[Belfast BRIAN Sullivan, (NUPE) secretary of the North…]

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Belfast BRIAN Sullivan, (NUPE) secretary of the North and West Belfast District coordinating committee, told me that workers are 'solid' throughout the North. Since August 20, Central Sterile Supplies Department units are out in every hospital. With other action, e.g. in transport and laundries, that makes the North of Ireland one of the strongest areas in the NHS dispute.

The 2800 workers at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, where Brian Sullivan works, have been at the centre of the fight.

The CSSD there has been closed down for over 4 weeks. Accident and emergency work has been covered through the Theatre Sterile Supplies Unit, with three workers from the CSSD vetting what is needed. It was they, through the shop stewards committee, who decided recently what would be needed in a bone marrow surgery case, and made sure it was provided.

There has been a slightly different form of workers' Brian Sullivan says that the feeling for all-out action is 'very heavy' , and points to the 2,000-strong meeting at the Grosvenor Hall on Friday, August 13, which supported the all-out call, as just one example.

'The TUC leadership has been absolutely pathetic throughout the dispute, to say the least' One aspect of this has been the isolation of different regions throughout the dispute. "The women in the RVH need to be able to pick up a sheet and see that the CSSD in Southampton is also out.' thought that was a very good aspect of the Health Workers for the Full Claim Broadsheet.

Even in the North itself, local coordinating committees had to push the regional officers to call an all N. Ireland Co-ordinating Committee, made up of 2 delegates from any local committee.

At the second of its well-attended meetings, a resolution was passed which called the all-out indefinite stoppage of SHOP stewards from all over Scotland are being called to a conference in Glasgow on Friday September 3 to organise action for the NHS strike day of September 22.

The Scottish TUC, which has organised the conlerece conference general strike' the words genera suuke but union officials are saying that 'the appeal for 'maximum support rules out nothing'.

Meanwhile 100 workers bulance workers have been on indefinite strike after their pay was docked on the pretext that the Trinity Park House strike made it impossible to compute overtime money.

NUPE ambulance workers throughout Scotland are on strike for four days -from midnight on August 30 to midnight on September 2 - for the 12% pay claim. And at the Western General hospital in Edinburgh, 100 ancillary THE DECISION last week to end the 12-day strike at the London Hospital in Whitechapel is a setback for union organisation there.

The victimisation and eventual sacking of shop steward Phil McEntee can be taken as a sign of the NHS administration's policy to take revenge for the months of disruption in hospitals successfully organised by trade unionists in pursuit of their pay claim.

Many of the reasons for the failure to reinstate Phil rest with the management's ability to act during the holiday period, when the bed patient level was about 50% and when the workforce had already lost wages all summer with the health union leaders' policy of drawn-out action.

Nevertheless the strike was still strong despite one union steward going back in, and most workers stuck with their union's mass meeting decisions. Management even admitted to the press that the trickle back to work was so slight that they had been unable to run the hospital properly.

The latter part of the strike was marked by the emergence of the problemby Tony Cashman TWO thousand TGWU mem bers at Vauxhall Ellesmere Port unanimously rejected the company's 7.5% pay offer at a mass meeting on Tuesday 31st.

The unions are demand * £25 on the basie * A 38 hour week now, followed by progress to a 35 hour week, * Better pensions staff status, * Five weeks' holiday at time and a third.

The main aim of the claim is to restore our basic wages to the buying power they had three years ago.

The company's offer includes improvements on holidays, holiday pay, pensions, and lay-off pay - with strings. The conditions are:

* It should be compulsory for wages to be paid by credit transter to bank accounts, * The works rule book to be updated * The company should have the right to re time any job at any time, * Workers should be expected to identify their own mistakes on jobs, * No interference by the unions with GM imports.

The offer came just before Vauxhall announced losses of £21.6 miller ::: the first six months o: 199: The company are using these figures - and the state oi ir car market and the economy - to try to get workers to accept this ridiculous offer.

They have used the same sort of pressure to force through 6,200 redundancies in Vauxhall in the last two years, and keep the Biles mere Port plant on shorttime working for one and a half years until recently.

But General Motors -the multinational that owns Vauxhall - made a profit in the first half of 1982. They imported 45,000 Cavaliers into Britain from Germany. where they can be made £1500 cheaper than in Britain - thus notching up large profits which do not show in the Vauxhall accounts.

Although the car market is depressed, Vauxhall's share has gone up from 8% last year to about 12% this year.

What we need now is a massive rejection of the offer by all the unions in the major Vauxhall plants, and, it necessary, an all-out strike by all the plants, supported by blacking of GM imports like the Cavalier and Opel models.

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John Harris John