Listening banks (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Big Five banks do not give consistent, unalloyed pleasure to the Prime Minister. Indeed, some of their actions, like a few weeks ago on interest rates, have been known to provoke one of Thatcher’s famous temper tantrums about which husband Denis writes so tremulously in Private Eye. But a recent decision by the banks, which might have come from the fearsome Norman Tebbit himself, must have given hearty satisfaction at Number Ten.

The situation, in brief, is that the banking unions have asked for a nine per cent pay rise. Nowadays it is usual for the employers to respond to such claims by arguing that they simply can't afford the money: the firm isn't making enough, or even losing money; any more rises and they will all be in Carey Street . . .

But that sort of argument is not available to the likes of NatWest and the Midland. who are accustomed to declaring profits of hundreds of millions of pounds. So the banks are simply confronting the unions with the harsh reality of capitalism in slump and of the true social standing of bank employees. The boot is now firmly on the employers’ foot; the unions have little bargaining muscle; among the three million plus unemployed there must be plenty of people who would willingly take a job in a bank without causing problems with pay demands.

Of course, being banks they don't put it in quite so demotic a way; what they actually say is: “In terms of the ‘need to pay’ there is no justification for any increase at all . . . none of the banks report any difficulty in recruiting the number and calibre of staff they require.”

This response will be difficult to explain, among those bank workers who have grown accustomed to the assumption that they are socially better than people like miners and lorry drivers and sewage workers. They have always believed that they had some common cause with their bosses.

But there is really no problem; the explanation is perfectly simple. Everyone who has to go to work for a living is a member of lie working class, and all members of that class have interests opposed to those of their employers. Miners, water workers, bank clerks are in the same class and have a united interest. There is no gentility in the social relationships of workers to employer; it is all a matter of the balance sheet, of the drive to make and sell goods for profit. Bank workers, more than perhaps any others, should be able to understand that.