and what wages are. The workers have no right to a share in the profits at all, in the capitalist system.

How Much Are you Worth?

There is no direct connection at all, then, between the amount that a man produces and the size of his wage packet. Neither is there any real connection between his wages and how hard he works. This is often difficult to see because of the piece-work systems, bonus schemes, and high overtime rates, all of which make it look as though the harder you work, the more money you make. If there really was such a connection, it would mean that that Dr. Beeching, with his salary of £25,000 from British Railways, was working about thirty times as hard every day as the average worker – quite impossible.

By the time that most of us get home after a day’s work, we are pretty well exhausted. It takes a real effort to get washed and changed to go out to a cinema or the pub. And now that television has brought the cinema to us, millions of us are content to sit in an armchair for three hours and then go to bed. We have put out, during the day, all the physical, emotional and mental energy we are capable of, without running ourselves down into illness. Even this happens fairly often with many people.

So we have done our fair day’s work; and we have got our fair day’s pay. And there is a direct connection between them. This commodity that we have to sell-our ability to work is used up at the end of the day. We have sold it. And it costs money to renew it-money to keep up a certain standard of food, clothing, shelter and recreation to make us able to face another day, or another Monday morning. What is more, we were reared with a certain amount of care in the first place, educated at a certain cost, and probably trained, too.

All of this makes up the true cost of production of our commodity-the ability to do a certain type of work. This is what our wages pay for-the cost of producing our labour power. This is all that is ever meant by “a fair day’s pay” – enough for us to keep on producing the ability to work for the capitalist class, throughout our lives, until our commodity loses most of its worth through old age. It has also paid for the cost of producing children to provide another army of wage-slaves to take out places when we are gone.

The wages system has proved so successful that it has spread to all the major countries of the world, and is still spreading. And, in between the wars and slumps that it causes, it works like a charm. The surplus that the workers produce is largely used to buy more machinery and plant and materials to extract more surplus from their efforts, and to bring more peasants and primitives in “undeveloped areas” into the system. The new machines produced by workers in one industry serve to step up the amount of profit made out of workers in another. The buildings and plant set up by one generation are there to extract surplus value from the next.

All the time, and all over the world, the workers are building up more and more wealth none of which belongs to them. By their very work they deprive themselves more and more of the wealth which is in the world, and so set the capitalist class higher and higher above them, with greater and greater powers of oppression.

And most workers accept this system of legalised robbery. (It is only legal because capitalists made the laws.) They accept it every time they press for their “right to work”. They accept it when they talk of “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”, and when they think that “co-operation between both sides of industry” is a good thing, they are showing their approval of being robbed.

Of course, they are being brainwashed into accepting it. They don’t realise that they can abolish the wages system. They are usually so relieved and glad to get their pay packet or their cheque, when it finally comes, that they forget they are holding in their hands the proof that they have been taken for suckers once again in the biggest swindle of all time.

S. Stafford

A Look Round. (1907)

From the June 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

When engaged last month in seeking matter for the Socialist Standard, I alighted on a report of a speech at a banquet, which was so up to the standard of capitalist clap-trap that I at once attributed it to a capitalist politician. But I was mistaken.

***

The words that led me to such a conclusion were the following : “Although at the present time they had not got everything they wanted or everything they ought to have, yet things were vastly different from what they were a few years ago. They had now a tolerably comfortable standard of wages and comparatively shorter hours, while they also had attained to political power.”

***

The speaker was Mr. G. N. Barnes, M.P., and the occasion the annual dinner of the Plaistow and East Ham branch of the A.S.E., held at the “White Horse,” East Ham, on May 4th. Mr. Barnes and Sir John Bethell, Liberal M.P. for the Romford Division, were the principal guests.

***

Of what use is a “tolerably comfortable standard of wages” to the working class if, as usually happens, it is accompanied by more frequent and longer periods of unemployment than were experienced under the old standard ?

***

There are but two classes in Society—the producers of wealth and the master class. If by trade union or any other effort the working class succeed in securing a larger share of the product of their labour, it must necessarily be at the expense of the master class. Competition among the latter compels them to be always on the lookout for means whereby the cost of production may be reduced and profits increased. “Concessions” wrung from them by the organised working class stimulate them in their efforts. As a result, old machinery is scrapped or improved, and new machinery introduced. Under the new conditions fewer workmen are required, and so many are discharged altogether or put on short time. In some cases their places are taken by women and even by boys and girls.

