All-out action needed

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"This yeard has a great reputation for specialist ships. They have a skilled workforce, and given the opportunity can even enter a higher field of tech"Men left this yard because we were being conned. British Shipbuilders are not people of integrity. They are confidenceshop steward, Cammell Laird, Birkenhead)

AS FROM Friday September 18, the 31,000 workers employed by British Shipbuilders are on a national overtime ban. And as from September 28, we will stast a series of one-day stoppages.

The reason for the action is BS's push to close down the Robb Caledon yard in Dundee: The call for national industrial action was unanimously supported by lay delegates from every yard in the country.

BS has responded with letters to every employee, adverts in the papers, and notices around the yards claiming that industrial action could mean a loss of jobs. But about 20,000 jobs have been lost since nationalisation in July 1977, and all that without industrial action!

Other yards are threatened with the loss of more jobs jobs. Vickers in Barrow will have a surplus of 400 workers by December, according to BS. Assets have been sold off at Scotts Paulin in Scotland. Plans are being made to sell off a small engineering factory in London. Cutbacks are also planned at Vosper Thorneycroft.

An engineering works in Hartlepool is due to close in December this year. Cammell Lairds, in Birkenhead, has only enough work for about a third of its present workforce, and that will only last two years.

The_SNC_ (Shipbuilding Negotiating Committee of the Confed) has had to call some action, despite its attempt to find a compromise. For years the SNC has allowed jobs to be lost without a fight, but now the crunch is coming. Those left in the yards are the ones who could not be pressurised into selling their jobs.

As the Socialist Organiser Lairds bulletin of September 17 says, "The SNC has attempted to divert the fight against enforced redundancies by becoming the gobetween for Kestrel Marine, a private offshore platform production company, and BS, in an attempt to sell off Robb Caledon.

"This is totally against the interests of Robb Caledon workers, who also see it as a diversion from the fight to keep the yard open as part of a nationalised shipbuilding industry. It is also totally against union policy"

Now is the time for all BS workers to stand and be counted.

The tactic of one-day strikes is being criticised, with an amount of rank and file feeling for an all-out strike until the yard is reopened. The civil servants' lesson has not gone astray.

Shop stewards' meeting to organise support for the Robb Caledon occupation -Tuesday September 29 10.30am at Marryat Hall. Dundee.