nation of wage-cutting, long hours and vicious 'new management techniques which go under the name of "flexibility'.
Last week's Panorama exposed some of the new employmem pracuces. Inese include:Sacking fulf time workers and making them part time.
"Employing workers on zero no. s - 4TT221 2237-95:570
DON'T
ATTEND UNION MEETINGS! WEAK UNIONS ARE EASIER TO SCREW! extra pay.
Fighting these and other 'new management techniques' will form part of the discussion at the Socialist Outlook day school on 3 July.
Fighting the new management techniques Socialist Outlook day school 3 July, 10.30am-5pm Conway Hall Red Lion Square London WC1 Admission: £5/£3 party which makes no pretence of defending their interests, and gives no union input into decision-making. Hence the bureaucrats' slogan of "no say, payleaders' responses to the proposal to scrap the link span the whole spectrum, from outright opposition, through various wasiatic support.
Left to their own devices. expecially if it is posed as a loyalty issue by John Smith, most union leaders will sock a compromise that the majority of poes against the interests of the This means rejecting any call to choose between different spunous "compromises"
The link can be defended and the right ocaten back, out l means ensuring that as many unions and CLPs as possible have clear policy, leaving as little room as possible for maThe 'Keep the Link" camuse in unions and CLPs and briefing material on the Party's consultation paper. • Keep the Link can be contacted c/o 120 Northcote Road, London E17 7EB.
THE GOVERNMENT decision to effectively close the Swan Hunter Tyneside shipyard is another practical refutation of Michael Heseltine's allegedly "interventionist industrial strategy.
Tarzan promised to intervene before breakfast, after lunch and after dinner' to defend Britain's industrial base. Major claims he rejects the fashionable 1980s hostility to industry.
Lame ducks
But the proof of the pudding is in the eating Major and Heseltine are running an old-fashioned Thatcherite "lame ducks" strategy.
As with the coal mines, the argument is that "there isn't a market" for new ships.
Not building new warships should be welcomed. But the decline in the international shipping market is a product not so much of a decline in world trade, but the fact cargo is being ferried round the world in clapped-out, unsafe, rust-buckets run under "flags of convenience". These ships are increasingly crewed by Jobs destroyed: Leyland DAF cheap (and expendable) Asian labour.
Far from countering this trend, the British government intends to establish its very own British flag of convenience, an off-shore "British' registration which will enable ship owners to evade all the safety and pay regulations.
As with the mines, as with DAF, as with countless industries the closure of Swan Hunter is economic madness. It would be cheaper for the govemment to keep the yard open by paying the whole cost of new merchant ships which were then given East. tions would need them too. and nitpicking over details. away free, than for society to pay the endless costs of unemployment and economic depression in the North A nationalised merchant marine would have need of new and modern ships; even a properly regulated shipping industry with real safety regulaBut social calculations like these are not made by those who worship "market forces'. Because the Labour and TUC leaders have capitulated to the laws of the market they are unable to deploy the fundamental arguments about closures and redundancies.
Nit-picking
Instead the snipe around the edges criticising the government's timing The same arguments apply to the railways, the mines, to DAF and countless industries. If they are not profitable here and now, according to the laws of the world market, they must be closed. Huge amounts of social capital are thus junked, lives wrecked and industries devastated.
For the left, the arguments about the laws of the market versus social costs and control are vital. But immeSOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 43 May 29 1993. Page 3 This shipyard campaign was allowed to die away. diately the need to practically fight against closure and redundancy, and against cheapening labour through the "new management techniques. has to be hammered home.
Timex
As the miners and the struggle at Timex have shown, industrial action is the only way to fight redundancies and closures, and that action must culminate in occupations and if posstole the cortnuadon of producuon under workers control.
This must be combined with the political fight for nationalisation of so-called 'bankrupt' industries.
Most importantly the fight for the right to work centred on the demand for worksharing, to start with a 35. hour week with no loss of pay, has to be popularised again in the labour movement.
The lack of struggle against unemployment, and its lame acceptance by the movement's leaders, is a massive indictment of the Labour leadership and the TUC. Once you accept market forces' you capitulate to every single anti-working class abomination that goes with them.