G&mwu Bureaucrats Circulate Bosses' Form

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Officials of the General and Municipal Workers Union have worked out a new way of weakening and dividing their members in the Warwickshire County Council School Meals service.

Proposals, prepared jointly with management, for a reduction in the number of permanent school meals workers to the level needed to cater for the lowest possible number of Icals at each site, and to supplement these numbers with гетрогагу staft hired on a termiy basis. are being circulated to al members.

Attached to these proposals is a she which the officials have asked Forkers to complete, stating whether they agree or disagree with the Proposals. But here is the real ireschery. The forms are not part cí a trade union test of opinion -they are to be sent direct to management!

Itis move has not gone 157L -- éhwere first outlined by the officials and submitted to the shop stewards committee, they were rejected.

Stewards recognised that if the plan went ahead it would enable management to ease in casual labour, impose speed-up, and that it carried in any case the threat of actual redundancy,, though of course only talking about "natural wastage"!

They also pointed out that the slip to be sent to management would provide the employer with an instant blacklist of militants, and would pick off union members as individuals. Such matters must be decided at a branch meeting, the stewards agreed.

Eventually the branch meeting was convened - only to be interrupted by the G&MWU District Official who informed the meeting that a "new contract" had been negotiated which meant no redundancies, no cutbacks and no slip to fill in.

One G&MWU steward correctly argued that it there ..were. new circulated to the shop stewards and referred back to a branch meeting. This was rejected without reply.

Ten days later the virtually unchanged proposals were circulated to members individually together with theit wages, and together with the form to complete for management.

The only real difference was a change in layout of the leaflet, designed now to suggest the official had won real concessions from the employers.

Clearly the proposals must be rejected by workers in the school meals service - but this must be linked to a fight for the independence of their union from the management and to assert the authority of union branches to take decisions on such questions and not individuals.

At the same time a committee must be elected from the next branch meeting to open the books of the Warwickshire CC, and paying particular attention to the finance Oxford District Committee of the T&GWU, held on Thursday 12th June, the right-wing successfully moved that the Automotive committee - set up by the District Committee and representing 14,000 car workers in the area - be disbanded.

The move, apparently organised by extreme right-wing District Secretary David Buckle, was proposed by equally right-wing Bill Roche - convenor of the Body Plant and a senior representative on the top Cars Council of the Ryder 'participation' scheme.

The move to disband the Automotive Committee came after the right-wing had lost their majority on it, a process which had begun with the left-wing victories in the elections of the 5/293 branch last December.

It is the policy of the right wing in Oxford to close down any committee on which they don't have a majority. (And as shown by the

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SOCIALIT IRES FA NDU TRIAL NE Ng l1 The Labour government's

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and . manning levels in the school At the meeting of the full