For unions to be slack about fighting for higher wages is one thing. For unions to campaign for lower wages is quite another. But that is the new proposal from GMB general secretary Paul Kenny, a supposed left-winger.

"It is difficult", so Kenny told the Financial Times (15/12/08), "for union officials to stand up in front of members and recommend that they should lose pay". But Kenny is not daunted. "It is much easier just to say 'No, no, no' to employers. But it must be an adult dialogue...

"We must consider all the available tools in the box to keep companies viable and save jobs".

The Financial Times reports that the GMB has already persuaded workers to accept short-time working and corresponding pay cuts (same hourly rate) at Hawick Knitwear, JCB, and Cosalt Holiday Homes.

However, the FT adds: "The GMB, having agreed short-time working at Cosalt... was last month given 90 days' notice of 280 job losses at the Hull company".

Agreeing to pay cuts is likely to persuade bosses that a workforce has no will to resist, and will be easy meat for job cuts.

Kenny's approach is new in Britain. But unions in the USA have been negotiating "give-backs" for decades, all in the name of saving jobs. Result: jobs in the USA are still even more insecure than jobs in Europe, unemployment is high there, but real wages have been falling or stagnant in the USA for most of the last 30 years, as inequality has spiralled there.

The first response of any union when a boss says that he will shut down unless wages are cut should be to demand that the books be opened, so that the workers can see where the money has been and is going.

If the company is genuinely broke, then the workers should occupy the workplace and demand nationalisation of the enterprise without compensation, to be run under workers' control.

The recent occupation at Republic Windows in Chicago shows the power of this tactic. The company had already decided to shut down. You might think the workers had no bargaining power. Wrong. Even if bosses want to shut down a factory, they will also want to sell off the stock and the machines kept there. Physical possession of that stock and machines is a powerful bargaining chip.

In Argentina, some factories occupied by the workers when the bosses said they would shut them down in the economic crisis around 2000-1 are still running under workers' control - for example, Zanon.

Even if the gambit of accepting pay cuts should "work", it can only do so by giving the boss of the pay-cut factory a competitive advantage over the boss at a factory where the workers' pay hasn't been cut. At the very best it only moves the job cuts sideways.

And if workers all across industry accepted pay cuts, would that save jobs across the board? No. It would ensure that the stronger companies, the ones which survive the crisis, come out of the crisis with higher profit rates and lower worker resistance to profit-making. But in the meantime the general pay cuts will also cut consumer demand across the board, and so push even more workplaces into crisis.