600 workers at Rover's Longbridge car plant downed tools and walked off the job on April 30 after management attempts to impose a malingerers'. Shop stewards persuaded the strikers to return to work so negotiations can take place.
Coinciding with the first anniversary of Rover's 'New Deal' this dispute dispels any illusions that industrial action is history. Workers will resist cruely imposco new working practices and brutal work codes which disregard natural Rover intended to impose its new Attendance conte Procodure from May 1 to combat absenteeism. Workers faced victimisation and even the sack for going over an arbitrary 'annual point scale' of lost days regardless of the cause.
AEEU District Secretary. Brian Chambers said, * ... genuine cases of illness could be penalisod. We are aware the company wants to drive down absenteeism...We would not condone people abusing the system, but we will defend people who fall by the way. sioc. we want maura usuce to prevail'.
Eric McDonald, Chief T&GWU Negotiator said, we will not stand aside while this system victimises genuine cases of sickness."
Rover's 35,000 workforce have to docide on this issue and the introduction of casual workers while redundancies are being negotiated.
A track worker said, "The system counts all absence. even periods in hospital and this has destroyed any good will... With the redundancies they want, while bringing casuals in, they are going to provoke a sloping giant and no procedures and "New Deal" is going to keep the majority of workers from taking strike action'. survived only by repressing their own working class. tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. establish its own class rule. in 40 countries world-wide. ourselves to be one. The fight for policies which pressed fight for their rights ing free to debate their differences.
We are a marxist current, based not on the brutish totalitarian parodies of state marxism, nor on the tame, toothless version of "marxism" beloved by armchair academics, but the revolutionary Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peaceful legislative change. We fight to mobilise and unleash the power of the working class - the overwhelming majority of society - to topple the corrupt and reactionary rule of capital and We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, working to link and unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed. of women, of pensioners, of the black communises and ethnic minorities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in ireland and throughout the world. Socialist Outfook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises co-thinkers Unlike some other groupings on the British left, we do not believe a mass revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaiming Too often this degenerates into sectarian posturing and abstention from the actual struggle taking shape within the labour movement, playing into the hands of the right wing.
Nor do we believe that the demands of women, black people. lesblans and gays or the national demands of people in Scotland and Wales should be left to await the outcome of a socialist revolu tion. The oppressed must organise themselves and fight now around their own demands, which are a part of the struggle for socialism.
But propaganda alone, however good, will not bring socialism.
can mobilise and politically educate workers in struggle, must be taken into the unions, the Labour Party campaign and struggle in which workers and the opTo strengthen this fight we press for united front campaigns on key issues such as fighting racism and fascism - in which various eft currents can work together for common objectives while remain.
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