Hotel Victory After 23 Weeks

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"Despite the fact we've won the hardest part is still to come"-the words of a worker who has had twenty three weeks to learn that the struggle for trade union rights is never over.

This was how Joseph Tosti viewed the complete victory of the Linton Lodge, Oxford, strike speaking from the platform of a WSL May Day meeting in London just two days after the management of the hotel caved in.

For 23 weeks the hotel workers struggled, not only against management but against TGWU inactivity and sabotage.

All workers who wanted reinstatement won it. Those who no longer wished to return won compensation. The TGWU has been recognised. Jo himself, against whom the management had set their stiffest resistance, is not only reinstated, he goes back as shop steward.

The strike started in November. As the long months passed some workers ineritably gave up. Just seven were left at the end to taste the fruits of victory.

Since the strikers gathered on the evening in an Oxford pub to hear the full time official, Geoff Hulett, declare 'war" on the hotel industry, the workers learned bitter lessons.

They learned that paper resolutions carried by the District Committee, the Regional Committee and the national trade group were the start of the fight not the finish.

The strikers confronted Jack Jones himself in his lair at Transport House and heard him say that the strikes were 'unwinnable' But Jo is right. The hardest part is still to come. They have to rebuild the union in the hotel, winning round workers who have been poisoned against them.

They still have to tackle the wages conditions that made them turn to union in the first place.

They go into that strongest weapon-the confidence that comes obstacles every bit as itself.

and the struggle with the experience and from overcoming big as the TGWU