Worker Rea S Ready

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(now an AUEW official) and programme of public works that jobs.

Labour would then be taken from have been circulated with details of this conference must bi Special Branch officers are vetting jurors who might be called to sit on a trial of six alleged anarchists next month.

Anyone with left wing connections will be barred from sitting on the case and all names have been run through a police computer.

There is no information as to whether the police have shown preference to those linked to right wing political activity.

This whole vetting procedure, which indicates the kind of information stored on police files aboutordinary citizens, was first revealed during the Aubrey, Berry, Campbell trial and is stoutly defended by all kinds of bourgeois "democrats"!

It demonstrates that those who prate most about "democracy' are the first to abandon any pretence of democratic rights.

AS THE Tories launched their already discredited Tax and Prices Index amid a barrage of openly • sceptical news. coverage and hostile trade union responses, government spokesmen and CBI leaders alike rushed to urge workers not to base claims on either the new TPI or the Retail Price Indexnow showing annual inflation of 15.6%.

Even the most extravagant cooking of books could not get the new TPI lower than 13.2%. But what is the real rate of inflation as it affects workers?

Neither index gives the answer.

Only the election of committees of trade unionists and housewives to compile workers' price index can show the real impact of Tory inflation on the working class, and only cost of living clauses can protect against it.

The announcement by British Shipbuilders of a programme of 6,000 redundancies was met by a virtually immediate mass meeting decision for an overtime ban and a protest strike by 5,000 workers at Scotstoun Marine and Govan.

The mass meeting called on other shipyard workersito call a "national campaign of resistance" to management plans for closures and redundancies, the bulk of which are concentrated in Scotland.

Three yards-including Scotstoun Marine-are scheduled to close, and a fourth to be "mothballed" on a care and maintenance basis.

Redundancies are planned at other shipyards in Scotland and England. These include the loss of 550 jobs and the cessation of shipbuilding at North Sands, Sunderland, and the slashing of 1,000 jobs at Cammell Laird on Merseyside.

10,000 jobs lost These cutbacks come on top of redundancies and closures announced earlier in the year, and bring the total loss of jobs to 10,000.

And with the tacit collaboration of union leaders the "nationalised" corporation had already cut the workforce. in merchant. shipbuilding from 38,000 in 1977 to 28,000 prior to these announcements.

Now, under mounting pressure from the shop floor to combat these sackings-all of which come in areas of mass unemployment-the leaders of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions has called a delegate conference in Newcastle for Thursday.

But the conference is not likely to be offered much in the way of perspective from bureaucrats who have until now slavishly accepted every management move for "viability" and rationalisation.

And while Govan and Scotstoun workers vividly demonstrated their willingness to fight in defence of their jobs, it was only a few months ago that their convenors were railroading through vicious no-strike agreements-and even getting workers to sacrifice their holidays-to complete an order for ships to UCS lessons Convenors and officials alike have drawn lessons from the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders 'work in' under the Heath government, which was turned, under the leadership of the Communist Party away from the necessary direct challenge to the Tories, into a union-subsidised protest that turned out finished ships for the liquidator to sell off.

UCS veteran Jimmy Airlie Coventry's. Labour Sammy Barr are still on the scene, and behind a thin facade of left rhetoric are prepared once again to head off the necessary policies:

*occupation of threatened yards;

#struggling to open. the books of British Shipbuilders to elected trade union committees;

*the figures revealed would show the real profits made from this "loss making" industry, and provide the basis for a useful could utilise the productive forces otherwise to be junked in the doomed shipyards.

*spelling out the necessity for the nationalisation of British Shipbuilders' private suppliers and the banks without compensation and under workers' management.

*fighting for supporting strike action throughout the engineering industry and the public sector unions where Tory cuts threaten thousands more jobs.

*linking this to the struggle for mass action of the trade union movement to bring down the job-slashing Tory government.

On the basis of such a programme of demands shipyard workers could rapidly win the sympathy and support of the whole working class in the struggle to defend jobs.

----- pull-quotes -----

imputi rigs jury

RIP for TPI?!