Barely a week goes by without some boss complaining about the "high cost" of employing workers. Apparently we have too many rights, too, preventing the economy from growing!

    This week, it was "Lord" Wolfson, the boss of clothing retailer Next, who told the government it should reverse the rise in employers' national insurance contributions, and reverse the minimum wage rises!

    Each of these rich bosses - Wolfson will earn £7 million this year - claims to be a "victim" of government policy. According to them, the government has made it far too expensive to employ workers. For instance Next has been "forced" to use "self-scanning lockers for customers to return items instead of having staff on tills". Nothing to do, of course, with helping their profits rise to £1.2bn this year!

    In fact all these bosses are very pleased to be able to blame the government for making them do exactly what they have always done! That is, cut jobs, cut wages and conditions and employ workers on worse and worse contracts.

    By now, overall (official) unemployment has risen to 5%, from just over 4% this time last year, while for 16 to 24-year-olds it's 16.2%, the highest since 2014! And these figures ignore the more than 9 million people who are "economically inactive".

    As the cost of living has been skyrocketing for the past b years, while wages haven't, it's obvious that workers have less to spend. Businesses, rather than taking a cut in profits, cut jobs instead. So the retail economy takes a hit...

    When Rachel Reeves suggested voluntary price caps for staple foods last week, the M&S boss said this was "preposterous!™. She immediately backed down! Instead, she'll now cut tariffs on certain food imports and announced a "Great British Summer Savings" program to cut VAT on children's tickets for transport and entertainment in August. A drop in the ocean and almost certainly eaten up by the rise in the energy price cap in July, expected to be an average of £200...

    Never mind, though, all these bosses and CEOs want to portray themselves as the real victims of this cost of living crisis! Next's profits of £1.2bn are hardly shabby! But Shell and BP profits - in just the first three months of this year - were already in the billions. Between January and March, BP doubled its profits to £2.4bn, and Shell was up to £5.1bn!

    The share of the national wealth going to workers is falling drastically, while more and more cash ends up in the hands of the richest capitalists and their companies. The working class will have to force them to turn out their pockets!