Goodyear ...Marathon... BANKRUPT! the union chiers who sell obs for profits

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Ceylon 1964 Recall Labour Party Conference.. p.5 Spanish elections.. p.2 POLITICAL PRISONERS ARE LYING NAKED IN LONG KESH TRISH HELYNO ARE IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT POLITICAL PRISONERS TRISH INSOUT as Sica POLITICAL PRISONERS ARE BEING SYSTEMATICALLY BEATEN RESTORE RESTORE al.

Picket in support of Irish prisoners last weekend. Ireland article-see page 9 Beneath a wafer-thin "progressive' veneer of anti-imperialist rhetoric and measures to cut off oil from the Zionist and South African regimes, the new Iranian capitalist government has begun to reveal its true reactionary character.

Even though Prime Minister Bazargan has yet to establish firm political control within Iran itself, his appointed repres.

entatives have begun earnestly reassuring world imperialism that its investments and oil supplies are safé.

Most significant was the weekend statement by the new governor of the central bank Dr.

Mohammed Ali Mowlavi, who declared that the regime will meet all its foreign commitments, that Western investments are safe and that further investment is welcome.

He went on to deny that there were any plans for nationalising either Iranian or foreign-owned banks.

In other words capitalist exploitation of the Iranian masses will not simply continue unchanged under the Bazargan government, but will have to be actually intensified in order to generate the resources to repay Iran's current £4 billion debts to the imperialist countries.

And while the new managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company has demagogically proclaimed to workers that the role of the BP-led consortium which has milked colossal profits from Iran's oil, is at an end, government spokesmen have repeatedly declared that oil production should this week resume at the old output level of six million barrels a day.

Such a figure requires more than simply "spot sales" of oil: it requires renewed stable contracts with imperialism.

Meanwhile Iranian and imperialist bankers will continue to grow fat on profits created by the sweated labour of the working class.

This, the real face of Khomeini's much-vaunted "Islamic Republic", • comes as no surprise to us as Marxists.

We have argued from the outset that the only form of government that can put an end to exploitation, poverty and unemployment and grant the democratic rights so long denied to Iranian women and the working, class as a whole is a workers and peasants government, based on the power of workers and peasants councils in each area.

In two major speeches last week Bazargan showed that his regime sees such a government as a real danger.

Threatening to resign if left wing political groups and committees of Khomeini's supporters did not cease to challenge his authority, he gave an idea of the scale already reached by such political forces.

*They persecute people, they arrest people, they issue Continued page 2, col. 6 Employers are hell-bent on a new round of jobslashing rationalisation and speed-up in every section of But trade union leaders are equally determined that there should be no resistance to these attacks.

They have rushed to sign away hard-won working conditions, living standards and trade union rights in a desperate effort to appease the profit-hungry capitalist class.

*In the Goodyear tyre plant in Drumchapel, Glasgow, TGWU officials John Miller and Hugh Wyper convened a special mass meeting at which they railroaded through a vote to give up the plant's 35-hour week if management would relent on their closure threat.

Management replied that the climbdown had come too late -and that the plant would close anyway: 430 jobs lost.

*Confed union leaders and Falmouth unions responded to threats to close Falmouth Shiprepairers by producing a "manifesto" , volunteering a no-strike clause, "more flexible working practices" and other guarantees of good behaviour.

British Shiprepairers management seem unimpressed even with this surrender, and still seem likely to close the yard: 1,200 jobs in the balance, Flexibility *At Marathon Shipbuilders in Clydebank, Stalinist-led shop stewards have steered a reactionary package of proposals for speed-up and flexibility of working through a mass meeting in a desperate bid to make the yard "competitive".

As a result, if more orders are won to the yard, less workers will be required to complete them: and if no extra orders are won, then the existing workforce will work itself more quickly out of a job and onto the dole.

*At the giant Singer sewing machine plant in Clydebank union officials and convenors TUC leader Murray have forced through a huge package of speed-up and redundancies in the face of a management closure threat.

*In British Leyland AUEW General Secretary John Boyd has moved in to publicly attack the 20,000 Longbridge workers who struck in protest at the non-payment of parity money by British Leyland management -after thousands of jobs had been shed through voluntary redundancy.

"Their tirm"

According to Boyd trade unionists should start out from the wish for British Leyland to prosper, and for it to be efficient, since it is their company!

"Every restriction on output, every strike in whatever plant puts another nail in its coffin" , he went on.

*At Dunlop's threatened tyre plant in Speke, TGWU official John Miller has begun by conceding that "there would be difficulty in maintaining all 2,400 jobs at Speke.

But, he claimed, 'as efficiency increased there is a possibility of attracting new products to the plant."

And in the British Steel Corporation, the Iron and-Steel Trades Confederation which, arguing that the corporation is bankrupt, has already negotiated away thousands of jobs, are currently involved in pay talks involving a productivity deal centring on manning cutbacks.

The same story comes up again and again. Wherever an employer pleads bankruptcy or threatens closure, terrified union officials and reactionary convenors come running with their own pet schemes to speed up the workforce, cut jobs and restore the bosses' profitability.

Challenge figures

Not once have any of these leaders thought even to challenge the figures on which companies make out that they are bankrupt.

Not once have they challenged the right of the employer to safeguard profits while thousands of workers are forced to sacrifice their livelihoods or to face savage speedup on production tacks.

When called upon to adopt a clear fiahtina poliev. startina with occupation, to defend all jobs, they respond with prevarication, bluster and promises that 'talks' will do the trick.

But as these recent examples show, such 'talks' amount time and again to a complete surrender in front of the employers.

Without a struggle starting from the mobilisation of the workers affected, there is no way in which jobs and working conditions can be defended.

The Workers Socialist League rejects the wretched notion that workers should start out in any way from the profitability of the employer.

In any event the only way this can be tested out is to fight for tha ananine of tha hanlanf put me peanny or the booKs Of these and other firms to elected trade union committees.

Such an investigation would reveal the innumerable link-ups between "loss-making" sections and the state sector and highly profitable sectors of private industry and the banks:

The, answer to even proven bankruptcy of a firm is not to tailor wage demands to the bosses' ability to pay, but to fight for the nationalisation without compensation under workers management of those firms which stand as an obstacle to workers earning a living wage.

Such a demand is an empty protest unless connected to the occupation of the threatened workplace and the fight for the widest possible supporting strike action throughout the labour movement.

And this in turn demands the building of a principled leadership capable of challenging and defeating the political bankruptcy now at the head of the trade union and Labour movement and pointing the way forward to the struggle for the socialist overthrow of this crisis-ridden capitalist system.

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