The Pickets Must Fly

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STRIKES have to be won actively, It you just walk out, go home and hope for the best, you'll probably lose.

The bosses have every chance to get at you as individuals, divide you up and convince you that there is no possibility of winning, while the union bureaucrats get a free hand to fix up a sell-out.

But there's been plenty of experience in the last ten years of how to win.

It was obvious from the start of the 1979 lorry drivers' strike that picketing the transport depots was not going to achieve much. The management could simply sub-contract the work to owner-drivers and scab firms, and hold out more or less indefinitely So the factories, warehouses, docks and railway yards that the drivers normally loaded out of and delivered to were picketed. In each area, strike committees were set up to run the action with delegates from each TGWU road transport branch in the district.

The Hull strike commit tee succeeded in virtually sealing off the town, while the Warrington committee got national publicity as g result of its careful vetting of the issue of exemption certificates. (Issued to allow the movement of medical supplies.)

But where the full time officials got control of the committees there were problems. for instance, drivers picketing the Cadbury's chocolate factory in Birmingham were surprised when the union told them to go away because they were holding up vital food supplies! (They kept the picket on anyway.)

The drivers won even though there weren't enough of them to go round the thousands of places that needed picketing. When scabs turned up determined to cross the line, they usually couldn't be stopped But back in 1972 the miners were able to mobilise thousands of flying pickets during their strike and concentrate them on the places where coal was still moving. They took the trouble to explain their case to workers in the local factories and mobilise their At Saltley Coke Depot in Birmingham 700 miners fought for several days to stop cowboy drivers taking loads out, and didn't quite succeed i until local transport and engineering workers struck for the day and several thousands marched down to join in.

The police and the scabs knew they were beaten, and the depot stayed shut for the rest of the strike.

The key to that victory was that the miners saw what they had to do to win, and then went out and did it. They refused to be bound by the Heath government's Industrial Relations Act or the furor about 'mob rule' • Other workers saw that they were serious about winning their strike, and supported them.

Likewise when the Southampton dockers were locked out last March they went out and picketed all the ports (as far away as Hull and Felixtowa) through which their work was being diverted. They took no notIce of the laws against 'secondary picketing' and were able to get the support of other dockers and lorry drivers in most areas, and they were quickly reintated.

The Civil Servants should be in a really good position to put the screws on the government if the lessons of the past ten years are learned.

While picketing city centre offices is obviously worthwhile, it shouldn't be the main priority. The places to hit are the ones that affect the economy of the country.

Large-scale picketing of docks, airports, inland container depots and the like would soon have the government crawling for a settlement.

But it isn't enough to leave it up to the small number of customs and air traffic control staff to picket their workplaces. There are not enough staff.

What it needs is workers from the sections with a large membership, such as the DE and DHSS, to join in.