LESSONS OF UCS

at Kellingley pit. They say there has been some friction at Kellingley because the transferred men have started later and finished earlier because of travelling time.

But Gomersal NUM branch has also called for shire-wide miners, a Yorkstrike against closures on May 14. This call was approved by the north Yorkshire Panel of the NUM on April 16.

It now goes before union's National Execi itive Committee, which meets next Thursday (May 10). REFORMISM ON THE CLYDE - REFORMISM ON THE CLYDE * The StorvotUCS By Stephen •Reformism on the Clyde' the first exposure of Communist Party tactics at the UCS work-in. It shows how a powerful challenge to the Tories degenerated into a reformist protest. It examines the records of the men who led the struggle, James Reid, James Airlie and Sammy Barr.

Price 30p, 128 pages, illustrated. Available from:

New Park Publications 186a, Clapham High Street London, SW4 7UG or the Paperbacks Centre 28 Charlotte Street London, W1 (Enclose 10p for postage)

GRAPES OF WRATH 1973 Press, Monday May BY OUR FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT INTRODUCTION BY J. GALI The United Farm Workers' union (UFW) was founded by Cesar Estrada Chavez in 1962, and was based on the Latin - American and Mexican-American workers in the Delano area of California.

By fighting on domestic issues, such as rents, welfare and education, it built up support among 2,200 families.

Its real test, however, came with the Delano Grape Strike. In May 1965, a strike of Filipino workers at Thermal was defeated. But four months after that defeat, over 1,000 Filipino workers walked out of the fields at Delano and eight days later were joined by the UFW.

The struggle became a General Strike in the grape helds for $l.40 an hour plus a 25c-a-box bonus for the harvest season.

The main enemies were the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation and the Schenley Corporation.

The most powerful of these was DiGiorgio, which owned some 30,000 acres. Three of its officials were directors of the Bank of America, and one of them-Carl Wente-was the bank's vice-president. Other leading figures in the DiGiorgio Corporation had key connections with the Pacific Gas and Electricity Company and the Pacific Telephone Company.

Other top employers were the Kern County Land Company (348,000 acres), the Tejon Ranch (Los Angeles Times-Mirror) with 168,500 acres, Perelli-Minetti, and Christian Brothers.

The owners fought the strikers with evictions-the bosses were also the slum landlords—while cars tried to run down pickets and bosses' agents sprayed strikers with sulphur. But the strike spread over 400 square miles of vineyards.

On the 100th day of the strike, the UFW called for a nation-wide boycott of Delano grapes and associated products. Before the strike had gone six months, 4,500 workers were involved and boycott centres had been established in 30 states.

On April 6, 1966, the Schenley Corporation signed an agreement recognizing the UFW. Two months later, contract for a $2-an-hour rise was won.

DiGiorgio, however, stuck out as the main enemy. and violence against the strikers was intensified.

Substantial financial support was given to the strikers by the United Auto-Workers. Then, in June 1966, the UFW affiliated to the AFL-CIO (America's TUC).

Meanwhile the leaders of the Teamsters' Union were doing all they could to break the strike. They sent in scabs and reached 'back-door' agreements with DiGiorgio and PerelliMinetti, while farmworkers in Salinas, organized by the Teamsters, were paid poverty wages of $1.12 an hour.

The battle for recognition of the UFW lasted eight years before it was finally won.

Then, following the Delano Grape Strike, the UFW led the lettuce and strawberry workers in the Salinas valley in a strike which broke out on August 24, 1970.

The immediate cause was a contract signed by the Teamsters' Union leaders which favoured their members and left the farm workers unconsulted and undercut.

This strike was fought against powerful 'agri-business' —the merger of farming with big business.

Three of the largest fruit companies in the States were involved-United Fruit, S. S. Pierce and Purex Corporation. United Fruit profits the previous year had been $30m. These firms had sought to clinch a deal with the Teamsters whereby the latter would supply the workers, keep the peace in the fields and keep the UFW out.

Over 3,000 workers were involved in the struggle and at one point a Monterey County Court threatened to jail union leader Cesar Chavez for life without trial if he failed to call off a lettuce boycott. The union had launched the boycott after the employers had won a Superior Court injunction against picketing.

Despite all this, Chavez continued to preach non-violence in the face of the employers' brutal assaults, refused to break politically from the Democratic Party, mounted no fight against the right-wing leadership of the AFL-CIO and continually directed his appeals towards liberals and churchThe chief obstacle fruit workers remains his reformist politics, even though some limited gains we e made under his leadership.

