Austerity is working! Austerity is working! It works for the big business bosses, bankers and bureaucrats who run Britain.
The average chief executive now earns 145 times more than the average worker’s wage.
The burden of this capitalist crisis falls on the working class with the poorer half of the population receiving just 12p of every pound of GDP – a 25 per cent fall since the late 1970s.
At the end of 2012, the real value of wages was more than £50 billion a year lower than in 2008.
Austerity isn’t working for workers. Adjusted for inflation, the real value of pay has fallen by 7% since the start of 2008 costing the average worker £7000. But super rich incomes soar. The proportion of GDP going to profits has soared by 4%. Boardroom pay rises above inflation, while the downward pressure on wages is unrelenting. Since the 1980s, top bosses have seen pay rises as high as 4,000%.
The ConDem government is using the crisis of their system to enforce permanent austerity, slash public services and break with the welfare state brought by victory in 1945. Austerity policies shift wealth directly and indirectly from the people to the big monopolies and to the rich. The masters of the capitalist system – buttressed by the World Bank, the IMF and the European Union – want the people to pay for the crisis. Workers’ rights are under attack while the debt crisis is being used to drive down wages, cut public services and privatise public assets.