Adwest strikers face BL tactics

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Frank Waller is big business. After Lew Grade, he's the highest paid director in the land.

He's on the board of over 50 companies, owns a Rolls Royce with a chautieur, an ocean-going yacht and lives in a mansion in Reading. It's big but no bigger than Blenheim Palace.

Frank Waller likes football, so he bought himself a football club: Reading F.C. They're looking for a striker.

Danny Broderick is a striker: but not the kind Reading FC want to buy.

He's the TGWU convenor at Adwest Engineering, Reading, who along with 50 other workers (including all but one shop steward) have been locked out and sacked for holding a mass meeting.

Personal The man behind the lock-out is Frank Waller, chairman of Adwest.

• Waller has friends in impor tant places: Peter Walker had to resign from the board so he could join Thatcher's vampires' orgy in the Tory cabinet, but still keeps in touch.

Ray Horrocks, managing director of British Leyland Cars and hit-man for King Edwardes is a personal friend of Frank Waller.

Frank Waller admires Michael Edwardes so much he has decided that his own workforce at Adwest should be encouraged to participate in the benefits of an Edwardes-style economic strategy.

Accordingly, the Adwest workforce of some 200 TGWU and AUEW members were told that it would be in. their interests to accept an • offer meaning a 15% cut in real wages, accept a new grading structure, be subject to complete mobility and sign away their trade union mutuality agreements.

The response of the workforce wasn't encouraging: through Danny Broderick they told Weller where to put his offer.

Undismayed, Adwest took the second leaf out of the Edwardes manual: organise an féar and smear propaganda campaign and carry out a secret ballot, accompanied by a message from the boss saying something along the lines of "If you dun't vote yes to the offer you'll have to lose your job".

Lost the This is what Adwes d despite the campaig Iwardes, they lost the vo 80% of the workers sted against the Waller plan started working to rule.

Next lesson: if things aren't going your way, move against a weli-known trade unionist.

SIx weeks ago, Martin Kaufman, AUEW militant at Adwest was summoned to the manager's office, informed that he was drunk and sacked on the spot.

His money had been the day before.

Put into action

Kaufman is a militant; Derek Robinson, convenor Longbridge wasn't, but the strategy is the same and so is the effect: diverting some workers' attention away from pay and onto personality.

A campaign to discredit Kaufman had already been prepared and was now put into action.

Danny Broderick isn't a very typical TGWU convenor.

He's in his late twenties, looks a bit like David Essex but tougher, and lives in a room in a house full of rented rooms in Reading which is where we went for a cup of tea after hours on the picket outside Adwest.

I asked him what action he'd taken after Martin Kaufman was victimised and sacked.

«We had to act fast because they did him on the Friday before Bank Holiday Monday, and Tuesday would have given them more time to spread the dirt.

"As chairperson of the Joint Shop Stewards Committee I called a meeting and from that called a mass meeting of all TGWU and AUEW members.

"When management heard of this, they made the move they had prepared: they refused permission for the mass meetinglike Leylands did-and foremen told all the workers that anyone attending • the mass meeting would be sacked.

Strike action

I called it outside the gates with about half the workforce present; the rest were too afraid of losing their jobs.

"I recommended immediate strike action over Martin Kaufman's victimisation.

"Any trade unionist knowsor damn well should know by now-that if you don't act straight away on a witch-hunt sacking you've blown it.

"If you sit back and wait for an enquiry you may as well have a whip round, shake hands and say cheerio.

"As it is, that strike motion was carried and fifty of us set up a picket outside Adwest with Brother Kaufman on that picket line. Then management said we'd all dismissed ourselves and became a lock-out"

"But we're fighting back. Just like Leyland workers will fight back.

«We know we're not just fighting Frank Waller or Michael Edwardes. We're fighting a government determined to smash the living standards of the workers.

"As trade unionists it's our duty to preserve and improve our standard of living and work conditions to increase democracy in the workplace and create systems of worker control.

"We see this strike as a strike for the working class against the capitalist system. This is why we must win it and will win it.

"But we need support: apart from official backing, we need volunteer pickets and financial aid. Every little thing helps.

"Some of us can't afford to eat anymore but we are fighting on because we're going to win."

ADWEST

DAY OF ACTION IONDAY 23 JUNE a 7.00 a.m.

Adwest Engineering, Headley Road East, Woodley READING This year's This year's SOGAT