Stop the Excuses. Start the Fight

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leaflet distributed by supporters of WOMAN WORKER, women's ague, at the Lambeth cuts conference on November 1. WOMAN months and is available from WSL, BM Box 5277, London WCIN United against action to bring down the Tories: NUPE We reprint paper of the WORKER is 3XX.

We are sure that we do not need to tell anyone here of the effects that the Tories' €200 million cuts in local authority spending have had on working class women.

Jobs and services are being slashed in school meals, nurseries, home-help services, cleaning, old people's homes and children's homes, teaching and administration.

Yet the Tories see even the damage they have done to our social services since they took office as totally insufficient.

Now they want to completely destroy whole sections of the welfare state as they showed last month with the massive attack on council housing.

We have to stop them before it is too late. They have already been allowed to get away with the virtual destruction of the school meals system which was a major gain of the working class.

The question now is how to stop further cuts? The only way to do it is to bring the Tories down! And the only way to do that is through widespread strike action.

The major debate whether such action desirable.

It is now a year since we had the emergency SERTUC conference on action against the cuts. Yet still there has not been even one effective national action organised by the trade union and Labour leaders against the cuts.

Excuses for inactivity

The same arguments will probably be peddled today as they were a year ago. A well-known excuse lor inactivity is to claim that the working class had moved to the right, claiming that workers are the ones responsible for voting in Thatcher.

Of course, the real reason for the Tory election victory was that many people could see little difference between their bitter experience of the right wing Labour policies of wage control, cuts and anti-union laws under Callaghan and Healey and the bland talk in the Tory manitesto.

This is the basis aot to give in to the Tories but to fight for the removal of Labour's right wing leaders!

The major excuse of the union leaders for not calling a strike is, however, to say that it is not up to them to do so-that it is the responsibility of the membership "at a local level."

The membership, they claim, are "apathetic" and "don't want to fight the Tories."

But take the question of detending school meals. In union branch meetings up and down the country, the membership, outraged at the attack on jobs and services, have been made "apathetic" by the fact that their union leaders have offered them no perspective for a fight to stop the school meals cuts.

They are told they have to find solutions at a local level and that there is to be no nationally organised campaign.

This means that instead of mobilising the strength of the whole union the fight is left up to isolated sections already run down to skeleton staff by the union leaders' acceptance of "natural wastage"

and huge price rises in school meal prices.

The members are assured. especially in NUPE, that there would be no public support for any strike action as we are in the grip of a prejudiced national press who will only portray our actions as inflicting suffering on the helpless!

With leaders like these who enemies?

Gesture

At best the union leaders offer members the gesture of a one-day or half-day token strike-which many members reject as being pointless, and just a straight loss of pay.

Usually, however, the leadership say that since the rest of the membership won't fight, no strike is better than an unsupported strike.

One way and the members are encourages action.

In many othe: ises 3Eer.

against the cuts. me no -* action, is not even cia.ie. ...

leadership, seeking resistance, fight to ge: mere:

voluntary • redundancy *e:

Hull, Oxford County NUPE!.

Other well-known arguments :amiliar to the many women in the membersrip o: below the text of published every tw today will be possible 3:1e: 52...

Labourites Hattersley and Kinnock the public sector unions is that the only people who suffer from strike action in the public sector are the people we are paid to look atter.

A desperate picture is painted of geriatrics abandoned as old people's homes go on strike or the sick dying in hospital wards as the heating is cut off.

Strike action presented in this way is therefore immediately dismissed as impossible by the members who care very deeply about the services that they provide.

What is not placed before them is the whole question of emergency cover, that in strike action the services would not necessarily be withdrawn but placed under workers' control. The strike committee should decide on what provisions had to be made and would decide not to withdraw home-helps, for example, from essential jobs.

We would not be inflicting suffering on the users of the public sector but would be dealing an enormous political blow by taking these services out of manacement's hands and running them nurselves with the workers decidine on emergency cover.

Cover provided

Such cover was provided during the firemen's national strike and the strikes of ambulance drivers.

The point that is never raised by the national leadership of NUPE, GMWU, and NALGO is that it really shouldn't be left up to the membership in 'caring' sections to take action alone on a local level.

