TWELVE months ago the Graphic, Print and Media Union launched a pay claim for £6.50 a week and a one-day holiday extension. The majority of employers have agreed or are negotiating. The BPI bosses union is in disarray through its virtual disintegration.
Three disputes have broken GPMU members are locked out at Arrowsmith, Bristol (120 locked out), Revell and George, Salford (25) and Harvest print, Maccelsfield (10).
At Arrowsmith, manages ment had reneged on holiday agreements and cut up to f50 a week from wages. The workforce voted 98-14 for limited industrial action.
Company chair Victoria Arrowsmith-Brown delivered an ultimatum that the entire workforce refused. They were then locked out on 26 April 1993.
TRADE UNION NEWS An offer from the company including trade union derecognition, attacks on jobs, wages, holidays and working conditions and has been refused.
Daily pickets are receiving wide-spread support from Bristol's labour movement and community.
On 20 August 1993 Amanda Lane and Steve Goldfinch CPSA stewards were sacked from Bedminster Employment Service Jobcentre, Bristol. They had refused to advertise the jobs of sacked Arrowsmith printers. Arrowsmith workers have picketed the Jobcentre in their support.
At a well-supported recent 1,000 strong Arrowsmith rally deputy Father of Chapel (FoC - a media union steward) Mike Vine stated 'We are not on suike, never been on strike. never threatened to strike even. We believe workers have the SOGAT MHA AUEU NUJ 1986 Women's march at Wapping right to be represented by a trade union and agreements should be honoured.
At Revell and George, in Salford, Greater Manchester, GMPU members have been locked out since 30 March.
The company attempted to impose new working practices, victimised FoC Ron Senchak and deputy Geoff Souther, and derecognised the GPMU and cut wages and benefits after an overtime ban was placed by the workers in an attempt to press for their holiday claim.
Morale is high on the picket despite the fact that Roy Senchak defended himself from a scab attack and is now banned pending as ludicrous court case.
Unfortunately three scabs are working and the company is trying to recruit more. The key is to force Revell and George's custom to go elseRon Senchak says 'We have turned a lot of lorries away and Judd's of Birmingham have refused to cross. They are GPMU-organised. But we need to explain our campaign and link with other struggles. We have been to Arrowsmith's, and spoken to Timex, FBU and UNISON branches.
'We have got the Manchester GPMU branch to organise a meeting of all FoC's and MoC's to escalate the action and pressure suppliers. The chapel is rock solid. They realise their future is in the balance. They could lose jobs, money and be victims of a dictatorial management.' Harvest Print in Maccelsfield locked out 7 GPMU members pursuing the pay claim. Support is being mobilised for the picket line, for further demonstrations and a rally is planned.
To win these disputes the management's injunctions and Tory laws must be challenged, effective boycott campaigns mounted, and mass pickets built up to keep scabs and supplies from going through.
GPMU members learned at Warrington from Eddie Shah, and at Wapping from Rupert Murdoch, than any vacillation or attempt to compromise can Facing mass unemployment, rampant employers equipped with savage anti-union laws, and a war on hard-won education, health and welfare services, the working class in Britain faces a real crisis -an avoidable crisis created by the historic failure of its official leadership.
Socialist Outlook exists to fight for a new type of working class leadership, based on the politics of class struggle and revolutionary socialism, to tackle this crisis.
The capitalist class, driven and politically united by its own crisis, its requirement to maximise profits at the expense of the workers, has been given determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal class-war Tory high command.
The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions with legislation, and to fragment and weaken the resistance of the working class and oppressed, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time, using the full powers of the state.
In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the defeatist politics of 'new realism, effectively proclaiming total surrender on every front, while ditching any pretence that they offer a socialist alternative. Every retreat and concession they have made to the employers and the government has simply fuelled and encouraged the offensive against jobs, wages, conditions and union rights.
New realism is the latest form taken by the politics of reformism, seeking no more than improved conditions within the framework of capitalist rule.
Socialist Outlook rejects reformism, not because we are against fighting for reforms, but because we know that the needs of the working class - for full decent living standards, a clean environment, peace and democracy - can never be achieved under capitalism.
Nor, as we argued long before the collapse of Stalinism, could these demands ever be achieved under the bureaucratically deformed workers states and deEngels, Lenin and Trotsky.
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 establish its own class rule.
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 communities and ethnic minorities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and throughout the world. Socialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises co-thinkers in 40 countries world-wide.
Unlike some other groupings on the British left, we do not believe a mass revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaiming ourselves to be one. 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, lesbians and gays or the national demands of people in Scotland and Wales should be left to await the outcome of a socialist revolution. 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. The fight for policies which can mobilise and politically educate workers in struggle, must be taken into the unions, the Labour Party and every campaign and struggle in which workers and the oppressed fight for their To strengthen this fight we press for united frontcampaigns on key issues such as fighting racism and fascism - in which various left currents can work together for common objectives while remaining free to debate