dards are the central tasks facing the workers' movement. But the TUC has aided and abetted Wilson's onslaught, and most of those who oppose the measures are confused about the sorts of demands and methods of struggle necessary to beat the crisis.
The Communist Party, tail-ending the Labour lefts, has yet to propose a single concrete initiative to mobilise extra-parliamentary action against the Healey measures. The International Socialism group has contented itself with calls for more rank and file militancy, without saying around what demands and forms of action this militancy should be mobilised.
On the opposite page Red Weekly proposes a programme of action as the basis for a united response to the Government attacks. One of the central demands that we believe the workers' movement must create united action around is the sliding scale of wages and benefits - the automanc ana compete protecaon of all working class incomes against the effects of inflation.
PERNICIOUS
One of the most pernicious ideas being put forward both by the capitalist press and the reformist leaders of the labour movement is that workers must make sacrifices to stop inflation because it hits their fellow harder than any other section of society. By claiming,as Wilson does, that wage-cut plans are really an "anti-inflation' package, the Labou. Government seeks to set low paid and high paid against each other.
VALUABLE
But these manoeuvres can be defeated. Even the experience of threshold agreements, which were far from being a comprehensive sliding scale, showed how automatic increases in wages to compensate for inflation benefited all workers, particularly the low paid.
A survey of 82 major national agreements for low-paid industries in the year 1 March 1974 to 28 FebTuary 1975 showed that 62 of the 82 settlements gave workers on a crease greater than the 27.5 per cent increase in basic weekly rates estimated for all workers. But leaving aside the threshold agreements only 43 of the 82 settlements would have given an above average increase.
The value of threshold-type arrangements has also been shown by those groups of workers who won threshold deals extending beyond November 1974 - the final date set by the Tories' Phase 3 legislation. Last August 11,000 Kodak workers won a pay increase plus a threshold deal giving 1 per cent rises - payable quarterly - for every 1 per cent rise ars at the Swan Hunter shipyards, Tyneside, are striking for a wage increase above the £6 limit crease at the time when they were recent new agreement.
inflation. Recently Tube workers £30 a week an inhad £8 threshold payments consolidated into their basic rates more than British Rail staff, whose threshold agreement worth £4.40, ended last November. In fact the extra money gained by Tube workers through continued thresholds was larger than the increase in new in the retail price index. These were worth another 12.5 per cent wage inconsolidated into the basic rate in a Eighteen thousand London Tube staff are now one of the few groups of workers whose wages are protected by any sort of agreement against £3 a week. Denis Healey at Tolpuddle last weekend-looking for new martyrs to his policies .£3.60 money gained by many British Rail workers in their recent settlement. What is more the Tube workers have won a new threshold deal - payable quarterly - giving 0.75 per cent for every 1 per cent increase in the Retail Price Index after February 1975 This has already been worth another No-one would argue that the Phase 3 thresholds in themselves were adequate: they only started after the retail price index had already risen seven per cent; they were not calculated on a working class cost of living index; they did not take account of taxation and national insurance contributions; and the money increases given were not couvalent to une rise in prices About 60p would be necessary to compensate for every one per cent rise in the retail price index.
However, the transformation of the threshold system into a genuine sliding scale of wages taking account of all these factors and extended to all state benefits, grants and pensions would be of great benefit to the whole working class.
Nine times out of ten the fight for a wage increase is in fact a fight to compensate for the effects of inflation already suffered. The sliding scale would lay the basis for actually campaigning for increases in the real value of wages. Far from demobilising struggles, as the IS group claim the existence of some form of sliding scale arrangement in Italy and Belgium has acted as a spur both for wages struggles and struggles around other social and political questions.
At the present time in Britain the fight for the sliding scale for all workers' incomes - and the Scottish TUC passed such a resolution at its annual conference this year - would cut across Wilson's propaganda that the relatively better paid are responsible for the misery of the lower paid. It would squarely place the responsibility for inflation where it belongs: on the back of the anarchic capitalist system.
The sliding scale would also serve another purpose: by boosting working class consumption it would create more demand in the economy and consequently more jobs. This could produce worse inflation if industry remains in the hands of the capitalist class - who will maintain or increase production only for the purposes of profitability but far from deterring the workers' movement from fighting for the sliding scale, it should inspire us to fight for control over the productive process itself, instituting a rational planning of production under the conttrol of the workers in place of the dictates of capitalist profitability.
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SLIDING SCALE AND WORKERS'