Mass meeting votes for £27 claim COWLEY WORKERS CHALLENGE PHASE 4

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In a dual challenge to Phase 4 of wage control and to attempts by management and union leaders to end plant bargaining in British Leyland, a mass meeting of manual workers at Leyland's Cowley Assembly Plant last week voted almost unanimously to submit a £27 pay claim for their November 1 Also embodied in the claim, which offers a lead to every other Leyland factory, are demands for a cost of living clause to give full protection against inflation, a 35-hour week without loss of pay and improved sick pay, holidays and pensions.

The massive support for this claim in the factory ultects riot only the particgrievances the Cowley workforce but also the head of pressure on wages building up throughout the working class as a whole.

Already up and down the country a succession of local strikes and struggles are breaking out on pay claims, grading claims and resistance to productivity "strings"

Ford claim

This Thursday Ford management are to present their response to a union demand for a 25% increase.

And, under pressure from their membership, leaders of nearly 1.5 million local authority manual workers are now tabling claims for a 33% increase, including a call for a £60 minimum wage.

The unilateral 5% pay limit decreed in July by Chancellor Denis Healey hangs by an increasingly tenuous thread-the ability of TUC leaders to prevent their militant members engaging in all-out struggle to win demands.

But with three years' bitter experience of varied bureaucratic strategies of betrayal, and with such a completely unacceptable pay ceiling imposed by Healey, the stemming of the pay tide will prove no mean task.

It has been made even harder by the complete failure of AUEW leaders to carry through their threat to expel 32 rebel striking toolmakers at Leyland's SU Carburettors plant.

They have found themselves unable to brow beat or drive out this section of workers-and this defeat will strengthen every militant section of workers wanting to take action in defence of their living standards.

Hell-bent

But rather than bow to this feeling within the working class, the Callaghan cabinet is hell-bent on enstandards and linked to cost of living clauses to defend them against inflation must now be combined by all sections of workers with a THE ADOPTION of the Cowley claim also carries far-reaching implications for other workers in British Leyland, Right wing and Stalinist convenors throughout BL cars have been holding back on submitting claims for the November review hoping to worm in by the back door a "joint" claim that would effectively introduce national level pay bargaining a year earlier than planned.

The Company, overjoyed at this prospect of abolishing plant bargaining and negotiating only with national officials who are not answerable to shop floor workers, went as far as suggesting that it would not negotiate at plant level in Cowley.

This would have been tantamount to tearing up the Company's own proposals on pay 3 must be learned.

The 5% pay limit can be broken, if the maximum number of workers take action now on their claims, negotiations which were accepted in a ballot vote last October, and which specified that "existing negotiating arrangements should continue on wages until parity is achieved in November 1979"

But after the mass meeting vote at Cowley, management took only one hour to retreat from this stand and to agree to meet the stewards' negotiating committee this week.

Leyland carworkers in other plants must seize on this setback to the plans of the Company and the convenors who so loyally serve them, and ensure that plant level pay claims to regain and defend their living standards are drawn up at once and submitted for the November 1 review.

There must be a fight against all forms of wage control and for a programme to answer the needs of the working class is fighting to build such a leadership.

PHOTO: John Sturrock, Report Plotter: Derek Robinson every attempt to take power from the stewards at plant level into the control of officials or convenors, who have been sucked right into management through 'worker participation

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