L.3s Fight for Sugar Jo

Scan page 10

3100 WE WAT THE ROT One GulS STOP NOW!

FLore Marching under the bannet of the Tate & Lyle Employees Action Committee seven busloads of workers from the dock-side refinery joined the Liverpool May 26th day of against the threatened closure of the Refinery which would mean the loss of 1,920 jobs.

Ever since Britain's entry into the Common Market a question mark has hung over the sugar refineries of both Tate & Lyle and of Manbre & Garton.

Both companies have refineries in the ports of Liverpool, Greenock and London and both have over the years made super-profits out of the starvation wages that were paid to workers in the sugar cane producing colonies of the British Empire.

COLLABORATION

The crumbs that the employers dropped from this imperial feast were . the basis for a class-collaborationist union Entry into Europe has undermined this relationship because the agricultural policy of the EEC is to provide its sugar from beet grown by its own farmers at the same time as stockpiling beet in order to continually push down the quota (currently 1.4 million tons) of cane Britain is still permitted to import from her former colonies.

By this means a market is created in Britain for the EEC's own beet produce.

With the restrictions that have been placed on the import of cane sugar the British Sugar Corporation see their chance of very profitable expansion.

The BSC is a capitalist enterprise with a 36% Government holding which was established in the interwar period to develop a home produced sugar beet based industry in the event of war and blockades.

Now its director is asking for government approval for the investment of tens of millions in capital intensive equipment that by his own admission will notcreate a single new job.

The only programma what can defend the jobs of the Tate & Lyle workers is the demand for a single must be commusted to due defenct of the jobs of every sugar worker.

Instead of this however the Tate taking their members on a suicidal course whose outcome can only benefit the bosses by creating unemployment and weakening trade union organisation in the sugar industry.

IMPORT BAN

On the 26 May demonstration, the Action Committee distributed a leaflet which called for a ban on the import of white sugar from the BEC and the stopping of any expansion of BSC beet production.

It is the paternal relationship that Tate & Lyle has cleverly cultivated from the days of Empire that now sets the refinery workers leaders in alliance with their bosses against the workers of Europe and the BSC. This suits the management of Tate and Lyle very well.

John McLean, secretary of the Action Committee, told Socialist Press "From the beginning the committee was clear that the interests of workers and employers at Tate & Lyle's would eventually diverge but that there was a common interest at the moment."

No one but the bosses can benefit from the fostering of this illusion. It leads the trade union representatives of the Port Refinery to argue against nationalisation in a report to the Government.

"The Trades Unions believe that the industry should serve the needs of the community including its employees. The trade union programme could be achieved under private ownership, provided that the companies. take sufficiently broad view of their responsibilities."

KNOCK

This utopian hope took a rude knock when the two refining companies Tate & Lyle and Manbre Garton considered various options in a report issued in February of this year.

They fell out predictably enough as each recommended options that meant the other implementing redundancies in its own refineries.

By refusing to put forward a plan that represents the interests of the working class the trade union representatives end up arguing that their plans for capitalism to make profits are more logical than those of the capitalists themselves.

----- pull-quotes -----

action demonstration against unemployment, protesting

WHO CARES STOR INMPIOMONT