Silentnight strike
Bed firm workers wake up to union struggle
By JACK SHARPLES
THE owner of the Silentnight bedding firm. Mr Tom Clarke, has a shareholding worth over
£7m and personal wealth exceeding £50m. He started up in business on his demob pay.
making matresses in his front room and eventually built up a large factory in Barnoldswick.
Lancs., and has since expanded by buying up other companies.
When Mrs Thatcher visited the
Silentnight showrooms about 15 christened months she ago
"Mr Wonderful".
Clarke expressing her admiration for the man and holding him up as an example to the rest of British industry.
Just why she thinks he is so wonderful has become clear.
About three years ago Clarke told the local press that he had the best workforce in the country. This was part of an article reporting yet another recordbreaking profit by Silentnight.
That same workforce has now been sacked.
The turnover of workers has been very low in that intervening period. The only difference is that the workforce has now become unionised.
Historically, the annual pay rise at the Silentnight factory in
Barnoldwick has since 1978 been
ALWAYS TOGETHER
workers
accompanied by a change in job values which has virtually wiped out the cost of the pay rises. After such a rate cutting exercise in February 1984 the workforce decided as a body that for once they were not going to accept, and a walkout resulted. On the morning of the walkout there were about 20 members of FTAT (Furniture, Timber and Allied Trades Union) at the factory. By the end of the day there were over 600, and Barnoldswick has been unionised ever since.
The current dispute has arisen because of management's desire for a confrontation. In December 1984, 88 employees were declared redundant. At the beginning of 1985 the Company gave a guarantee that no further jobs would be lost if the workers accepted a postponement of their nationally negotiated wage increase for a period of three or Socialist Viewpoint No. 9 December 1985 p9
FORWARD TOGETHER~
50
SACKED
support the Silentnight
FATU four months. The workers agreed
- yet just 8 weeks later, another 52 redundancies were announced. As the management had reneged on their side of the bargain, the workers pressed for the implementation of the pay award. The management refused.
Tom Clarke sacked the manager who had made the "no redundancies" deal and offered an increase to be offset against Serpent to time to worn ple respect to time-rate working. Silentnight workers are payment-by-result workers, the effect was that the majority would get little or no increase at all. A secret ballot was held on industrial action and resulted in a 354-203 majority in favout of a work to rule. The workers in one department were then suspended and on June 10 the remainder took strike action in support of those members. On July 22, 523 workers were sacked!
The Silentnight workers are very bitter about the way in which management tried to dupe them. They were not a political workforce and they were in good faith attempting to "help the company out" by foregoing their pay rise. They now know that this was wrong. People like Tom
Clarke use the workers to push through not only more also the Tory dream of lower wages for all
This week CBI leader
Beckett made a vicious attack on the working class and told employers not to award annual pay rises, saying that they should implement the old Yorkshire saying of
"nowt for nowt". Of course at the same time these very same employers modelled on Tom Clarke will be speeding up line rates and pushing for more productivity.
The American model of wages and work is rapidly being pushed for here in Britain.
In America wages are often negotiated only every three or four years and now the negotiations are about how little will be cut rather than how much more workers will get. Relative to the price of capital costs
American wages were 37% Jower in 1983 than they were in 1972. Profits however of the major companies continue to rise. Tom
Clarke is no ordinary small business person. He is a leading Tory backed by the
Tories and determined to smash the work-
Although Silentnight have a major influence in the National Bedding Federation the management refused to use the etablished disputes procedure as specified
Agreement of the Bedding and Mattress Manufacturing Trade. After two abortive meetings with representatives of ACAS the company have refused to accept any Almost six months later the strike still
Tom Clarke has, on numerous occa. sions, let it be known that he is anti-union. His action even led to him being removed by the police for provocative behaviour after he made abusive gestures to pickets at the factory gate. Mr Clarke is, incidentally, Chair of the local Conservative Partyl Since the strike began, profits have slumped from £5.2 million to £1.5m, yet dividents have remained the same at E1.2m -of which the Clarke family have claimed E644,771. This sum alone is three times the cost of the union pay claim! featuring the strike, shop steward Janet On the "Diverse Reports" proramme Seymour was quoted as saying "Clarke and MacGregor are Maggie Thatcher's knife and fork! She moves her arms and they carve us up!* This analogy with the miners' dispute is further stengthened by correspondence which In 1979, Ken Murray, then the Joint Group Manager for Silentnight Holdings Ltd, wrote to the Tory MP for Pendle, John Lee. His letter reads:
"One thing 1 would like to coment on is the apparent lack of urgency wit drowing payments to the families available to the families of moderates would help stiflen their note to fee militants ... from a strategic point of wel this particular move could very well be taken earlier rather than later. John Lee replied:
You're absolutely right. we must get roughour more controversial legisi on in the early stages of this parli
I take your point withdrawal of payments to the families John Lee, formerly parliamentary coniltant to the National Bedding Federatio ind now an Under Secretary for Defenc workers have asked for his help, but, not surprisingly, none was forthcoming.
