A Diversion from

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directing towards workplace provision because it wont face up to a fight against cuts in the public sector?"

This question from the floor at the SE Region TUC Seminar on Workplace Nurseries last Saturday pointed to the key issue at stake.

It forced Jack Dromey, 'left' speaking Secretary of SERTUC to hurriedly change his set-piece summing up speech in order to reassure the speaker that there was no change of emphasis.

Of course, he blustered, "if" the campaign for workplace nurseries and the fight against the cuts weren't proceeding side by side then "today's seminar would of course be a dangerous diversion."

Welcome

Yet is was clear throughout the seminar that the workplace nursery campaign, in the present political climate-with the Tories hellbent on an ideological attack on women's right to work, and determined to dismantle the welfare state-is indeed seen as a welcome diversion by the trade union bureaucracy.

Speaker after speaker, from OFISHALL RUNS» local NALGO and NATHE branches in particular, detailed their local surveys and attempts to force local councils to accept their responsibility as employers by providing workplace creches for local council and college workers.

Yet some of these speakers had no idea what their councils? day nursery and nursery school provision were, nor how these were threatened by cuts.

• Axed hospital Bere Saxby, ASTMS speaker from the Heathrow Airport nursery campaign even announced that this campaign was asking permission to use the axed Staines Hospital and Ashford School for workplace nurseries! (At a cost to parents of at least £15 per week!)

Speakers from the Oxford Save Our Nurseries Campaign explained how the Tory Council there has exploited the insular nature of a workplace creche campaign by offering a classIOOM (which should have housed a state nursery class that was axed in the first round of cuts) to the local Polytechnic Student Nursery Campaign with a charge of £12 to parents.

This had driven a wedge between the students and the nursery campaign in the town and prepared the ground for introducing the concept of parents paying for all nursery provision.

• Closed down The same speakers also showed how the national NALGO policy. of workplace nurseries had allowed the local NALGO leadership to turn their backs on the nursery nurses and assistants in Oxfordshire nursery classes-who face redundancy when the nurseries are all closed in July 1981.

If any delegate to the seminar was in any doubt about the intentions of the bureaucracy, their doubts should have been answered by the explicit statement in the paper submitted by Terry Marsland of the Tobacco Workers Union: "There is no hope over the next five years of achieving any improvement in the provision of child care facilities by Local Autart is and persuade way employers, who have the provisions at the place of work."

If this is not a diversion from the fight to defend and extend existing state nursery provision then what is?

IS IT THE STEELWORKERS MARCHING RIGHT THROUGH DENNINGS JUDGEMENT - LET MONE BHL SIRS TUDGEMO NOT PARTICULARLY!) • WELL IS IT JIM'S NO, ITS THE LOOMING FAILURE TO FIX THE POSSIBILITY OF A..

LABOUR PARTY INQUIRY? NuL WEL THE

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

"Is the TUC changing its emphasis on nurseries and

financial resources available, to establish creche and nursery