Addressing the annual Congress in Liverpool, Dave McCrossen – Usdaw Deputy General Secretary said: “With the ongoing cost of living crisis, talk of rising prices has never been far from the news. As prices have increased, it has been trade unions ensuring that wages, pensions and welfare payments keep up. However, throughout this whole debate, our wage negotiations and our representations to Government, we need an effective measure of how much prices are rising and impacting households.
 
“Unfortunately, over the past thirteen years, the Conservatives have been taking us further away from a measure that reflects the impact of price increases on households. Instead, they have become increasingly and indefensibly reliant on measures of inflation which gauge the general performance of the economy.
 
“The Consumer Price Index measure, which the Government now favours, was designed to compare one international economy to another. Whilst it can do this with some accuracy, it does not offer a full picture of how much our members' wages need to increase to protect their living standards.
 
“CPI and CPIH are flawed measures for our members, consistently underestimating inflation and not truly representative of their lives. For example, the CPI and CPIH measures include the spending of the top four percent of earners and the spending of those people holidaying from abroad in the UK. As a result, the CPI measures over-represent changes to the price of luxury goods, such as yacht maintenance costs or stockbroker fees. They under-estimate the impact of price increases on essentials, such as food and rent.
 
“All of these issues show why we need to protect and defend RPI against Government’s attacks.”
 
Notes for editors:
 
Usdaw (Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers) is the UK's fifth biggest trade union with over 350,000 members. Most Usdaw members work in the retail sector, but the union also has many members in transport, distribution, food manufacturing, chemical industry and other trades www.usdaw.org.uk
 
For Usdaw press releases visit: http://www.usdaw.org.uk/news and you can follow us on Twitter @UsdawUnion