Glasgow rents asg

Scan page 14

District Council decision to freeze rents and rates could be the start of a real campaign in the city against Tory attacks on local government. The council is carrying out District Labour Party policy.

But rank-and-file activists will need to do a lot of work for that to be the case.

A joint committee, involving the District Labour Party, the Council Labour Group, trade unions, and tenants has been set up which organised a demonstration last Saturday (25th).

But there are problems. Glasgow District Labour Party's decision for a rent freeze went against the District Party Executive's recommendation for a 6% increase. A piece of procedural incompetence by the chair allowed Executive members to escape their mandate and vote for the rent freeze.

The Executive won't lead a serious fight to defend the rent freeze it never wanted.

And the Glasgow District Labour Group is a long-standing faithful administrator of Tory cuts.

There is more than a grain of truth in the accusations by Tory councillors that the rents/rates freeze is motivated by the approach of the May District Council elections.

With regard to the unions most involved in the joint committee (NALGO and the TGWU) the situation is little better.

Both are primarily concerned about defending their members' jobs, which is obviously a legitimate desire, and are far from firm against rent and rate rises.

And the Glasgow Council of Tenants' Associations, which is represented on the committee, is weakly based and hostile to

Scan page 15

SCOTT Lithgow at the moment resembles Berlin in the latter part of 1945. A lot of people have already gone, and most of those left have no fight left in them.

They have been hammered senseless by the big guns of capitalism. They have lost their pride and they see their proud history crumbling in front of them.

Now, as the Germans waited to see who would take over their empire - the Americans, the Russians or the British - the workers of Scott Lithgow wait to see whether Trafalgar House, Bechtel or Howard Davis will take over their particular empire.

I have spoken to a lot of people at Scott Lithgows, both from a microphone at mass meetings and personally in the yard. And from what I've heard, the workers could be led into a fight with the proper leadership.

Now I don't normally believe in leadership in this sense. I believe in collective leadership. But in this case a strong voice is needed to start the fight and then broaden out the responsibilities into Occupation Committees.

At the present time we have MPs debating in Parliament, we have had public meetings, we nave had delegate conferences, we had the Women for Scott Lithgow' descending on Downing Street, we have pensioners sending donations to the fighting fund. Everybody is fighting except the workers.

Downing Street should have been packed last week -with workers from Scott Lithgow. We should have taken up our position and réfused to move.

We should have invited workers from other yards to join us, then called for workers from other industries to join us - miners, railway workers, NHS workers. In fact the streets of London should have been brought to a standstill.

But the shop stewards at Scott Lithgow just want to amble along in their own pitiby Joe ful way and the just following on.

The softening up of the workforce at Scott Lithgow has been going on for two years now.

In January 1982 the workers in Kingston/Glen yards walked out, because over the Christmas holidays the pipes in the yard froze up and burst, leaving the workers with no toilet or canteen facilities. At a mass meeting it was decided to walk out until the facilities were returned, and to demand payment for the days lost.

No strike After three weeks on strike the men were forced to return to work - firstly because the full time officials of the CSEU had recommended them to return and progress the claim through the National Grievance Machinery, but mainly because the shop stewards committee had no stomäch for the fight.

In May of the same year, the shop stewards signed a no strike agreement with management. They did this without consulting the workTwo of us had argued on the shop stewards committee that by signing this THE only movement at the Scott Lithgow shipyards on the Luwer Ciyde recently has been that of the three firms competing to take it over. The union full timers and leading shop stewards who pledged to lead a fight back are just letting these predators get on with it.

Trafalgar Hruse has met shop stewards to explain their plans for the yards in more detail.

They would retain only 1,250 of the current workforce, thereby causing a leap in the local male unemployment rates to 43%.

Trafalgar, the Tories' first choice to take over the yards, just happens to be the conglomerate which owns Cementation agreement we were accepting responsibility for everything that was wrong with Scott Lithgow and that it should be put before a mass meeting. This request was denied and as a result both of us resigned from the Joint Negotiating Committee.

