Rubery Owen: Officials Rush to Prop Pay Lim

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What cause could drag the General Secretary of the TUC together with the President of the AUEW and the President of the EETPU together with the National Organiser of the T&GWU and other officials away from their Christmas holidays?

Certainly not the interests of the working class! On the contrary, these gentlemen leapt from their armchairs spurred only by hopes of working out a deal at the strikebound Rubery Owen car component works at Darlaston which could preserve the hated 44% wage limit fixed by the TUC and the Labour ELECTRICIANS Sixty-two electricians at the plant were challenging that policy - staging a sit-in strike to back their demand for £100 each in layoff pay for time lost during an earlier strike by AUEW members -who had themselves been demanding a wage increase above the TUC limit.

Management threatened to shut down the factory unless full normal porting with a guarantee of a strike free year from all unions as forthcoming when the factory reopened on January 4th.

What worried management was not paying the money demanded by the electricians - but the fact Scanlon that if they won lay-off pay for that period of shut down, this could immediately be demanded by another 1,900 T&GWU members in the plant who have not until now been involved in disputes.

Management and TUC leaders were agreed unanimously therefore that the top priority was to ensure that the electricians did. not win their lay-off claim.

From this starting point they arrived at the ludicrous terms to be proposed to the electricians by EETPU President Breakell the day we go to press: that the company pay £6,000 to charity, not to the electricians, and that the electricians go back to work with only three weeks unemployment benefit and a fortnight's social security to show for their struggle.

But the collaboration in this betrayal by the TUC leaders has strengthened the resolve of the employer to tame the strength of shop floor organisation.

Plans are now to be discussed between Regional officials, stewards and management towards a new disputes procedure - which no doubt will centre the power in the hands of full time officials.

And going even further than this, management want to do away with the piecework payment system for manual workers, installing a single payments system.

"FLEXIBILITY"

. This of course cannot be done until the expiry of the current pay proposals for the extension of pay restrictions after July will permit a degree of "flexibility" to enable such reactionary deals to be drawn up.

It seems likely that there will be considerable resistance among the electricians to the first stage in this proposed union-management carve-up of wages and shop floor strength.

But whether or not the EETPU leaders get the acceptance of the deal they so desperately want, it is clear that a whole series of struggles are still to come at Rubery Owen fighting not so much a vicious employer but much more his agents within the labour movement itself - union officials desperate to uphold the social contract.

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SOCIALIST PREST bestesday Sin Jennes. 197° NI 19 OUT Workers leave the BLMC Assembly Plant at Cowley -ThesMan agement Page Attitudes of shop floor managers can make or break a participation scheme. In this article Bill Roche, a leading shop steward, gives a personal view on this and other problems in Leyland factories A report on the latest offer by British Leyland management on so-called 'fringe bene. fits' was presented at a meeting of Senior Stewards of the manual unions on Thursday 23rd December.

Leyland have been using these negotiations as a major step towards corporate (company-wide) bargaining. The company is eager to The Finanetal Times Friday December 17 1978 1128y In July 1971 a work-in was launched at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders yards in resistance plans by the Tory government to sack 6,000 out of 8,500 workers.

This form of action, proposed and led by members of the Communist Party, was one which avoided direct confrontation with the Tory government, aiming instead at simply protest to "pres surise" for a change of heart by then Industry Secretary John Davies. Yet despite or weakness struck a chord sympathy among the mass sections of workers seeking a means of resisting Tory attacks - and won a huge response from trade unionists throughout the country, who contributed lavishly to maintain the workforce in the yards while the CP Stalinists allowed