Heathrow action restarts

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AUEW maintenance engineers at Heathrow have resumed industrial action in of their shift pay claim.

At a mass meeting on Friday 3 June, the 4,000 workers voted overwhelmingly • for an immediate overtime ban and a 40 hour strike each week until their claim was conceded by management.

The negotiators reported to the meeting that although British Airways had increased their offer the previous Tuesday, they withdrew it à few hours later, insisting that the engineers should reduce their claim in order to enable negotiations to resume.

The position of the tive negotiators was that since the claim for shift pay increases of between 20% and 33% had been endorsed Heathrow engineers attend a mass meeting. by the Executive Committee of the AUEW there was no way they were prepared to reduce the claim.

The withdrawal of the latest offer can only be seen as further provocation by the British Airways management. As the negotiators pointed out to the mass meeting, the money is obviously there if the management have been able to offer it, and so the reduced offer is totally inadequate.

It remains doubtful, however, whether the action the men intend to take can win further concessions from the management.

Each shift will strike for eight hours each week at a point where because of the shift system, this will lose British Airways 40 consecutive hours of maintenance.

But none of the day shift are involved in the action and since British Airways managed to keep the total shutdown, it is likely that they will be able to keep most of their services going through this action.

Even if the dispute is settled in the near future, and a further stumbling block is the fact that the current offer does not accord to the percentage formula demanded by the men, there still remains the question of when the money is going to be paid.

There is no doubt that the government will tell British Airways that the shift pay cannot be paid under Phase 2 of the Social Contract. And with the union conferences lining up for a fresh round of wage controls atter August, it is unlikely that the men will receive anything like the full settlement under Phase The only way the men will get their money is if they take on and defeat the Social Contract. This would inevitably mean appealing for support to wider sections workers, particuarly in the engineering industry.

A Workers Socialist League leaflet distributed at last week's mass meeting argued for the men to call on the Leyland toolmakers who received nothing as a result of their stoppage, to strike again for their own demands and in support of the Heathrow engineers.

The support of the other workers in the Engineering and Maintenance section of British Airways, all of whom stand to gain from a victory for the AUEW members, must also be fought for.

And the one shift per week strike action must be replaced by indefinite strike action until the AUEW claim is paid in full.

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Longbridge convener Derek Robinson, leadine advocate of Fage I2 A fresh move to stamp out plant-level bargaining throughout the British Leyland