What isn't stressed is that nationally the three public sector unions have the power to bring the country to a standstill. They control our cities, the water works, sewage, waste disposal, our roads, courts and local government offices.

Full all out strike action, not an odd day's stoppage here and there, could well end Tory rule.

What is needed is a strong lead from a national level. The stakes must be clearly placed before the working class: either we must endure three more years of Tory rule, the end of our social services, the loss of still more jobs and union rights: of we fight for national strike action.

Such a right can be waged along tr *e sections like BL and the miners in = seemed ime i kick out the lottes = me wil a government com....=: :: sedals: policies and answerao.e i ine morning diass that has put them in since.

We know, however, that Fisher and the rest of the TUC stand in complete opposition to a mass mobilisation of the working class against the Tories.

Fisher, and As a result the Tories have a free hand to carve up our social services and to inflict what they like on the working class while the TUC feebly crawl to talks with Thatcher-hoping to persuade her to r.ake a U-turn!

Now that the talks have predictably failed, what have the TUC to offer? More one-off demonstrations? Or perhaps every union is going to follow NUPE's example and buy shares in a local radio station to help educate the "public' on the effects of Tory policies?

Meanwhile as the leaders continue to argue that their membership "won't fight" the fact is that every time there is a focus for a struggle-like the St Benedicts Hospital occupation and the Eileen Crosby victimisation in Nottingham, it is the membership and the 'public' who respond while the union leaders leave them isolated on a national level, lett to be picked off by the Tories one by one.

The St Benedicts occupation just like all the other occupations-Wandsworth and Coventry nurseries, Fulham Baths, St. Columba's-should have had full supporting strike action from the unions involved, the moment they were threatened with eviction.

Occupations should be established immediately to defend threatened facilities, with full scale back-up strike action.

Labour-run local authorities shouid refuse to implement cuts, not put up rents and rates, repudiate interest charges and in the event of any victimisation call upon immediate supporting strike action.

Strike action

Strike action is the most effective weapon of the working class to defend our interests from Tory devastation. So why don't the trade union leaders use it?

They don't want to use it because they are terrified of the power a general strike would give to the working class: workers have the potential power to bring down governments, they have to power to change the whole social system on which the labour bureaucracy depends for its privileges.

Were this power aver unleashed the working class could end capitalism.

I say i de right against the mes me de aise engaged in the fight * 0* existing leaders-for a new •stered in ine labour movement.

Moread a leadership that is prepared :: igh: cooth and nail for our interests 30: 00: :ose of the employers and their alling sysien.

Enough is the TUC enough! Stop the making excuses! Force action now!

Women driven While the monthly unemployment figures continue to give an idea of the general impact of Tory policies and the capitalist crisis, another set of statistics shows the rapid decline in total jobs available.

The quarterly figures for employment published in the Financial Times show that 185,000 less jobs existed in June than in March of this year.

Between June 1979-June 1980 no less than 405,000 jobs disappeared, as the number of workers employed fell to 21.9 million.

This fall in twelve months is nearly double the total decline în jobs that took place during the two years of the 1974-76 recession-and of course since June the pace of redundancies and closures has greatly increased.

But the special oppression of women is highlighted by a comparison between the fall in the numbers employed and the smaller rise in the number registered as unemployed.

Though 405,000 less people were in work, the rise in unemployment over the same period was just under 300,000.

In other words the working population fell by some 100,000-despite the fact that the number of people of working age has recently been rising by 200,000 every year-a discrepancy of some 300,000!

At the same time there has been a definite fall in the female labour force of 135,000 between June 1979-June 1980.

In other words, more and more married women, thrown out of their jobs by redundancies and closures but ineligible for unemployment benefits, are failing to register as unemployed -and are being forced to revert to a dependent existence in the home as housewives.

These figures of course fail to account fully for the massive loss of part-time jobs in the public services and private industry, which has also predominantly hit women workers.

As the cuts begin to bite home and the Tories plan their next round of social spending cuts, the numbers of women confined to the home will be further increased, as more and more find themselves forced to cope with sick and aged relatives, denied nursery and childcare facilities, and denied even the chance of taking the low-paid jobs in the public services traditionally designated "women's work"

Only the fight for a socialist solution that can expand the social services, expand production and create new jobs can end this mounting oppression.