Productivity Deals Sell Jobs and Conditions

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Scenes from last week's mass picket at Sandersons-see article: page 11 threaten some plants with a 12% cut in labour.

In doing so, the employers are trading on the reluctance of the trade union bureaucracy to lead serious action to destroy the 5% policy once and for all. certainly strengthen employers and particularly management throughout the public sector.

It will redouble their determination to concede not an inch beyond the 5% limit unless each further penny is paid for by Todd cuts, closures and speed-up.

As claims from 1.4 million public sector workers and 120,000 BL carworkers fall due for settlement, and as union negotiators prepare if possible to abandon the remainder of the Ford £20/35 hour week claim in exchange for a rewording of the 12.5% offer, workers everywhere must be on their guard against any form of productivity dealing.

"Attendance allowances" may seem innocuous, but are in effect a means of cutting labour pools and further disciplining and intimidating the workforce, penalising them for disputes, and whipping up hostility against sections that cause layoffs.

If any employer wants to pay more than the 5% limit, then union leaders must insist that this is paid openly, without productivity strings of any kind.

Ron Todd, TGWU chairman of the Ford negotiators, is on record dismissing productivity deals as offering workers no more than "a raffle ticket" for possible money in the future.

The price of the "raffle ticket" is the, axeing of shop floor jobs and the end of working conditions hard won in years The possible "prize" is a few measly extra pounds in the pay packet, produced through increased exploitation, and rapidly eaten away by inflation.

But, while their leaders toy with such ideas and continue locked in talks on wage-cutting with Callaghan, workers continue to show that, given a perspective and a firm lead, they are prepared to fight in defence of living standards.

Only the day after the Luton Plant voted to give the management seven days ultimatum, demanding they make response to the plant's £27 across-the-board pay claim.

Yet to meet But in the nearby Body Plant and in many other Leyland plants stewards have yet to meet to discuss the company's failure to respond to similar claims.

The struggle against the Phase 4 pay limits and its tacit defenders in the trade union bureaucracy is one which faces workers with the inadequacy of right wing and Stalinist convenors and officials who have accepted three years of rigid wage controls, and who now have no strategy or perspective to offer.

The fight must be taken up for the pressing of claims designed to regain lost living standards and protect this year's increases against inflation through cost of living clauses, with no loss of jobs or conditions.

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vote last week, a mass meeting at Leyland's Cowley Assembly