NUPE leaders blame members

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Tory government cuts in health, education and social services have workers by the tens of thousand fuming.

Many, sick to the teeth of futile petitions, protests and token actions, are frustrated, longing for a firm determined call for action from their leaders —a call which has never come.

In the meantime, men and women who are ready to fight in defence of their jobs, wages, working conditions and hard-won social services are left in forced inactivity.

But for the public sector union leaders, who have time and again shown themselves more willing to chat with the Thatcher government than fight them, the problem is the other way around.

They blame the members for allowing Tories to ram home their attacks! They claim it is necessary to "educate the members" before any fight is possible!

Isolation

Meanwhile, as at the St. Benedicts Hospital occupation, as in the case of victimised Nottingham nursery teacher Eileen Crosbie, as in the CPSA struggle at Brixton, the militant struggles of the membership that do break out are left in isolation, to be picked off by the Tories one by one.

At the centre of this is the supposedly "left' leadership of NUPE. While Alan Fisher as chairman of the TUC heads delegations to Thatcher, the union's gang of smooth-talking officials and officers are heaping the blame for the cuts firmly on their members.

Typical of this is the attitude of NUPE's West Midlands Local Government Area Committee. The Secretary's report on September 9 declares that:

"He appreciated that there was very little help from the membership to attack the cuts made at the present time. He said that in Staffordshire it appeared that the Local Authority can do what it likes and the membership [!] were not prepared to stand up and oppose them. He said that he did not blame the membership entirely On defence of the school meals service, the same committee agreed that "not much could be done nationally-it must be done locally."

The problem is that members are being "done" locally by spineless NUPE officials towing the Alan Fisher line of capitulation to the reactionary Thatcher government.

Only the building of a new leadership in NUPE and a fight for all-out action can prevent further devastation.

Fisher

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JOHN LISTER examines the position of support for Iran in the Gulf War with Iraq adopted by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and in particular by the American Socialist Workers Party-an organisation in sympathy with the USFI.