***

Thus we see the limitations of working-class effort under capitalism, so long as that effort is only directed to palliating the evils of the system, to making it more bearable for the wage-workers.

***

No doubt the unemployed will be gratified to learn that Mr. Haldane has decided to increase by one shilling per week the minimum rate of pay of leading hands and labourers of the Army Ordnance Department at Devenport and certain other places. He regrets that he cannot accede to the request to make the rate of pay for labourers at Devenport the same as that at Woolwich, where, he points out, the cost of living is much higher.

***

How interesting to the unemployed labourers of Woolwich, of whom there are just now a few, to be reminded that their rate of wages is higher than that of their fellow labourers at Devenport. The income of the workers must be measured by their purchasing power, not by rates of wages.

***

But the members of the A.S.E., at any rate, have attained to “a tolerably comfortable standard of wages.” Mr. G. N. Barnes says so, and he should know because he is their General Secretary and a “Labour” member.

***

Professedly, the Daily News stands for “righteousness.” Thus on May 13 it printed a letter relating to the L.C.C. tram clerks, signed by “New Cross,” who complained that the clerks were working every evening till 9 and 10 p.m., and that the overtime pay was at the rate of l½d. per hour, but in some cases it had not been paid for at alL Here again can we see that rate and payment are not the same.

***

The letter also appeared in other papers, which qualification for membership of the Party, and assert no special claim to “righteousness.” But in the other papers the letter contained words which were not printed in the Daily News, as follows: “Last year the clerks worked from Xmas until the latter end of July until 10 o’clock at night, and without any relaxation.”

***

As the letter appeared in the “righteous” Daily News, it would seem that the “wicked” Municipal Reformers were alone the sweaters, but the omitted clause relating to last year involves the “righteous” Progressives.

***

Mr. W. Lander, of Bolton, in presiding at the 39th Annual Co-operative Congress at Preston on Whit Monday asked whether it was not a fact that in some directions they were following the practices of their competitors ? Prize giving, he said, bonus systems, overlapping, and the increase of credit trading could scarcely be described as methods which make for the elevation of the individual, the purifying of trade, and the betterment of the condition of the people.

***

It was pointed out in our May issue that the Co-operative Societies are capitalist concerns, as of course they could not otherwise be under capitalism. If, therefore, they are to flourish they must fight other capitalist concerns on capitalist lines. They are useful to capitalist politicians because of their pratings of “thrift,” “self help,” “independence of the State,” etc. Many of their leading lights, past and present, are general utility men for the Liberals.

***

A discussion took place at the Congress on sweating. The President asked whether the Co-operators are sufficiently careful in making their purchases and whether they ever inquire as to the source of supply of their commodities. And everybody seemed pleased when it was announced that Mr. Gladstone had consented to an exhibition of sweated goods in one of the anterooms of the House of Commons.

***

It is sometimes asserted that if there were no purchasers of cheap goods there would be no sweated labour. Apart from the fact that the working class, even when they receive what is considered a fair wage, can only afford to buy cheap goods, what guarantee is there that the workers engaged in producing high priced goods receive higher wages than those who produce low priced goods ? At the Congress itself Mrs. Gasson, a member of the National Anti-Sweating League, said that the League had in their possession a lady’s blouse which would be sold for 35s. to 40s., for making which the worker received sixpence.

***

Under capitalism the working class are poor. Some get a “fair” wage and are poor; some get a sweated wage and are poor ; others are unemployed and get no wage at all. They are all poor.

***

And what, after all, is a fair wage ? Is it the Trade Union rate ? Because if so anything below it must be “sweating.” Yet in the same issue of the Daily News that reports the discussion referred to above appears an advertisement for a non-Society Linotype operator, used to daily news work, 6,000 essential, salary, 40s. for 50 hours. The minimum rate fixed by the London Society of Compositors is 45s. for 48 hours, but although they have fixed it, it is evident they cannot enforce it. The piece rate for a London lino-operator is 3d. per 1,000. The man who has to produce 6,000 per hour for 50 hours per week should make £3 15s. in wages. He is offered 40s., from which it is also evident that the Daily News is not prepared to sacrifice any portion of its revenue in the interest of what are called “fair” wages for the working class.

