Dock Jobs

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4000 lockers' jobs hang in th: balance now the Port of London Authority (PLA) has declared its plan to virtually close the 'Upper' Royal, Millwall and West India Docks.

The number of registered dockers in London has already fallen from 24,000 to 8,000 in the last 10 years.

If the bosses figures are to be believed, the Upper Docks have made a loss of £13 million in the last three years, £8 million last year alone.

The PLA assets are claimed to have shrunk from £54 million to £2 million since 1973.

The world recession in trade is only part of the explanation.

The main reason is the growth in the size of ships being used, the reduction in general cargo handling as opposed to modern methods • of containerisation, palletisation and rollon and roll-off systems.

The Royals, bigger the St. Katharine and Surrey Docks which have already been closed and lucratively sold off to property speculation, take 12,000 ton ships.

The West India Docks take 8;000 tonners.

They might at a pinch take 50,000 ton ships. But the ships the PLA wants to use, and for which it would like to build new seaways and ports at Maplin, are for 100,000 ton ships.

Ports all over the world have been restructured to accomodate these giants.

MUR SERVICE Cuts hit narticularly hard at women .... Fur in a muted form these demands were incorporated into Labour Party policy, at a time when capitalism itself needed to attract women into wage-labour and to grant them increased freedom of movement.

They were later expressed when the Labour government legalised abortion, made divorce easier and introduced legal reform on sexual discrimination and equal pay.

Only infantile idealism could dismiss the gains contained within these reforms, but they were limited, partial, and hedged about with a dense thicket of restrictions.

Social democracy had helped to loosen the bonds The speed of technological change has accelerated, the last five years having seen as much change as' the previous 30 years.

At least 200. brand new smaller ships are lying up in the fjords of Norway-there is no market for them.

The recent tanker disasters show some of the social dangers involved in 100,000 tonners. They are slow and difficult to manoeuvre, taking as much as 5 miles to stop. ' But capitalist profitability cannot be held back for social factors.

End of The main attraction of the Maplin plan, which the PLA is still nurturing despite government veto, is that it would employ • пО more than 1,000 dockers, perhaps only 700.

It would entail the end of the dock registration scheme which the labour movement fought so long and bitterly to achieve.

Already thousands of jobs connected with and replacing registered dockers work are outside the registered system. of the family by mise. between needs and demands.

Yet already the persistence of capitalism's economic crisis meant that women were no longer required as wage-labourers.

Adjusting to new conditions, the Labour leaders slaved to defend the interests of capital.

First alone, then in coalition with the Liberals, Callaghan and the whole leadership of the Labour Party have presided over a series of major attacks on the working class, which have hit women workers in scheme its comprocapitalism's workers' attacks That was the significance of the betrayal of the dockers' strikes of 1972, 1974 and 1975. The aim of the five week strike in 1975 was to bring all unregistered docks and ports and all dock work within five miles of the riverside into the Docks Labour Scheme.

: Watered down Longshoremen in the US do in fact have a nine mile corridor of this type.

Thanks to the treachery of such "Labour" MPs as Brian Walden, this Ports Bill proposal got watered down to a half-mile corridor.

The five mile corridor, had it been implemented, would have put all work connected with the docks on a quite different basis.

It would have stopped employers fleeing from the registered strongholds.

Trebors, just the latest example, are about to leave West Ham in favour of unregistered Felixstowe.

Thousands of workers whose working conditions provide no protection against short time and lay offs, and whose very jobs are now in jeopardy through gion particular.

As unemployment has climbed, it is women who have suffered the heaviest loss of jobs. The cuts in public spending have been a major contribution to this increase.

Faced with permanent unemployment and driven back into the home, women have there experienced the effects of inflation which has served to make housework an even more arduous occupation.

The public spending cuts have added to these burdens by throwing on to the family more of the responsibility for the care of children, the old and the sick. the threatened closure of the Upper Docks, would have been in a position to defend themselves as an integrated and organised labour force.

Redeployment

Such workers include container depot workers, railway workers, lorry drivers and loaders, in firms dotted all around the Dockland and Lea Valley area, but judiciously outside the half mile corridor.

