Rig Safety: Hold a Union Inquiry

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appropriate for the General Strike, when The Party well 'knew that... the workers... were not ready to challenge the social system'.

Everything else that they did flowed from this, and has been used to justify every Stalinist effort to hold back and defeat the working class ever since.

There is a curious congruence between these views and those presented in a recent pamphlet by James Hinton and Richard Hyman, two lecturers at Warwick University associated with the International Socialism group (now the SWP) entitled Trade Unions and Revolution: The Industrial Politics of the Early Communist Party. 1remair tress onesented This work is that he cold not have done any better. The fact is, we are told, 'it was a mistake to construct a mass revolutionary party' in a profoundly unfavourable situation'.

-Though they agree that the Communist Party in the period before the General Strike tied itself too closely to the trade union lefts, they also quote a most uneharacteristic statement from just before the struggle pointing to the potential of the councils of action. Even the Stalinists themselves have not gone that far in defending their position!

Statistics

By the use of statistics about strikes and union membership in a way that must have gone down well in many a postgraduate seminar, Hinton and Hyman argue from their Olympian hindsight that there was no "revolutionary situation' in the mid-1920s.

They sneer at the 'orthodox Trotskyists, who, unlike themselves fail to understand that history moves in its devious way through the contradictory cross currents of the immensely varied and many-sided consciousness of the working masses' needs and aspirations of the working class in failing to even consider how evolutionaries could or should have intervened Armourea cars escori revolutionary situation into a thrown in Mav 1926 in to they could smell or measure with a slide rule.

They moved in a mass way in a struggle which could have developed of to a much higher level.

Revolutionaries had responsibility to present policies to develop the struggle, even if they could not predict in advance how it would finally work out.

While it is certainly true that the orientation towards the trade union 'lefts in 1925-6 represented a fatal error, it is also worthwhile recalling the strengths and achievements of the Minority Movement before it finally succumbed to Stalinist degeneration.

Step forward

It was above all not a kind of precursor of the SWP 'Rank and File' organisation, which places itself outside the dynamic of the struggle for leadership in the working class.

•It represented a considerable step forward from the wartime shop, stewards movement, in that it hoped not to bypass the officia leaderst to bypass the putting forward a programme to bring together the interests of all sections of the working class in a unified, revolutionary way.

By challenging the established leaders within the mass organisations, it openly proclaimed that it aimed to become a 'majority movement'.

There is no doubt that they had a considerable effect in forcing the hands of the union leaders on 'Red Friday'.

It strengthened the miners, gave confidence to the trades councils, and did much to prepare the working class for the battles that were bound to come.

It was a lack of sensitivity to the moods of the working class as the struggle developed that made the denunciation of the lefts' by the Communist Party and the Minority Movement after the General Strike ring jooa convoy inrougn roptar . much less true.

The failure of anybody at all to present any other possibility meant that there was no new road open to the working class when they were overwhelmed by the sell-out.

When the Coventry Council of Action sent a delegation to the TUC after the surrender to demand the recall of the General Strike in the name of the workers of Coventry' one of the delegation found that when they met the 'left' Purcell:

"the mighty leader whom I had known as a fighter was cowed and beaten... The iron man ... had feet of clay"

It is clear that more than fifty years after the event the General Strike and its problems live with us.

We can of course see a capitalist class still determined to solve its crisis at the expense of the working class and a trade union and Labour bureaucracy determined to help them with the task.

Many echoes of the strength and determination of the working class have been heard in the battles of the miners, the dockers; the engineering workers and the steelworkers in recent years.

It is important not to confuse the wrong policies of the Communist Party in those years with the counter-revolutionary activities of those who masquerade behind the same name today.

Analysis

Above all, it is necessary to see that the struggle for a revolutionary rogramme in the working lass is inseparable from a co tinual analysis of the political process within the working class and the testing of different layers of its leadership. It is in this process that even small groups of revolutionaries can play a central role in the construction of the mass revolutionary party which is necessary to put an end to capitalist exploitation for good.

