Letter Officials Vitivinl

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Union

211, Broad Street, Birmingham 17.3.77 Dear Sir, Dispute-Trust Houses Forte Ltd.

Your style of reporting makes me sick. If you expect decent, clear-thinking workers to follow your confused type of constant back-biting, then you stand no chance, at least with any of the 11,000 members whom I personally supervise in Birmingham.

I am sending you a copy of my up-to-date report showing what the people here-and who are led by and an Official of the Transport General Workers' Union for nearly twenty years-are doing.

Just because I do not seek any publicity does not mean to say that I, and many other Officers like me, are not using our Organisation on behalf of the workers.

You have my full permission to quote this letter and the report and perhaps, in the intersts of getting your facts right, you will give my office a ring in the future.

Yours faithfully, A.D. Law Regional Trade Group Secretary.

We Reply:

Brother Law does not inform us which article spurred on the indignation we note in his letter, which attempts by reference to his own area to defend TGWU officials in general. • We would point out that until now our coverage of the 18 week dispute between TGWU members in Oxford and Trust Houses Forte Ltd which only later extended to a THF club in Birmingham had never referred to Brother Law, though we did, in issue 55, refer critically to a statement by a member of his TGWU branch.

IRATE

Brother Law is clearly irate at our insistence that the TGWU impose national blacking action to ensure the victory of its members in dispute with THF in Oxford. Birmingham and Sheffield.

But both his letter and the attached list of "action" carried out under his leadership (much of which takes the form of writing letters) show three things:

1. There is no national blacking in force.

2. There is not even proper regional blacking in force.

3. That such a state of affairs is highly embarassing to TGWU officials.

Brother Law as a Regional Trade Group Secretary is of course well placed to implement regional blacking action on THF and to use the weight of the TGWU to mobilise the labour movement throughout the Midlands against this viciously anti-union employer.

RESTRICTED

Instead, as a close look at his list of "actions" indicates, blacking has been restricted to four THF establishments other than the 'Night Out' Nightclub where the dispute is now in progress.

And we know from news of the toolmakers' dispute, which was sold out in THF's Aibany Hotel, Birmingham, that at least one of these establishments is in full operation-though without doubt fuel supplies have been cut off from the Corley Motorway station.

If only half the story emerges on blacking in the Birmingham area, Brother Law shrewdly maintains diplomatic silence about the brazen refusal of TGWU officials in Oxford and Sheffield to impose local blacking action or to challenge Jones' veto on national action.

PLAIN ANSWER

We offer Brother Law space in these columns to tell us plainly his position on these strikes. Does he favour national blacking? Why has he not organised and fought for regional blacking of THF? Where does he stand on the role of local TGWU officials in Oxford and Sheffield? And how long in his view can leaders of Britain's biggest union allow its members to be kicked around before socialists are allowed to expose this state of affairs and fight for a new leadership to defend them?