Chavez insisted that politics be 'kept out' of the struggle. When students flocked to the fields to assist the strikers against scabs and the bosses' strong-arm men, they were warned by Chavez not to 'politicize' among the strikers.

And 'El Malcriado, the UFW's paper, declared on January 13, 1967: 'The idea that each man is to some extent responsible for the wellbeing of all other men is a basic leftist idea ... examples of left-wing people are Martin Luther King and President John Kennedy ... also, organizations such as the AFL-CIO are on the left.' On June 2, 1966, 'El Malcriado' told the fruit workers: 'Henry Ford has learned to pay high wages and bargain with the unions, and still make all-time profits, millions of dollars every year. Growers should follow his advice and example' By statements such as this, and by his continual expressions of admiration for Robert Kennedy, Chavez spread illusions about the fruit growers' enemies and the system they maintained.

Nevertheless, the employers still fear the union.

Last year, the employers' Farm Bureau drew up a measure to outlaw the UFW and to make unionization of California's farm labourers virtually impossible.

Under Californian law this was put to a state ballot as Proposition 22. Despite a heavily-financed employers' campaign, the proposition was decisively rejected.

Meanwhile, the farm workers of California continue their fight. Coachella This small farming community, ity, 150 miles south east of Los Angeles, has become the centre of a new stage in the Californian farmworkers' battle to defend the United Farm Workers union (UFW) and the limited gains made under Cesar Chavez's leadership in the eight-year struggle to Just three years ago this month the UFW signed its first major contract, and the Coachella valley vineyards have been the basis of union strength ever since.

A year later the UFW made an important informal agreement with the Teamster s, under which field hands would belong to the UFW and workers in the packing sheds and more mechanized jobs would belong to the Teamsters.

The UFW contract expired at midnight on Saturday April 14 and the second agreement was broken abruptly the next day when the Western Conference of Teamsters in Los Angeles announced 'sweetheart contracts' with a majority of the valley's 32 growers who produce 85 per cent of Coachella's table grape harvest.

The four-year agricultural contract is the Teamsters' first in the valley and was announced only a short time after the termination of five days' futile negotiations between the growers and the UFW

Left: Chavez and United Farm Workers' Union pickets in Coachella Và \pril 16 5, the UFW announced The next Monday the renegotiation of its contract with the largest grower in the area, a prominent liberal, Lionel Steinberg, who was the first to sign up three years ago. The UFW contract covers approximately 15 per cent of the Coachella crop. Monday Afternoon, Chavez announced a strike against all non-UFW vineyards in the valley.

Although only 12 per cent of California's table grapes are grown in the Coachella valley, 80 per cent of the country's grapes on sale from May to July come from this desert area only 80 miles north of the Mexican border.

At stake then is the union label on 3 million boxes of some S0apes5,500 farmworkers in the representation of the valley during the peak harvest season in late June • and the very existence of the UFW.

On the Monday night, a packing house nearby Thermal, valued at $740,000 and belonging to a grower who had signed up with the Teamsters, was burned to the ground. Riverside County sheriffs have been given 12 hour shifts and no days off, and police helicopters buzz over the vineyards nightly guarding against further 'vandalism'.

As dozens of Teamster 'organizers' stand behind sheriff lines in the vineyards, hundreds of spirited farmworkers of all ages, carrying the UFW's bright crimson and black banners, march along the highway on the edge of the field as their bullhorns blare the message in Spanish of the 'true union' to workers a considerable distance back who have been brought 60 miles from Brawley to thin the quickly-ripening grapes in the scorching sun.

Frank Fitzsimmons, Teamster president: will not accept UFW challenge to hold open elections in the fields.

Despite Tuesday's restraining order which barred effective picketing, 311 arrests had been made when, late Friday (April 20) the same judge dropped all charges for trespassing, cancelled the restraining order and released all pickets through the intervention of AFL-CIO attorney Jerome Cohen.

There can be little question that the UFW commands the support of the Coachella valley farmworkers, most of whom are Chicanos-Mexican Americans, A meeting the week before the strike of more than high schóol auditorium gave Chavez unanimous authorization to proceed with the UFW's efforts to drive the Teamsters out of the valley's fields. At some 40 vineyards picketed the first day, only two crews refused to walk off and join the UFW.

The Teamster organizer, Al Droubie, is the cousin of Coachella grower Dave Valdera. While UFW 'strategy sessions' include 600 workers, the Teamsters and the growers hold secret meetings which brought into the valley powerful growers from other parts of California.

They will neither reveal with whom agreements have been reached nor release copies of the contract.

