Britain's big companies ended 2011 having paid a record £67bn worth in dividends to their shareholders, while sitting on a cash pile worth over £240bn.

By contrast, working class households ended the year with record low savings and record high debts. Even those workers who managed to remain in work, had their standard of living slashed, as their wages were increased by far less than the 5%+ official inflation figure - when they were not frozen or cut. And to make matters worse, the new year started with another raft of price and fare increases.

A general attack on wages

Over the past year, inflation has, together with job and pension cuts, been the capitalists' preferred way of making us pay for their crisis.

Inflation allows the bosses to kill two birds with one stone. They can protect (or even increase) their profit margins by increasing prices in line with, or above, rising costs. And, at the same time, they can use inflation to reduce their real wage costs. This leaves workers to foot the bill, with reduced purchasing power. And, despite the Bank of England's repeated pledge that the inflation level will "soon" be brought down to its 2% target, there is no sign of this happening in the near future.

Now, however, there are more and more attempts by employers to go further than that, by imposing outright wage cuts on workers.

The first attacks in this new wave came in the public sector, especially in local government. In Birmingham, Southampton and Doncaster, among others, council workers were given the "choice" of signing up to new contracts involving lower pay rates, or facing the sack.

More attacks have emerged since, this time in the private sector. In construction, over 5,000 electricians and other skills are threatened with a wage cut which could reach up to 35% for some.

Likewise, just as it was hailing rising sales and profits, car manufacturing giant Ford announced plans to introduce a 2-tier system within its workforce, whereby, among other things, future recruits would earn 25% less for the same job.

Similar attempts at cutting wages are being made by smaller companies up and down the country, using the same blackmail over jobs that was common in the first year of the crisis.

Other companies, including big ones - like some train operating companies and car manufacturers BMW and Jaguar-Land-Rover, among others - have taken advantage (or are trying to) of a tailor-made "loophole" in the European Agency Workers directive, to create another form of 2-tier system in the shape of lower paid "permanent temps".

The class struggle is the answer

Whether we listen to the ConDems or to Labour, we hear the same tune: solving unemployment depends entirely on the "goodwill" of private companies. New jobs, they claim, will only be created if profits start rising again and, therefore, if labour costs go down. The only difference between them, is that the ConDems claim companies need to be "encouraged" by slashing workers' rights, whereas Labour proposes to do this by granting them a National Insurance Contributions holiday.

As if the bosses were part of the solution, when, in fact, they have been the real problem, since long before the crisis even broke out. Today, profits have regained a level which, for most big companies is comparable to what it was in the run-up to the crisis. Has this led the bosses to re-hire the hundreds of thousands they made redundant over the past three years? Of course not!

Far from investing and creating jobs, companies carry on closing facilities and extracting as much sweat as they possibly can, out of a much reduced workforce. This is how they have restored their profits - thanks to increasing the level of exploitation of the working class.

And what the present wave of attacks against wages shows, is that having boosted their profits by reducing headcounts as much as possible, the bosses are now aiming at boosting them even further by butchering the wages and pensions of the remaining workers, in addition to screwing more work out of them.

Cameron has made a point of telling us that the coming year will be "difficult". But we can make it "difficult" for the exploiters too. The capitalists can be forced to use their huge stockpile of wealth to create the jobs which are vitally needed and pay decent, inflation-proofed wages. 2012 could be the year when, by using the weapons of the class struggle, workers stop the bosses' profit drive and start regaining lost ground.