LEYLAND BETRAYAL PREPARES SACKINGS Robinson sacrificed

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To deter convenors Robinson at the Birmingham rally - not waving but drowning And as union officials, convenors and stewards in BL and in other industries come under pressure-on the one hand from members demanding action to defend jobs, wages and conditions, and on the other from employers bleating about falling profits and empty order booksthe ruthless victimisation of Robinson carried out with the full support of union officials stands as a brutal deterrent designed to scare them away from any show of resistance.

The treacherous role of the AUEW leadership in this dispute is no accident.

It flows from their earlier support for Edwardes' plan to axe 25,000 jobs in BL and close 13 plants.

Resistance

Like every other section of the trade union bureaucracy they accept without question that the need to make capitalist industry "viable" comes above the interests of their own members.

Robinson, however, though on a partial and completely inadequate basis, stood, along with the vat majority of Combine convenors, against that plan and called for resistance to it.

It was clear that for Edwardes' stage-managed "ballot" to have any value the shop floor strength of the unions had to be confronted.

From ihe outset, therefore, it was in the interests of the AUEW leadership to assist Edwardes in the victimisation of Robinson, and their every action took place in this light:

*Official support was with held from the immediate strikes in Robinson's defence, *AUEW officials deliberately withheld categoric support for the struggle for a whole week in the teeth of a full-scale press and media "back to work" campaign-while TGWU. officials made all the running;

*No AUEW engineering Edwardes officials at all appeared on the platform of the Birmingham rally in Robinson's support Actions speak louder than words. With this record behind them, does anyone believe that on Tuesday Edwardes really needed to threaten closure of the whole of BL in order to force the AUEW leaders into a squalid betrayal?

Indeed the form of the betrayal-setting up a union "inquiry" into Robinson's activities-is custom-built to provide the material for a further witch-hunt when it is published in several weeks time.

Full pay

Similar "inquiries" run by the TGWU in BL's Cowley Assembly plant have led to the further victimisation of militants-not by management but by the union bureaucracy itself!

In the meantime, to knife any prospect of continued strike action in his support, the stillsacked Robinson has been artfully put on full pay.

He now says he is "bitterly disappointed" by the AUEW Executive's action.

But if anyone peddled the illusion that these right wingers would act to defend trade unionism rather than collaborate with Edwardes, it was Robinson himself.

Certainty

From the moment of his surprise sacking onwards, Robinson never issued a clear call for all-out strike action throughout BL.

He did not even criticise the AUEW officials when they failed to support those strikes that were called.

Nor did he or his fellow Communist Party members on the Combine Committee fight for the national conference of BL convenors, held the next day, to issue a clear call for a strike in all BL plants.

It was CP member Jack Adams who argued for the vague resolution calling on convenors simply to "get what action they can"-and to do nothing sooner than risk losing a vote!

Nor did Robinson campaign fur the necessary mass lobby of the AUEW national executive to demand all-out official action.

On the contrary, on the Sunday before the sell-out, Robinson blithely informed supporters in a meeting in Wednesbury that official backing was a certainty.

And on the Monday rally, Stalinist chairman Len Brindle blocked a motion calling for a mass lobby of the AUEW EC the next day while Robinson only appealed to those from BL plants still working to go in and "collect money"

In reality the only certainty was that the reactionary politics of the Communist Party over recent years have inevitably created conditions for attacks on BL workers.

Robinson was eventually knifed in the back by those he thought were his closest allies.

On the one hand stood the attacked by General Secretary Duffy the "inquiry" to find Robinson