King Henry's: the savade face of capitalis

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1) Not securing guards to the crimping machine..

2 Providing insufficient training and supervision.

The charges arose from an accident last spring when 17year old Heather Valentine lost 1½ fingers in a machine which crimps the lids on pics.

In evidence she said she had tried to remove a lid after she had put it on crookedly.

Management admitted that the guards were wrongly adjusted but denied that the training was inadequate.

Striker and witness Debbie Fitzpatrick clained the accident happened before she drew her first week's wage packet and that she had only been given half an hour's instruction on how to run the machine.

This is the second conviction of the company in its four year In 1978, a man's arm was badly injured when it was pulled into a machine with a faulty limit switch which would ordinarily have automatically switched the machine off in an accident.

Since Heather's accident there have been another three.

In June Duncan lost 75% of. his hand including his thumb and first three fingers in a muttin machine without a guard.

The management is being prosccuted over this. But he is still crossing the picket ine! In September Margaret, a union member for over 15 years had three fingers crushed in the steak pudding crimping machine.

Crushed

On 22 October another worker had two fingers crushed in a third crimping machine.

Despite them crossing an official picket line to risk life and limb in the factory, and falling behind in their dues, these workers are still being defended by the Bakers Union.

Such generosity is not shared by manager Hollins whose offers have now reached the level of telling the strikers they should draw straws to see which eight return!

Picketing continues. On the evening of 19 September picket was arrested for criminal damage to a car, halt an hour after gone through line.

Police also arrested her friend for complaining about her treatment. • Their case will be tried on 10 December. The other eleven pickets arrested on 29 August wilk be tried by special court on 1l and 12 December-all to be heard before the notorious Stipendiary Magistrate, Judge Coffey.

There will probably be a demonstration in support of the pickets and against the Tories' Employment Act on 12 Decentber.

The beginning of the nearby Gardners occupation resulted in a fall in money and attendance at mass pickets but support for this dispute remains essential.

Donations and messages of support should be sent BF&AWU, 30 Dudley ., Manchester 16. imposed photograph showing a nuclear bomb exploding in the centre of London.

But for all that the Mirror needs the pennies of the 70,000 people who demonstrated in London on October 26, it also needs the politics of nuclear weapons apologists Rogers, Owen and Healey.

A stern editorial-looking out of place amidst the simulated carnage-declared that the oniy way to prevent nuclear war was to build more nuclear bombs!

The same hypocrisy has swept through the press over the Tories' economic policies.

It is no longer good business to sound too enthusiastic over Thatcher's economic policies.

Her public status dwindles by the day and the number of critics among supposed supporters increases just as fast.

(The Brighton Argus gave prominent coverage to a Guy Fawkes party where Thatcher was burned on the bonfire. The organisers said they tried to focus their display on a theme of public interest!)

The national press generally makes a pretence at trying to make up its mind at election time before plumping either for the Tories or the Labour right wing.

BL workers, we were first told, deserved some sympathy. But on the morning of the senior stewards' crucial vote there was a sudden blast of the old venom with references to 'suicide' spread across most of the front pages.

The collapse of the senior Thatcher own jobs which go when they beat the limits, but other people's."

Conservative papers like the Sunday Telegraph showed its concerns were the same: the problem is not the attack on the workers; the problem is that the workers may fight back.

All papers agreed that the collapse of the BL convenors in the face of Edwardes' threat of closure was a major factor in the government announcement.

There have already been predictable bleatings in Britain when the government of Zimbabwe announced it is nationalising most of the daily papers. There have been far fewer criticisms of the reactionary Thatcherite Fraser government in Australia which has censored two newspapers which were about to expose a defence contract scandal.

In Britain, after all, the Law Lords this week tightened the gag on British journalists with their judgement on the BSC "mole" case-setting a precedent aimed at preventing any further such embarrassing leaks.

The press in Britain, for all its breast-beating about independence and freedom, is as servile and constrained as any in the world.