Tgwu Witch-hunt Conference Steps up Defence Campaign

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T&G witch-hunters Evans (top) and Region 5 Chairman Davis race An important step forward has been taken in the campaign to defend nine militant TGWU members at Leyland's Cowley Assembly Plant from disciplinary action at the hands of the TGWU Regional officials.

A conference of nearly 200 TGWU members from nearly every region of the union met in Oxford last Saturday and unanimously backed a resolution calling for a mass mobilisation should TGWU officials decide to procede with the threatened discipline.

The resolution condemned the "continuous disciplinary action being taken against leading members in the Cowley Assembly Plant", and called for the charges to be dropped.

Those present voted:

"To go back into the Branches and Committees represented and obtain the affiliation of those bodies to this campaign.

"To extend this campaign within the TGWU and obtain the maximum affiliations to the campaign"

And the resolution pledged:

"To reconvene the conference, on the basis of the affiliated branches and committees, in the event of any disciplinary action being taken against any of the Cowley 9. This conference will decide what | further action should be taken in defence of those disciplined"

It is urgent that this resolution is acted on immediately throughout the union. Once the victimisation takes place TGWU officials must be confronted by a much larger conference, based on branch and shop stewards committee sponsorship.

Even on Saturday it was clear that there are strong supporters of the campaign who could not attend this conference, which was the first of its kind for many years within the TGWU A number of additional branches and leading militants sent apologies and messages of support, and a large number of branches and stewards committees have sent motions of protest to Regional Committees and the General Executive Committee.

Political motive

The conference itself was sponsored by 130 prominent TGWU members including branch officers, con venors and shop stewards.

A central issue dealt with in speeches and in the subsequent discussion at the conference was the political motivation for the victimisations.

TGWU officials have decided that those who speak up for the independent interests of shop floor workers in Leyland have to be silenced at all costs.

This has brought them to the unprecedented step of attempting to expel, bar from office or discipline newly reconvenor Bob Fryer, along with three newly elected deputy convenors, three shop stewards and two militant TGWU members.

This McCarthyite purge is aimed not at the individuals concerned, but at the policies for which they stand.

It was pointed out that deputy convenor Alan Thornett -who is now threatened with expulsion from the union-opposed Jones' call for a Phase 3 of wage control at the last TGWU conference, and fought for the alternative strategy of cost-of-living clauses to protect wages against inflation.

All of the Cowley 9 have opposed 'worker participation' and the /job-cutting Edwardes plan.

Leyland management and their allies in the TGWU bureaucracy, know that a leadership placed in office by a majority vote of the membership fighting on such a perspective could strike heavy blows at Edwardes' proposed closures, redundancies and speed-up.

One speaker in particular, showed this when he detailed the fight that had been waged in the plant for the policy of the company to expose the links between Leyland and major sections of the privately owned component industry and the banks.

He told the conference how the policy-taken up in the face of threatened redundancies-had won widespread popular support in the plant and led to the setting up of an Open the Books Committee by Assembly Plant stewards.

The support won for the policy had been a major factor in the growing isolation of the right wing and the re-election of Alan Thornett as the chairman of the 5/293 TGWU Branch, The open the books policy and the fight for work-sharing on full pay and factory occupation is now crucial in the fight to defend the Triumph plant at Speke which is threatened with closure under the Edwardes This is why the struggle to defend the Cowley 9 against victimisation, as part of the struggle for democracy within the TGWU, is an essential part of the fight for a new principled leadership Leyland and throughout the