Right winger lefeate on key post

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For the first time the TGWU has held elections for the eleven seats on the Leyland Cars National Joint Negotiating Committee.

This is the body that will do all the corporate negotiations in Leyland Cars.

The elections were held at a delegate meeting, where each plant was allowed one delegate per thousand TGWU members.

• Out... Roche Previously, right-winger Bill Roche, senior steward from the Cowley Body Plant and one of the Joint Secretarios of the "participation" Cars Council, was one of the selected TGWU representatives.

But at last Thursday's election, Roche was voted off the Committee.

Elected

Elected in his place was Cowley Assembly Plant convenor Bob Fryer-who is one of the nine militant Cowley stewards still under threat of TGWU disciplinary action for such absurd and trumped up "crimes" as walking out of a meeting of the Oxford District Committee.

The Chairman of that District Committee land a member of its Finance and General Purposes Committee which is still pressing charges against Fryer and the rest of the Cowley 9) is Bill Roche.

In... Fryer Workers wanting to fight to defend their living standards now face a fresh obstacle, created by union leaders who claim to oppose the 5% pay limits.

It is the argument that pay claims should be related not to workers' needs, but to the needs of the employer, his "profitability", his "ability to pay"

Among the chief exponents of this line is TGWU leader Moss Evans. He has supported the Ford £20 claim largely on the basis of Fords' £246 million profit.

- And,_like other TUC ing", , and continuing to talk on wage control with the But on less profitable or supposedly "bankrupt" firms like Vauxhall and Leyland, Evans has stayed silent.

Lumbered

His policy of asking only for what the bosses can "afford" would lumber workers in many such firms with an endless series of puny and inadequate rises.

Last weekend, however, Vauxhall workers at Ellesmere Port, in supporting their negotiators' call to reject the company's derisory 4½% pay offer and strike for more than the Phase 4 limit, took a very different stand.

The mass meeting decisions by 8,000 TGWU and AUEW members show a determination nrst ana IOTemost to defend real wages and regain living standards slashed by three years of rigid pay limits.

This determination is shared by the Ford strikers and by whole sections of the working class who will undoubtedly respond to a clear lead and a fighting perspective.

But as the vote to reject the strike call at Vauxhall's smaller Dunstable plant showed, this militant mood within the working class does not mean that strikes to defeat the 5% policy are in any way automatic.

Perspective

Workers who have witnessed TUC officials policing three years of wage controls need to be convinced that their leaders have a real perspective for winning their demands.

The vague Vauxhall claim for a "substantial increase", and the perpetual talk by both negotiators and convenors of possible.

DOIT "phony" productivity deals to provide extra cash without the hardship of a prolonged strike, expose grave problems of leadership which confront not only Vauxhall workers but the working class as a whole.

Illusion

The Tory press and mass media have gone out of their way to create the illusion that productivity deals are a simple fraud which enable the employer to hand out more money.

The reality is very different. Productivity deals mean no more than selling jobs and hard won conditions in exchange for a few extra pounds in the pay packetpounds which are soon whittled away by inflation, leaving only increased workand increased profits in eues hands of the employers.

And the defenders of 'productivity deals are also the most consistent