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their costs in sustaining their profitable plants, combined shop floor agreements, and a existing plant and stocks of with speed-up and cuts in real miserable 5% pay increase railmaterials are constantly rising. wages for the remaining work- roaded in with the aid of spinethis situation the need to take British Leyland management has and British Shipbuilders firm action-and ram through a taken the lead in this--with the management are following on combined programme of ration- axing of 13 plants, 25,000 jobs, with their package of redunalisation and closure ofless a vicious package of attacks on dancies and attacks, together Mass march of unemployed in 1930s: TUC fears "social disturbance"

Thatcher In line with Tory policy unemployment is now higher, and rising faster thar at any time since 1948 Redundancies are running al 1,000 every day.

For the Thatcher govern ment, this growing tide o human misery is all part of their strategy to boost the profits o private industry and thus lin‹ the pockets of the ruling class.

•To force: British employer: to carry through a frontal attac on their workforce, Thatche has decreed a policy of sky-higt interest rates and to expost them to the full rigours of inter national competition she .ha: insisted on maintaining a strong pound This means that while Britist manufacturers find themselve: out priced and squeezed out o markets by international com petitors at home and abroad The Thatcherite theory is force that employers will draw from With eager Tory approval, less union leaders. Statemen t on national Liais affiliated and British Steel Corporation with Chrysler/Talbot and Lucas.

But elsewhere, smaller or weaker firms are simply going to the wall-at the rate of 120 liquidations a week. In every case the measures sought by the Tories mean more sackings, more closures, less vacancies and thus a continued rise in unemployment.

While the private sector, in response to the international sump and the tory recession, throws workers by the tens of thousand onto the dole queues, the public sector, too, is axing jobs as part of Thatcher's savage programme of cuts.

Many of these lost jobs fail to show up in the official unemployment statistics, since the first workers sacked are parttimers-many of them married women ineligible for benefits who therefore do not register as unemployed.

If these "invisible" unemployed are taken into account, along with the 200,000 involved in various phony government "job creation" schemes, it is clear that the Thatcher government has already created a pool of over 2½ million unemployed.

Yet not in one single instance have trade union leaders in either the public or private sectors lifted a finger in serious action to prevent the 1 the strike wave in Poland on Committee Summer Scl sympathising sections.

U.K. UNEMPLOYME

2000,3000 1,500Whally Vacancies asanelly adjusted 1111 1977 "78 '79 80 Tory onslaught on jobs.

There has been no officially led occupation to prevent the closure of a single factory: there have been no preparations even for blacking action to prevent the transfer of work that generally accompanies "rational¡sation"

It is therefore the height of hypocrisy for union leaders, headed by TUC leader Len Murray, to make angry statements denouncing the latest unemployment figures.

No challenge Neither under Labour nor under Thatcher have they even attempted to challenge the 'right of the employers to increase their profits at the expense of the workforce.

Indeed the union leaders make it clear they are more afraid of the possibility that anger over unemployment will threaten their peaceful coexistence with the Tories than genuinely concerned about the Continued, p.l1