WHERE IS EQUITY GOING?

The right wing in the actors' union Equity has launched a campaign to strengthen the bureaucratic arm of the national executive.

The showdown will come on Sunday when the union holds two of the most important meetings in its history.

At meeting number one Equity members will vote on a resolution demanding the resignation of the existing council for twice ignoring democratic decisions of the membership.

At meeting number two, immediately afterwards, the executive will make a last ditch attempt to ban once and for all the Special General Meeting where the rank and file can decide policy on key issues like the Industrial Relations Act and opposition to the Tory pay laws.

Sunday will be the culmination of a long and bitter struggle between the strong militant wing in the union who want Equity to take its place in the trade union movement and fight the Tory plan to impoverish wage earners, and the right-wing, dominated by the Tory Party, who want peace at any price.

The immediate cause of the special meetings is a demand by over 240 Equity members for the resignation of the leadership. They say that the executive, steered by general secretary Gerald Croasdell, have capitulated to the Tory pay laws and have blatantly ignored the members' wishes.

Equity Open Meeting P7950 mam. The charges arise out of an uary 28 when over 350 members considered the Tory decision to outlaw a West End pay increase. Gerald Croasdell, Equity general secretary, with other members of the executive at the Press conference which dustrial Relations Act, and a campaign with the rest of the trade union movement to force the Tory. government out in favour of a Labour government pledged to repeal all anti-trade union legislation.

The success of this motion, carried in the teeth of rightwing opposition and a bid (orchestrated by the Tory Press) to launch a witch-hunt, was a blow for the council.

Undaunted Mr Croasdell held an immediate Press conference where he announced that the Equity Council-a 45strong elected body-would almost certainly ignore the decision This proved to be the case. Two days later the right-wing heard the good news that the Council had turned down the resolution. There was no commitment to fight for the claim, no promise on •deregistration.

The legality of this move under Equity rules is now under some doubt. As usual the rule book hedges both ways on the powers of the executive. On the one hand an open meeting can decide policy, but on the other the leadership is given the right to ace in the union if it publishes its act in the 'best interests' of reasons for doing so.

In the case of the Industrial followed the January 28 meeting. Here they will ask for a mandate to change rule and castrate the membership's ability to decide policy.

Their rule change aims, so they say, 'at preventing the future organized exploitation of outdated rule without diminishing the genuine democratic rights of members'. Organization, the basis of trade unionism, is here equated with subversion.

Rules which permit the rank and file to challenge decisions of the leadership are 'outdated'; in place of such bogus democratic rights are to be substituted the council's version