[CHRISTMAS ON THE PICKET LINE Socialist Press looks…]

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CHRISTMAS ON THE PICKET LINE Socialist Press looks at two recognition disputes Sandersons: re-run of Grunwicks a snook at The continuing defiance of the Transport and General Workers Union by the bosses and scabs at Sandersons Forklift plant near Skegness is a challenge of prime importance to the labour movement.

For 19 months factory owner Roy Sanderson has stood out against demands for the reinstatement of workers sacked for organising the union and taking strike action in defence of Phil Gillet, their victimised shop steward.

Last Wednesday, having given ten days previously an assurance to TGWU National Organiser Ron Todd that he would concede both reinstatement and union recognition, Sanderson publicly snubbed the two million strong union by going back on that agreement.

This was done under the guise of concern for the scab workforce, who had been involved in an anti-union protest 'strike' in company time the previous week and had voted against a settlement in a management-run factory ballot.

Those who have followed other unionisation struggles over the past few years will not fail to notice more than a passing similarity between the Sandersons developments and what happened in .the battles at Grunwick, against Trust Houses Forte and : the . still-running Garners strike in London.

Not only was the TGWU the union involved, wholly or partly, but the employers tactics are seen to be almost identical.

For example, the recent "demonstration" organised by Sanderson management was precisely the same method used at THF's Night Out club in Birmingham during that six month long strike in, 1977, when the company was resisting official strikes both there and at hotels in Sheffield and Oxford.

Defeat

It was those actions which ended in outright defeat with the union's membership in the firm wiped out, that revealed starkly the limits of support from the union leadership.

Like at Sandersons, solidarity blacking action was the only effective weapon that could make victory possible.

Yet this policy, which had been the strikers' demand from the beginning, was only ever taken up in one area with supplies of petrol being cut off from Forte's motorway service station near Birmingham.

Regional Officer Alan Law, took a typical 'left' stance and demagogically declared his determination to win, even bringing 200 or more drivers from his now broken-up 5/35 branch for periodic shows of strength on the Night Out picket on Saturday evenings.

Though limited, the blacking an immediate effect which brought a storm of abuse from the media.

It also resulted in the union national leadership bringing Law to heel and getting him to call it off.

That capitulation put paid to any chance of victory.

Not the least significant link concerns the involvement of the National Association for Freedom.

A major factor in the failure to implement blacking was the union leaders fear of court orders and injunctions from the NAFF who had publicly championed the empioyers cause both in the hotel strikes and at further connection between these anti-union companies and NAFF was the common theme of the strikers threatening to infringe the 'rights' of the 'loyal' scabs.

THF spent thousands of pounds in a media campaign to that effect.

George Ward at Grunwick made it a main plank of his resistance, and like his successor Sanderson, turned increasingly to Franco-style referendums to back it up.

Ward had, of course, refused to accept the outcome of the ACAS ballot which deciared in the union's favour-just as Sanderson ignored the result of a similar pro-union vote in the period leading up to the strike.

This new-found concern for workers' "democratic rights" (in every case discovered only after the employers had carried out mass. sackings) has also emerged, coincidentally, in Theré, almost on the same day as at Sandersons, employer Cyril Margolis was reassured that the hundred or more people he ahd taken on to replace the sacked workers, did not after all favour joining the union they had spent the last ten months trying to break!

Claims by employers like Sanderson that scabs have to be consulted before a settlement can be made are nothing less than ridiculous.

In the one hotel strike last year where victory was achieved at Oxford's Linton. Lodge, TGWU members won reinstatement and recognition after six months on the picket without any such phoney consultation.

Yet the most important link of all between these common struggles must be the weakness of the TGWU leadership.

Sanderson plays cat and mouse with Ron Todd in much the same way as Ward did with Roy Grantham of APEX.

These employers are very well aware of the spinelessness of such reformist leaders.

They reject the collaboration and double dealing which is the staple diet of these bureaucrats and feed instead off the raw meat of confrontation.

Though Todd, unlike Grantham, has a 'left face (particularly when as at Fords Your there are 57,000 of his members on all-out strike) his record in defence of union rights is no It was Todd who led the TGWU's powerful London region throughout the Grunwick strike and personally instructed his members not to support the August 8 mass picket.

He held the same position for the first three monts of the Garners dispute, again resisting calls from the strike committee for mass picketing and a regional financial levy.

And it was blacking initiated from rank and file shop stewards, not the national leadership which brought Sanderson so near to collapse. The Sandersons mass picket December o way of Acuun Mass pickets of the factory have received only a token mobilisation from the union's national and regional officials.

Barry Cooper, Skegness District Secretary has now threatened to bring 3,000 pickets to the plant if Sanderson failed to settle.

He must be instructed to get busy with making that pledge good as soon as the strike committee sets the date.

Calis must be made for General Secretary Moss Evans to issue a personal statement to the whole , membership outlining how he proposes to organise action to use the power of the union in support of Sandersons and against all those who deny workers the right to organise.

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