Jobs Crisis: Our Answer

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Leyland Vehicles mass meeting decides to right on Trade union democracy: the Truth behind the Abortion rights: the Tories try to outlaw the 'social' grounds South African workers have Wilson-Rowntree: were pidun truth about TASS; and our on which 80% of abortions are approved. -page 6 President Reagan has drawn up yet another package of draconian attacks against the working class at home and abroad in his latest budget.

His plans involve an 18% increase in defence spending to finance the biggest-ever peacetime build-up in armaments.

All other government spending is to be heavily cut-by an overall total of 16.5%.

Once again prime candidates for cuts are the poorest sections of American workers-the unemployed and low paid who receive food stamps, welfare payments or housing assistance.

Meanwhile even sections of employers are profoundly uneasy at Reagan's budget which as a result of its huge arms allocation projects a deficit of $91 billion.

Next week's Socialist Organiser will carry a closer analysis of the implications of Reagan's economics. Freddie Laker is doing OK. He still has his millions, and as soon as he likes he can be back in some better line of profit-making.

Laker's 2,600 workers never had much: no union, poverty-line wages, no sick pay, no pensions, and enforced early retirement. Now they have nothing-no jobs, and, for many of them, little chance of getting jobs.* But that's always how it is when the miracle breaks down by which the murky water of private rapacity is supposed to be changed into the wine of public benefit.

Comedy

As the official jobless figures go over three million, the rich stay rich. All they need to do is shift their activities to City speculation or overseas investment.

It will not cause Rupert Murdoch more than a shrug of regret if he sticks to his bluff and shuts down the Times and the Sunday Times. For 2,600 workers it will mean the bleakness of the dole.

Sacking 1,000 workers in Burnley is simply a necessary adjustment to their money-making for the bosses. of Lucas Aerospace.

The black comedy of pensioners sending pound notes to Laker, and some of his workers offering to take social security wages, shows a desperate wish for the alchemy of the free market to work, a grotesque hope that perhaps a few pounds charity can get capitalism thriving again.

But the accountants just snicker in derision as they survey the airline's £270 million debts.

Putty And there is less and less welfare-state putty to plug the cracks. With the new appointment of a hard-line Thatcherite to head the Manpower Services Commission, the drive will be stepped up for the young unemployed to accept being cheap casual labour-or else.

The system of produc tion for profit offers us nothing but increasing chaos.

But, especially in the last 1.10 British Rail:

'line closures Foot silent? -Centre pages month or so, many groups of workers have started to fight back.

240 officers and crew occupying the Senlac ferry in Newhaven have won a victory. Last Friday, 5 February, Sealink dropped its plans to end the service. Talks were started on reopening it, with the officers and crew maintaining their occupation to be sure of a satisfactory conclusion.

Earlier they had been helped by supporting strike action by the Merchant Navy and Airline Officers' Associn. ation in other ports.

300 workers at Plessey, Bathgate, are also occupying to save their jobs-and are dafvino a court order to blackmail; Why is quit.

Leyland •Vehicles workers in Lancashire and at Bathgate, Scotland, are on strike to save jobs and defeat Michael Edwardes' corporate plan, even though the LV leadership is resisting all pressure to broaden the struggle to BL Cars, where workers are equally affected by the same Edwardes plan.

Each sit-in poses in a practical manner the question of who is the boss of the factory: the capitalist or the workers?

It raises the question of which will prevail: the drive to profit, which makes workers' livelihoods so many corks tossed around by the convulsions of capitalism, or the right to work.

Workers demanding the right to work are seizing the means of production and insisting that their use should no longer be governed on the profit drive, but should be organised on the basis of defending jobs.

A fight on the broadest scale for work-sharing, under workers' control and with no loss of pay, is what is needed to enforce this.

That fight starts with support for the existing struggles, especially against the courts and the bailiffs, and opposition to the efforts by the misleaders of the labour movement t0 jsolate been on strike for 12 months. Laker: laughing all the way to t them.

But it must not stop short of the nationalisation of the banks and major industries to provide the basis for a genuine socialist alternative.

To raise the straggle to the level where it "can come to grips with the chaos of capitalism, and the disaster of three million unemployed, we need to restructure and reorientate the labour movement so that it is canable of asserting working class economic over the whole wealth of society.

Limp Another Labr -page 4 regulation productive ›ur governthe bank ment making limp attempts to soften the damage is no alternative to the rampant Tories. We need a government accountable to the labour movement and willing and able to defeat the capitalists-a workers' government. Only the fight for a labour movement with new structures, new leadership and new policies, capable of enforcing such a workers' government, can offer a perspective to the growing jobs resistance.

IT IS TO UISCuSS UIVOY Hiennice thece questions that Socialist Organiser is sponsoring major trade union conference- 'Democratise the Labour Movement'-on April 3. Details, page 15.

plans for a conference.

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