By Colin Foster
Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline recently agreed an £18 million pay package for its chief executive.
The workers have been offered a 2% rise - in real terms, a pay cut.
After seven years of New Labour government, inequality in Britain is still increasing. The gap between rich and poor is getting larger. The slice of total income taken by the top one per cent is already back to what it was in the 1930s, and continuing to increase rapidly.
Despite recent rises in public spending, the government still says it can't afford to run universities without top-up fees. It can't afford decent pensions for the majority.
It can't afford to have school students taught by qualified teachers rather than assistants or makeshift substitutes. It can't afford to invest in public services, but must instead use the "Private Finance Initiative", more costly in the long term. It can't afford to keep public services in the public domain, but must continue contracting them out.
It can't afford to have councils build more council housing. In fact, it wants to make them sell off the entire council housing stock.
On 15 May, at last the leaders of the big unions - TGWU, GMB, Unison and Amicus - began to speak up, saying that they would demand a "radical manifesto" from Labour for the next general election.
Far from mobilising the rank and file, the union leaders have not even made public their exact demands on Labour. Apart from leaks in the Guardian, those are still "private and confidential".
Two demands are essential. Repeal the Tory anti-union laws, replace them by laws guaranteeing the right to strike and take effective trade-union action; and tax the rich!
The rich now pay less tax, in proportion to income, than the average working-class person.
Over their 17 years in office, the Tories shifted the tax system fundamentally. They abolished progressive income tax on the rich. They reduced taxes on business profits. They introduced or increased regressive indirect taxes, like VAT and poll tax, then council tax.
The richest 20% of households now pay out 34.6% of their income in direct and indirect taxes - less than the average for all households, which is 35.6%.
On taxation, exactly as on anti-union laws, New Labour has continued straight down the Tory road.
The unions should demand good, universal, publicly-owned, democratically-controlled public services, paid for by taxing the rich.
Would the rich respond by going into "tax exile", or organising a "strike of capital"? The answer then should be to take their wealth into public ownership, under democratic control, and without compensation. The wealth of the rich represents nothing but the accumulated profits of generations of exploitation of the workers who produced that wealth.
