LEYLAND CONVENUR BACK PENALTY CLAUS PENALTY Leyland's fight for survival

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Finding his rightful place in the Financial Times, Cowley Body Plant Convenor, Bill Roche. which was an aggregate of four conditions worse than the present to such reactionary moves hours." state of affairs! company.

clause. doubt stretch to the limit the their goal of corporate bargaining bership. get rid of plant level bargaining, aiming to put all negotiations into the hands of unelected union officials at national level - away from the strength of the shop floor.

The negotiations . have been organised on the trade union side by the same 'ad boc' committee (each one selected by union officials) that negotiated the reactionary "participation' system into Leyland.

The company's latest proposals are on the basis of certain amendments to the management document which, as we reported in Socialist Press 47, was circulated sécretly in November to the lad hoc' committee behind the backs of other convenors and shop stewards. company offer repoints of the *Introduction of a common wage review date throughout Leyland's Cars Division - November 1977.

*Slightly improved lay-off payments - increased to 15 days every three months for disputes outside Leyland. But these will be attached , to a penalty clause which has never previously existed in Leyiand which states that:

"No lay-off payments will be made for any quarter to any individual employee who in the previous quarter took part in unconstitutional industrial action, the duration of *A sick pay scheme - which will no longer include a similar penalty This offer therefore combines a major step by the company towards with the introduction of a new clause which jeopardises all the layoff entitlements workers have previously won.

WORSE CONDITIONS

In other words, far from offering 'fringe benefits' , the package offers But despite this the senior stewards including, of course, prominent members of the Communist Party. who have been continuously drawn into assisting management through 'participation' and implementation of the pay policy, voted over 3-1 to recommend the offer to their members when it is reported back to the plants.

There is no doubt that the mood on the shop floor is bitterly hostile Jur American Correspondent writes on by the The task of winning any kind of acceptance for this deal will no ability of these senior stewards to manoeuvre around the memUnder these conditions the fight must be taken up to expose to the entire manual workforce the attacks aimed at them by their bureaucratic leaders, and build an alternative leadership prepared to defend the conditions, jobs, and wages of the membership. simply to complete ships for the liquidator to sell off.

The work-in eventually ended in October 1972 with three yards merged in a new company and the Clydebank yard taken over by the American Marathon company for constructing oil rigs.

But now things are changed. With a Labour government relying on the TUC bureaucracy preserve it in power and with the working class desperately looking for a national lead, in the struggle against redundancies, the Communist Party seeking to preserve its alliance with the union bureaucrats, has also swung massively to the right.

So when last month Marathon announced financial difficulties were going to necessitate redunwas not even so much as to cali Instead convenor Dickle proudly announced to a delighted capitalist press his new way of 'fighting' redundancies -he had persuaded 1,000 Marathon workers accept "indefinite suspension" (on the dole, though formally still on Marathon's books) to avoid the need for sackings!

This marks a new depth of Communist Party betrayal run alongside their management role in the British Leyland 'participation set-up.

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dancies, Stalinists' response for a work-in Stalinist