Seamen face SAS tactics

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Published by the Socialist Organiser Alliance, 28 Middle Lane, London N8. Printed by East End Offset (TU). Registered as a newspaper at the GPO. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the SOA. whose war now? DURING the South Atlantic war, the leadership of the National Union of Seamen (NUS) emphatically supported the government's efforts, and threw its weight against the union's port committee in Felixstowe, which had urged members not to go to war.

Now the 'national unity' between armed forces and seafarers has worn very thin indeed: Last Sudany some 55 Royal Navy men launched their own little invasion' - seizing a ship, the Keren, where the NUS crew was in dispute over management attempts to cut wages by £40 to £60 a week.

The specitic issue on the Keren is that the crew, recruited when it was operated as a ferry, want to keep their old pay rates rather than going onto lower deep sea rates now the vessel is operated as a troopship (owned by the Ministry of Defence, but operated by a civilian company).

According to the Financial Times, "union leaders believe that the wider implications of the issue, are that the Government is using recession and industrial weakness to force through an SAS-style' approach to industrial relations, as a possible prelude to displacement of all NUS members (in Falklands operations] by regular naval crews".

It is a precedent for the use of troops in other industries, too.

As we go to press, the NUS leadership seems to be retreating from their initial call for a worldwide strike, and going instead for retaliatory occupations of other ships.

Meanwhile, an industrial tribunal ruling on Tuesday revealed another seamy side to the South Atlantic war. Employers operating a hospital ship during the war openly admitted that they had rejected two Somali men for the crew on racist grounds. The Morning Star reported that the bosses' representatives:

"told the tribunal that some crew members might have refused to sail for the Falklands if they were forced to share a cabin with a member of a different race.

"A dispute caused by such a failure to segregate men of different races 'could have caused terrible delays, damaged the morale of the troops, and been a great publicity coup for the Argentines' he said."

And the employers won the tribunal.

Within the armed forces, too, and even after the grave, the sordid facts of capitalism keep pushing through. Two councillors in Aldershot have decided to boycott an army charity because they discovered that money from the £14 million South Atlantic Fund is being paid out unequally to officers' and to other ranks' widows.

One of the councillors said, "If people ask me what their money will be used for, I am not prepared to say that 75p will go to an 'officer's wife and 25p to a private's wife..." The Defence Ministry, however, blandly explained that officers widows should get more because they have bigger expenses.

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