[Airlie tonnage of ships, announced plans to cut…]
Socialist Press1978 1978-02-01Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 1 →
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Airlie tonnage of ships, announced plans to cut back their capacity by 50%.
Blackmail
Under these conditions of slump the employers are seizing the opportunity to blackmail sections of workers into accepting massive speedup and worsening of working conditions.
The only answer to such an offensive is a principled unity of workers both nationally and internationally in an all-out fight to defend jobs and conditions.
There is no doubt that, given a firm lead, support would be forthcoming for such a policy, and that the Swan Hunter ships could be blacked in every yard in the country.
Other But the Stalinists of the Communist Party have other ideas.
The convenor at Govan Shipyards is CP member James Airlie.
Airlie has already agreed to scab on Swan Hunter workers by persuading Govan stewards to accept one of the reallocated ships.
Dirty work
Now that three more are virtually certain to go to Govan, Airlie has again refused to call for blacking.
Instead he has called for the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions to do his dirty work and take the decision.
Airlie knows that this is tantamount to referring the matter to the employers. Indeed one prominent member of the Confed, Boilermakers' leader John Chalmers, is on the Board of British Shipbuilders and is a party to the sacking decision -which will first hit his own boilermaker members at Swan Hunters.
Other leading Confed figures include union leaders already up to their necks in collaboration with management rationalisation plans and "worker participation" schemes for speed-up in British Leyland and the steel Sweeping plans But while union bureaucrats cook up sweeping plans ta attan thain man mamhiar tu alack tel own inemoets, the resistance of the Swan Hunter boilermakers to this blackmail attempt indicates the mood of the working class.
The onslaught on jobs, conditions and the independence of the trade unions must be resisted, and a leadership built to fight for a clear We reject all attempts to make workers the victims of, TE O