Redeployment without worsened conditions would have been possible rather than redundancies.

No doubt the PLA, politicians and trade union bureaucrats saw in the five mile corridor the very embryo of what they most fear-the basis for a fight for a nationalised, integrated transport system, under workers control.

It would have brought an extension, rather than the destruction of the registered scheme:

It would have heralded the fight for the PLA to be a body of delegates elected from the shop floor.

With these measures the Labour traitors have . done far more to restore the family and to continue the oppression of women than their 'progressive' parliamentary acts did to reform these elements of capitalism.

Now they seek to cover up this treachery with words of cosy comfort and the smooth pieties of wellpracticed hypocrisy.

Callaghan's speech was way a freak outburst.

Central theme

A decision has clearly been taken that the rehabilitation of the family will be central theme in the Labour Party's electoral campaign. Labour Weekly has already enthused with uneasy sarcasm on this 'devilishly clever electoral gambit':

Such proposals must be fiercely resisted as part of the struggle against this programme for attacking the working class to defend capitalism.

Every step must be taken to break the repressive and reactionary influence of family life.

The policies of betrayal can be fought only with a socialist programme.

We call for:

*Work sharing on full pay, linked to a massive programme of public works, to end unemployment and redundancies, and to bring women back into social *A sliding scale of wages, to be assessed by elected It is still open to the TGWU leaders to fight for these policies.

Most of the workers in the industries concerned are in the. TGWU. But the TGWU bureaucrats Fred Bryden and Ron Todd; who have sat on the PLA Board for years, and who have participated in the documents pleading for the virtual closure of these docks, consider themselves (in their own words) not as trade union representatives, but as appointees of Her Majesty's Government.

Hard job

Not once have they passed • on information or reported back to the docks branches despite resolutions last year demanding that they should.

The PLA, government and trade union bureaucrats know that they will have a hard job carrying through 4.000 redundancies.

The East End Labour MPs Peter Shore, lan Mikardo and Nigel Spearing ate likely to look for delaying tactics.

. The TGWU still committed to national Family' specialist Thatcher committees of trade unionists . with the full participation of housewives, who can be brought forward from domestic isolation in this way.

*A sliding scale of public spending and a massive injection of funds into the social services to meet the needs of workers, including those facilities required by working women-free abortion on demand, full time creches and nursery education.

*The immediate abolition of all forms of legislation that authorise repression or discrimination on the grounds of sex or sexuality. strike action in the event of any registered dock workers being forced off the register.

When Wallace's, the last private employer in the Royals, folded last month, making 330 redundant, consultations were immediately held between the TGWU, Dock Labour Board and PLA.

Fe:

Rather tha • provoke a confrontation at that stage all 330 were found jobs, distributed on a percentage basis around the various London docks.

No employer refused to take their share-despite overmanning.

Fear of the problems facing them lies behind the PLA saying that in carrying out changes it will look for:

:. the positive cooperation of employees, trade unions and the National Dock Labour Board"

Undoubtedly Cuckney, PLA chairman, renowned for his hatchet job on the Liverpool Docks and for "sorting out' the scandals of the Crown Agents, has a carefully worked • out mark Predictably . it is the dockers themselves rather than the TGWU bureaucrats who have resisted his invitation to make a joint approach to the government for £68 million.

It is the threat of dockers' resistance that places a question mark over the PLA's plans. A recent booklet from the PLA, The Challenge of the Future, makes this clear:

"The present situation is unsatisfactory in every way (except perhaps for those who are exploiting it to their own advantage at the expense of others).

It provides an unsatisfactory workplace for the PLA employees in which frustration, fear, cynicism and discontent are rife"

This "discontent" which the employers fear, must now be turned into a clear political strategy to defend dockers' jobs.

Industrial action

The demand must be raised for a conference of all workplaces connected with the docks and transport.

Such a conference must be the first step to launching industrial action on a scale which can force the opening of the books of the port authorities to elected union committees, expose the corruption and profiteering at the expense of workers and implement a workers plan for an integrated transport system based on the social nationalisation without compensation of all firms involved.

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SOCIALIST PRESS. heanesdas 31 Mas I9-s