***

Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour M.P. for Leicester, has been on the warpath again in the House of Commons. This time he is concerned about Baptists in the Congo. On May 6 he asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he had received from the Baptist Missionary Society complaints that the fiscal imposts upon materials used for the construction of churches, schools, and hospitals, and for the carrying out of the general work of missionary societies, were heavy and oppressive.

***

As the effect, if not always the object, of missionary work is to bring those parts of the world in which their operations are carried on under the capitalist form of society, and to fit the wild, untutored savage for wage-slavery, bringing him into competition with white labour, Mr. MacDonald’s anxiety to assist the Missionary Societies will no doubt be shared by the members of the I.L.P., whose chairmanship he adorns.

***

Miss Macarthur, the Secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League, who has recently returned from America, told a Daily Chronicle interviewer that in the States there is a large proportion of “model” factories, and employers state quite frankly that they give these good conditions because they find it pays.

***

Just as they become convinced that it will pay, the capitalist class, by legal enactment or otherwise, will institute reforms. It may pay them only from the point of view that the reforms will enable them to get better value out of the wage workers, or, as Mr. A. J. Balfour put it, as an “antidote to Socialism.” Because we of The Socialist Party of Great Britain know this we assert that the working class has no concern with the advocacy of Reforms. If it is claimed that Reforms, temporary though they may be in their effect, are needed, then the surest and quickest way to secure them is to organise for Socialism and for Socialism alone. Then the master class will throw Reforms to the working class as an “antidote.”

***

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is the only Party which at its formation and ever since has declined to side-track the working class by advocating palliatives.

***

Another interview with Miss Macarthur stated that the attentions showered upon her while in the States had not turned her head. “She stands just where she did and still believes in old clothes and porridge.” And yet when in Boston she paid 16s. for a pair of gloves which she could easily buy in London for 2s. 9d. “I wouldn’t have bought them” she said, “but I was due at a dinner, and my own were split.” Old clothes and porridge, indeed !

J. Kay

Blogger's Note:

I'm 93% certain that 'J. Kay' was the pen name for Jack Kent when he was writing the 'A Look Round' column.

The Coal Miner and his Union (1922)

From the February 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

We remember a glowing eulogy of Frank Hodges appearing in the daily Press at the time of the coal strike, 1920.

An immediate reason for “pointing him out” arises from the following statement he is reported to have made (“Daily News,” 14/1/22) on the miners’ plight and low wages.

  “Those who are working, are working with unprecedented energy, but the pithead prices secured for the coal does not warrant either a decent wage for the workmen, nor anything like a fair measure of profit to the owners; although the industrial consumer and the domestic consumer are still having to pay fabulously high prices for the coal after it has passed through the hands of merchants, factors, and retail dealers.”

Why should Hodges be concerned about “a fair measure of profit to the owner” ? What are profits ? They represent a portion of surplus value, unpaid labour time.

The workers are poor because they are robbed of this surplus value. The workers receive back only a relatively small proportion of the values they produce. They are paid wages on the subsistence level, the sliding scale system. The worker has but his power to labour, which, in order to live he is compelled to offer for the best terms he can obtain.

His labour power is a commodity, and like every other commodity, its price is determined, in the main, by its cost of production, the price fluctuating through the operations of supply and demand. Therefore, the cost of purchasing the necessaries of life—food, clothing, and shelter—determines as a rule the amount of wages which the worker receives from time to time.

Now Hodges knows that the wages system spells misery to the worker and he clouds the situation with his talk of “decent wages” and “a fair measure of profit.”

O.C.I.

Letters: The Labour Theory of Value (1970)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Theory of Value

Sir,

I have not read in the Socialist Standard an explanation of the Labour Theory of Value, and since it is a theory to which objections are frequently made may I put to you the following four points.

(1) It is a basic .and apparently reasonable law of economics that when demand exceeds the supply the price of a commodity rises, and conversely, when supply exceeds demand, the price then falls. What role therefore does supply and demand play in determining value?

