Bakery Closure

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Announcement of the closure of • ABC (Aerated Bread Co.) bakery has brought nearer the final death of industry in the London Borough of Camden.

Bakery workers are being told that a fall in the sale of cakes (itself an effect of the capitalist crisis on workers' buying power) means that more than 300 must go on the dole!

Workers Socialist League members in Camden are campaigning for a real struggle by the trade unions against the redundancies. WSL leaflets issued last week explained how capitalist rationalisation destroys jobs.

ABC Camden is not just one bakery in trouble. ABC is part of the Allied Bakeries Group - which controls 49 bakeries and 2355 shops and restaurants in the UK.

Allied Bakeries, in turn, is just one section of Associated British Foods. As well as Allied Bakeries, ABF controls the 842 Fine Fare supermarkets and shops, a chain of 42 supermarkets in Ireland, 21 Hour mills, 7 Twining tea and coffee houses throughout Europe, and more. It has 77,000 workers in Britain alone.

SHARES

Who owns Associated British Foods? Most of the shares are held by Wittington Investments Ltd., a huge food empire which also controls the "millionaires' grocer" Fortnum and Masons in Piccadilly and the sunblest Bakeres chain, besides massive holdings in the food industries of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

And who owns Wittington Investments? That company is completely owned by multi-millionaire Mr. W Garfield Weston and his family!

Weston has already closed down bakeries in welwyn, Acton,_Plymouth, Sheiteld and York. He is closing ABC because - he says - it lost him £158,000 last year.

But in 1975, Associated British Foods announced after-tax profits of more than £20 million. And over £5 million of that was given away to shareholders.

Just 3% of what was handed over to those shareholders would have wiped out ABC's loss and saved more than 300 jobs!

But the capitalist system exists for profits - not for workers' needs.

MODERN

This is why Weston,hand in hand with his list of closures, is opening new bakeries, with more modern machinery and less labout, on the outskirts of London.

The Bakers' Union has completely caved in to the bosses, and is doing nothing to protect its members' jobs. They told us/"We are forced to recognise the realities of the economic situation. We can't make , a case for keeping ABC open"

The workers at ABC are angry and frustrated, but this sort of line has also created demoralisation.

It is possible to wage a successful fight for jobs in cases like ABC, but only with policies which come to grips with the nature of the crisis and take up the struggle for a socialist alternative.

The reformist trade union bureaucrats must be fought and pushed aside if they refuse to defend the workers' interests.

The answer is not to close the bakery, but to produce what workers want and need, instead of defending the profits of multimillionaires!

Open the books of ABC to a committee of trades unionists. Whose pockets did the Labour government's food subsidies go into? What about Associated British Foods and Wittington Investments? Take the profits out of food. Fight for the nationalisation of the food industry under workers' manageSOCIALIST PRESS Wettese More tie 155

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