From Epic Strikes Forunions

Scan page 8

Pat Lally reviews "The Hotel Strikes, Lessons for pamphlet published by the Hotel and Catering Workers mittee. Available from the Action Committee at 21, Scala price 35p plus 15p post and package Some of the many Trust Houses Forte workers who can bear testimony to the hostility that the firm has for workers who join a union. Sacked workers picketing Henekeys, in Leicester This pamphlet is more than a record of the 6-month strikes for union recognition fought out by TGWU Catering workers in • Sheffield, Oxford and Birmingham from last autumn until August this year.

In placing those struggles firmly within the context of deepening collaboration between the labour leadership and the employers, it draws immediate connections with both Grunwick and Desoutters recognition strikes, and raises questions which extend far beyond the fight for basic union rights.

Respectability

The whole industry is a combination of prestigious 5 star rated respectability and pay and working conditions which compete with the lowest and worst there is to be found.

The problems are legion. Tied accommodation, deliberate recruitment of immigrant workers and the constant threat of the withdrawal of proportiomes traditionally a high low paid women workers, combine to make effective union organisation difficult.

It is within this section of the working class that unionisation has dramatically increased in the last few years, forced on by mounting inflation and unemployment.

A major part of these new union members have turned towaras ine TAHITT the . country's biggest union which has grown by nearly a quarter of a million since 1974.

Square. London, in July 1974.

Jack Jones But, like so many more, those new recruits in Trust House Forte and Linton Lodge hotels quickly learnt that joining is only the beginning of a solution. For the majority it brought bitter realisation of the chasm which separates the union membership from control of their organisations and the ability to mobilise its strength in support.

It is this central issue of leadership which runs consistently throughout the pamphlet.

Not fighting Jo Tosti, reinstated as Shop Steward in the one successful strike at the Linton Lodge, writes in the foreward *Throughout the disputes, It was very clear Inat ine union bureaucracy was not fighting for their members. The will of the membership was overruled by Jack Jones in what is supposed to be the most democratic union in the country. The policy of the TU bureaucratic leadership was always one of accommodation with the management of THF at national level. They were not prepared to fight against the victimisation of their shop stewards, but on the contrary worked towards the demoralization of their members in dispute to facilitate a sell out which they succeeded in doing with THF .

Determined

This analysis is confirmed by the events. Faced by a determined and powerful employer in Trust House Forte, properly prepared for the confrontation it had provoked, the TGWU leadership from Jack Jones in Smith Square to his assorted appointed time-servers in the Regional and District offices proved pathetically incapable even of defending the elementary principles of the organisation on which their parasitic existence depends.

Just as with the TUC and APEX over Grunwick, the policy on which victory turned, and was clearly seen to turn when begun in even a limited way, was the blacking of supplies and services.

Unlike Grantham and Murray, Jones did not need to be prompted by John Gouriet and NAFF; the 'legal compucations surrounaing this action arose from within the union itself.

Not that NAFF were disHOTO: Chris Dav EER ON ies.

Report Top: police in action outside made, as fascists breached the interested bystanders. Whenever the freedoms of the likes of George Ward or Sir Charles Forte are threatened by the exploited labour on which they depend, these middle-Class anti-union fanatics reach for their cheque books and lawyers.

A mass campaign of national and local press publicity against the strikers was the visable expression of their support; many things point to a much closer connection behind the scenes.

Alan Law, interviewed on ATV last week about his super tough image against employers:

I knew perfectly well 1 would have to be tough and ruthless with my own members. We've weeded out the ones who couldn't stand the pace just as we : weeded out the employers who couldn't stand the pace, until we've reached a situation which is 99 per cent perfect.

It was NAFF's industrial arm, Self Help, run by fascist Lady Birdwood, which set up the open provocation break the Randolph's picket line in early May.

Three hundred trade unionists and students responded to the call and faced the picket-busting Special Patrol Group. A total of 39 were arrested.

The real bankruptcy of the union hierarchy was effectively exposed only through the continual turning of the fight back into the union. Every avenue was explored and the demand for support raised at every possible opportunity.

At each crucial point talks' and • 'negotiations' between the union • leaders and managen nt would conthe Randolph Hotel, Oxford, in May picket line. Above: scabs and fascists veniently cut across action being carried out. Eventually the strikers were forced to stage an occupation of Jack Jones' office in Transport House which completely confirmed that delays and sabotage of supporting action was being orchestrated nationally.

A particularly important lesson was the drawing out of one TGWU full-time official who had for many years formally taken his distance from the extreme right wing in the union.

Alan Law was, in effect, the one-person-strike-committee at Birmingham's THF Night Out, and proved the only bureaucrat to begin to implement union policy of blacking THF owned establishments along with regular mass picketing.

His demagogic statements to the newspapers established him as the 'champion' of the workers cause.

Telling But the pamphlet the telling point The place to launch a campaign was not the capitalist press but throughout the Transport and General Workers Union. If Alan Law was really serious about taking on the THF empire and defeating it he had • to mobilise the full force of the union on a national scale. He proved unable to do this because it would have involved him in a struggle against Jack Jones and the national leadership of TGWU: against the union's bureaucratic apparatus of which he is himself a part'.

Predictably Law was soon to call off the blacking in favour of ACAS talks as a preparation for winding down the strike and a management buy-off. 1977, where 39 arrests watch from the steps.

Strikes which leave the participants unemployed and the workplaces without a single union member are, unquestionably, very hard to present as anything other than comprehensive defeats, and in many ways the THF struggles are no exception.

But at the same time they have become a part of the history of the working class in those areas and some blows have been struck against the forces which conspired to bring those defeats about.

Within every industry, with the fight for improved wages gaining momentum, the theme of betrayals and sellouts of the bureaucracy is in the sharpest contrast to the courage, self-sacrifice and fighting capacity of the workers themselves.

Weakness

It is this weakness of leadership which must be overcome, as the pamphlet concludes 'In every dispute the task for management is to find the point beyond which the union leadership will not go. The only leadership capable of defending the working class is one that has no such point, which will fight with all means possible to defend the workers, and which will be replaced it it does not do so' •As the hotel workers view the betrayals at Grunwick and Desoutters, as they see official after official reaching the limit of action they are prepared to sanction, the hotel workers must see clearly that what happened in their strikes is not an isolated story of individual betrayals. It is a crisis of leadership as deep as the class struggle itself. Solving that crisis of leadership remains the most important task of the working class today.

Scan page 9

SOCIALIST PR SSS.! edi 30 Norember, 197

----- pull-quotes -----

HENEKEYS AND TRUST HAN