(Report OUR INION NEEDS
KOAR SUPPORT NUM ONE DAY LOU MAT NEEL as a means of breaching the 40-year old five day week agreement.
The issues involved in this offensive affect every mineworker, as the excellent leaflet produced by Dearne Valley NUM (box) shows.
But speed-up and attacks on national agreements are not restricted to heavy industry and manufacturing. The recent British Telecom dispute and struggles on the rail have cenTHE Coal Board are piling on the pressure.
So far the Board's approach has been furtive to force in drastic changes in working practices colliery by colliery. they are showing their hand forcefully on Margam, by demanding acceptance of continental shifts
What's at stake?
• Productivity
"A productivity target of 10% yearly increase abould be within our reach.
- Sir Robert Haslam to Industry Society, March 2, 1987.
The Board want an overall Output per Man Shift (OMS) of 6 tonnes, up from an average of 3.25 tonnes at present! Thin productivity increase is to be delivered by lorcing through The Wheeler heavy - duty lace equipment, craftsmen, deputies and other grades, new 8 or 9 hour shifts, incentive schemes and deregulation of health and safety.
•Jobs
"The natural wastage on that (the total workforce/ is something like, guess, 12,000 a year, maybe more:
-Sir Robert Hasmiam to the Commons energey Committee, November 5 1987.
The effect of the Wheeler Plan on jobs would be savage. Up to 50,000 jobs would be lost - 12,000 a year over four years. The deep mine output of 90 million tonnes
BADE
BOUT
Silenat
The Telecom sell-out has ushered in new attacks tred on management drive for inten of sification workers in the health service have also been under the hammer.
Government ganging health authorities into putting NHS ancillary competitive tender has not produced the vast once predicted: the vast majority of contracts have been awarded house"
Margam proposals?
tra few miners.
Now
• Pits lower tech pits and merge others.
• Working conditions and safety the Coal legislation
- Sir
Committee five day removed."
Plan
6-day coal.
changed role for
Society:
the 5-day Week Agreement.
miners and their families.
I would the 1954 replace regulations vague working.
1.2 million action
In pressservices out to private takeover that was
"in
TUC are would be produed by only 70,000 men.
Even if demand for coal picked up, the exproduction would be taken from hi- tech superpits like Selby, which require
Increased output from hi-tech pits and mine complexes would be used to close
Such
"We realise that to bring about the kind of changes Mr Wheeler is outlining, ther to would have to be quite radical changes in bargaining
50,000
Robert Haslam to
Energy
• NEC
"Outmoded restraints, such as the 1908
South the
Hours of Work Act and the 40 year old, be week agreement, must
-Sir Robert Haslam to Coal Industry for all miners.
It took a century of bitter struggle to win
Faced the 1908 Act and another 40 years to win
These hard- won gains provide a very real protection to past
The Board has been putting pressure on the Health and Safety Executive. It came as no surpise that the HSE is now trying to
Mines and
Quarries legislation. The HSE has drafted a series of and non-statutory
Codes of Practice to replace our safety regulations. The NUM, NACODS and the
Socialist Viewpoint No. 16 April 1987 p8
OKAY, MELL STOP ASKING FOR A SNORTER WORK
WEEK HOW ABOUT A LONGER WEEK ENDO"
attempt blocking this to downgrade safetyin the pits.
• The first targets
The Margam Drift Mine must be sunk.
But it won't be producing for 5 years. The first targets for 6-day coaling and 8-9 hour shifts are the high investment pits in every coalfield and pits awaiting major investment.
Hasiam bas already told Selby miners
Miners in the they must work 6 days.
coastal pits of the North East have been told to accept 9 hour shifts now.
The Wheeler Plan makes it crystal clear
• six day coaling and longer shifts must be introduced in all collieries.
The Board are desperate to get the 1908 demanding a
Act amended. They are commitment to a CONCEPT at Margam.
commitment would make it possible for The Board to ask the Tories
The Board are amend the
Act.
780 Jobs at Margam for would be lost that in every coalfield, including South Wales,
The National Executive Committee said
Wales Area must organise
Margam, It also agreed that the condition on houss and the working week must besubiect to national negotiations. One
Area Union cannot negotaite these issues with these tremendous pressures, we must:
• Maintain our unity hard-won gains of the
• Defend the
• Demand national negotiations
• Demand that real benefits come to miners from the new technology
- a shorter working week
- a shorter working life
- better conditions
- improved salety.
- now health comes
But the exercise has achieved its objective: in the tendering process upwards of 40,000 jobs have been axed, bonus payments have been slashthousands of part-timers have been cut below the 16 hours which give pension and sick pay entitlement and national union agreements and dismembered up into a multitude of local contracts. In almost every case
Thousands of hospital cillary workers employed by antithemselves outside the health unions - thousands more NHS employees are isolated from fellow workers who may be employed by private firms in the same hospitals. And every three years these workers have to compete again for their own
The impact of this shake-up is not only a massive intensification working for most ancillary staff -and effective casualisation of many ancillary posts, with a rapid turnover of demoralised and poverty-stricken staff - but also an increased burden forced onto nurses.
Now NHS mangement are looking at further ways of exploiting the traditionally poor unionisation and lack of militancy among nurses. Among their schemes are revised shift patterns of up to 10 hours at a time, eliminating "changeover" shifts under the hammer of speed-up where student nurses are trained — and possibly tearing up national pay agreements and instead looking for
While nurses are in desperately short supply in London - where NHS pay of £87 per week for a staff nurse is less than the newest office secretary could expect - there are less shottages outside the South East of England. The employers want to exploit this difference and only offer extra cash where nurses are short in
Meanwhile the crazy logic of Tory public spending limits means that the more efficient the hospital, and the more patients it treats in the beds available, the more likely it is (as in the case of Rochdale and districts) to run into cash problems.
Nevertheless the NHS (and local government will come under similar fire if the Tories get back in) offers a stark warning that no section workers is safe from the employers'
Union leaders — like Bill Sirs of the steelworkers — who have run from confronting these attacks, and sought to collaborate with the employers have presided over the decimation of their membership and the run-down of the industry.
The AEU, too, is now facing a major cash crisis arising from its fall in membership as thousands of redundancies have gone through Socialist Viewpoint No. 16 April 1987 p9
Weneed
12%!
COHE
uncontested.
SOGAT and the NGA are already finding this to be the case in national newspapers, where every major employer encouraged by Rupert Murdoch's success, is now looking to relocate and to ditch hundreds or thousands of printworkers. Some local papers are even hoping to get rid of all their unionised typesetters and replace them with direct input and casual workers off the dole using
The fight for an independent working class line of defending jobs, wages and living standards, rejecting towards a socialist solution to the crisis may seem utopian and "over in today's climate of collaboration and "new realism"
But it is the only coherent alternative to a wholesale loss of jobs and the sacrifice of pay conditions painfully won over decades of struggle.
The task facing Marxists is fighting class struggle perspective in the unions is far from easy. Yet without the development of a core of political militants in every industry and workplace able to combat the manoeuvres of right wing and amount of resolution- mongering and electoral politics in the unions or the Labour Party will prove ineffectual in the fight against the ruling class.
PHOTO: Andrew