Suspicion of POEU leaders

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and reduce take-home pay by up to £30 a week.

In June this year the management withdrew an agreement not to make any compulsory redundancies, which was signed years ago. 2 weeks' action forced the management to backtrack.

They then attacked the 'protection of earnings' agreement. Already staff in the CSSD department at Whitechapel have lost between £17-30 a week.

Since the lock out on November 5, management by Steve Akers Leicester Trades Council has given a welcome boost to the locked out TASS members at Evans Lifts. It has called for a day of action in support of the sacked workers, calling on the local labour movement to join the picket.

The Secretary of the Trades Council has urged that the demonstration be peaceful, saying •There's no way we are going to fall foul of Tebbit's proposals."

The major probler. lacing the Evans pickets now on 24 hour duty has been prior's Emoloymer. Act, not proposals which have P&O seafarers in Liverpool are angry about lack of support from their union.

They have not received a Jenny or strike pay since thev began their action against closure of the Liverpool-Belfast ferry service. (They also have had no money from the DHSS).

And the big talk of solidarity from the NUS leaders has come down to very little. The shutdown of all services between Britain yet to bacome law. The Day of Action should be turned into a massive show of strength against a rabid anti-union employer.

An effective picket, with scab drivers turnec away, will be the best encouragement the workers have yet received.

If the scab office staff are blocked from getting in so much the better.

TGWU drivers are still crossing the picket. This has to be taken u p. An official letter from the T&G is available spelling out from the TASS office in Leicester spelling out their support.

A BOC steward from the Derby Depot, who stopped and Ireland lasted all of half a day. The blacking of all P&O ships in British ports was stopped because the union was supposedly new buyer tor the stry of a But the pickets and the workers sitting in are still solid, and need support -both through direct rank and file action and through demands on the NUS leaders to meet their promises.

PETER CASHMAN to give his support, suggested that TASS should contact those BOC depots that supply other Otis companies in order to get all oxygen supplies to Otis blacked.

Workers throughout the Midlands should also black all deliveries by Smiths Haulage of Abbeygate, Leicester, who have consistently broken the picket.

Leicester UWU and Leicester Right to Work Campaign have supported the regular Monday and Wednesday mass pickets and have called on the unemployed to support the Evans workers. With the dispute now in its 13th week, effective and supportive secondary picketing in defiance of Prior's law and blacking at source are now needed more than THE Post Office Engineering Union (POEU) Special Conference on November 18-20 reflected a distrust of the present union leadership, and a growing feeling that different policies are needed to protect the jobs and living standards of POEU members.

The conference was nominally set up to discuss the split of the Post Office in the postal business and British Telecom, and the break-up of the telecoms monopoly through the Telecoms Bill.

There was, however, no mention of fighting the Telecoms Bill in the National Executive Council's (NEC) report for the conference. Instead, to go along with the split of into BT and the PO, the leadership (well-heeled full timers and the annually elected NEC, who meet behind well-closed doors), proposed a Federal Union to include the POEU (the largest union in BT, with approximately 129,000 members), the CPSA Postal and Telecommunications (P&T) group, and SPOE, a bosses' union.

Discipline

The federal union structure was to have an elected body, the Federal Council, with delegates from each of these unions (elected not fox inferences but from . a union's NEC), which irruld control all common matters. The unions would each retain some degree of autonomy, although no-one outside of the NEC Out knew to what exact degree.

SPOE members discipline POEU members, and SPOE has withdrawn from joint negotiations alongside the POEU on pay, on the few occasions the unions' full-timers have worked together, because the POEU annual conferences had called for industrial action if no satisfactory pay offer was forthcoming.

Counterposed to this was the proposel pushed by the POEU Broad Left and supported by a number of branches, which called for a rank and file based union amalgamation spanning both businesses, to include the POEU, the UCW, and the CPSA P&T group, but excluding SPOE.

Both resolutions fell, although significant changes were made to the NEC's proposal before it was defeated.

Exclude The delegates at the conference supported a resolution from London North Central External branch to delete SPOE from the Federal Council, thereby excluding the bosses' union from the Federation. A resolution from Leamington Spa and London Factories to exclude SPOE and instead include UCW in the Federation was passed, despite previous union policy (which stretches back for years) in favour of splitting the businesses - a policy which, if carried into the workforce, would block links with the UCW.

This was a major step forward, the delegates seeing the common link in the fight for better conditions and against the Tories' Telecoms Bill.

The influence of the democracy campaign in the Labour Party and the logic of carrying it into the unions was shown by the overwhelming support from the floor for a resolution from Edinburgh External which was carried, calling for all Federal Council meetings to be minuted, with the minutes showing the voting of each Council member, and the minutes to be made available to all branches.

Pathetic

At a rules revision conference of the POEU three years ago, before the democracy campaign had taken such a high profile in the Labour Party, a similar Stanlon lender of the POEU resolution in relation to the POEU was heavily defeated.

Up to this point, the union leadership's policy on 'fighting' the break-up of the monopoly has been pathetic, relying on sponsored MPs such as John Golding (a man so dedicated to free speech in the labour movement that he attempted unsuccessfully, with POEU money, to sue the Militant newspaper for criticising him), to compete in Platonic dialogue with Keith Joseph, monetarism's main man in the good ship Parliament.

The oft-quoted phrases in the POEU journal about 'the split of the businesses' and 'the break-up of the monopoly' have meant very little to the rank and file telephone engineer, and full-timers have merely echoed management's newly-developed mating call of the 'engineer eating buzby' ... 'we are in competition now with private industry, you will all have to work a lot harder, no slacking in the ranks'.

So instead of being prepared and working out policies of action to fight back, the rank and file are now finding out through management's new, harder attitudes what these phrases mean - in face of a leades nicar. ership who back up management all the way.

A document leaked in London stated that 11,000 redundancies could be expected in the few years. Recruitment been cut. Sackings of viduals, previously al unheard of, are increa Discipline has been 1 ened up.

The secret police o PO and BT, the ID, been making dawn engineers' ho on searching them, que ing, calling in the p and claiming the e eers have stolen property! A work to was recently carrier in a London branch t the ID out of the area.

The task now facin vists in the POEU is forward from the mer rejection of the p and actions of the p leadership, to build : alternative. The Bros is emerging as suc is still very small in ers and does not ha support of the vast ity of the rank and fil More campaignin be done by Socialis aniser supporters activists in the through the Broad I through turning the union branches campaigning, bodies:

• to disband the II • to fight for jobs, • to turn the:

union policy for a working week into ar • and to link up y UCW, the CPSA an public sector uni fight the four per cel