SOCIALIST Not surprisingly the combination of mass unemployment and cut-backs has increasingly led to demands for a programme of public works - 66 per cent of all work in the construction industry is state financed. The successful UCATT motion on housing rounded off a week in which the TUC passed motions opposing cuts in most areas of social expen diture, and both the composite resolutions for and against the £6 curb called for a programme of public works.
But other than ritual delegations to 10 Downing Street and the gnashing of teeth amongst the Labour left' in Parliament, nobody has proposed how such a programme is to be carried out. In fact appeals are being made to Wilson to launch such a programme, when it is his Government which is the architect of the present attacks on the welfare A major problem in fighting back against the cuts and unemployment in the building industry is the nature of the industry itself. The majority of workers in the industry work for small contractors on small sites -averaging less than 50 workers. Only a quarter of the industry is unionised, and 'self-employment' is widespread. There is little in the way of plant and produce that building workers can hold and occupy in the fight for jobs, and 'lump' working is still a major prob lem.
All this means that a simple sectoral response from building workers will be inadequate. A class-wide response and organisation WE don Council, for example, currently pays 85 per cent of all its rents to the City in the form of interest repayments. As council houses are amortised over a period of 60 years, interest rates are by far the biggest item in the costs borne by housing revenue accounts, and supported by subsidies. Inflation has put interest rates through the roof.
It is largely because of this that the past decade has seen the current account deficit of local authority housing increase tenfold from £150 million to £1.5 billion. In some local authorities not even a complete end to building would cancel their housing deficits, as refinancing continues. The immediate cancellation of all local authority debts to the financial institutions and the state provision of interest-free loans is needed to finance a programme of public works which will bene fit the working class. FAR-RANGING Furthermore, the construction industry itself is dominated by a few giant firms which take all the major contracts, combined with inefficient, small-scale firms which really act as labour suppliers. To carry through the extensive measures envisaged, the total nationalisation without compensation of development land and the building industry is required To guarantee the success of these measures, it will be necessary to extend and co-ordinate the committees which draw up the lists of public works required on a national scale. The need for such a national workers' plan to