Black Grunwick Now!

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SOCIAL Weekly paper of the Workers Socialist League * No. 99 * 10 May, 1978 * 15p A clear call three weeks ago for an occupation to stop the closure of Leyland's threatened Triumph plant at Speke would have produced a massive majority in favour from a mass meeting determined to defend 3,000 jobs in the plant.

No such call was made. Speke stewards contented themselves with a form of words defending the right to work and opposing compulsory redundancies.

Bluster Ind they allowed combine shup stewards chairman, Stalinist Derek Robinson, to lead the meeting in completely the opposite direction, Flustering about the same ESS stale old forms of action -one day parliamentary lobbie that have preceded th of sackings and huge social services.

Peaceful

Meanwhile, trade union officials (who had from the outset talked in terms of negotiating redundancy payments big enough to secure "peaceful transfer" of production from the doomed Speke plant continued their background work of fostering confusion and demoralisation.

They were allowed the leeway for this treacherous work by self-styled rank and file' groupings led by the Socialist Workers Party, who at each point studiously aroided spelling out the absolute necessity for occupation of the plant if the closure was protest strikes, etesusands cuts in know your Grantham addresses strikers be prevented.

SWP members used every opportunist argument they could dream up in order to persuade their supporters in Speke that they should not call for too much all at once but should simply rest content with winning support for general statements of opposition.

And the SWP reserved particular scorn for the call for elected union committees to open Leyland's booksthe only policy that could firmly establish the link between the struggle to save the jobs at Speke and the fight by workers throughout Leyland against speed-up, rationalisation and redundancies under the Edwardes plan.

More time For those who imagined that there would be more time in which to add some BiLI For 22 months the officials of APEX wriggled to free themselves from the Now, at the national conference on The Lessons to be Learned' from the dispute, they hope to pronounce a pious obituary on this struggle for union recognition.

At every stage Grantham and his companions in bureaucracy have twisted and turned to impose their deadening control over the strike.

But their efforts could never have achieved any success without the invaluable support of Jack Dromey from Brent Trades Council and other 'lefts'.

As thousands of workers mobilised on the mass pickets last summer, it was Dromey, Scargill and their treacherous like who were able to divert this militant response.

By refusing to call for blacking of the Grunwick factory, they specific demands to the general call to endorse the right to work and oppose closure, last Saturday's mass meeting provided a sharp awakening.

Even though they had been demoralised by weeks of aimless to-ings and fro-ings by union officials and shop stewards; abandoned by officials of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions who voted a week earlier to sell all the jobs in Speke in the name of preserving the 'viability' of Leyland; and blackmailed bya company ultimatum to accept "improved" buy-off payments and join the dole queues quietly, hundreds of workers arrived at the mass meeting ready to fight for their iobs.

No But still not so much as one Speke steward stood up on the platform to call for occupation. An SWP "Right to Work" leaflet given out at the meeting made no call for occupation.

And the stewards' recommendation-simply to reject' the company's new offer and contained the threat of an independent movement which could have developed beyond the reach of the bureaucracy and its anti-democratic methods.

Their actions have been directly responsible for prolonging the strike by avoiding any leadership on the one policy that can break the intransigence of Ward and the reactionary anti-union policies of his backers in NAFF.

Terrified of any independent action by workers fighting to defend democratic rights and to advance their class interests, these bureaucrats-both 'left' and right -are completely unable to win the most basic, minimal demand for workers in this period.

As the forces of the state were mobilised against the strikes, APEX and Dromey hid themselves behind the 'democracy' and "justice' of the Scarman report, and the ACAS machinery for betraying workers' interests.

At last week's conference of oppose closure-was seen by workers as no more than a haggling over terms.

Again a key role was played by Derek Robinson. As leading defender of the Edwardes plan and of the worker participation' set-up that first lined up Speke for closure as a supposedly 'low productivity' plant, Robinson was keen to be in on the final Disgruntled In between his predictable bursts of left' rhetoric Robinson was careful to include the statement that the right-wing led Canley workforce has agreed to accept work from Speke.

With no serious alternative course of action being proposed by their leaders a disgruntled 1 mass meeting voted 60-40 against their stewards' recommendation, thus deciding not to oppose the closure of the plant.

Already cynics and opportunists are rushing to claim that the fault was that of the workforce refusing to back the stewards.

But the reality is that the stewards and the combine offered no perspective to the English WRP Fingermen .. enough to argue that the official strike would be called off unless ACAS recommended recognition within five weeks.

This position of capitulation must be fought at the conference called by the strike committee.

APEX conference rejected a call to resume mass picketing and for the blacking of essential services to the company. But if Saturday's meeting is to be anything more than a funeral wake, the demand for blacking must be taken up, along with a campaign of mass lobbies to demand that the TUC fulfil its promises of support by organising this action.

*Grunwick National Conference, 11am-5pm, Sunday 14 May, Wembley Conference Centre, Empire Way, Wembley. Middlesex. Credentials £1, 12 delegates per branch), from Trades and Labour Hall, 375, High Road, Willesden, London NW 10.

Speke workforce-there was really nothing for them to The stewards even went on after the meeting to carry a vote of thanks to Derek Robinson -whose only role has been to assist Leyland in the butchering of 3,000 Merseyside jobs!

The betrayal at Speke has involved a lethal combination of conscious sabotage by union officials and leading combine stewards (who, through 'participation' have become no more than an arm of management) with a complete absence of a conscious alternative equipped to fight the bureaucracy.

The bitter lesson is that without a fight for the demands of occupation, open the books, work sharing on full pay and nationalisation there can be no serious fight to defend jobs against a ruthless crisis-ridden capitalist class.

A Trotskyist party, capable of leading such struggles and fighting on all levels against the class collaboration embodied in the Lib-Lab coalition government must be built as a matter of urgency.

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PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report rights! ÁPE

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