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British furniture workers demand import controls GARMENT WORKERS UNION Al US garment workers demand import controls US steel workers ioin the chorus of nationalism From carpets to coking coal; from pianos to plimsolls; from fish to furniture; from steel to sperm whale oil; from televisions to textiles, the raucous voices of union leaders and desperate employers are clamouring for the Tory government to impose import controls to protect the profits of British companies.

The campaign has gathered pace alongside the galloping rate of redundancies in British industry as Thatcher's policies along with the world-wide crisis of capitalism bring a slump in production and post-war record unemployment.

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RILE t0° DID UNIS •fact that to make British industry competitive in capitalist terms means in fact Jurtner closures, further "rationalisation" , and further Edwardes style speed-up and attacks on shop floor organisation in order to increase the exploitation ot the working class.

And, while happily proposing measures that would simply create growing unemployment amongst workers in other countries, they litt not a finger to fight for factory occupations, supporting strikes and mass action to defend threatened jobs in Britain.

The Thatcher government has been able to force unemployment towards the two million mark without a single serious official struggle against a plant closure.

Not in one instance have union leaders challenged the right the preserve or restore prontabit) at the expense of the jobs anc living standards of the workforce.

Not in one instance has there been an official fight to force the opening of the books of the "bankrupt" British and multinational operations to elected trade union committees to reveal the wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, the employers' overall strategy for speed-up, and the profits creamed off by the banks and suppliers from "loss-making" firms and industries.

Yet the fact is that there is no common "national interest" which British workers share with British employers.

As an exploited class, and one which does not own the means of production, the working class is an international class, facing a common capitalist enemy. world Trotskyist movement! leconstruct the Fourth International peakers from WL and TILC sections Wednesday 23 July at 7.30 p.m. sway Hall, Red Lion Sq., London WC1 Tickets £1 He Now 1S S The working class can only win the right to a job and decent living standards, to adequate social services and a future of peace and security through mass action in every country for the overthrow of the anarchic system of capitalism and the fight for a socialist planned economy.

In this struggle the main enemy to be confronted by workers in any country is not a foreign capitalist exporter, but the employers at home and the state machinery and government through which they maintain their rule.

In Britain this means that the struggle to defend jobs (and to create jobs for the unemployed through • a planned programme of public works)

requires the development and extension of strikes and occupations in threatened factories and social services; the building of councils of action to coordinate and extend such struggles; and the fight for a General Strike to bring down the Thatcher government.

This would create the best conditions to expose the refusal of the existing leadership of the Labour Party to implement a socialist programme, and to show the necessity to establish a workers government to lead the struggle for the nationalisation of basic industries and the banks without compensation under workers' i management which alone can lay the basis for a planned socialist economy.

It is precisely because the existing union and Labour leaders are incapable of offering such a perspective that the Workers Socialist League fights to build a new, revolutionary leadership in the workers' movement. IS BEST JOBS

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