SOGAT must fight Chix women for sliding scale

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Main interest at this year's SOGAT conference will be centred around resolutions from the North West area and the Midlands on the national basic wage.

General Secretary Bill Keys and the NEC this year capitulated to the employers' organisation, the BPIF, meekly accepting their final' offer of £75 with a 37½ hour week delayed until 1982.

This was after the SOGAT leadership had churned out reams of literature on the importance of fighting with the NGA and NATSOPA to win the joint united claim for £80 and 37½ hours in April this year.

As a result of Keys' betrayal the NGA was left to fight alone for the full claim, while SOGAT • leaders issued instructions to their members to "work normally" during the NGA dispute.

Indeed Keys went further and attempted to ride on the backs of the NGA's possible success by claiming similar pro rata increases to avoid a large differential arising.

This position amounted to siding with the employers against fellow print workers-in a struggle which is still not finally resolved after five weeks of lockout and strike action.

Motions had to be submitted for the conference as early as last November.

At that point some thought that an £80 minimum basic would be adequate to the economic needs of the membership. But since then constantly rising prices for basic commodities like food, fuel, housing and transport have taken their toll and it is clear that the £80 NATIONAL ITTEE SUMMER figure would in no way eliminate the excessive overtime working to maintain living standards during a period of high and increasing unemployment.

The North West's £80 demand and an amendment for £90 from the Midlands offer an opportunity to expose the miserable cowardly lack of fight shown by the • NEC and Bill Keys.

As a leading member of the TUC General Council, Keys was also shamefully involved in the Lever Inquiry's sell out of the steel workers' 14-week strike in defence of jobs and living standards.

A resolution from the Oxford Branch calls for a sliding scale of wages to keep up with the high rate of inflation.

It calls for price rises to be monitored by the establishment of a committee representative of the SOGAT membership, with no reliance on the often distorted official price index.

But the motion has been Keys deliberately separated from the main motions 'on wages at number 335 on the agenda-and is to be found sandwiched between items of such immense importance as the Derby Draw and a nationalist complaint at the "dumping" of Russian Xmas cards on the British market!

The fight for the Oxford motion as union policy on wages must be a part of the fight to develop an active policy of struggle to defend jobs and living standards against the Tory NUJ members IPC magazines are still suspended following a narrow majority vote for rejecting a deal which would have given them three quarters of the back pay in dispute.

The original claim for a bigger wage rise has become submerged in a dispute over whether the editors and journalists should be paid for the time they have officially been suspended.

IPC -which attacked the union after minimal action had been taken-is losing millions of pounds and stands to face disruptive action at Mirror Newspapers.

The chapels had continued going into work, though in many offices, phones, heating and post had been cut off.

They have made their main demand full back pay for the length of the suspension, which they refused to recognise. Members have not picketted or, until now, called for any supporting A heavy blow has been struck at the GMWU bureaucracy's attempt to force through a sell out deal of. the 8-month long union recognition strike at the Chix bubblegum factory in Slough.

A mass meeting of the remaining strikers last week threw out a 'compromise' settlement negotiated by union fulltime official McMullen which would have left a majority of the sacked workers on the dole and did not even give a starting date for the 19 who had been "reinstated".

In a struggle where up till now the voice of the Asian women involved has been effectively drowned by the smooth talking McMullen and other GMWU bureaucrats, (who had the nerve to hail their agreement as a 'victory' at the union's conference a fortnight ago before the strikers had even had a decisie to font for full this statement must be followed up EIS MOND UI HA by the stepping up of practical support from within the GMWU and other unions.

Too often in the past in similar strikes the union leaders' stranglehold has led to defeats, as with the Grunwick and Garners strikes-which also involved mainly immigrant workers.

The leadership's ploy in Chix has clearly been to organise only minimum assistance and let time and demoralisation create conditions for them to ditch the strikers' demands.

The picket line at the Slough factory is now back on and must be strengthened.

The ground lost by the bureaucracy's capitulation, which has allowed the employer to stockpile heavily. depleted supplies, must be made up by renewed blacking of the plant and its supplying firms. = GMWU leader Basnett has been forced into threatening strikes in support of the Isle of Grain laggers. Similar demands should be made to assist this other crucial battle for basic union rights.

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