LET ATTACK THE

PAY BOARD mover. He aisne is suave and generany aesignarea as a last likes the claptrap of 'partnership in industry' which is talked 6T e -1- 1.: about on ine Cal and in the industrial society. It makes him want to go outside and vomit, says an employer who knows him. He believes there are two sides of industry and he is firmly on the side of the ruling class. He has led management campaigns to break the militancy in the draughtsmen's and engineering sections of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. He is Michael Bett, recently appointed member of the Tories' Pay Board. The basic right to free wage negotiations has been legally abolished by the introduction of the Board. This corporatist body has sweeping judicial powers to slash the wages of working men and women. But the Pay Board is only one arm of the Tory strategy. The other is the deliberate fuelling of inflation and the creation of a prices ramp. The result of this twin policy is the mass impoverishment of the working class. At 38 Bett is the youngest member of the board. But despite his relative youth, he is a seasoned campaigner when it comes to fighting the unions. In this article we profile Bett to illustrate the sort of men the Cabinet is promoting to positions of considerable power in its plans for the corporate state. On October 2, 1970, the Engineering Employers' Federation sent a confidential memorandum to all its members in Britain's most prosperous and powerful industry.

It was a lucidly argued case in preparation for a wage claim by staff workers in the engineering industry. It amounted to a declaration of war on the trade unions and the living standards of white collar The arguments set out in the document were completely in line with the Tory governBett, their director of industrial relations.

Then 36, Bett was telt to be one of the 'fast movers' in the organization. He had graduated from Cambridge and served an 'apprenticeship' in the organization at Manchester, one of the most powerful concentrations of engineering in the country.

In these formative years he learnt what tough negotiating was all about. Not noted for diplomacy, he quickly earned a reputation as being 'vigorous and pushy. 'He will tell a trade union leader that he is behaving like an ass,' said one employer who is familiar with Bett's style. tion of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, went to the Tothill Street headquarters of the EEF to discuss the claim.

One of the union's organizers told Workers Press: 'We were left in a room we shouldn't have been in and it (the document) was there for us to see. It advised members (of the EEF) to start campaigning to spread and draw out the expected disputes with DATA for as long as possible in order to financially break the union. This was the gist of it.' (Workers Press May 5, 1971)

At the union's annual conference in Eastbourne, DATA general secretary, George