[Published by Folrose Ltd for the Workers Socialist…]
Socialist Press1979 1979-06-27Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 12 →
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Published by Folrose Ltd for the Workers Socialist League, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, Printed by Anvil Printers Ltd, London. Registered as a newspaper at the Post Office increase in MP's pay over two years.
Callaghan was warmly applauded by Tory back benchers for his stand-while Labour I MPs bayed for the resignation of Tory Leader of the House Norman St. JohnStevas.
They whinnd and moaned about pay 'anomalies' and the effects of inflation on their hefty £6,897 salaries.
But these were the same Labour careerists who imposed three years of wage cuts on the working class and viciously witch-hunted the public sector warkers who took strike action last winter in a desperate bid to increase their wages from poverty line levels to a modest £60/35 hour week.
And they are the same 1HR. trial action, say these reformists, would be to reject "democracy"
But for selfseeking MPs to line their own wallets by calling for the resignation of this same government is apparently a different question altogether!
Whether or not the government is in fact defeated on its proposals for MPs' pay is matter of supreme irrelevance to the working class.
Hand outs
But the fact that this pay hike is simply the latest round of astronomical increases and tax handouts to the rich and the filthy rich at a time wher workers' wages are falling in real terms must fuel the struggle for wage demands.
Prestcold workers last week voted at a recalled meeting to accept voluntary redundancies and only fight to keep some of the present 900 jobs at the firm's two Glasgow factories.
The factories, which make refrigeration plant, employ a large proportion of older, skilled men and have become virtually an island among a sea of unemployment on the Upper Clyde.
SUMMER FETE
Saturday July 7 fron "12 to 4 p.m.
Cowley Community Cowley, Oxford Cakes * Plants * Game Bargains * Fortune teller * Refreshments Organised by the Oxford Area Workers • Socialist League London NW5 1HR.
News that the plants would close in September was announced on June 7 and the management called in a firm of consultants to prepare a report on the reasons for the losses.
The consultants' report, released on June 18 was deliberately kept away from shop stewards.
Bad management
It explicitly blamed bad management as the reason for the losses and stated that the factory did have a viable commercial future once the new range of compressors for domestic fridges was introduced in 1981.
Of course they did not reveal the enormous profits already made out of the operation by the firm and its bankers and suppliers.
The report also stated that as little as £52 million invested over five years would make the factory viable.
Keith Joseph, putting into practice the anarchic, anti working class doctrines of the 'free' market has naturally refused any such aid to Prestcold.
He has told the workforceand Scottish workers in general -to go and find themselves other jobs-or start something up for themselves!
Seeing no real perspective a mass meeting on June 19 came to the decision to abandon the struggle, • rejecting shop stewards' calls to fight the closure.™ But the vote of 295 to 245 was changed the following day to a decision to support a union campaign for the plants to be kept open with a reduced workforce.
But. as the sold-out struggle at. Dunlop's Speke factory showed, the solution is not to appeal to the employers, offering to sacrifice jobs and conditions, but to occupy the factory and open the books to reveal how money has been syphoned off into the hands of the capitalist suppliers and bankers.
British Leyland workers and Scottish engineering workers must enter into the fight alongside the workers at Prestcold to defend both their own jobs and those at Prestcold.
*Occupy the plant and open the books to committees of trade unionists to show the case for nationalisation without compensation under workers' management.
*Fight to bring down the Tories-no cuts in public spending-for a sliding scale of expenditure.
And the mass anti-imperialist movement that toppled the Shah and now worries every Middle East bourgeois regime would focus its full fury in resistance and retaliation to such attack.
threat In short, while the ageing Brezhnev returns to the Kremlin waving a paper agreement for 'world peace' the imperialists are hell-bent on a course that threatens renewed war.
It is not through class collaboration on a national or a world scale that peace can be brought about: there can be no end to war until crisis-ridden imperialism is overthrown through the revolutionary mobilisation of the working class.
And that is a prospect feared above all by both the imperialist chiefs and the Stalinist bureaucrats.
IKERS SOCIA
LEAGUE WINSFORD Public meeting "Trade unions and the Tory government"
Sunday July 1 at 7.30 George and Dragon Delamere St.