Press R Tories Pla to Smash Pickets®

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Pickets-mass pickets, solidarity pickets, effective pickets-are, along with the closed shop, the main target of the Tories new anti-union Bill published last week by James Prior.

Picketing would be legal only if carried out by:

Wiard *employees outside their own workplace;

*union officials with their members at their own workplace;

#sacked workers picketing their former employer in a reinstatement fight;

*strikers picketing places where their employer gives them work.

Illegal, under the new Bill, would be lorry drivers picketing docks, miners picketing power stations, workers - picketing plants other than their own, and labour movement support for unionisation disputes such as Garners, Grunwick or Desoutters.

•And, if the Law Lords overturn a scandalous judgement made last year by Lord Denning against the NUJ, Prior may tighten the Bill still further by an amendment designed to make sympathetic strikes and blacking action illegal.

80% vote The attack on the closed shop takes the form of insisting that new closed shops can only be established through an 80% vote in a secret ballot, and of wide-ranging "conscience" clause to enable almost any would-be anti-union scab to seek extensive court damages if he is sacked for refusing to join a union.

There are specific proposals to make unions liable for damages cases where the in PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report union presses an employer to sack a non-union member.

In addition the Bill offers unions government cash aid to conduct postal ballots during strikes or internal union elections or decision-making.

Any union leadership that accepted such a pay-off would of course be consciously handing over control of its affairs to the witch-hunters in the press and mass media.

In addition, Prior's Bill abolishes the right of a woman to return to her own job after taking maternity leave, and imposes a series of new requirements on her before she is allowed to return to work at all.

No obligation Employers with a payroll of less than six staff are no longer obliged to take back women after maternity leave-and larger firms are now obliged only to offer a "suitable alternative" to her old job.

Other measures strip away the obligation of an employer to provide the "general level" of terms and conditions for a given job, and introduce new restrictions on union recruitment, on expulsions from unions, and a new series of technical regulations, enforcible by tribunals or the courts.

Major attack

. The Bill is a major attack on trade union rights, but carefully framed in order to hit the workers' movement hardest where the TUC leaders have already shown themselves to be weakest-in the area of picketing rights.

in responding to the new measures Len Murray bleated that they were "wretched, irrelevant, dangerous and unfair"

But rather than threatening concerted trade union action to defeat the Tory government that is proposing them, Murray merely threatened that the TUC would consider withdrawing its own reactionary 'Concordat' proposals, drawn up by union and Labour leaders last winter in a vain bid to stem the mass struggles against Phase 4 of wage controls.

GMWU leader David Basnett attacked the Tories for bringing in new laws-declaring that what was needed was "commonsense and compromise"

Yet while union leaders have shown themselves ready to compromise down . the line on the jobs and conditions of their members, the Tories, and employers driven on by the • economiç crisis, do not share this approach.

Encouragement

Every weakness and retreat by the union leaders encourages them to press home their attacks with renewed fury.

With TUC leaders already in full flight, the Tories know that they can also count on Labour's reactionary right wing to do their best to damp down resistance to the new laws.

Prior with Thatcher The Callaghan/Healey leadership was second to none in denouncing "secondary" picketing last winter: and the TUC/ Labour Concordat contains many proposals similar to the Tory Bill.

Labour traitors The struggle against Prior's Bill is therefore linked to the fight to remove the Labour traitors and for a principled leadership in the unions.

There is no doubt that the Tory measures will be resisted in practice: but the fight must be taken up at once within the workers' movement for all out action to bring down the Thatcher government to prevent basic trade union rights being once more threatened by Tory legal restraints.

The National Union of! Students conference. has called for a one-day strike by all NUS members on the day of the final reading of John Corrie's anti-abortion Bill.

The Bil, which restricts the! time limit for abortion to 20 weeks-a limit even attacked by the Tory government as "too low"-and sets out to destroy, charities like the Britisi: Preg-' nancy Advisory Service, which currently provide a third of legal: abortions, is being rushed pellmell through its committee stage by fanatical Tory and Labour anti-abortionists.

The National Abortion Campaign has called on the TUC to call a one day strike to oppose the Bill, and this will now be assisted by the firm stand of the NUS.

But with a solid Tory. majority in Parliament and. numbers of reactionary Labour MPs committed to an anti-abortion position and hostile to women's rights, the passage of the Bill seems assured.

The fight for abortion rights must therefore be directed not solely at Parliament but into the health service trade unions and the wider labour movement which must pledge themselves:

*to take action including strikes and occupations to defend existing NHS abortion facilities against cuts or closure;

*to continue to provide abortions irrespective of the Corrie Bill;

*to mobilise full scale supporting action to defend charities and clinics attacked under the Bill;

*to fight for the defeat of the Tory government and for a socialist policy of incorporating such abortion facilities. into an expanded NHS.

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