Officials Help Axe Singer Jobs
Socialist Press1979 1979-01-24Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 10 →
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Union leaders last week successfully piloted a reactionary scheme, involving 560 redundancies by March and a longer-term cut of 2,000 jobs, through a mass meeting at the Singer sewing machine plant at Clydebank.
Management had drawn union "representatives" into joint talks on their £8 million rationalisation plan, and relied heavily on union bureaucrats to railroad the finished scheme through a hostile workforce.
Last month a meeting voted to reject the "rescue"
proposals.
But as union officials recalled the mass meeting they made it plain that they would withdraw support if workers stuck to this position.
Right wing AUEW official Gavin Laird went on to claim, laughably, that the proposals did not give Singer management a blank cheque for speed-up.
GMWU bureaucrat Ken Baker went even further, The booklet which spells out the policies necessary for all-out struggle against the cuts, drawing on practical experience at the EGA and the Oxford Nursery Occupation.
30p plus 10p p&p from the WSL, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill Dartmouth Park London NW5 1HR. don NW5 1HR. and declar ed that the meeting had a "duty to the community" to endorse the axing of 2,000 jobs and submit to wholesale speedup.
With plant convenor Hugh Swan supporting the deal, arguing that the sackings would be by "natural wastage". , there was no alternative perspective put forward to the Singer workforce; the only answer to the management/union ultimatum is to occupy the plant in defence of all jobs and demand the opening of the books of this multinational, to show the case for the nationalisation of the "loss-making' Clydebank plant without compensation under workers' management.
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