While national Teamster president Frank Fitzsimmons, 'welcomes a national investigation', the union will not accept the. UFW challenge to hold open elections in the fields.

Teamsters have driven workers back into the fields when they attempted to walk off in support of the pickets. The UFW introduced 23 affadavits into court alleging such harassment and intimidation with 'guns, knives, clubs, baseball bats, grape stakes and other dangerous instruments'.

The UFW charged that the 1970 Teamster organizing drive in the Salinas lettuce fields was prompted by two $1,500 bribes to Teamster Although local teamsters remain uninvolved, rank-and-file teamsters are brought in from Los Angeles at $67.50 a day to protect the scabs against the UFW. The teamsters spend considerable time in their camps, well supplied with beer which, in the words of one farmworker, 'makes them drunk so they will fight against us'.

This reporter found the teamsters receptive to criticism of Fitzsimmons' support for Nixon, but very defensive about their role, which they pass off as 'defending Teamster workers in Teamster fields'.

The Teamsters imply the issue is simply a jurisdictional one: the UFW say it is a simple question of 'Mafiosa bribery'; neither is correct.

It is no accident that the latest Teamster decision to increase organizing efforts in Coachella was made in December, shortly after the Nixon administration began to map out its strategy to phase out the decades-old farm subsidy programme so that the US's highly-efficient agricultural sector could become the spearhead of its coming trade war with industrially more efficient Japan and the Common Market countries in order reduce its $6.8 billion trade deficit.

Accelerating food production in the US will simply increase the rate of mechanization in agriculture. At the same time field workers' wages will have to be driven down along with those of other workersthrough inflation and the wage freeze.

The Teamsters are preparing to channel the few field workers who will receive more mechanized jobs into Fitzsimmons' support for Nixon's trade war.

The tens of thousands of present field workers thrown into the expanding pool of rural unemployed will be left by the Teamsters to the UFW, if it survives the current Teamster attack.

Fitzsimmons' strategy, outlined here, suits Nixon's own plan: he would prefer to have farmworkers a highlybureaucratized union under Fitzsimmons or a Hoffa than in the more democratic and populist-oriented UFW within which the rank and file will soon press for more farsighted policies than those now pursued by Chavez.

Chavez's consistent strategy of tying the courageous and persistent struggle of American farmworkers to the Democratic Party and middle-class protest is responsible for the very slow gains made by America's agricultural poor through nearly a decade of militant While Fitzsimmons attempts to disorient workers with his direct support for Nixon, Chavez's support for Congressional liberals, who daily demonstrate their utter incapacıty to stand up to Nixon over Indo-China, the wage freeze, impoundment or Watergate, disarms the farmworkers.

This at a time when their struggle against the growers will become increasingly confrontation with the Nixon administration's need to represent the interests of American capital as a whole--locked in mortal combat with its counterparts abroad and having to discipline the American labour movement.

Since the Stalinist Communist Party has always supported uncritically this aspect of Chavez's strategy, it is not surprising to find that the west coast Stalinist weekly 'People's World' regarded the most 'significant' feature of a recent survey in the Coachella vineyards, which overwhelmingly favoured the UFW, to be the three Democratic Congressmen who participated in the poll-taking.

Chavez's Coachella strategy coincides with that of George Meany who, after a decade of belated, begrudged and niggardly support for the farmworkers' lonely battle, was driven by the latest Teamster push to send to Coachella a dozen national organizers including Bill Kircher, Director of Organization, from Washington DC.

In a Washington Press conference,. Chavez, Kircher and Democratic Congressman Edward Roybal jointly called for a Senate investigation of Teamster moves, to which the Senate Committee on Labour and Welfare has graciously responded.

A Coachella field representative of the International Labourers' and Hodcarriers' Union frankly assessed Kircher's role in the coming battles in the valley's fields and the corresponding AFL-CIO lack of strategy:

'He even looks like he just bopped out of his air conditioned office, ripped off his tie, forgot his big per diem expense account and feels he's with the real people on the line of fire. All the AFL-CIO has to do is place a few strategic phone calls to all the local affiliates, and we'd close the whole thing down in port of the farmworkers, support or the larmworkers.

While the "liberal' grower Steinberg prepares to add to the spiralling rise in the cost of food and blame it on the farmworkers - his contract 'substantially increases the farmers' costs' — Chavez calls for a resumption of the grape boycott the late 1960s, which the federal government countered, in far less perilous times, with massive purchases for the US Armed Services.

