NOW son under fire

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Thursday.

• basically agreed with the first decision but was worried by the second.

Why was this?

support the policy of workers' control of emergency cover.

Some of the people we look emergency cover.

Whilst the discussions on the strike committee were going on I went to our area officer in order to asses how many clients out of the 600 we cover would in my opinion be éligible for an emergency list.

The organiser already had a list. I insisted that virțually every case was checked by me until | was satisfied that all those on the final list needed attention.

For example it, included seven day covers /SP: extremely serious cases who are tended seven days a week, may te incontinent, and are unable feed themselves)

We went into the mass meeting of home helps on Thursday with my area the, only one geared to emergency cover linked to indefinite strike action -and with the strike committee confused on emergency cover.

That's why you were worried about the meeting?

Yes, very much so. The idea of facing 300 women who had no experience of trade union work, who had an isolated work experience and who had voted against strike action was potentially disastrous.

The most important factor, as I said before, was that most areas had had no lead as regards When I arrived next morning there was a crowd of women parading before the press, who only too eagerly responded to their anti-strike hysteria.

. The secretary actually allowed these women into the meeting, and in a tense atmosphere himself proposed that the home helps be allowed exempSTANDARD 'We can't let the old suffer :00 home helps defy strike order by NU PE Even the pathetic careerist touts of Gerry Fitt's Social Democratic Labour Party have been forced into a gesture of protest at the political stance of. Labqur's 'Minister for Torture' Roy Mason.

They have declared formal boycott of talks with him and his imperialist 'direct rule' administrators as part of their pretence of concern for the "Irish ,diménsion" to a possible power-sharing deal with the Loyalists.

Fearful of missing out on a plum job is a collaboratiomist "solution", Fitt has even threatened to • withdraw support for Labour in the House of Commons in future.

This move comes at a point when feeling against British imperialism is running high amongst the Irish people, pressuring even Jack Lynch's reactionary Fianna Fail government in the South to renew its i demagogic pronouncements about an "all-Ireland con" text" of the war in the. North.

This feeling has been further intensified by the prosecution of RUC men and now two members of the British SAS on charges of murdering Catholics.

Mason has also clearly been stung by the effectivenèss internationally of the IRA's campaign exposing the savagery of the treatment meted out to republican prisoners 'on the blanket' in "H' Block of the Long Kesh concentration camp and Armagh Jail.

These prisoners are demanding the restoration of political status stripped from them by Mason in 1976rand are refusing to wear prison clothing or do prison work.

Their courageous struggle against all forms of ill-treatment and torture by prison screws has wòn them growing support internationally.

The British working class, however; lags far behind in this respect. Trade union branches and Labour Parties must be pressed to take up the struggle to support the 'H' Block fight, and demand the removal of Mason and the pro-imperialist Callaghan cabinet, and the immediate withdrawal of British troops from PRESS The crude attempt to force women back into a "traditional' role women never have played was echoed two days later by the London Evening News.

Home helps in Camdenmostly women-were wrongly given block exemption by the strike committee to continue The home helps also agreed to pay f5 a week each to the strike fund-hardly an indication of anti-strike sentiments!

Yet the Evening News, under a picture of a dozen home helps outside strike HQ blazoned the headline "The Women with Heart" and another headline distorted the truth by saying " We can't let the old suffer 300 home helps defy strike order by NUPE"

Newspapers sell themselves on pin-ups, 'beauty hints', , reactionary problem pages and jokes which portray women as stupid, mean and avaricious.

If they also claim to have women's interests "at heart" it is because they wish to keep women downtrodden and to divide society on any grounds other than class.

A "family newspaper" is a euphemism for capitalism.