Yorks pay battle

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Over 1,000 shop floor workers at the Hickson and Welch chemical plant in Castleford walked out last week in pursuit of a pay claim.

Four picket. lines were established on the factory gates, and drivers at both of the firm's main transport contractors have pledged support for the strike:

TGWU convenor Dave Newton told Socialist Press that the issues at stake involve:

"an effective productivity scheme, a guaranteed week, provision for people off sick and a realistic wage structure. But, above all, we are on strike for basic union rights including the right to negotiate on behalf of our members"

In a letter to employees the previous week, management assessed the value + these demands as a 17.5% increase in pay and claimed that this could result in closure.

Newton discounted the pathetic pleading of management that their profits have fallen in the last six months by 35%:

"The profits of this company have continued to increase during the past ten yéars. What the company means is that predicted profits have not materialised"

The management letter, an extraordinary document, tries every conceivable argument for rejecting the TGWU demandsfrom attempting to prove that all employees are better off, through warning that government sanctions could ruin the history of the company the firm if it paid up, to a potted precarious position the chemical market and its generosity to its workers.

Even pleas for the pensioners and a Len Murray-style warning that the strikers might unleash spiralling " inflation are thrown in, along with the call for a secret ballot.

Workers have decisively rejected these management arguments. But the claim lacks any clear policy to protect workers' wages against inflation —which all independent forecasters are expecting to rise sharply during the coming year.

Such a policy--the demand for a cost-of-living clause in the pay agreement to compensate for the rising cost of living as monitored by an elected committee of trade unionists and housewives-is essential as increasing numbers of workers follow the Hickson and Welch strikers into struggles against the Phase 4 pay limit.

It must be fought for to defend living standards regardless of the profitability or losses incurred by the employerswhich in any case can only be assessed if the struggle is taken up to open the books of the employer to elected trade union committees.