This strike is a major political battle. The dispute over pay rises is no longer important, It is now about the right to belong to a trade union and this was reflected in the unanimous votes of support passed at TUC and Labour Party Conferences. However,
FTAT officials have tried hard to contain the strike to avoid any danger of confronting the anti-trade union legislation.
Nevertheless, boycotting of Silentnight products has occurred at Hull and other especially in Ireland. The who are the largest customers for Silentnight beds, have frozen orders. Such solidarity action is beginning to bite hard but the action needs to be extended. Few are experienced trade unionists and it has taken time for the limitations of the full time officers to become apparent. In fact it was only when local "Militant" supporters started producbulletin that the union responded with information of its own. No mass meetings have been held for months but the workers remain firm and continue to develop links throughout the country by extensive speaking tours.
The strike has catapulted the workers vernignt into the political arena miners" strike and used them. A Women's
Support Group has been set up in Barnoldswick and Sutton to support both the women strikers and the partners of male strikers. For most of the women involved it is their first industrial action.
The support group is also very important because the strikers are mainly men (a reflection of the make up of the workforce) and without the support of other women the women strikers could easily be left to seat. One of the leading figures in the strike, Janet Seymour, has travelled all over the country talking at Labour politicians at Conference, and col. ••• Hands off .... ••
Guillermo Lora!
VETERAN Bolivian Trotskyist Guillermo Lora has fallen victim of the country's singularly anti-democratic electoral laws.
For the July general elections the Bolivian National Electoral Court decided that any parties receiving less than $0.000 liable to a fine of USS7.000.
The court was controlled by former military dictator Hugo Banzer and the man who has since Estenssoro of the bourgeois Revoluwere at the time predicted to be the two front runners in the poll.
ora however stood as presiden on behalf of th Revolutionary (POR). using the election as a platform for revolutionary propaganda and exposure of the electoral law. He received less than 50.000 votes.
The Paz Estenssoro government. Socialist Viewpoint No. 9 December 1985 pl0 lecting funds for the strike committee. She says that she never dreamed a year ago that she would be doing this.
Another woman who came down to London to address some meetings had never been out of Lancashire beforel There are some forms of communal childcare which have started since the strike and which have begun to allow both men and women to fit in their domestic chores with their
As is always the case when women take strike action there are also problems with the men who are not used to their partners not being there and the meal not being
The women are working these things out together and are determined that come what may they will not abandon
The Asian workers are also now working with a number of black activists in London and this marks a big step forward in terms of the poltics of the strike.
the silence from the trade union and Labour Party bureaucracy remains. After the defeat of the strike, the last thing that Willis, Kinnock and their friends want is class confrontation against one of Maggie's boot-boys. A victory at Silentnight would, however, be unionists everywhere.
Only if the support, both financial and hysical, Is stepped up can this happen
'his strike has many similarities to Grun wick and even the NGA dispute at Warrington. The FTAT leadership needs to be forced to mobilise the same sort of support that those disputes received. The right to belong to a trade union is what is at stake and no excuses can be accepted for the isolation of the Silentnight strikers.
Donations of food and money should be
Cravendale Branch 92 Strike Fund, c/o
10 Rainhall Crescent, Bar• however. ran immediately into opposition from the militant Bolivian trade union movement, who staged a 16-day general strike against his heavy handed austerity plan to deal with Bolivia's huge economic crisis. The plan included a wage freeze and a 95% devaluation of the peso in a bid to cut the 14.000% inflation rate. The strike was met by miltary repression and the arrest of thousands of workers and union leaders.
In the aftermath of that strike. Lora has been singled out for legal demanding he pay the $7,000. government
The POR has launched an international appeal to raise this sum of money, which is enormous in the context of Bolivia.
Donations are invited to be sent to: Juan Pablo Bacherer, c/o G. Böhrt. Vaktarsatan 30-D. 754 22 Uppsala, Sweden.