Gec Workers Dig in on Pay

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- JOIN OUR FIGHT Returned to office after five years of Labour betrayals, the Tory government has immediately begun wielding a sharpened axe on jobs, conditions and social services. Trade Union rights face imminent legal attack. Prices are already beginning to rocket upwards.

Plum sectors of state industry will be handed to the Tories' profiteering big business backers; and the pay rises to police and armed forces mark only the prelude to increased state violence against pickets and anti-fascists, and an intensified army crackThe Callaghan-Healey leadership has made it clear that it will opppose any perspective other than settling down and meekAnd, though they have once more dusted off their near-forgotten "socialist" speeches, Labour's "left-wing" MPs have continued to duck away from any fight to remove Callaghan.

TỤC leaders, too, have set out to establish a basis collaboration with Thatcher and the Tory cabinet, parallelling their anti-working class alliance with Wilson and then Callaghan.

But the working class has experienced and overcome such betrayals before-to topple Heath's union-bashing government in 1974, and smash through Callaghan's reactionary Phase 4 of wage controls in a series of monumental pay battles last winter.

These experiences are not dead. They point to the way that jobs, social services and hard won union rights can be defended But a principled, revolutionary leadership is needed if the Labour traitors; the TUC collaborators and their hangers-on in the Communist Party are to be exposed and pushed aside, and the mass struggles mobilised that can defeat and remove the Such a leadership must fight day in and day out for a programme of transitional demands which, starting from today's conditions and today's consciousness within the working class, lead workers to grasp the necessity for socialist revolution.

, And in taking up democratic demands-such as an end to racial racial and sexual discrimination, it must show the crucial role that must be played by the working class as the only consistently revolutionary class capable of leading the struggle for the And it must fight on an international basis-mobilising solidarity for anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggleswhether in Ireland, in Southern Africa or elsewhere throughout the world, and drawing strength, and political lessons from revolutionary upheavals such as that which ousted the hated This means fighting for the reconstruction of the Trotsky.

This method of approach, rejecting any descent to simple trade union militancy, or concessions to any wing of the labour bureaucracy, is the method fought for by the Workers Socialist The next period will see major class struggles in Britain. A principled, Marxist leadership is essential. Our movement though strong in programme remains small in numbers.

JOIN US and take forward the struggle for socialism!

The strike by GEC/ English Electric workers at the Liverpool plant is now reaching a critical stage.

After five weeks, the members of the TGWU, AUEW,_ EETPU and Sheet Metal Workers Union are still solid in their efforts to regain living standards, and are picketing 12 hours a day on a rota.

Indeed the convenors have still not recovered from the shock they received when the members overwhelmingly voted for a strike despite the weakness of the claim for "a substantial increase"

It is clear that the convenors have been looking for an escape right from the start of the strike and are having to be kicked up the backside by the membership every inch of the way.

Indeed. the spirit of determination exhibited by down in the accupied North of Ireland.

ly accepting five years of Tory devastation.

against renewed Tory attacks.

Tory government. emancipation of mankind.

Shah in Iran. ist Fourth International.

League. the members is . quite staggering and has revealed the steady erosion of patience at the decline in real wages since the last strike several years ago.

The wave of redundancies that has hit the plant has been met with no resistance whatsoever from the reformist leadership.

And wages have likewise been allowed to slip in the name of "company viability"

Indeed the dome :stic appliance division has t een completely axed and the remaining switchgear and fuse-gear divisions are all that remains.

Now the company are claiming that one of these is a "loss maker"

The failure of the leadership to question company need for a new leadership.

This should then demand proof of such company propaganda by demanding that the company open the books of the company including also the books of suppliers and bankers to the scrutiny of elected trade union committees.

This would then reveal the need to nationalise this huge monopoly combine along with all the bloodsucking suppliers and bankers, which create the "non-viability" through their profiteering.

Local 'left' MP Eric Heffer should be required to wage a fight at the coming Labour Party conference to mobilise support for the resolution tabled by Thanet East CLP calling for a vote of no confidence in and the resignation of Callaghan, who has declared his opposition to any fight to bring down the wage-cutting Tory Council of action To: strengthen and extend their struggle the English Electric stewards' committee should call a local delegate meeting of all labour movement bodies to set up a council of action. Such a body would provide the means to support and extend all struggles against the employers in defence of jobs and against the policies of the Tory government and prepare action to bring it down. Ship launched at Cammel ions

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claims of "loss-making" and "non-viability" reveals the

iET SOCIALIST PESS lead