Cp Prepares Shipbuilding

Scan page 11

In a move spurred on by widespread fears of impending redundancies in the shipbuilding industry, over 400 shop stewards and convenors from the major shipyards in Britain and Northern Ireland met in The Labour • Government has consistently made it painfully obvious that their plans for the industry after nationalisation involve large-scale sackings and rationalisation.

COMPENSATION

When this is seen alongside the huge sums to be paid in compensation to the present owners of what are in many cases some of the world's most dilapidated and neglected shipyards, the real role of "nationalisation" as seen by the Callaghan Government is revealed. It is simply another variant of the National Enterprise Board strategy for propping up ailing sectors of capitalism and subsidising the profit of the employers.

The new unofficial combined trade union committee, which elected . Stalinist James Airlie, convenor of Govan Shipbuliders, as its chairman, passed a resolution which declared that "industrial action" would be used to combat redundancies and yard closures.

But these fine words will have to be seen in practice. Airlie (one of the Stalinist leaders of the notorious UCS "work-in" which paved the way for the loss of thousands of jobs) only recently showed by his conduct at the AUEW Engineering Section national conferènce that he is opposed to serious struggle.

Airlie successfully moved an amendment to the resolution which opposed the 4½% pay deal, so that a clause, which called for official backing to be given to any group of members fighting the deal, was deleted. The already castrated resolution was then defeated by a narrow margin.

Airlie confirmed this is still essentially his position when he said that the new shipbuilding unions committee would, despite its threats of "industrial action" adopt "a flexible response" to any threat of redundancies.

NICHE

Even more ominous are the signs that the committee is seeking a niche for itself in some form of "participation" machinery -following the same lines of policy which have turned Derek Robinson the Stalinist convenor at Leyland's Longbridge factory into an open representative of management.

The weekend meeting agreed that given a "guarantee of job security" would undertake to cooperate after nationalisation to make the industry as "successful as possible".

All the signs from other industries are that this sort of "cooperation" can mean only cringing collaboration with every move by management to impose speed-up and rationalisation.

Taken together with the reactionary call from the meeting that British shipowners place orders only with home yards - the shipbuilding industry's version of the nationalist policy of import controls - these policies can only spell betrayal and disaster for the 72,000 shipbulding sories covered by the committee.

A centralised coordinated fight is certainly vital. In this sense this committee is important. But its programme must be thrown out and instead demands put forward for:

*No sackings — work sharing on full pay where order books are short, and a programme of public works to guarantee jobs.

*Open the books of the yards to elected union committees to show the need for nationalisation without compensation, under workers' management.

*Nationalise the ship owners to enable planned production programmes to be drawn up.

*Occupy any yard threatening redundancies.

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

Glasgow last weekend and set up an unofficial committee.