24-hour General

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As IME government starts to sound serious about its threat to put troops into the hospitals, and as pressure becomes stronger in the NHS unions for an all-out strike in the health service, the call is growing in the labour movement for a one day general strike in support of the health workers.

The Scottish TUC has convened a conference in Glasgow for September 11 to allow concerned shop stewards from outside the NHS to discuss the situation and what the labour movement should do about it. The Scottish miners and the Confed have already agreed to support the conference.

ASTMS has put a resolution to the TUC health services committee calling for a DEDICATION 24 hour strike in support of the health workers. The Islington Health Workers' Pay Campaign has called for a one-day Islington general strike on September3.

Thus more and more sections of the labour movement are seeing the hospital workers' fight as the test case it is: The timid intervention of the courts to penalise the Fleet Street electricians for taking solidarity strike action has not put the frighteners on the labour movement. If anything, it has had the opposite effect.

It showed what they are frightened of. More and more workers want to take a hand and help the health workers beat the Tories.

The health workers' strike is giving focus and purpose and a rallying cause to the labour movement, whose militancy and selfconfidence had been badly shaken by the slump and unemployment. For nobody can doubt the justice of the health workers' demands, or the brutal cold-hearted class militarcy that inspires change spivs, who refuse to pay them a living wage.

The Tories are not only carving up hospital workers but the entire Health Service too. Hypocritically denouncing the 'threat to life' which arises during the strikes, they are themselves determined to make basic health care in Britain something that is again bought and sold at market prices and governed by the drive The health workers, many of whom are blacks, immigrants, and women the especially exploited sections of the British working class - symbolise the entire working class in slump-paralysed Britain: underpaid, insecure, seeing society rotting and decaying all around them, abused and denounced for defending themselves. The labour movement instinctively understands this. MY BILLS By rallying to the health workers the labour movement has begun to pick itself up and fight back. The rash of solidarity action, and now the call for a general strike which is beginning to echo and re-echo through the movement, is the measure of the revival of confidence and purpose.

There must be maximum support for the lobby of the TUC on September 6. It is right and proper that the health workers' lobby will merge with a lobby at the same time and place to get the TUC to take the fight against the Tebbit anti-union legislation seriously.

Demand that the TUC organise a one-day strike in support of the health N.U.PEUI Organise now to help prepare for it. Islington shows what needs to be done. A joint labour movement committee there has brought the Labour Party and the unions together to organise support for the health workers.

Such committees should be set up throughout the country to give support now and prepare for a one-day general strike.

THI Inside, pa! orts from Hospital, Islington, W9, etc. for profit. workers. ge 15: the Li Edinb St Ma CLAIM • rep the health ndi irgh John Harris

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801 SET ON ort the health workers asuns FAIR PAY

XESNT PAY Thatcher and her vicious government of exploiters, parasites, and Stock Ex-