Women Textile Workers

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houses burn in 1 year Scenes from the picket line outside King Henry's Meat Products factory in Levenshulme, where workers have been on strike for over 3 months over union recognition.

Go repent here tre text of a leaflet distributed by Woman Worker supporters at the recent conference on "Local Once again the audacity of the employers has been brought to light when the management of a clothing factory in Winsford called its shop stewards to a meeting unveiling their plan to cut the wages of the work force by an average of 23% with some reductions amounting to 45%.

Surprised that the shop stewards immediately rejected this massive cut in wages, the management gave them a weck to think about it.

In a factory of 150 workers, 95% of the women are on piccework where such wages as €60-€80 per week can be achieved and where at the opposite end of the scale €30 for 40 hours can also be achieved this comes at the end of a long period of struggles between management and its workforce.

The anti-union management opposed the union recruiting members in 1976 by threats and actually making life so difficult in some of its factories that workers were frightened to appoint a shop steward for fear of victimisation.

Wages and increases were fiddled so many times that any rises were immediately clawed back by some underhand method.

The strength the women felt in joining the union was so evident that an immediate change could be felt in the factory Although a lengthy fight against the management had to be put up to get the union recognised, an equally lengthy fight had to be put to the union official for branch meetings to be held.

He insisted "women weren't interested and wouldn't attend such meetings" . It was around this. time we found out the National Union of Tailoring and Garment Workers branch had been present in Winsford for ten years-and never had a branch meeting.

After much insistence from the shop steward we finally got one arranged, and 60 women turned up —not bad for 'women not interested' Ever since we have had a consistent 30-40 turn up at meetings.

We have also organised demonstrations against both the low wages paid in the clothing industry and the Tory Prime Minister and the government's policies.

Over the last months, in keeping with the reduced market for clothes and high inflation, the management have made every cut possible canteen facilities have been lost, cleaners reduced and machinists not replaced.

Smaller factories have been merged into larger units, prices have been calculated as tight as the time-study engineer can make it, and short time working (2-3 day week) brought in.

We have in our factory resisted any redundancies, and the union meetings now take on a more and more political turn.

This is much resisted by the official whose favourite theme seems to be "we must not stray into the realms of politics".

But as his women members are more and more desperate to keep their jobs, in an area where unemployment has gone up 50% in twelve months, and where the majority of women work in the clothing trade, the interest in the political reasons for the crisis in industry is growing weekly.

Factories like Metal Box, ICL, Fodans, James Carr are sacking hundreds of workers and increasingly this produces a situation where some women are the sole wage earner in the house.

It is in this climate the management of Winsford Textiles Ltd now feel confident enough to demand a 23%45% reduction in the wages of the workers.

We, of course, have rejected this outright and we are confident a mass meeting of the women machinists, pressers and packers will back up our refusal to accept slave wages in an already low paid industry.

But we must be prepared for a long, hard struggle and it will be the strength of our politics which will determine how long and how much support we get in our struggle.

We have asked for support from the other factories in the group.

We will organise an Action Committee willing to put in as many hours as necessary in order to organise total opposition to this vicious attack.

And when we win we will show other workers that the working class can and will struggle to maintain the rights and standard of living they have won over the years.

We demand:

*No reduction in wage rates!

*Open the company books!

*Share the work with no reduction pay!

Furthermore we must call for a ge al str o bring down this Tory government fore hole working class pays for the cr ; of apitalist system.

200 angry tenants marched to County Hall in Leicester last month after a fire in which a mother and her three year old son died and another woman suffered 65 degree burns.

Tenants are angry as this is the sixth recorded fire in one year in steel-built houses on the New Parks Estate in Leicester.

A year ago all the houses were re-wired by an outside contractor. Many tenants complained that the work was cheap and shoddy, with wire sticking out of walls and sockets hanging off. The contractors only spent half a day on rewiring each house.

At a recent meeting of the North West Division of the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers the main discussion was led by full time official Ralph Don.

He first apologised for bringing politics into his discussion -then went on to talk about the problem of closures.

He expressed his sympathy for those hard-up employers who couldn't afford to eat at the luxury hotel where the employers and union EC were meeting to discuss the wage increase for 1981-and had to eat with the union officials at a local pub!

In the heated discussion that followed, a Winsford delegate raised the question of a lack of union policy to fight the massive closures in the clothing industry and to organise against the Tory he risis that is hitting the clothing workers is a result of the crisis of capitalism, she said, and not the problem of imports from low cost countries.

The union leaders are simply using the question of imports to divert from the fight against the Tory government.

A call for the nationalisation of the clothing industry was received favourably by the delegates, but diverted by the officials.

Three delegates, however, declared their willingness to fight for this policy before the conference next April, to make it a real issue in the union.

The pessimism admitted by one union official in no way reflects the workers in the clothing industry, who are more than willing to take on the Tory government and discuss the question of occupations and strikes to bring down Thatcher.

The mobilisation of workers for 29 November must not be left there.

Clothing workers must carry on the fight with other workers to build councils of action to fight closures, cuts, and unemployment.

The residents had to threaten a rent strike after the fourth fire before the council eventually had the wiring checked and began a programme of insulating the houses.

Holes were drilled in the outside walls and insulation material inserted. In most cases the holes were left open and as one resident remarked: "It hasn't made any difference to us but all the birds in the area now have fire-proof nests!"

The house which burned down had in fact been checked and insulated. Workmen doing this work downed tools in protest after the fire.

Representatives of the Housing Department, the fire prevention officier, local Labour councillors and local Labour MP Grenville Janner have all combined in insisting that there is no fault in the wiring or in the structure of the houses.

They claim that all six accidents are due to people-yet in each case the houses have burnt down in less than six minutes! -At a public meeting, a council spokesman

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FIGHTING REDUNDANCIES