["THE struggle. against apartheid is the same struggle…]
Socialist Organiser1982 1982-07-01Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 5 →
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"THE struggle. against apartheid is the same struggle for fundamental trade union rights and for a free non-racial society" , said national USDAW official Garfield Davies at a joint Trades Council/Anti-Apartheid meeting in . Leicester last week in support of the Rowntree strikers in South Africa.
Garfield Davies went on to describe the effort of the joint negotiating council (involving the three main process workers' unions in Rowntrees, TGWU, GMWU, and USDAW) to pressurise management over the dispute. This was essentially De two meetings with the company chairman which failed to shift him!
Although Garfield spoke with great feeling, in essence his union (and the two others) has done nothing for the South African Allied Workers Union members facing torture, intimidation and arrests under the racist regime.
When asked why his members and other Rowntree workers have not yet been informed of the dispute by the union, let alone moblised in solidarity, Garfield evaded the issue with typical bureaucratic rhetoric. He blamed the members' "apathy' A NUPE member who had come to the meeting from the picket line at Leicester Royal Infirmary, by Colleen Molloy commented: "If our leadership had the same attitude as you, there would never be a national health dispute today"
However, the meeting welcomed the resolution passed at the USDAW Annual Delegate Meeting which calls for links with SAAWU, for a campaign against handling South African products, for information through the union journal, and for the union 'to solidarise with South African workers in ways their unions suggest' (This last clause is the most significant, since it commits USDAW to organise rmy blacking when South African unions call for it, as SAAWU has done for Dunlop).
The motion is an important one, won through successful work by the AntiTerrorism Act.
The Rowntree campaign needs to be developed into the defence of SAAWU, with demands for the release of its members and especially nationalisation under workers' control of all companies with subsidiaries in South Africa, * full blacking action against all military and related supplies to the South