Bl 'losses': Open the Books

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As we go to press talks are still continuing between British Leyland management and the Joint Negotiating Committee on the November 1979 pay review.

The company's 5%-withstrings offer was rejected in a recent postal ballot by a 3-2 majority -yet convenors and union officials have consistently refused to call strike action that would bring out BL workers alongside the steel strikers.

After months of hedging and delays had handed the initiative back to management, conveners' meeting ten days ago meekly caved in to Edwardes' carefully timed tactic of laying Duffy off a few thousand BL workers in selected plants and voted against calling a strike.

Pressing home his advantage, and well aware that BL's carefully doctored balance sheets were shortly to be given full publicity, Edwardes moved in for the kill. He summoned obedient union General Secretaries to talks on the firm's "recovery Hammered home There the call for further sacrifices by union members to restore the "viability" of BL was hammered home to union leaders who have already lent their support to the loss of jobs by the thousand.

And they were called upon to press gang the negotiating committee into accepting the offer -strings and all.

Duffy and his fellow bureaucrats emerged declaring their commitment to the viability of BL.

A few days later Edwardes produced the latest. balance sheet -showing …a thumping £144.5 million loss for the last year-and spelled out in no uncertain terms what viability required.

He said that the task was to reduce "overmanning" • reduce "excess capacity", , "slim down" the company to a sustainable level and eliminate the cashe flow deficit.

Further talks then took place with the union leadersafter which BL Cars Managing Director Ray Horrocks declared "we are pleased with the outcome."

On Monday March 17 the talks reconvened, with General Secretaries present to bludgeon the convenors of the JNC into line.

Yet it scarcely seemed likely that convenors who a week earlier had accepted without question the absurd claim that there were 40,000 workers laid off in BL (when in reality no more than 8,000 were temporarily laid off) would even stop to consider the validity of BL's balance sheet.

Of course what the BL figures conceal is precisely the question of who profits from this supposed "loss-making" corporation.

The profits of BL's myriad of private suppliers, dealers and contractors are hidden from view.

The claim that BL holds huge unsold stocks of cars remains unproven.

Interest payments

And the huge sums creamed off in interest payments by the bankers are obscured: last year such interest payments amounted to over £60 million.

Yet in the period since the Ryder Report and the introduction of workers participation' there has been no move by BL convenors or union officials to question at any point the need to make "sacrifices" to restore. pay offer seems not unlikely. But such a move seems certain to provoke fierce resistance on the shop floor, where the 92page book of strings threatens to strip away every worthwhile union agreement won in 30 years of struggle.

Either way BL workers face the need to fight both management attacks and the treachery of their own present leaders through the fight for a new leadership that will defend their interests.

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PHOTO: Laurence Sparham, IFL IFL