FBU leaders plan strikes to save pay agreemeni

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Gorbals nursery THE PLAGUE . state bans on marches has now spread to Scotland with a draconian three month ban on marches throughout the Strathclyde area.

The ban was imposed to prevent a march in solidarity with Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands and a Loyalist counter-march.

And like every other such ban it prohibits all labour movement mobilisations in the area.

Fire Brigade Union leaders are to plan a series of one day strikes in the summer if local authority employers maintain their refusal to reinstate the pay agreement which settled the Parents this weekend occupied the threatened Moffat Street nursery in Glasgow's Gorbals district in a last-ditch bid to halt its closure by the Labour council.

Plans include the axing of 150 nursery places Moffat St and Baltater St. The closures are blamed on "falling rolls": the "falling occupied 1977-78 strike.

8,000 firemen last week joined a mass lobby in protest at the attacks on their pay agreement and drastic cuts in the fire service by many local authorities.

The pay agreement was effectively broken in the rolls" are themselves related to the fact that 760 council houses in nearby Crown St. are left vacant and uninhabitable because of damp.

Meanwhile, working women in Glasgow are forced to shoulder the full burden of oppression -homelessness and a chronic lack of child •cared,, other facilities::. - November 1980 pay settlement, in which employers conceded not the full 18.8% due but a two-stage deal, with 13% in November and a further 5.8% this month.

Management made it plain that they want future pay reviews to take place in April-making it more than likely that last year's deal would remain in force until April 1982!

The compromise deal was eventually accepted only on the casting vote of the FBU national chairperson on the eve of the first of a series of one-day strikes.

No strings Executive members insisted that there were "no strings attached"

Yet now, only six months after the settlement they are forced to face up to the fact that the pay agreement-linking Fire Service wages to the "upper quartile" of male manual carnings- is no longer in operation,. and. . can only + be restored through industrial action, beginning in July.

160,000 US coal miners, mem bers of the United Mine Workers of America, are on indefinite strike for an improvement terms of their 3-year pay contract.

Despite a recommendation from UMWA President Sam Church and from the union's executive to vote for acceptance, miners voted 2-1 in a ballot to throw out the bosses' offer.

The deal axes their costof living protection, offers the western" them 5% less tish miners in and sacrifices an arrangenauire into British SOCIALIST AALS coup plot!

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•SIS Allegations that Lord Mountbatten together with press barons discussed plans for a possible coup in Britain in 1968 have not been in any way answered by the various evasive government statements in the last week.

Labour MP Ted Leadbitter's appeal for a full official inquiry has met firm opposition from the Tories.

But the Prime Minister of the day, Sir Harold Wilson has now said that he regards the affair as a plan for a coup to take over the machinery of his government in that year of stormy and revolutionary struggles throughout Europe.

Wilson has never raised the matter for debate within the labour movement. Nor have other ministers in his government.

The Tories may well wish to hush it up. But it is time the workers' movement mounted its own inquiry into the whole affair.

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Glasgow marches banned