Scanlon attacks firemen

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At the last Sheffield AUEW Shop Stewards quarterly on December 7, Hugh Scanlon was invited to give his retiring speech by the Stalinistdominated District Committee. A speaker from the FBU was also invited to attend.

Scanlon had the audacity to publicly attack the fire-. men's strike for not accepting the TUC Finances and General Purposes Committee decision to accept the 10%.

"If they were in the AUEW we would lose no time in getting them back to work", , he added.

At this point uproar broke out, with militant stewards shouting him down, much to the embarassment of the Communist Party members.

The meeting of well over 100 stewards then voted full support for the firemen and overwhelmingly passed WRP-sponsored motion calling for the setting up of a Council of Action based on engineering union branches and stewards committees to back the firemen against the 10%.

The Stalinist dominated District Committee has, of course, done nothing about this.

Not a single AUEW banner was to be seen on the local firemen's demonstration the following Saturday week despite official invitations from the FBU.

In fact the District Committee in its minutes covering the quarterly seems to have reversed the meaning of the stewards' vote.

Clearly, however, most of the stewards who voted for this motion also want to fight for it.

Action

This fight for a delegate council of action must be taken up in every engineering union branch in the area, directing against the treacherous District Committee and fighting for real support for the firemen.

This means engineers organising action to smash the 10% themselves. Only in this way can the fight be broadened out to include other areas of the local labour movement-most importantly the Yorks miners.