Drivers Fight for Jobs

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Eighty car delivery drivers at Silcock & Collings Coventry Depot are on strike over a plan to make 17 drivers redundant.

Threats to make the strike national - which would involve some 800 drivers - were suspended last week during further discussions with management. As we go to press, representatives of the 800 drivers are meeting with management in Coventry.

Meanwhile other delivery drivers are on strike in Coventry against the refusal by Toleman James to take on extra workers.

The company has recently won a contract to deliver Fords in the Midlands but have not taken on extra workers.

The strikers, members of the TGWU. claim this is a break with by workers at Autocars and transport.

Drivers at Silcock and Collings are expected to stay out in support of the Toleman James workers even if their own dispute is settled.

Coventry Engines NINETY LABOURERS at British Leyland's engine plant at Courthouse Green; Coventry, walked out last Tuesday leaving behind on their benches copies of the current Leyland Mirror in which Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon plead for an end to strikes.

The strike was sparked off by the suspension of one of the men but the background is a long stand The diction i bee mana

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silent as NOGAOT CH The Labour Party's home policy committee, under the silent and passive chairmanship of fading 'left. Minister Wedgewood Benn, last week passed a resolution sharply critical of the government's economic policies, and decided to press for a vote on it at the Party Conference.

The resolution announced that Conference:

"is appalled by the increasing evidence of the effects of the government's public expenditure cuts on vital social services such as housing; on the level of employment and the economic growth » Prospects of AN IMMEDIATE ae eA 21900 MILLIGN SHEILZ NCC march against health service cuts that the 'lefts' on the committee whose votes carried the resolution had earlier voted for these spending cuts in Parliament, and that Wedgewood Benn is a member of the Callaghan cabinet actually implementing them.

OPPOSED

The resolution will go to the full Labour NEC and if approved Will go to Conference in Blackpool - where it is certain to be opposed by the block votes of the big union leaders who have throughout been the mainstay of the government's anti-working class policies.

Indeed Healey and Callaghan have relied entirely on the passive N.C.C. LOBBY OF THE CONFERENCE Tuesday 28th September 9.00 am.

Winter Gardens Blackpool health service unions in consciously flouting last year's Conference motion rejecting any cuts in the Health Service and calling for an injection of finance to defend it.

The issue at this Conference, then, as at previous Conferences, is not so much the verbal formulations adopted in the various stage-managed performances, but whether those 'left wingers' who claim to oppose the line of the Callaghan leadership will mount any serious fight in the labour and trade union movement to remove them and implement a socialist programme making themselves answerable to the Party and not the bankers.

Benn, the silent partner in the home policy committee, is confidently expected to put his plum Ministerial job before his tenuous "sociatist" principles when the chips are down in Blackpool. The SOCIALIST PRESS, Wedriesday 22nd STOP TUC STRIKEBREAKERS the TUC leaders, backed up by their army of full-time officials and Stalinist hangers-on, have now openly emerged as the chief strike-breakers for the employers in front of the working class is a development of fundamental significance.

Their strike-breaking of course is not confined to the seamen. In British Leyland their publicly proclaimed policy is the maintenance of continuous production.

VICTIMISATION

Having facilitated the victimisation of four shop stewards in the Cowley Assembly Plant, (reported in detail in Socialist Press 42), Jones and Scanion now appear on the front page of British Leyland's company newspaper, Leyland Mirror, giving theit message in banner headlines - KEEP WORKING.

This grotesque spectacle, just as unprecedented as their occupation of the employers"

September 1976 Part of the lobby outside Brighton TUC continued from front page ship.

The Workers Socialist League has insisted throughout the past period that the working class is not in retreat but is on the move. This is now shown to have been correct.

The urgency now is to establish a broad basis of support for a programme on which the working class can fight. Such a programme must stand in sharp relief to that of the capitalist policemen in the TUC.

*DOWN with the social contract!

*For a sliding scale of wages!

*NO SACKINGS!

*For work sharing on full pay!

*OPEN THE BOOKS of the employers!

*Establish the case for nationalisation under workers' management. ASAL Na staime!.