(2) Following from this it is suggested that if all the commodities used by man were supplied by nature either the intervention of human labour, and in the same proportions as they are now produced, then they would have the same exchange value as now. In other words if meteorites which occasionally fall, were really diamonds and could be picked up off the streets once in a lifetime, they would still have the same value, providing they were just as rare and could be obtained in no other way.

(3) Why should the value of works of art rise to such heights? An estimate of the value of the Mona Lisa puts its worth at nearly £36 million, and this can only be due to the painting’s rarity — the fact that it is unique, and the demand for it — the fact that it is one of the world’s most coveted treasures. The original labour involved was fixed for all time, and ought not therefore to have altered the value.

(4) Finally, does the capitalist by anticipating demand, and matching supply to demand. thereby reducing waste and needless expenditure of socially necessary labour, not contribute to the value of the commodity?

K. McCormack.

Belfast, 15.

Reply: 

It would be helpful to make a few definitions and give a brief outline of the Marxian Theory of Value before dealing with the points raised. By economics we mean the study of wealth production and distribution under capitalism. By wealth we understand useful goods and services (use values) produced by the application of human energies to the nature-given material of the earth. Under capitalism wealth is produced for sale with a view to profit, its unit being a commodity which in addition to use value also has exchange value. This form of society has not existed for all time but is the result of a long process of evolution. From the simple societies of pre-history where little or no exchange took place to the complex society of the 20th Century where activities are nothing but a continuous series of exchange transactions. Under capitalism the means of production are run co-operatively by the propertyless majority of the population whilst being owned and controlled by a non-working minority. The Labour theory of value not only shows what regulates the proportion in which commodities exchange but also the source of income of the owning capitalist minority.

As exchange is a social act value, which regulates this, is defined as a relationship between people which shows itself as a relationship between things. It has nothing to do with the physical properties (weight, colour, size, etc.) of commodities. It is the social labour embodied in commodities that gives them the common social property by which they may be compared. The value of a commodity is the amount of socially necessary labour required to produce it. Price is the monetary expression of value.

It is the working class who create value at the point of production. In order to get the necessities of life, they sell their labour power (skills and energies) to the capitalist. On average they get the value of their labour power: enough of the things needed to maintain themselves and their families (i.e. to produce and reproduce their labour power). But the value created by workers in production is more than the value of the labour power they have sold. This excess is known as surplus value and forms the source of the capitalist class’s income in the form of rent, interest and profit.

This brings us to the answer to question (4). A capitalist is someone who lives off rent, interest and profit. The capitalist does not play a role in trying to match supply and demand. This is done by workers, such as statisticians and market researchers, whose efforts are concerned with selling and maximising profits. Capitalism generates enormous waste over which neither capitalist or worker have any control. The only way a capitalist could contribute to the value of a commodity would be through being engaged in productive activities but as such would not be acting as a capitalist.

(1) It is price that varies according to supply and demand. When supply and demand are in equilibrium price and value are equal. Value varies according to the amount of socially necessary labour required to produce a commodity. Factors affecting value are the productivity of labour, and natural conditions like the fertility of the soil and ease of access to mineral wealth.

(2) This is an assumption we cannot accept. There is no commodity (wealth for sale with a view to profit) supplied by nature without the intervention of human labour. Air for instance is most useful to man and it is provided by nature without the intervention of human labour. It has no value or price and is not a commodity and is not private property. If everything were available from nature in the same way they would not be commodities.

As for meteorites, we know of none that have delivered anything useful that cannot be obtained here. For the sake of argument if it happened that a meteorite delivered “once in a lifetime" some useful material not previously known to man, there would be no means of applying theories of price or value (which deal with here everyday experience of capitalist production and distribution) to this. No doubt efforts would be made to reproduce the material synthetically. If successful, then the question of value would arise as we would be back to the familiar ground of labour power being expended in production. In the case of diamonds, efforts have been made to reproduce artificially what nature has produced naturally. For the capitalist it has proved better (cheaper) to have workers mining for diamonds, than making them artificially. If diamonds were to fall regularly as meteorites then their value would fall to the socially necessary labour spent in collecting them.

