Steel Leyland Generai Strke!

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Sirs (right): now singing a different tune WE STAND The Lever commission was cobbled together by BSC precisely in order to cash in on this weakness of leadership in the ISTC-with the even more right wing leaders of the craft unions already having declared themselves willing to accept any new offer that came up.

The "inquiry" specifically excluded the question of jobs, and set out to provide a highspeed token money increase that would enable Sirs to press for a sell-out settlement prior to April 8.

Yet so transparent is the fraud of this "extra" one percent that BSC management immediately pointed out that it would be paid for in further closures and redundancies!

As we go to press strike leaders and executive members from various areas have declared themselves opposed to acceptance of the offer. Sirs on the other hand is to fight tooth and nail for an end to the strike -at the very point when it could be strengthened by joint action with BL workers.

There will never be a better opportunity for steel workers to press home their fight. If the 15.5% money offer is accepted, and there is a return to work, it will herald an unprecedented round of job-cutting and closures that will decimate the industry and lay waste whole towns and industrial areas.

BSC has offered not the slightest concession om jobs. Under orders from the Tory government, management engaged in a frontal onslaught on the workforce in pursuit of profit.

The rank and file committees that have emerged in the steel strike now face the most severe test of all: can they hold the line against Sirs sabotage, and maintain the strike?

They have proven their militancy and their tenacity in struggle. Have they developed the necessary political independence to stand firm and fight on, hopefully alongside BL workers, for the defeat of the Tory government's attacks?

BL workers too, face grave dangers as a result of the manoeuvres of their union officials and the repeated capitulations of their convenors.

April 8 has been set as the day on which Michael Edwardes intends to impose the company's vicious 92-page book of new working practiceswhich effectively abolish every trade union agreement won in 30 years of struggle.

To clock in for work on 8 April, declares Edwardes, is to accept these "strings". To stay away, or to organise action against the company is to invite "disciplinary action"-clearly meaning the sack.

Yet it is obvious that militants in BL face a Catch-22 situation. If they organise a strike against Edwardes they may face the sack: but if they clock in, and accept the company's blackmail, they can be picked off at management's leisure as soon as they challenge any one of the host of completely unacceptable conditions laid down in the 92 pages!

workers 12155 meetines heavily to endorse the strike action on April 8. These include mass meetings of AUEW members at Cowley Assembly Plant, Llanelli, and BMC Services; mass meetings of TGWU members at Jaguar; and meetings of shop stewards at the Cowley Body Plant, Cowley Assembly, Castle Bromwich and Longbridge.

This is further evidence-if any were needed-that shopfloor workers in BL still stand hahind tha slac tha company pay offer that they registered in a postal ballot two months ago.

But this is not good enough for the right wing AUEW Executive. They are committed to providing BL with a prolonged "moratorium" of no strike action in the hopes of restoring it to "viability"

So having failed to secure a postal ballot bote against strike action they now have attempted to use the votes of skilled toolroom workers as a pretext for refusing to call out their members in BL.

This is why they instructed AUEW convenors to hold mass meetings prior to a decision on the strike call.

Toolroom workers have already won a substantial increase in the last 12 monthsand have now been offered double the increase on offer to semi-skilled workers. Few of LA Edwardes' strings apply to the skilled men, and none of them have been subjected to the recent lay-offs.

From this privileged position they have felt able to vote heavily against strike action in both Swindon and Cowley toolrooms. This casts a real doubt over the AUEW Executive's decision.

But for the TGWU, the major manual union in BL, there is no such excuse available. The ballot vote clearly still reflects the feelings of the membership.

And if there is no strike on April the acceptance of Edwardes package will effectively herald the end of trade unionism in many plants; it will open up every militant steward and convenor to a Robinson-style victimisation; and it will destroy the bargaining power of the unions until For not the AUEW saction. the, TGWU must call out its BL members on ficial strike from April 8.

Just as the steelworkers have been locked in battle with both BSC and the Tories, so BL workers face both Edwardes and his Tory backers. On the success of their struggle hangs the strength of the workers movement in many such battles to come.

This is why the steelworkers should not have been left to fight alone: and why BL workers must not be left solated in their struggle.

This government is attacking the whole working class by picking off individual sections one by one: it must be met by a united class response.

This means fighting for a General Strike to bring down the Tory government and create conditions for a political reckoning with the Labour traitors who helped put them in office.

It means fighting to defend all jobs and living standards. through the struggle for a workers government to establish a planned, socialist.

And it means fighting to build-in the steel industry, in BL and in every union-a revolutionary leadership prepared to start at all times not from the profits and "viability" of the employers, but from the independent interests of the working class.