Birds Eye-only a NUJ chapels picked

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WORKERS w.!! T & G Garners workers before the ban on marches almost daily on Merseyside, it is clear that the threat of mass sackings is increasingly the means that management use to discipline workers and solve their crisis of profitability.

Management announced on Tuesday 7 March their intention to close the Bird's Eye factory and throw 1,200 workers on the dole.

This followed a 14 week strike by 110 engineers for a pay claim in excess of 10%.

Bird's Eye announced they would pay no redundancy money, since the production workers refused to cross the picket lines and therefore were also on strike!

PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report production workers had agreed 456 redundancies.

But the 110 engineers were still solid on their original pay claim.

The statement on the closure was therefore management's final attempt to force speed-up and redundancy on the workers.

Climbdown

At the weekend the threat had the desired effect. The engineers voted to call off their strike having failed to win their claim, in the hopes of saving the 1,200 jobs.

Both AUEW and TGWU agreed to submit to every one of the management's demands.

Such a climbdownFOR HOOSES plant and mobilising suport throughout the firm-will only strengthen management's determination to press ahead with rationalisation Predictable 'Left' Labour MP for Kirby, Robert Kilroy Silk's solution to the closure announcement was to call on the coalition government to stop all grants and aid to Bird's Eye's parent company, Unilever.

Callaghan's predictable reply to this pathetic gesture was that grants to the giant Unilever monopoly must continue-but that workers on Merseyside must stop going on strike!

Journalists on 18 provincial newspapers stand in severe danger of being thrown to the wolves as part of the NUJ's annual wages deal.

They work on eighteen papers which have yet to grant backdating on the 10% pay rise to January 1. All but six of the chapels still involved are confronted by the same management-Westminster Press.

Backdating

Provincial employersmembers of the Newspaper Society-refused to backdate the pay agreement after the NUJ successfully imposed sanctions to force changes in a clause on local pay claims over and above the national agreement.

Now almost all of the 200 plus NUJ chapels in the Newspaper Society have forced their employers to give ground on backdating through local action. Those that are left are being lined up by the employers for a thorough dose of union bashing. All non-union journalists have already received the increase of £7.09 a week.

Penalty period

Offers made to NUJ members seek to ex act a penalty period for a plying sanctions of anything up to six weeks.

It is no coincidence that among the Westminster Press chapels singled out for attack are some which proved thorn in the management's side during the protracted Darlington "closed shop' strike-including the Oxford Mail and Times chapel and the Kentish Times chapel.

Outside Westminster Press the Camden and Islington Gazette chapels, who have won a strike a year for the past three years, have also been refused backdating.

Sanctions have now been stepped up on all the remaining papers to the point where union members have all but stopped work. Members are refusing to use the phones, travel by car, work outside 'normal' working hours or start work on a second story until the current story IS complete-a rule which is causing long delays.

Mandatory

Meetings are being } called in working hours to disrupt The South Shields chapel, growing frustrated at the delay, has been in a mandatory chapel meeting for two weeks.

But despite the unity and anger of the members the NUJ nationally has done little but congratulate itself on the fact that so many chapels have won.

Those are demanding that national action is organised in their support. What started as a national land seemingly trivial) dispute has been translated into a local and fundamental one.

Inadequate

The NUJ strategy of permitting local deals has been translated into its opposite, in that local managements are being given a free hand to attack their chapels.

Once again the leadership is proving hopelessly inadequate tasks demanded of it.

The work to rule, where vigorously applied, has had a major effect on the newsp apers but it has not stopped them appearing. If continued indefinitely it will have a destructive effect on the membership While a strike under these conditions- where managements are clearly reluctant to lock out the NUJ members- is a tactic to be carefully used. immediate steps must be taken to draw back into the dispute chapels which have already settled.

Climbdown

Nothing will have quicker effect on producing pressure on Westminster Press and the small managements to settle than howls of protest from Thomson Newspapers, United Newspapers and the rest that their chapels are taking action against them.

The employers have virtually allowed the Newspaper Society to cease to exist as an organisation during the dispute. Iney must be forced to resurrect it as the body which will NUJ itself to the

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