HOUNSLOW WORK-IN ENDS Sell out deal at House of Holland

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campaign to re-open it as a community hospital.

Throughout this time the occupation was faced by endless manoeuvres against them by the AHA, culminating in the notorious raid, in which patients were snatched from their beds without warning to themselves or their relatives and bundled out to a fleet of private ambulances.

Those ten NALGO members who assisted in this action are currently appealing against their expulsion from the union.

Carl Brecker's initiative to continue the occupation, coupled with an immediate and: successful appeal for national 1 The union recognition strike at the House of Holland warehouse has been called off by TGWU full-time officials following a sellout deal cooked up between them and the employer.

Though it had been clear for some time that the union bureaucracy were making moves in this direction, it was not until last Tuesday that they moved in for the kill.

The Northampton and Oxford-based officials Bill Morris and Geoff Hulett called the sacked workers together, making sure they included what was by then a majority who had abandoned the struggle since it began two months previously.

Morris, (whose record of activities on behalf of local employers has included most notably, supervising an all out management-union offensive against the militant shop stewards leadership in the Export Packing Service plant next door to the House of Holland) proceeded to announce the terms of the "settlement' He said the firm would pay varying amounts as compensation which the strikers could accept or reject as they pleased, but as far as the TGWU was concerned the union had done pretty well as agreement had been reached and the dispute was over.

Well aware that most of the people there had no interest other than such a buy-off, he was able to brush aside the bitter opposition from the group of workers who had kept the strike going from its earliest stages.

Regional Secretary Determined to hold out as long as possible, the group confronted Region 5 Secretary Brian Mathers and demanded . the union continue its backing.

Mathers reply was that he had full confidence in Morris and was prepared to support whatever actions he had taken.

There is no doubt that bureaucracy's desperate The key book for understanding post-war Stalinism. 166pp, £1.75 plus 20p post and packing from WSL, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR I would issues. I Name. Address efforts to end the strike had been increased by the success of the recent mass picket and the prospect of another one on the horizon for which bigger forces were being mobilised.

Justified Hulett now justifies the betrayal by saying the company had threatened to. close down unless the action was called off.

The lesson for workers in similar actions could not be clearer and confirms the role of the union bureaucracy in the fight to defend basic rights.

Hulett like to receive.. enclose the sur Send to: Socialist Pri Dartmouth Park Hill, London NWS IHR pay A mass meeting at Swan Hunter's Tyneside shipyards last week followed Govan shipbuilders in throwing out plans to replace the present pay structure with a three-grade system based on a single set of national negotiations.

At present there are 168 separate sets of negotiations covering trades in British Shipbuilders yards.

The new proposal involves minimum wage levels of only £80 for craftsmen, £70 for semi-skilled and £62 for unskilled.

But in order to introduce it Govan workers would be faced with a 2½ year standstill on their wages, and other shipyard workers with a Phase 4 increase of only 2%.

The reactionary scheme is backed to the hilt by leaders of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, by the employers and by the It offers to workers the prospect of indefinite sacrifice in an all-out bid to make this crisis-hit industry profitable.

Meanwhile the compensation payments to the old owners, the bank interest charges, and the profits raked in by private suppliers continue to be guaranteed..

In rejecting the new pay structure, workers must also demand the books of British : Shipbuilders are opened to elected committees of trade unionists in order to reveal the exploitation of the industry for private profit.

On this basis the fight in defence of jobs, wages and conditions can be seen to connect with the fight for the nationalisation, without compensation, under workers' management of the engineering industry as a whole.

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