Fisher survives!

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In a three-day cover-up operation NUPE leaders emerged comparatively unscathed from their miserable betrayal of last year's £60/35 hour week pay claim.

General Secretary Fisher was able to brush aside a call by ILEA schoolkeepers for his resignation. And clouds of synthetic anti-Tory rhetoric from conference chairman Tom Griffiths, Assistant General Secretary Bernard Dix and others helped to lay the basis for avoiding any move to formulate a wage claim for next year.

But nevertheless the leadership did suffer a number of body blows, all of which indicate the mounting militancy within NUPE's rank and file.

Collaboration

Fisher, who in the Economic Policy debate defended the policy of collaborating with the Tory government, was instructed to cease any talks with the Tories on restrictions on trade union rights and to campaign through meetings and demonstrations and industrial action to resist Tory attacks on the public sector.

Also passed was a Westminster Hospital motion fought for at branch level by WSL Health Service supporters which called NION DUES Survivor-Fisher for:

1) Relaunching an active campaign involving the mass membership of the union to defend the public sector and to call for support for such a campaign from all other unions.

2) To support occupations in hospitals, clinics, schools and other public sector units threatened with cuts and/or closures and to place all possible resources at their disposal.

3) To ensure that all branches are informed at the earliest possible opportunity of any actions against cuts and/or closures in their divisions.

4) The Executive Council Goball AT THE TOP should publicly give support to any such campaign and strikes against the cuts.

Paybed deadline And an Edinburgh motion calling for the immediate nationalisation of the pharmaceutical industry without compensation was also carried.

The most publicised setback for Fisher and the bureaucracy was the passing of the Hammersmith motion calling on the Executive to instruct NUPE members to provide no further services to private patients from January 1, 1980, and for faster moves to phase out private beds. Dix had unsuccessfully asked for this resolution to be remitted to the EC because he believed that "we should be fighting now to make sure that the Tories cannot phase in private beds."

Grovelling praise On pay policy, a Westminster Hospital motion calling for the protection of wages against inflation through a sliding scale of wages • was inadequately moved by delegate Jamie Morris, who spent his time delivering grovelling praise for Fisher and attacking the addendum to the motion which called for the resignation of Fisher and Assistant General Secretary Ron SEEMS LIKE OFISHALL HAS RUSHED OFF TO A MASS MEETING WITHOUT HIS EQUIPMENT! WE'VE BEEN IN THE GAME TOO LONG TO LET THOSE TROTSKYITE BOOT-BOYS COME BETWEEN US!

WE MUST STAND TOGETHER AGAINST MEN OF VIOLENCE...

EXTREMISTS..

RENT-A-MOB PICKETS!!

Keating.

Camden General Branch

secretary John Suddaby made the hardest-hitting contribution, that the £60/35 hour claim could have been won in one go must have been mad."

Suddaby quoted the example of Camden, where all-out strike action had actually won the claim for a large section of the workforce.

But he, like ILEA delegate and fellow IMG member Ray Varnes, failed to make the call Fisher's resignation priority. Even so Fisher used a special suspension of standing orders to reply to Suddaby's contribution and portray himself ludicrously as "the most accountable General Secretary in the Trade Union Congress"

The extent of the NUPE leaders' willingness to collaborate with the Tories as further cuts loom • underlines the urgency of fighting at shop floor level to force officials to implement many of this year's conference policies, and for the building of a leadership capable of fighting Fisher and his bureaucratic hangers-on AH, HERE HE IS, LADS!

WELL OFISHA L, THANKS FOR THAT ROUSIN; SPEECH AND. (IN APPRECIATION OF YOUR WORK ON OUR BEHALF THE MEN WOULD LIKE TO MAKE A PRESENTATION!

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SOCIALIST ... -130

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attacking Fisher's earlier state- ment that 'anyone who thought

RAPTUROUS -APPLAUSE