The horrific tragedy of the collapse of the "Aleksander Keilland" hotel platform into the North Sea with the loss of 123 lives has concentrated the attention of trade unionists upon the whole question of health and safety standards onboard North Sea oil installations.

: The demand for a trade union controlled enquiry into the disaster is strengthened daily as fresh doubts as to the safety of the semi-submersible rig are voiced.

One of the major issues is that the platform was not purpose built to accomodate workers but was a converted drilling platform from which the 200 ton derrick had not been removed.

Replacement

That the management recognised this drilling tower intensified the instability of the rig is suggested by the fact that it was due for replacement by a sisterrig, the "Henrick Ibsen", which had no derrick.

Mr Sverre Nielson, managing director of Stavanger Drilling, has : said, "There's no doubt that, once the rig started to list, the derrick would have had a bad effect."

Why did the leg of' the platform crack in the first place? Now that the disaster has occurred, reports are emerging of warnings given up to four years ago about the insufticlenty tested materials used in the construction of such rigs.

Hollow steel structures of large dimension but built of extremely thin material continue to be used, despite the warnings of experts.

The fifth leg of the "Aleksander Kielland" which broke away was 5 ft by 4 ft in diameter but made of metal only 30mm thick.

The whole question of metal fatigue on such immense structures in the hazardous conditions of the North Sea has also been insufficiently researched.

Trade unionists will not be fobbed off by references to the unpredictable nature of the elements.

They are rightly suspicious that standards of health and safety are blatantly ignored in the search for quick profits from North Sea oil.

Less strict

The fact that regulations are less strict in the British sector as compared to the Norwegian in the oilfields must intensify the call for a workers' inquiry. This report, which was commissioned by Tony Benn four years ago, contains a strongly worded dissenting note by the two trade unionists in the Committee.

Whereas the majority position was that matters of health and safety should remain in the hands of the Department of Energy, the trade unionists involved have demanded that these matters come under the surveillance of the Health and Safety Executive and the unions.

Their stand has been backed by Benn, who has drawn attention to the absence of trade union representation on the rigs as being a serious factor in safety.

Anti-union.

This rightly spotlights the notorious resistance of the multinational companies, such as Phillips and Esso, to recognition for the trade unions on offshore installations.

Nor is this blatant disregard for safety confined to offshore working. The five week suspension of workers by the Chicago Bridge Company on the site at Hunterston, Ayrshire, where they are building a platform for Phillips is over this very same issue.

There men have been expected to work on totally unsafe staging at heights of over 100 feet. The determined resistance of the workers in defence of minimum safety standards has met fierce hostility from the American management.

Hellbent upon extracting maximum profits from the oil bonanza, construction companies such as Chicago Bridge, Marathon and the French-based. • UEI have rushed to take advantage of the prospects opened up to them by first a supine Labour Administration and then a rapacious Tory government.

Marathon, having milked £1 million in 1972 from the last Tory government, in return for an agreement to set up business on the site of the defunct John Browns Shipyard in Clydebank, have now sold out to the French UEI who have demanded large scale redundancies as their terms of entry.

As a further measure of their unscrupulous approach the same companies are having some of their work done in shipyards such as Govan Shipbuilders and Cammell-Laird-where men are being paid lower rates than those employed on the platform building sites.

In protest against this anomaly, 900 boilermakers at Govan went on strike last week seeking parity with the men on the sites.

This attempt to take advantage of a lack of orders in the shipyards and secure work done at lower wage rates is now meeting resistance from workers in the yards.

The demand, already taken up by some trade unionists, for a conference of representatives of all workers in the oil production and related industries, must be campaigned for with new vigour in the light of the recent disaster.

Such a conference should consider:

*a full scale inquiry by the labour movement into health and safety. standards both onshore and offshore.

*a renewed. struggle for unionisation on the rigs.

*a campaign for parity of wages for workers involved in similar work on rig construction.

*the demand that the next Labour government nationalise the oil production and related industries under workers' control.

By lan McCalman

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However, it is they who show an utter contempt for the