Bureaucracy in Bournemouth

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If the Women's TUC last week did nothing else, at least it showed why the Women's Fightback TU conference on March 27 is necessary. Rachel Lever reports.

Speakers at the conference will include: Hilary Bird (Lambeth NALGO), Jan Pollock and Vida Bond (Women in NUT), Theresa Gunn (Edinburgh Unemployed Centre), Helen Allison (War on Want), Hilary Land, Harriet Harman, Andrea Campbell, Ursula Huws, Cathy Warnock (Hackney NALGO), Angela Phillips, Lucy Gaskell, Winnie Murphy, Christine Bickerstaff, Helen Flack, Siobhan Lanigan (Foyles strike), Jean Sprey Brent CHC) and a speaker from Plesseys occupation, plus many others to be confirmed.

There will be an all-day creche. Workshops on various topics under these main headings. pay, public sector and the cuts, jobs, fighting sexism, The conference fee is £3.50 (£2 for low-waged or unwaged non-delegates). Starts 10am at Kingsway Princeton College, Sidmouth St, in BOURNEMOUTH was reeling. 'They've filled 20 hotels, must be 2,000 of them" the taxi driver told me.

In the event, the Women's TUC mustered 267 delegates, including the voteless pariahs sent by trades councils. Rows and rows of empty seats in the big gloomy cinema testified to the reluctance of head offices to send their full quota of delegates. After all, the money might be needed It stocks oi cigars were to run low.

The one controversial motion was moved by the NUJ (whose well funetioning Equality Working Party had placed a number of good ideas on the agenda). The motion asked for half a day of workshops at Women's TUC, a bookstall and the right to send five motions on to the main TUC conference.

The whole lot fell. ''There'd be problems with a bookstall - we'd have to find some way of vetting the books" , Bill Whatley of USDAW replied from the platform. And there was a suggestion that sisters whose books were on the stall might have an unfair advantage when it came to elections to the Women's Advisory Committee = a none-toosubtle attack on Anna Coote, who was elected in any case.

Another controversy was over the rights of part timers. Last year's Congress had passed a motion deploring discrimination in redundancy agreements against part-timers li.e. women), but the TUC had taken the guts out of it with a leaflet appealing against "unfair" discrimination and reminding brothers that some part-timers (single parents, main breadwinners, etc) really did need their jobs. Which left others as still not 'real' workers.

Apparently 30 agreements have come to light in which part-timers are expected to get the sack first.

The latest Women's Fightback - 20p plus postage from 41 ElIington St, London N7 racism and the Third World.

Terry Marsland of the Tobacco Workers didn't do herself a lot of good with the feminists, with her impassioned opposition to the anti-smoking resolution. There must be better ways to defend your members' jobs, and the logic would be to campaign for arms spending if your members make the things.

Smaller On the fringe, a rather small meeting was briefed about the June 5 Festival and demonstration. The Labour Party's fraternal delegate, Anne Davis, had made no mention of the Party's festival for women.

And the Women's Advisory Committee report contained a classic cover-up of how the demand for a demonstration had been turned into an 'event'. It's been left to the Action Committee for a Woman's Right to Work to publicise the Festival properly, and to call a demonstration for the day to make sure some protest is made.

Evidence

On the evidence of the Women's TUC, it won't otherwise happen. If the tremendous energy exuded in the Lord Mayor's kneesup (not a dry armpit in the house) had gone into the tremble.

As it was, it had all been filtered through smokefilled National Executives and steered through conference by Marie Patterson, who has done more than anyone else in the past nine months to sabotage even a demonstration for a woman's right to work.

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resolutions, we might see sume action gand Bourne-