(3) As already explained the theory of value deals with everyday experiences of production in capitalist society. A commodity is not only produced once but is continuously reproduced. Works of art are unique and the prices put on them cannot be explained by economic theory. [That capitalism has to foul the things it finds most beautiful by putting prices on them is to be condemned.] The ‘Mona Lisa’ is no more rare than other paintings having much lower prices say the £500,000 recently paid for a Van Gogh. It will no more help us, if we could explain the conundrum of a price of £36 millions, than if we know the reason for Lisa's enigmatic smile!

Editorial Committee

Beyond Wages

Sir,

Among the multitude of wage and salary slaves, there are few indeed who look beyond striking for higher wages and salaries to a solution of their problems. Truly, that hypocritical slogan “A Fair Day’s Work for a Fair Day's Pay” has a lot to answer for!

Does our modern wage slave, crawling painfully into the Seventies really think he has “won” or yet "broken even” at the end of his day ?

On the contrary, he has "lost” on each occasion he accepts his wages. Why do we say this? Once a worker has worked — once his labour power has been expended, it has created a value greater than its own. But what he has produced this concealed labour within a given commodity, is the legal property of his employer, the capitalist, who thus has increased his original capital with the surplus-value donated by the sellers of the labour power generated in their carcases.

Despite these facts, we daily witness appeals for higher wages as the be-all and end-all of working class aspirations.

Certainly they must strike to protect their living standards, so long as capitalism remains, but if they desire to put an end to their status as suckers for the capitalist class, they must organise for the abolition of the wage system and the establishment of world Socialism. This will be an overdue end to human beings hawking their abilities, which is a degrading business.

G. R. Russell

Like with like (1979)

From the April 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Comparability Con Game

Buried deep in the jungle of remotest Whitehall there is a secret government factory which supplies ministers with meaningless catch phrases. This factory is always hard at work but is under the greatest pressure at times of what the ministers call National Crisis (which is itself a meaningless catch phrase). At such times, it has registered its most memorable achievements; like Export or Die, Free Collective Bargaining, the Social Contract. And now, its latest product—Comparability Study.

We are in danger of being driven into a frenzy by the repeated drumming into our consciousness of the word Comparability, because the Labour government are clearly hoping that it will help get them out of their sticky situation over wages. Here is one example:

  In the wake of criticism of the 9 per cent pay offer to nurses the Health Minister, Mr. Ronald Moyle, gave a guarantee in the Commons yesterday that the nurses' position in relation to other workers would be restored and maintained if they accepted the Government’s offer of a comparability study (The Guardian, 7/3/79).

The very next day the government announced the birth of something with the resounding title of the Standing Commission on Pay Comparability. Callaghan was in hopeful mood:

  These new arrangements . . . should help us in future years to avoid the dislocation and hardship that the public has suffered in recent weeks. (The Guardian, 8/3/19).

But of course the word Standing should not be taken too literally. Similar high hopes were expressed for bodies like the Relativities Board and the Prices and Incomes Board but they are dead and buried and there is no reason to suppose that the Commission on Comparability will have any longer life.

Teachers

Like most of the products of the Meaningless Phrase Factory, Comparability is not a new idea. In 1974 the government accepted a recommendation of the Houghton Committee, that teachers’ pay should not be allowed to fall behind that in “comparable” occupations. In 1958 the Civil Servants had made a similar agreement with the government, after the report of the Priestley Royal Commission. Both groups of workers have subsequently found that the government, enforcing a wage restraint policy, has broken the agreement—which is why civil servants of all people, are now on strike.

Comparability is supposed to ensure that workers in what is called the public sector—nurses, dustmen, local government employees—earn roughly the same as those in similar jobs in private industry. It sounds like an especially generous gesture by the government to help workers who. because they are in the “public” sector, have a limited bargaining power. There is really little reason for this strange idea; civil servants, dustmen and sewerage workers have already shown that they can cause quite a bit of disruption by striking and the bargaining power of nurses, although unused, is all too obvious.

