Scotts call to action

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"IT wasn't Arthur Snipe who beat us. It wasn't even the police or the Tory government. It was the leadership of our own union —that's what beat us."

These words of Dennis Barry sum up better than anything else, the events at Laurence Scott over the past week. Whilst Snipe's scabs have been systematically looting the place of anything worth taking, helped by hundreds of police every day, the labour movement in Manchester has sat back and let it happen.

Pickets

1,000 pickets could have kept the scabs out and sent them packing along with their friends in blue. It shouldn't have been too difficult to get that number to turn out, considering all the promises Scotts workers had been given in the past.

What went wrong?

The treachery of the union leadership at national level, especially in the AUEW, has to be top of the list.

It wasn't just the lack of support they gave to the strikers, they were actively campaigning against them.

Boyd and Duffy broke every rule in the book to withdraw official support from the dispute. And when they did circulate branches, it was to warn them off giving support. Last week's events must have come as a great relief to them. The motion calling for new elections to the Executive has already been passed by over 130 branches, and the pressure was on.

One of the lessons the Scotts workers are determined to take with them, is the need to build up the strength of the movement at grass roots level again. In the meantime they are carrying on their campaign to remove the AUEW Executive and get fresh elections and at the same time to get the Mining Supplies Group blacked throughout the country.

They are also preparing a broadsheet on their experiences. That will be essential reading for all militants.

"When the police came 500 strong with their Tactical Aid Groups, there was no way that the Laurence Scotts pickets could hold the gates on our own. We were let down by the grass roots engineers. Laurence Scott fought on our own—we gave a lead and showed that it was possible to fight. We hope now that someone else takes up the cudgel.

"The fight now revolves around Rule 14. Branches must send resolutions through and fetch the Executive to the polls. These are the men that sold us out—and we're not the first, witness Plansees. We saw what happened at Leyland with the lack of lead given there. District Organiser Len Brindle even read out a letter from Edwardes to the mass meeting!

Sell out

Now there will be massive redundancies there. Boyd and Duffy sell out their members in big companies, so what chance those in the small ones.

We rejected the Executive's ultimatum to settle, and that was a democratic vote. They ignored that and withdrew strike pay and official backing.

Laurence Scotts will still fight on to make the union democratic. We've been called militant morons but we were just fighting to save our jobs and we would have succeeded.

What we've got to do now is strengthen the grass roots of our union to make sure that this debacle doesn't happen again.

It's the rank and file that should dominate the leadership, and not the other way around. We need people with different views on the Executive who will do the job they were put there for and represent the views of their membership.

There's one more thing. Through occupying the factory, seven stewards are faced with a bill of over £6,000, two thirds of this is to pay for the Sheriff and the bailiffs who we didn't invite and who chucked us out of the factory.

All AUEW members should be demanding that the union pays for this. But if they don't then we are going to be asking for donations. And that isn't the end. There are still two more cases to come up."