POEU must pick up the pieces

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The final session dealt with 75 rule amendments and proved controversial both for rule changes and the undemocratic rulings of conference chair, Tom Breakell.

One EC motion proposed to delete payment of accident benefit from the EETPU. Although delegates voted this down, the conference decision was over-ruled by Breakell. The following day this ruling, too, was overturned. Instead, Branch general purpose funds were reduced from 2% to 1% of total union revenue.

Increased weekly subscriptions of 20p a week were also scheduled to compensate for a decrease in membership of 20,000 over 1983.

This should at the very least stabilise cost-of-living pressures for 152 full-time appointed officials.

There were two other significant EC sponsored rule changes. Firstly, shop stewards 'BRITISH Telecom management have cleared a room in the basement of an exchange and called it the sheep-dip", reported a London Post Office Engineering Union (POEU) member from BT International division at a meeting of militants last weekend.

The 'sheep-dip' is the room where engineers have to report before resuming work, to be cleansed and shorn bald of militancy' Some engineers are being moved from their place of work and redeployed. Changes are being made in working conditions, drastic wage cuts are being made, and long-standing agreements, some covering rota shifts, are being imposed on returning strikers by a BT management confident that the local branches are isolated now that the POEU leadership has made its deal with BT.

Circular

During the first week of December BT International management issued a circular which states: 'The letter will point out the employees' contractual obligation to work normally as directed, etc. And war that any subsequent refusal or industrial action as part of a campaign against privatisation or interconnection may be regarded as a repudiation of contract, leaving BT free to regard employment as terminated without going through the running procedures adopted hitherto.

Commenting on the POEU's campaign following the end of industrial action, the circular states: 'Privatisation -for better or worse - is still going ahead; the union has been ordered to accept interconnection; the members are not returning to the status quo"

London branches are incensed at the conditions their members are having to return to work under, as they face BT management's offensive which has developed since the sell-out over the Mercury injunction November.

Only a small number of branches voted to defy the NEC and the injunction, although it is fairly certain that the conference would have followed the leadership had they recommended defiance. aken ovin a month for the Nat- It h86 ional Executive Committee (where there is a majority for the Broad Left slate) to agree to the ending of industrial action against the privatisation Bill. Four of the NEC members elected on the Broad Left slate voted to comply with the Mercury injunction, thereby giving the Right a majority which it has followed up.

BT management are now preparing Bi for privatisation and increased competition in a more direct and determined manner. A full-scale attack on job conditions and job security can be expected. Even the right wing General Secretary, Bryan Stanley, admitted at an international telecommunications conference that BT's modernisation programme will devastate jobs in the industry.

The task facing the left in the union is now to pick up the pieces and reassess, in the light of experience, the whole strategy and tactics which have led us to defeat. The fight to mobilise the membership in their own defence has to go on.

The recent decision of the Broad Left to kick the four who sold out off next year's NEC slate is an indication that it is beginning to do this.

London City branch has put out a letter calling on branches to support a call for a special conference to debate the strategy needed to win the privatisation battle, noting "the disastrous results... [achieved by] the pursuance of a policy of selective industrial action"

The need has never greater.