[Workers in Milan demonstrate against the closure of…]

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Workers in Milan demonstrate against the closure of Leyland's plant at las continued. And Leyland workers'.

ised. Leyland claims, with militants.

inionism. Congress Party and backed up by South African police use British Leyland Land Kovers to supplement their armoured vehicles Despite the financial catastrophe suffered by some of its subsidiaries (in Spain, Italy and Australia), British Leyland remains a vast international company. And, wherever it operates, it shows the same arrogant hostility to workers' demands as it shows in every dispute in Britain.

In Italy on November 26 1975 Leyland announced the complete closure of its Innocenti workers and tried to sack all 4,500 workers.

Although the company put every possible obstacle in the way workers' organisations, especially the elected factory council, the workers occupied the plant.

After five bitter months, during which Leyland refused to pay a penny in compensation to the sacked workers, the occupation ended because of the betrayal by the leaders of the Italian Communist Party. They cooked up a deal with the government and Italian capitalists to rescue the factoryan agreement which left the workers without a thread of security.

FIRMER CONTROL

Leyland prefers to operate in countries where the activities of the workers are under firmer state control-in places like South Africa and India where a combination of starvation wages and brutal repres sion of workers by the state in alliance with Leyland management have produced high profits.

In South Africa Leyland has three factories. At Blackheath near Cape Town it manufactures and assembles cars; and at Mobeni in Durban and at Elandsfontein in Transvaal it makes vans and trucks.

Since 1973 Leyland South Africa has been involved in a long dispute with its 800 or so black workers. Through a policy based on Lies, hypocrisy and collusion with the racist repression of the state, Leyland has refused to recognise the trade union to which its black workers belong.

RECOGNITION The Metal and Allied Workers Union (MAWU) first began to recruit members in the Mobeni plant in April 1973. Within three months 95% of the black workers had joined.

MAWU applied for recognition which Leyland refused, saying it was illegal.

In fact, though under South Africa law black unions are denied any of the facilities given to white unions, they are not as such illegal.

nor is it illegal for individua companies to negotiate with them.

Faced with Leyland's refusal the union retreated and tried instead to elect representatives to the plant works committee. Leyland refused to recognise these representatives.

At the beginning of 1974 ment-dominated 'liaison committee . The workers boycotted it and demanded a referendum of the workers.

Leyland refused and so the union called the first recognition strike for many years. The company sacked all the striking workers and, when the union was forced to retreat, refused to employ anyone who had played a part in organising the union.

MAWU tried to spread its recruiting to the Elandfontein plant but the Union secretary and other workers organising within the plant were promptly arrested by the Security Branch and threatened with various charges.

REFUSAL

That was three years ago. The 1AWU campaign for recognition ontinues to refuse recognition.

Union organisers have been ncessantly intimidated and victiminbelievable hypocrisy, that to ecognise the union now might set pack the cause of African trade The truth is that any increase The truth is that any in the power of the black workers in the power of the black (whose wage in 1974 was £10 a week) would set back the cause of Leyland's profits and might threaten its lucrative deals with Vorster's racist dictatorship.

A very large proportion of Land Rover production south example, is sold to the African army and police-and are widely used in internal security operations.

ON SUPPLIES The British Leyland Combine Committee voted last year for a black on supplies going to the South African subsidiary until MAWU gained recognition.

Len Murray, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon claim to support this demand. But in accordance with their class collaborationist policies in Britain, they have done absolutely nothing to enforce it.

Meanwhile Leyland is trying to crush the union in South Africa by moving its Mobeni operations to Blackheath in the Cape where MAWU has no strength.

Leyland's activities in India have been even less publicised than those in South Africa. But they reveal the same ruthless hostility to its workers. Innocenti.

At Ashok Leyland in Ennore in Madras a manufacturing and assembly operation employs 4,000 workers making old models using old machinery on which , the intensity of work is very high.

Skilled workers at the plant receive about a fifth of the wage of an unskilled worker in Britain.

A British trade unionist who managed to visit the plant last year during Dictator Gandhi's emergency reports that it is ringed by wire fences and bristling with state RUTHLESS There is a police station at the entrance to the plant and the police continuously intervene inside the factory. He reported finding a ruthless management hated by the There is a long history of violence and intimidation in the factory against trade union This takes the form of a struggle between the independent unions and the stooge unions run by the the management and the police.

PERThe stooge unions regularly hire armed thugs to terrorise shop floor militants.

The Leyland management was in the forefront of the brutal strikebreaking actions taken by employers to crush the widespread strikes in Madras in 1972.

SYCHOPHANTIC

The factory is run by British senior managers backed up by a group of sychophantic Indian middle managers. It was some of these who told the visiting British trade unionist that 'the English managers have told us that what Mrs Gandhi has done in India (the emergency and suppression of trade union rights) the British government should do there' Leyland management, like that of other multinational firms in India have been firm supporters of the Gandhi emergency.

Leyland's brutal and reactionary actions in India, like those in South Africa, must be taken up by the workers' movement in Britain.

Henry Phillips

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