Leyland Sirke Houli Fell Callaghan

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9,000 workers at British Leyland's five truck and bus factories in Lancashire have rejected a company pay offer of 7.6% and, as we go to press, are entering their second week of strike action demanding a €15 increase and a 35-hour week.

This major strike, paralysing one of the most profitable sectors of Leyland, marks the emergence of mass struggles in the fight against pay policy.

It is no coincidence that it comes at the same time as 3,000 skilled workers at Vauxhall plants in Luton and Dunstable have voted to give the company seven days' notice of strike action unless it improves on its 82% pay offerwhich has also been rejected by other manual unions.

SHOP FLOOR FEELING These moves-about which the Tory press is consciously silent: are only the clearest cases of the shop floor feeling on wages which has already produced indications that the government's arbitrary 10% pay ceiling is breaking up.

Most notorious of these signs has been the unsuccessful government attempt to force the Belfast firm of J. Mackie to withdraw a 22% wage increase already in the pay packets of 4,000 (largely Loyalist) workers.

The government attempt to bludgeon this employer into directy cutting wages-amounting to a last ditch effort to impose a Phase 3-even brought em barassed opposition from arch wage-cutter Jack Jones.

It adds to the growing list of firms under threat of government sanctions for l paying increases above Healey's limit-yet so far no employer has felt strong enough to attempt to reverse an agreement.

Meanwhile the CBI, while of course in favour of wage cutting, is clearly disturbed by government measures which could potentially bankrupt certain employers, and has had to declare support for individual firms "unjustly" penalised.

ABANDONED

In fact Healey's original call for another year of increases no bigger than last year's 5% figure has already been abandoned.

Instead government and employers are now frantically trying to hold settlements to 10% while "self-financing productivity deals" , which can only further boost unemployment, have been devised as an escape clause for anguished employers.

The main weapons in enforcing PHOTO: Chris Davies. Report Healer the 10% figure are union officials who see it as their job not to regain and defend members' living standards, but to prolong the reactionary life of the CallaghanSteel coalition government.

These bureaucrats know that if large sections of workers break through the 10% limit, the Liberals could be forced to withdraw from the coalition. This would inevitably precipitate a huge government crisis.

What worries union bureaucrats is not so much the possible return of a Tory government they lived happily with Heath for four years) but the prospect of a sharpened fight for new leadership Between September 21 and the end of October it will be illegal for any organisation to exercise its elementary democratic right to hold mass meetings and marches within the Greater Manchester district of Tameside.

This important precedent poses a grave threat to the labour movement.

Make no mistake, the ban is directed principally at those forces who have shown that they are not going to allow fascists to parade freely whenever they will.

The Workers Socialist League Is opposed to state bans on any the labour movement.

This is why they are using every device to divert workers from pay strikes. Instead they are attempting to negotiate job-cutting productivity deals.

WEAKNESSES

This same attitude is reflected in layers of convenors and stewards.

David Hewett, for instance, AUEW convenor leading the Leyland strike has shown weaknesses on this score, complaining that the Lancashire factories:

•. have become a low wage, low productivity set-up so the workers have become and uncooperative."

Instead of making this kind of statement, Hewett should be seeking every avenue to spread the strike. The Leyland stewards should call a meeting of delegates from other local shop stewards committees, union branches and other labour movement bodies with the aim of spreading the strike in the area.

This would lay the basis for a local council of action capable of action independent of the trade union bureaucracy.

They must call on other Cont'd P.11 Col 4