[Nurses: break trom #LIVE IANOWOR MONA iS /10…]

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Nurses: break trom #LIVE IANOWOR MONA iS /10 C RCN. Fight for a THOSE PUT PUT THE AGLE THE NO 'ON NHO CAREF IN THE BANK IN THE BAND iving waae. official GMWU mass picket on the site, poured scorn on threats of national supporting strike action:

*It would not be disastrous if all the laggers in construction went on strike. We would sent our members through the picket lines and they would do the laggers' work wherever it became necessary".

Delighted

Baldwin's determination to smash the laggers clearly delights employers throughout the construction industry.

Not only does it offer them the hope of slashing laggers' pay rates nearly in half; but the employers can see clearly that the brazen blacklegging of union leaders on this issue is simply a foretaste of the craven class collaboration they will offer in There's one law for the rich and the Tory establishment-and one for the poor.

And in case anyone missed this basic fact of life in the last Thatcher longer term.

As the Sunday Times has pointed out, a formidable alliance of capitalist firms that build power stations, chemical plants and oil refineries, together with the state firms and private monopolies that commission them, are determined to break the strength of the laggers.

"Managers hope that if they can break the laggers the rest of the workers will fall into line, like the 1,300 who were bussed through Tuesday's Grain picket line."

In other words the management scheme is to use AUEW and EETPU to break the GMWU -and then to step up the offensive on AUEW and EETPU members!

Nor is the danger restricted to largescale construction and building sites: the driving force year of Thatcher government, the contrast between the lavish £80 per week increase handed out to doctors and dentists and the pitiful 14% increase for nurses-thousands of whom earn less than £80 per week-should make it crystal clear.

The £312 million cost of the doctors' 31% rise will itself bring a new round of cuts in the National Health Service as a result of the Tory cash limits.

This coincides with Thatcher's strategy for buying off the top professional layers in the public sector as a prelude to further cuts and closures in the basic service. • But when leaders of 450,000 nurses, incensed and embarassed by the doctors pay deal, last week called upon Thatcher to behind Baldwin's: blacklegging has been the threats by the CEGB to shut down the Isle of Grain power station and the alleged national threat to construction jobs.

In words wearily familiar to workers in British Leyland, British Shipbuilders and the British Steel Corporation, all of whom have suffered the consequences of similar arguments, Baldwin claimed:

*I am fighting to save an industry and 35,000 members' jobs. It is my Waterloo. If I lose it, we have had it."

To "save an industry" to Baldwin and his fellow bureaucrats means to sacrifice members' wages, jobs, and now even the most elementary trade union principles, to preserve the profitability private employers-in this case the vicious exploiters in the lift the cash limits to make way for an improvement on their 14% offer, they got the cold shoulder.

Banking on the traditional spinelessness of the nurses' union leaders and on the fact that the pro-management Royal College of Nursing is constitutionally barred from calling industrial action, Thatcher made it clear that there was no way the 14% offer would be increased.

But feelings are running high among nurses-forced to work for a pittance in a crumbling Health Service beset by government attacks.

Union leaders have begun to suggest that a nurses' strike Cont'd p.11, col. 6 construction monopolies.

Baldwin and Hammond have therefore nailed their colours to the employers' mast in the drive to cut laggers' pay: but the very same arguments could be used to justify the surrender of wage rates and jobs in any industry in a crisis-wracked British capitalism!

The GMWU leadership have pointed out that the Isle of Grain battle is a prelude to an all-out drive by construction bosses to hold down wage rates prior to the launching of a new programme of nuclear power stations.

Cornered But after allowing the bonus dispute to drag on for ten months they now find themselves cornered -by a militant Nurses on the march in 1973 membership demanding that their rate of pay for a dangerous and skilled job be protected: and by an unholy alliance of management with rival union bureaucrats determined to cut back their wages and rejecting TUC compromise proposals.

"Save jobs"

-The reality is that in everv other instance GMWU leaders themselves peddle Baldwin's line of sacrifice "to save jobs".

They are therefore incapable of spelling out to workers at the Grain site or elsewhere the enormous dangers that face the working class as a result of this organised scabbing.

Nevertheless they must be called upon to mobilise the full strength of all 6,500 laggers to force the CFCR to cannado tha C unC XIWE TOOR YOU CANT national agreement on laggers' bonuses, reinstate the 27 GMWU laggers, and drive the 25 scabs from the site.

Within the AUEW-particularly the construction section-and EETPU, militants must demand an immediate end to official blacklegging which threatens the very fabric of trade unionism, and fight for an alternative to a leadership that seeks to "protect jobs" by sacrificing the wages and conditions of trade union members.

The threat of sackings in the industry must be combatted by the fight for work sharing without loss of pay, and for the nationalisation of the construction monopolies without compensation under workers" management.

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