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Address Send to Socialist Organiser, 28 Middle Lane, London N8 8PL. time-keeping offences and of course the current situation with the telecom engineers.

In BT a previously relatively soft-line management has been given the job of implementing the major single privatisation move of the Tory government. After months of a careful soft approach they have decided that now is the time to put the boot in and create a confrontation.

They proceeded to send 2000 workers home until the POEU was prepared to remove the sanctions..

At the same time Michael Edwardes, now running the Mercury project, took a High Court injunction to restrain the POEU from taking sanctions against Mercury or its backers.

Politically, however, the most fundamental development is taking place in the coal industry.

Ian MacGregor is now in control of the National Coal Board and is programmed to do to

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1460 TGWU and 900 AUEW workers at Shell's biggest UN refinery, Stanlow (Cheshire), began an all-out strike on Tuesday 18 October, against the company's 4.5% "final" pay offer.

This escalation from previously imposed overtime ban came - in response to management provocation in taking disciplinary action the weekend before against a night shift worker.

TGWU members at Shellhaven, in Essex, also began an overtime ban on Saturday 22 AS WE go to press, it appears that British Telecom management have pulled back from the threatened sacking of 19 Post Office Engineering Union members at Walton-on-Thames.

This - at least temporary -stay of execution appears to be part of the re-think of management tactics following the bodyblow of last Friday's High Court judgment, which denied an injunction to restrain the POEU from its industrial action.

The private telecommunications consortium, Mercury, failed to secure a court order demanding the POEU lift its blacking' of work on the interconnection of Mercury with the BT network. POEU leaders either to escalate the dispute far beyond the present 'selective' action, to allow militants to be picked of and victimised one by one for implementing union policy.

The union's general secretary, Bryan Stanley, came out confidently from the court -and boasted that selective action would go on.

But what would he and his right-wing friends have done if the judgment bad - as expected by many - gone the other way? What will they do if it is reversed on appeal or in the House of Lords?

Rather than simply celebrating the judgment, POEU șocialist Organiser no.152 October 27 1983 PHOTO. Statano Cagnon/ (IFL)

NUM militants lobby the Special Conference