Socka Make This the Age of the Claim!

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St ike BRITISH RAIL workers do an average work-week of 54½ hours. With only three weeks holiday in the year, their total working hours per year are about one-third more than anywhere else in western Europe.

The long hours of overtime are due to low basic pay and deliberate under-staffing by BR. 'Railman' grade workers have a basic of £58.75 a week. The 'minimum earnings level' is £66.60 - but any worker who refuses to do overtime does not even get that.

Since 1975 - according to the official arbitration tribunal - railworkers' real wages have gone down 29%.

Parker

Meanwhile British Rail boss Peter Parker gets £37,500 a year. Jimmy Saville was paid £140,000 to do his 'Age of the Train' ads. And £70 million - more than enough to meet the unions' demands - was paid out by BR last year in interest charges to financiers and in continuing compensation to the people who owned the railways before nationalisation in 1947.

Like almost every basic sector of British industry the railways are being run down at the expense of the working class. The bosses get paid well to manage the rundown, and whenever they want they can take their money somewhere else. But for the working class the choice is to fight back or see conditions worsened and the dole queue get longer.

Battle plan

For the Tories, the railworkers are victim no. 4 in a worked-out battle plan. The strategy was laid down in a Tory internal memo before the 1979 general election:

avoid (to begin with) all-out clashes with strong sections like the miners, and pick a series of targets: steelworkers, the civil service, By choosing their battles the Tories hope to notch up victories and pave the way for bigger confrontations.

After a tremendous fight, the steelworkers were ultimately defeated by their own union leaders' failure to EASTOE SCOTTA UNIT link the fight for wages and the fight for jobs. The civil service workers have been beaten by their union leaders' pussyfooting months of ineffective selective action instead of an all-out strike.

BL workers have suffered a series of heavy blows, again mainly through the weakness of their official leadership. But they are still fighting back.

Edwardes style Now the Tories want to take on the railworkers. The Sunday Times on July 12 -before the arbitration tribunal had even reported - told readers that BR bosses were going for a "Michael Edwardes style" "showdown" and accurately predicted the bosses' line: no pay rise without productivity deals.

Like Edwardes in BL, the BR bosses are pushing aside normal trade union negotiating practices, and presenting a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum.

While Edwardes routinely threatens BL workers with a shutdown of the whole corporation, BR is trying to blackmail railworkers by saying that 20,000 jobs will go if they strike. The £50 million loss for the first half of 1981 is being used for all it is worth.

The BR bosses, however, are only acting as frontmen for the Tories - who have told them that BR will

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not get the money it needs for electrification unless productivity deals and job cuts are agreed first.

The Tories can be beaten. With effective organisation, blacking and solidarity, a rail strike can hit the Tories just as hard as the developing miners' strike this February that forced them to back down. What the miners did, railworkers can equally do.

The setbacks the steelworkers suffered can be avoided if the lessons are learnt.

The steel unions divided the fight and giving the bosses a walkover victory on jobs after they had been pushed back significantly on wages.

Local strike committees took control of the picketing. But they never organised on a national scale sufficiently to form a new leadership, able to force the full-time officials into action or push them aside if need be.

The TGWU made verbal expressions of support. This time, too, Transport House has told regional secretaries to instruct members not to carry freight normally carried by rail.

But in the steel strike there was no clear, wellpublicised instruction to TGWU members not to cross the picket lines.

Unambiguous

There was a front page article in the union paper, the Record, but nothing strong enough to give the necessary support to drivers facing threats from their employers if they didn't carry the steel.

This time the support must be clear and unambiguous.

Solidarity was the key for the steel strike. And it will be the key for the rail strike, Employment Act or no Employment Act. With strike committees will be INSIDE: Page 8 - what the "productivity' strings mean; page 10 - the Tories' plans to run down the railways.

solidarity, the railworkers can not only win their pay rise without strings, but stop the jobs rundown in their industry and strike a deadly blow to the Tories and their plans.

Obstacle The potential support and solidarity is present in the working class as workers look for ways of hitting back against the Tory offensive.

The obstacle to solidarity is the leadership of the rail unions and of the TUC -who (like their coleagues in the steel union bureaucracy)

fear above all that their members will recognise their own strength and take action that goes beyond the limits of the TUC's "peaceful coexistence" with the Thatcher government.

Unity

The unity we must fight for is unity in class action against the BR management and the Tories, not the false "unity" of empty rhetoric and inaction as peddled by the existing leaders of the labour movement.

itt elected from mass meetings, 5p if sold separately THE RAIL unions demanded a "substantial increase in pay", but agreed to go is arbitration.

The official tribuna: reported on July 16, recommending an 8% increase on basic rates to be dated from. April 20, and another 35 to be dated from August 1 It also proposed a 15F rise in the Minimum Earr.ings Level, and an increased London Allowance.

With inflation around 12%, the recommendation was hardly generou.. Because of taxes, inflanor usually takes a bigger proportion of any increase than of your original wages, and 15 or 18% was needed jus: to keep pace with inflation.

But the tribunal dis recommend the wage ris: without strings.

The unions accepted the recommendation. But or July 20 British Rail bosses announced that they wouls pay the second part of the increase on basic rates - ine 3% - only if the unions agreed major changes ir work practices.

The major rail unions ASLEF and the NUR refused to 'sell' jobs and conditions for... nothing Only the white-collar unior. TSSA, accepted BR's ou:rageous blackmail.

Now ASLEF and ire NUR have called a strit: from midnight on Augur: 30/31.

NO workers will be vital

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National Union piRa ich

the jobs issue from the wages issue, thus weakening