Nobody Pleased by German Official's Steel Sell-out

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Schmidt with Callaghan-mavbe discussing Loderer transfer bid?

When Eugen Loderer takes his seat in the European Parliament, he will certainly be making speeches, fired with urgency and fervour, on the need for a 35 hour working week to destroy the evil of unemployment.

And every well-paid Social Democratic deputy will loudly applaud his passion and his rhetoric. With good reason.

For Loderer has a record second to none in fighting for this demand.

As President of IG-Metall, he was the individual most responsible for selling out the strike by steel workers which centred on the call for a 35-hour week.

It was Loderer who controlled the limitation of the strike as employers throughout the industry rushed to impose lockouts with the aim of dividing the union members.

'Victory'

And at the end it was Loderer who proclaimed as a victory' the deal which stated categorically that wage contracts were based on-a 40 hour week!

After a strike lasting more than six weeks, with 57,000 members called out in the later a ragbag of concessions from the employers' federation-a 4% wage increase over 15 months, longer annual holiday, and 'free' shifts for workers over 50 and as compensation for night work.

Under the fiercely restrictive labour laws of West Germany just as a 75% majority was needed before the union was authorised even to prepare a strike, so a 25% majority in the compulsory secret ballot would have obliged IG-Metall to call an end to the strike!

But Loderer was narrowly spared such humiliation. 40% of the workers concerned voted to reject the deal, against 49% who agreed to accept the terms of the settlement.

Such a result is scarcely surprising, when a massive proportion of the membership was totally cynical as to the leadership's willingness to offer the employers any fight at all.

It was only last year, at IG-Metall's delegate conference that the union bureaucrats were working week, the 35-hour demand by itself is, as we have always argued, an inadequate basis for the fight of the working class to destroy unemployment.

The steel strike also raised other major political issues.

In passing the strikers exposed the bogus character of one major foundation of the supposed 'economic recovery' of West Germany.

Far from indicating a return of 'industrial confidence'. , the boom in steel orders last summer can now be seen clearly as the defensive stockpiling of other capitalists in preparation for the strike tiey felt to be inevitable.

The West German 'miniboom' has its own mini-reality, but bourgeois claims that it heralded the end of their crisis have now lost all credibility.

Support from Schmidt Far more important, though, was the impact on the labour On television, Helmut Schmidt himself was forced to declare his support for strikes, as a part of the 'democratic process', while he pleaded for a setțlement. Employers indignantly responded by arguing that the lock-out was their contribution to this same process.

Banned

Lockouts are banned by law in France and Italy; in many other European countries capitalists do not dare to use them against workers. But in West Germany they are fully legal under the repressive labour laws drawn up by the imperialist allies when they created the Federal Republic and reconstructed the union movement destroyed by fascism to act as a tool for class collaboration.

At the special conference of the SPD in December, resolutions were easily passed in support of the 35 hour week and condemning the use of lock-outs.

But the demand that federal deputies take immediate action to ban lockouts was heavily Loderer himself, as president of the world's largest trade union, is nof just an aspiring politician.

Through the West German state's machinery of 'industrial democracy' and 'participation' Loderer is a 'worker-director' and even the deputy chairman of the supervisory board of Mannesmann-a steel producing firm!

But the growing disruption of 'industrial peace' in West Germany must be raising many doubts in the minds of the bourgeoisie as to whether Loderer and his companions still retain this power.

Within IG Metall, opposition to the leadership has grown and consolidated over the last year, despite • fierce attempts at bureaucratic suppression.

Words

But the problems of the working class will not be solved by the fiery words of lefttalkers, any more than unemployment will be abolished by the limited and inadequate demand for a 35-hour week.

The crisis of proletarian leadership demands the building of a Trotskyist revolutionary party, fighting for the Transitional Programme to defend the working class against every form of capitalist attack and to advance its struggles towards the international victory of socialist

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stages, the union's wage bargain- ing council voted to recommend