Tubeworker reported recently on management's tiny-violin-playing, tear-jerking claim that, due to our austere economic times, workers shouldn't expect a pay rise out of the talks which began recently (see here for more).
But in fact, we live in a society of immense wealth, where there's enough money sloshing around to guarantee a life of relative luxury for everyone. The problem is who controls is.
The HSBC bank is currently under fire because of documents which show that a Swiss subsidiary facilitated, helped, and even prompted tax avoidance and money-laundering. About £80 billion was held in those Swiss bank accounts. That’s the equivalent of £3,000 for each household in the UK. If the money had been taxed at a high rate, we’d be visibly better off.
HSBC and other banks have already got into lots of trouble for other shady dealings. Over the five years 2009-13, since the 2008 crash put banks under closer scrutiny, HSBC and three other big British banks, RBS, Barclays, and Lloyds, have paid or set aside £36 billion for fines or settling claims for misdeeds.
That’s £1,400 for each household in the UK.
On the latest figures, total household wealth in the UK is £9.5 trillion. A large part of that is homes which people own or part-own: the disposable, fluid wealth is only part of it. The £9.5 trillion is an underestimate, because many of the super-rich hold their loot not as “household wealth” but in the formal ownership of companies and trusts which they control.
Even with the underestimate, though, official figures show that the top 10% own 44% of that household wealth. If the wealth of the top 10% were distributed evenly, then the average household would be 60% better off.
Banks hold around £20 trillion in financial assets — enough to buy up all the country’s physical assets three times over — or the equivalent of about £800,000 for each household in the UK.
Out of those assets flow huge incomes for individuals. Bankers’ bonuses over the five years to 2014 totalled about £80 billion. Or, to put it another way, over those five years about £3,000 was extracted from the labour of the average household to expand the luxury of just a few bankers.
It’s not just financiers. Bosses of the top 350 companies average £1.9 million a year each in pay, bonuses, and other deals; bosses of the top 100 companies, £2.8 million.
The banks are the pinnacle of a system in which the majority labour — on a living wage if we’re lucky, less if we’re not, but in any case no more than we need to keep going — in order to create ever-more-dizzying wealth for a tiny minority.
Of course, seizing the wealth of the banks and redistributing it to pay for social services and improved working-class living standards isn't an "immediate" answer for LU workers - at least not in the sense that our union could submit it as part of their claims in the pay talks! But the massive wealth inequality in our society is part of the context for understanding where we're at. Tube unions should unite with others across the labour-movement to build a working-class political campaign that highlights this inequality, and advocates expropriation of the banks as the answer. A movement that raises the idea can one day become a movement that implements it.
This article is based on an editorial from Solidarity 354, 18 February 2015. For the original, click here.
