Sackings and Cuts a Class Issue

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T.abour leaders march against Tory cuts: took no action against cuts by Callaghan and Healey jobs and services has produced a variety of responses.

These have ranged from the crocodile tears of Jim Callaghan, leader of the last service slashing Labour administration, through the token, ritual opposition of Labour councillors safely outnumbered on Tory controlled County Councils to actual physical opposition in the form of strikes and occupations by groups of workers directly affected by the cuts and closures.

Each individual struggle has thrown up different problems and different solutions and the vital point to grasp at this point in time is that. most of these so-called solutions have been individual solutions.

Pleas to be treated as special cases have abounded, as have short cuts around the actual struggle to stop the Tory attacks.

Thus, services chopped by one tier of local government are likely to appear in revised form as competitors for finance at a different level.

Chop a nursery from the Social Services budget and it could pop-up again as a community creche asking for an urban aid grant. And often the initial response is to replace existing state services which fall under the axe by voluntary provision.

The problem here is that while such tactics may-m a minority of cases-have the effect of defending a particular local service, they do not in any way alter the fact that cuts are taking place all around us as an act of government policy.

This becomes obvious when looked at in strictly financial terms.

that poor ton Winning a grant of £10,000 for a youth centre or a nursery does not in any way halt the €5,000m cuts going on elsewhere, in the schools, the hospitals, housing and the health service. And it does nothing to defend our rights to those services.

A nursery place is of little use to a working mother whose job as a school "dinner lady" goes as an alternative part of the cuts package. And the job is no use without the day care provision to enable her to take . Trading one cut for another may well solve one, individual, personal problem but it does not even begin to tackle the root of the problem: the drive of the Tories and big business to offload the cost of their economic crisis onto the working class.

Collective That is why it has to be treated as a collective problem facing the whole labour movement, a class question.

Of course, that is what the Tories fear most, a united response. They have, therefore, been at pains to prepare their ground carefully.

Their efforts to sectionalise and atomize working class thinking by painting : various unions as 'blackmailers', 'hooligans and 'greedy bullies' through the press, have gone hand in hand with the preparation of specific incentives to induce workers to approach cuts closures and loss of jobs as individual, personal problems.

Schemes like redeployment feed on just such thinking.

Thus, with redundancies, the payments offered are dangled like a carrot in front of cach individuol trade uninnist to met LILLEL u ALL him or her to sell their job. and concentrate on looking after themselves.

The employers don't of course, during their soft sell, point out the real facts: what price the lump sum when inflation literally rips the cash out of your hands as you try to pocket it?

"Scroungers"

What. price the cash when the real prospect is mass unemployment and Tory attacks on the right of the unemployedbranded as "scroungers"-to claim benefit from the state?

The only aim with volunThatcher tary redundancies, natural wastage and early retrement schemes is to cut the workforce cheaply and without confrontation-boosting unemployment by the back door.

The unnatural wastage of people on the dole is carefully not mentioned because it is precisely that surplus army of labour which will itself be used as the weapon in the next stage to hold down wages.

These sort of of softly, softly tactics by management have, of course, had the able support of most union leaders Officials like Bill Sirs of the ISTC have cheerfully boasted of their achievements in cutting the workforce while Duffy and Co. made no secret of their determination to back the Edwardes plan-all this in the name of 'viability'.

Accepting argument What they don't tell members is that by accepting this argument they l have also implicitly accepted that what is good for the bosses must be good for their members.

So steelmen lose their jobs while the Tories extract massive forced donations-£500 million is the latest figure quoted by Joseph-from the BSC board to finance their state attacks on jobs and services.

With similar demands on the Gas Board to pay for Tory policies (£180 million) the nationalised industries are clearly becoming a milkcow for the bankers and speculators who back Thatcher.

Unlike the trade union leaders the Tories know full well that the crisis of capitalism is a class question!

For trade unionists, therefore, faced with the stepping up of attacks on all their basic rights, the question posed most sharply now is that of class action.

Workers can only defend themselves by acting as a class, recognising the identity of their problems. As individuals they have no future except as part of that class.

Above all workers. must come to recognise that the inter-

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