SUCIALIST RESS JOURNALISTS IN Phase 4 relies THE FRONT LINE on TUC leaders

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more important sectors voted to come out.

Only 200 NUJ members in the provinces are now scabbing on the strike out of a total membership of more than 8,000.

Reversed The Liverpool Post and Echo journalists who had at first voted against the strike have now come out and Coventry and Wolverhampton journalists also reversed earlier decisions not to strike.

Rarely have arguments that the membership were not prepared to fight been so clearly shown to be false.

But the failure of print unions to tell their members not to cross picket. lines looks, certain to prolong the action and make its outcome uncertain.

Work normally

Individual chapels are left to fight for local supporting action from printers who are told by the head offices to 'work normally?.

Since all the print chapels are committed to free collective bargaining; and since all print union members will be demanding an increase of well over 5% when their review dates fall due during 1979, this instruction is a clear sabotage of the wages struggle.

Print union leaders should be forced to bring their members out in a united fight against. the Government pay policy.

Arrests

There have been a number of arrests around the country and increasing violence from police against pickets.

With the strike solid the leadership of the NUJ must PHOTO: Laurence Sparham, IFL now take decisive steps to see that it is won.

Scabs at the Press Association-where about 100 members out of 212 are on strike-and at other places must be faced with an immediate choice-obey the strike call or be expelled from the union.

Mass pickets must be coordinated at centres where NUJ members are still working.

Demands for financial. and practical support from other unions must also be stepped up.

Chapels should also begin to prepare for a new meeting of FoCs-not to discuss whether the strike naersons Todd Journalists on the picket line goes on, but to plan for making the strike more solid.

Individual employers are beginning to make offers separately from the Newspaper Society.

The Birmingham. Post management have agreed a £20 rise with their London office journalists, although the chapel has decided to continue the strike there.

Birmingham Post journalists are picketing the main office in Birmingham after the chapel voted not to support the strike last week. The numbers not crossing the picket line have been growing.

hitch Has the Sanderson strike been won?

Despite premature press statements that after 19 months Forklift truck boss Roy Sanderson had conceded to demands for reinstatement and As a massive army of nearly 2 million workers gathers for a renewed assault on Phase 4, the TUC leaders continue to prove themselves either in the pay Since Chancellor Healey laid down his 5% limit ultimatum in August a whole succession of manoeuvres, delays, and open sabotage has ensured that rather than waging a frontal assault on the pay limits, sections of workers have been forced to go 'over the top' in strike action one at a time.

During the nine-week Ford strike, leaders representing over 1 million local authority workers sat tight on their £60/ 35 hour week claim as their November 1 review date went by.

Negotiators at Vauxhall went one step further, and, with no preparation or attempt to clarify the membership on a confusing management offer, called in the middle of talks for strike action, hoping to be voted down.

Abandoned

In British Leyland, collaboration between management, union officials and convenors has effectively abandoned the £100 per week pay claims lodged by most car plants, and substituted a ballot on a 5% pay offer linked to a job-cutting productivity, grading and "parity" deal.

And the Bakers Union had been on official strike for four weeks before TGWU and GMWU bureaucrats even went so far as instructing their members not to cross picket lines.

Despite this collective misleadership, heavy blows have been struck at Phase 4-particularly in Fords and British Oxygen.

But the TUC's 'one at a time" strategy has ensured that the 5% limit is alive and kicking throughout the public sector and in much of private industry.

The New Year will see a renewed surge of struggles as 1.5 million local authority and health workers, 200,000 postal workers and thousands of tanker drivers and lorry drivers line up behind their claims in excess of 5%.

While these workers will draw strength from the power of the Ford strike and the tenacity of the bakers' struggle against low pay, they must draw the key lesson out of these strikes which were both led entirely from above by national union officials:

Weakened The failure to develop independent strike committees in each factory and workplace led in each case to a weakened resistance to settlements which fall far short of the claim and include stringent penalty clauses and other conditions.

This lesson must be learned above all in the public sector; PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Healey Maddox where union members are going to have to wage an organised fight to get any serious action underway at all.

NUPE leader Alan Fisher has already given strong hints that he intends to implement little more than token "guerrilla" actions and protest stoppages which will do nothing to win the claim but much to demoralise the membership.

Cross pickets

Another reason why elected strike committees are essential is to combat the tacit agreement now in force within the TUC which has made it standard practice to cross other union's picket lines.

Organised scabbing by drivers, engineers and white collar staff characterised the whole of the bakers' strike-and led to mass arrests and polic violence against pickets.

And in the provincial journalists' strike, print workerssome of the best organised workers in the country-are under instruction to. "work normally" by crossing NUJ picket lines!

But it need not be like this. Knowing the outcry there would be if they tried such tactics in the Ford strike, union officials came together to give a model display of total blacking action-halting almost the whole of the firm's European operation.

Strikers must demand such official support become the rule, not a near-unique exception. .. In doing So, they themselves up against not simply the obvious' right wing leaders, who make no secret of their support for wage controls but also those who rattie out fine sounding left' speeches at rallies and press conferences.

Pulled back

Even bakers' leader Sam Maddox, whose rhetoric left most "lefts" standing, and who had seemed determined to fight the strike to the finish, pulled back from open criticism of the TUC leaders who were supervising scabbing against his members.

The reality is that the TUC right wing are attempting to repeat their performance in isolating the firemen's strike against Phase 3, in the hopes of preserving Phase 4.

To defeat such sabotage, strike leaders must be called on to put their 'left' words into practice and appeal to and mobilise the rank and file membership of the other unions involved, calling on them to come out too in a united fight against the 5% limit, and in defiance of the 12 month rule.

And, since the council workers' and health service pay claim means a direct confrontation with the government over the 5% limit, the role of Labour's so-called "left" | MPs must come to the fore.

Last week in a deliberate effort to get themselves off the hook on the 5% pay policy, a handful of 'lefts' consciously talked out a Tory motion which condemned the use of government sanctions against Fords.

The fact is that neither léft" union leaders nor 'left' MPs have any alternative perspective or policy to offer the working class.

They reject the vital demand for catching up pay claims to be protected against inflation through cost-of-living clauses.

: They accept instead the general need for workers to make certain "sacrifices" , and the state to pay out subsidies, in order to preserve the profits of private employers.

They reject the call for supposedly 'bankrupt' employers to be forced to open their books to workers' committees to prove the case for nationalisation without compensation.

Instead they argue for import controls and National Enterprise Board investment to preserve "British" industry.

And for these reasons they accept, in practice, the right of Callaghan and Healey to defy the labour movement and implement their Tory policies without interference.

This is why Labour lefts' refuse to fight for their removal from office.

And it is why in the struggles to come workers must break from these leaders and build a revolutionary party that is prepared to fight for the independent interests of the working class, for the oyerthrow of capitalism and for a planned socialist economy.

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of the enemy or, at best, the world's worst generals.