The Steel 'war' Comes to Cowley
Socialist Press1980 1980-03-19Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 11 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 11
"We're in a war." This is how most of the South Yorkshire steel pickets described their decision to picket the Leyland Body Plant at Cowley.
After the refusal of the Leyland senior stewards to call a strike on their own pay demand, despite the steelworkers' lobby of their meeting, the steel strikers decided to put pickets into Oxford.
The South Yorkshire TGWU members, after ten weeks of TGWU lorries crossing their picket lines, finally got Moss Evans to issue a clear "directive" as opposed to his earlier request. This reads:
"The General Executive Council. of the Transport and General Workers Union meeting Monday 3 March 1980 discussed in detail the current dispute in the steel industry and reinforced the request put out by the General Secretary that all Transport and General Workers Union members should observe the pickets of the unions in dispute with the British Steel Corporation. We are instructing all members to recognise that this instruction must be positively observed."
When pickets started Body Plant on Monday March 10 the lorries started to queue up outside.
Drivers went away to phone their shop stewards. Their stewards contacted the District Secretary of the TGWU, David Buckle.
Suddenly the lorries, mainly BRS, started to cross.
When David Buckle was challenged by the pickets he replied that Evans' instruction only applied to 'new steel' Pressure More pressure was then put onto the TGWU-at national level by the strikers and National Organiser Ron Todd then interpreted the directive as meaning "fresh steel, oil and gas"
The Cowley Body Plant needs very little steel over the next two weeks, because the press shop workers are nearly all laid off.
Oil and gas supplies can take time to affect productionespecially if the company is able findino nays to get in supplies ConCentraTe of these two items.
Yet it is in the power of the TGWU to stop the plant virtually immediately, by stopping supplies of made-up steel products-such as petrol tanks. Yet these have been specifically exempted from observing the pickets! Steel pickets at BL's Cowley This is a war' in which the Generals' will not use the very weapons that will defeat the enemy!
The Oxford Student Trade Union Liaison Committee has formed an active support committee and they organised a lobby by TGWU members of the TGWU District Committee last Thursday.
The right wing-led District Committee did allow d steel striker to speak, but the outIDED Body Plant come was that the TGWU directive was still limited to the three types of supplies.
The support committee has backed up the pickers well. with inanie and and pickers.
The Yorkshire strikers will soon be getting back-up from Corby. But the real question, if the battle of Cowley is to be won, is getting the directive interpreted in a way that will enable production to be stopped.