Socialist Worker wrong on BL

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W9) on October 19th was a great success.

All day ambulance drivers brought patients into the hospital as instructed by their union, in defiance of BRANCH ROL Socialist Worker's sniping and ill-informed comment (October 17) on the recent lay off strike at the Cowley Assembly plant needs a reply.

The article, by Ceri Jones, calls the strike "nothing but a shambles". • It accuses the strike leaders of failing to spread the strike to the whole plant, badly organising the picketing, and therefore causing a split vote when the AUEW officials "said there was no chance the AUEW would make the strike official".

It was a very militant strike, and very important, since it took up the principle of lay-off pay. Its weakness was that it was a sectional strike, involving about one third of the total workforce on the plant, and confined to two tracks plus trim..

They were the people who had lost a day's pay.

Advisability

From the start there was a division of opinion among activists on the plant and the strikers themselves as to the advisability of a mass meeting designed to extend the strike to the whole plant.

The problem was that a majority of the strike committee formed by the strikers themselves was against extending it.

They were reluctant to submit their strike to a vote when the majority had not lost money.

At first picketing was very strong, but it is true that it broke up towards the end following the decision of a mass meeting to picket on a 24 hour basis. There was poor organisation immediately following the meeting, but basically the meeting did not appreciate the problem of a 24 hour picket on a plant with ten gates to cover and as many again which could be opened whenever the management wanted.

Cruised

Management cruised around in a car and opened up any gate not in sight of the pickets.

More importantly, what split the strike was not what Ceri Jones says, the reluctance of the AUEW to make it official, but an instruction from the AUEW Executive ordering their members back to work.

Such an instruction was a very serious matter, given an employer like Edwardes. Within hours he issued the sacking notices.

Ceri Jones would have done better to have identified the real problems, instead of criticising the strike committee. That Socialist Worker lacked focus is shown by the way it related the local strike to the upcoming national BL wages One of the strikers is quoted approvingly as saying that the lay-off strike was far more important than the wages struggle.

The job of the strike leaders was to lead a successful local strike, but to insist that it remained subordinate to the national action.

ORGANISER