Lucas Strike

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SH Lucas toolroom workers overwhelmingly threw out the latest offer from management at a mass meeting in Birmingham despite a plea from AUEW bureaucrat, Terry Duffy, that this was management's last offer.

The offer was for a f3 a week rise, and a £100 cash payment for loss of carnings during the dispute.

The toolroom workers are sticking firm on their demand for a minimum £S increase on their bonus.

As part of the package, management were proposing an "alternative self-financing bonus scheme" whose details were to be worked out by a working party, including representatives from the toolroom.

INTIMIDATION The response by management to the overwhelming rejection of their offer has been to try and intimidate the toolroom strikers, and set other Lucas workers against them, by threatening that there will have to be sackings because, they claim, Lucas will lose its position as the main supplier of clectrical components to the car industry and acrospace.

Clearly management are worried by the effects of the strike.

Despite British Leyland stockpiling before the strike began, Wilkinson, an Executive Director of Lucas, has been quoted as saying that supplies to the motor industry Sare drying up and there will be substantial lay-offs.

Already workers engaged in the "too busy" , although he was never too busy to make statements to the press.

Fis office even retused to put the branch stamp to strike fund collection sheets, arguing that Alan Law did not like appealing for "charity"

Atter demoralising the strikers for months with his stonewalling and his refusal to organise any action Alan Law was able to present the sell-out deal he had hatched up with THF as a realistic' settlement.

He went so far as to describe the deal as a "victory' , although clearly the victory lay entirely with Trust Houses Forte, who aided and abetted by the bureaucracy of the TGWU have this ycar defeated three attempts to organise a union in their establishments.