It is not necessary to be a cynic, to realise that the government’s offer of a comparability study is anything but generous. The so-called monetarists, whose ideas on how to run capitalism become increasingly popular in a desperate response to the abject failure of interventionist theories, would argue that in any case it is unnecessary. In their view, wage negotiations should be left to run free and in that process comparability would be achieved by the process of workers moving from the lower paid jobs to the higher. This may be a callous simplification—an enforced change of employment can be a stressful experience for a worker—but it does illuminate some of the fallacies of the Comparability Game.

Dream

This game is played by two sides each with a different object. In some cases, a union may put a case for a rise on the grounds that its members earn less than those in similar jobs. On the other side governments can play the game as a delaying tactic—as the Labour government is doing now—by offering something less than the unions demand with a promise that an investigation into comparability will bring absolutely fair and balanced wages to everyone.

Now this must sound like a very reasonable and progressive idea to the City gent on the Clapham omnibus, who longs to see Britain a sunlit, strike-free land where all industrial disputes are settled by an infallible arbitration system and all wages balanced by a process of completely rational awards. The City gent does not nurture such fantasies alone:

  . . . you’ve got to get the balance roughly right. This again, is a function of government — to get the balance right between the groups in your society as well as between the individuals in your society.
  The Times had a marvellous leading article—I think it was in January last year—about a balanced society. It said what my colleagues and I had been saying for quite some time . . . (Margaret Thatcher, Observer, 25/2/79).

In this sort of dream society everyone earns a wage exactly suited to their job and accepts their place on the social and economic ladder. No dustmen envies the income of a solicitor and conscientiously carts away the latter’s rubbish because he knows that everyone does a Fair Days Work for a Fair Days Pay. He also knows that his dustman’s wages buy goods whose prices always represent exactly what they are worth, that the best solicitors get the highest fees and indeed the whole of capitalism moves smoothly on economic bearings lubricated by justice and good sense.

Reality

The reality is that there are no such things as fair pay or fair prices. Whatever the City gent might mean by justice and good sense—or Margaret Thatcher by balance in society—simply don’t come into the process by which wages and other prices are determined. By the same token Comparability is a nonsense. How is it possible to fix a “fair” wage for, say, the nurses who care for sufferers from terminal cancer? Or for the workers who operate sewage plants, remembering the consequences of a breakdown in sewage disposal? Can their wages be “balanced” or compared against those of members of the armed forces, whose work is wholly destructive? Is it "fair” that ambulance crews should receive a fraction of the income of stock-brokers and members of Lloyds?

Then what about a comparison with members of the ruling class, like the Duke of Westminster whose only significant achievement to date has been to be born into a family which acquired, a couple of hundred years ago, some stretches of swampy London water meadow which became Mayfair, Belgravia, Pimlico . . . If the Duke of Westminster received a “fair” wage, according to his usefulness to society, he would starve to death while his many stately homes would be occupied by dustmen and nurses.

But that, too, is a dream of a sort. The majority of people in capitalist society are compelled to work in order to live, whether as nurses or clerks or miners or whatever. When they work they are selling their mental and physical energies, their labour power, to an employer. Thus labour power is a commodity, like apples or cars or houses. In some way or other every commodity will struggle to be sold at the highest possible price; in the case of labour power this struggle is a deliberate affair of negotiation, threat, work to rule, strike, lock out and so on. There is no eternal morality in all of this; it is a matter of power and force.

In this struggle both sides will use any weapon or argument which comes to hand and Comparability is one of these. But like much trade union activity it has its dangers for the working class. Firstly, it is an argument which can be used in more than one direction; for example what happens if wages in the “comparable” industries fall below those of the workers who are claiming a rise on grounds of comparability? And, as we are seeing at present, it is something which can be used by employers as a delaying tactic, with the rewards doubtful.

Divisive

Secondly, it is divisive for workers to argue that one group should have wages related to another because this, rather than an attempt to achieve equality, is an argument against workers in one occupation getting more than those in another. For workers to compete against each other in the wages struggle, to try to use each other as rungs up the ladder of improvement, is not an exercise in working class unity.

And unity is an essential element in working class struggle. The ideal wage claim would be one in which the entire working class together demand everything that they produce. The capitalist class would find such unity irresistible; no meaningless catch phrase or delaying tactic could stand in its way. But of course a claim like that would mean a lot more; it would signal that capitalism itself was in its terminal stage, needing only to be nursed quietly to death.

Ivan