Typical of its own drifting orientation to the middle class, the 'Militant', organ of the revisionist Socialist Workers Party, attributes the UFW 1970 contracts exclusively to the liberal boycott effort, which forced the growers to sign', rather than to the farmworkers' strike efforts.

Neither the Teamster nor UPW contract drives in Coachella offers any solution to the farmworkers caught in the tightening vice between rampant inflation and the lowest wages in the economy.

The Teamsters' contract supposedly will bring a four year increase to $2.70 from the current $2.30 an hour-along the hated labour contractor system.

The UFW introduced the welcomed hiring rate, $2.40 an hour and 25 cents a box, up from the $2 of the last contract. These wages are little more than Nixon's current minimum wage and completely proposals for national inadequate today to support a farmworker and his, often large, family which he must leave in the barrio or take with him chasing the seasons along California's freeways.

As one migrant from Delano expressed it: 'I can't live on $1.65 an hour with everything going higher. When we ask for higher wages the bosses say: so somewhere else the work, The Coachella farmworkers must begin with the international crisis of capitalism and the role Nixon expects Monday PAGE American agriculture to play in his attempts to glut the markets of highly industrialized competitors with cheap US food products.

Farmworkers and teamsters alike will increasingly face the determined policy of the Federal government, backed by both the Democrats and Republicans, to couple vicious attacks on their current wages with the already uncontrollable rise in the cost of living.

They must join together against their current union leadership to fight to build a national political organization, which alone can provide the framework to prepare themselves for the historical tasks ahead - their own Labour Despite his strategy to bust the UFW, Fitzsimmons cannot escape the growing discontent in his own ranks over his wage agreement Nixon in January.

Within the UFW, the older farmworkers have demonstrated their patience and determination. When asked how long the struggle for decent wages and living conditions would continue, one elderly veteran of many crimson and black fluttering picket lines responded: ; a long time • • a hundred years.

But among the younger members of farmworkers' families, a hundred years more of stooping ten hours a day in the hot California sun to fill the neon-lighted shelves of the country's supermarkets in order to be told by Teddy Kennedys to mind priest when he tells them to get down on their knees as the sheriff approaches throw their bright banners in the golden brown California dust as he leads them off to the paddy wagon years more of that to get a fair days wages is too long.

A bottle thrown against a shiny new Oldsmobile full of jeering strikebreakers, a few rocks thrown at the police by impatient youth in their early teens-beneath the surface of the liberal 'non-violence' lies a new generation which is preparing itself for the tasks posed by the coming revolutionary decade.

This militancy must find its appropriate political expression in the coming fight to unite all working people in a Labour Party, to nationalize all agriculture and use the country's millions of acres of farmland and hundreds of thousands of pairs of willing hands to create a life of abundance and leisure for all.

THE WATCH ON THE CLYDE •We thought it was just words, but it's not just words. These people mean business.' This was the verdict from one experienced boilermaker on the situation in the shipyards on the upper Clyde. It is over six months since the work-in ended and the honeymoon between the new employers and the yard labour force is rapidly coming to an end.

Managements are beginning to drop the 'pals act' and insist that the two agreements signed by the former UCS shop stewards' co-ordinating committee mean exactly what they say-a massive breakdown in craft demarcation heralding an enormous increase in productivity. And in their efforts to make the words work, they have found familiar allies.

The situation is most critical at Govan Shipbuilders, the firm headed by oil boss Lord Strathalmond, which took over three of the old UCS divisions-Govan, Linthouse and Scotstoun.

Govan Shipbuilders want to drive up productivity by 120 1973 per cent-the level which, according to the Swedish consultants Maynard's, will make the yard viable.

At two divisions, Govan and Linthouse, on the south side of the Clyde, time-and-motion studies are almost completed. Management hopes to hold a board meeting soon and reveal plans for re-vamping working practices and the yard lay-out to the five-man negotiating committee.

Only the boilermakers, traditionally the pace-makers in the yards and still jealous of their independence, hold reservations. At Govan's third division, Scotstoun, there has been strong opposition to what shipyard workers call 'the watch'. Scotstoun workers have never accepted time and motion, but now management, with the help of the shop stewards' leadership headed by Sammy Barr, (Communist Party member of work-in fame) is timing the men.

This struggle over time and motion, however, has revealed a new and dangerous tendency within the trade union moveIt was the Scotstoun boilermakers who held out the longest against 'the watch'. At two mass meetings they rejected work-study, despite warnings from Barr that time and motion was written into the original agreement.

Eventually the conflict reached the point of confrontation when the men walked out in protest against a decision to send industrial engineers into the yards. It was around this time that Barr, on behalf of the majority of shop stewards, brought forward his amazing plan.

