Ten Years on

Scan page 6

The roots of the toolroom committee stretch back ten years to a pub in Chipping Norton where the first delegates came together after Castle Bromwich was taken into the Pressed Steel empire.

From Castle Bromwich, Cowley, Swindon and Autobody Dies of Luton delegates gathered at the King's Arms into what became known as the Chipping Norton Committee.

EMERGENCE

Its emergence as a serious industrial and political force came last year at the time of the strike by toolmakers at Triumph, Rover, Tractors and Transmissions and SU Carburettors, all within the Leyland group.

All these factories as well as the Longbridge plant, Lianelly and Rearsby Engineering now joined the committee, which switched its meetings from Chipping Norton to The Good Companions in Birmingham.

And it was here that their claim for the right to separate negotiations took shape.

From the beginning the leaders of the toolmen were obsessed with going through every correct constitutional step. They wrote to the management, they wrote to the union, they visited MPs.

But the union bureaucracy, dead set against allowing negotiations for any section of workers to bypass their control, refused to support the claim to meet management separately.

And Leyland themselves, far from wanting another group negotiating separately wanted to direct all claims through the bureaucrats they had come to know and depend on.

As a shot accross the bows the toolmen staged a one-day strike on December 6.

It was a shot the company, the bureaucracy and the government were to ignore, but it was the signal for the political crisis that was to follow.

When the all out strike began in February the bureaucrats still did not understand what had happened. The AUEW National Executive instruction to return to work was ignored, officials were excluded from meetings and not a single toolroom steward attended a special meeting called by the Birmingham District Secretary, Bert Benson.

The pressure that had built up under the dispute and which took it to the point of a near general strike throughout the AUEW was the same pressure that gave Scanion the biggest humiliation of his career.

The toolmakers' committee had been ignored at Scanlon's peril.