Later the same year. in September, came the ill-fated Crossword strike. This was when .the management decided to sack one of the best shop stewards in the yard and at the same time take on and defeat the most militant department (Kingston/Glen Platers). They succeeded in doing this with no little help from the shop stewards committee.

Since then they have taken on and defeated the only other militant department, the stagers. They did this by giving away a large part of their job to the shipwrights - who grabbed it with both hands, leaving the stagers again unsupported.

So what we have in Scott Lithgow now is a workforce steeped in compromise and capitulation. A workforce who by blindly following the lead of the shop stewards committee have invited ThatInternational, the company for which the Prime Minister's son recently won a contract in Oman in unusual circumstances.

The second company in the running, Bechtel GB, has also announced its plans should it take over the yards. Bechtel GB would close Scott Lithgow fur three months, pay off the entire workforce, pick and choose the 1,500 they would re-employ, and introduce higher levels of "supervision" (i.e.

work discipline) into the yard.

The third shark cruising on the Clyde with its teeth showing is a joint venture headed by Howard Davis. But they have yet to tell the shipyard workers what they will do to their industry if they acquire Scott Lithgow. cher and her attack them.

A workforce who by not taking the lead in their own fight, have discouraged other people from supporting them.

It is not too late.

If the workers rise now and take a positive lead by occupying the yards and calling for workers throughout the country to support them, then we might still win. We might restore the once proud name of Red Clydeside.

I know that all might seem lost but think of this:

Compared to British industry, Scott Lithgow is small.

And compared to a ship an anchor seems small.

But when the time is right, and when set properly, an anchor can stop a ship. THIS Saturday, March 3, the Scottish TUC has called a demonstration in Glasgow under the slogan "Let's Stop the Rot and Win a Future for Scotland" - opposing job losses at Scott Lithgow and elsewhere.

But it is difficult to regard the demonstration as other than a cynical token gesture.

The leaflet for the demonstration declares that: 'The magnificent fight put up by workers at Scott Lithgow has forced mrs Thatcher to eat her words."

"At the end of 1983 she insisted the yards had to close."

But the Tories' strategy all along was to brow beat the Scott Lithgow workforce into accepting privatisation, job losses, and a new "survival" plan - not closure.

Even more disastrous is the leaflet's statement that, ''The NCB says Polmaise and Bogside Collieries have to close . .

(but) the miners have said no." But in fact the Scottish NUM has said no to strike action in support of Polmaise and Bogside, leaving Polmaise miners on an isolated strike.

The leaflet talks of ''half a battle being won" here and successes there. But the reality In shipbuilding, Robb. Caledon in Dundee was privatised and taken over by Kestrel Marine after workers occupying the yard were left in the lurch by the union leadership.

Now, Henry Robb faces closure or privatisation, and Scott Lithgow is to be raffled off. Once again the leaders of the shipbuilding unions, along with the STUC, have equated a "fight to save the yards" with an endless round of visits to various Tories and industrialists.

It is the same sad story in every other industry too.

In every case, the fighting talk of the STUC has remained just that - talk. And where workers have organised to defend their jobs, as in the sit-ins at Lee jeans and Timex, the only support provided by the STUC has been "financial and moral"

Solidarity strike action has never even been considered. Take the Carousel dispute in Glasgow. For over six months, OTEcTiser. young workers from a Glasgot East End sweatshop have bee on strike for union recognition reinstatement and better worl ing conditions.

Their own union, the TGWI has declared the strike officia but done precious little els And the STUC has done nothin at all.

The STUC's answer for jo losses is class collaboration. turns away from mobilising th working class to fight in its ow interest through working cla forms of struggle, and lool instead to the "moral impact", a united plea from themselve: Chambers of Commerce, tt CBI, vicars and "progressive Tories.

Echelons

The theoretical justificatic for this is provided by the Cor munist Party.

But the workers pay the bill.

Scotland, like the rest Britain, rots. And the reasol for that rot will be found n just in the upper echelons of t Tory Party and the CBI, but al on the platform at this Satt day's demonstration - tim served union bureaucrats ai Labour Party careerists with n even a half-ounce of class co sciousness and militancy share between them.