He told workers that the men doing the timing would be from the ranks. And, indeed, this turned out to be the case. Workers, in some cases ex-shop stewards, have been elevated to staff positions in order to time their workmates. One man on the boilermakers' stop-watch is the former shipwrights' shop steward!

This procedure has shocked militants. They point out that the use of union men to time other union members is unprecedented in British industry, let alone the shipyards.

This outcome, however, is entirely in line with earlier developments. Towards the end of the UCS struggle it became clear that the co-ordinating committee, in particular the three Communist Party leaders, Barr, James Airlie and James Reid, had embraced an essentially corporatist philosophy. According to them class struggle in the yards could be subordinated to a bout of co-operation between employers and men for the greater glory of shipbuilding on the upper reaches of the river.

The stewards' latest action -their insistance that the agreement must be honoured to the letter and their decision to promote the new breed of 'worker time-and-motion men', , represents these policies Clearly management would have faced a confrontation if it had attempted to bring in time and motion to the boilerworkers' trades at Scotstoun. Now the stewards have done the job. The aim of the exercise, says management, is to find out the 'anomalies' with the work force and iron them out'.

In fact involves speed-up and new working practice that will make the incredible 120 per cent productivity increase possible. Barr and conipany are company's greatest allies in this attempt.

The move is doubly diabolical because it takes place under the Tory plans for state control of wages.

The other row in the yards is over money. Workers understood that the original agreements promised either a wage rise or a rise in bonus earnings by April. But management has refused extra money on both issues.

First it says that the government-which is still financing the project-will allow no increases until the drastic bid to boost productivity and break down traditional rights is under way.

Secondly it argues that wage or bonus increases would be near impossible under Phase Two of the Tory wage controls anyway.

Thirdly it says that workers should shut up and prepare for Phase three by co-operating with management over a new productivity deal so a claim for a rise can be lodged perhaps in September. Even then there is no promise over pay or bonus.

In other words Govan Shipbuilders is oftering nothing but a beating. The unions' silence over the issue is revealing. Only the boilermakers —portrayed of course as the universal villains (and then only the rank-and-file boilermmy Barr ove left: rbin, Reic Clydeban!

makers with one or two not- a reformist protest, have now able exceptions among the reached a further low in class stewards)—-are putting up any collaboration. They have befight against this naked at- come the direct agents of the tempt to destroy wage rates employers and by their active promotion of management The situation at Marathon plans, they are bringing corManufacturing—which took over the Clydebank yard—is This could eventually inalso one of brooding antici- volve the destruction of all pation. The most immediate protective practices in crafts, crisis is over redundancies. a massive increase in producThe 350 workers still left with tivity and a future of redunthe UCS liquidator finishing dancy. This development is off the few remaining vessels especially treacherous since it are being paid off between takes place at a time when the trade union leadership is conow and June. Marathon says it would reconsider employing operating with corporatist them if they could all retrain plans at national level. as steel workers. The four- Paradoxically, it is perhaps year, no-strike contract at the traditional conservatism of Marathon has been waved in the boilermakers that is the the face of boilermakers who main obstacle to this proobject to this erosion of their craft position. This provides But such conservatism is for a massive re-training pro- based on a history of bitter struggle for rights and condiSo far it is stalemate. Local hnilermakers' officials will do No shipyard worker will deny that it was the boilernothing without orders from their leader Danny McGarvey. makers who pioneered pay Meanwhile the steel trade men and conditions in the yards. are villified in the local Press. It is not for nothing that inlucSarr this dialace tate irds cers inal nus lanxtra jovlanstic and ghts rage be lase ionW8002 and basic rights. gramme. tem. Wo tion get productic tenance supervisi white ha is reserv yard from looks lik chocolate But it The wor to one ir Marathor year anc Tames Fr tell them He re that the crafts at many me for wagi Marathor men got bank rat they got sent the: the barg VARAVILIO Press, Monday irkers on reconstruca yellow hat, men on on a blue hat, mainworkers a green hat, on on production a it and an orange hat ed for the staff. The m the top of a crane poratism to the yards. ie a heaving mass of = smarties. is not all gimmicks. kers have been called nass meeting since the n deal was signed last 1 then only to hear ox, the lean US boss, 1 of their future. :minded the workers ere were too many t Marathon and too en in some crafts. As es-well in some of n's yards, said Fox, less than the Clyde- capitalist strategy. e and then in others : more. For the prey were satisfied with ain, he said. tions.