Shift work

ON SHIFT WORK, the working party notes that this is already in operation on many sites, but only as a method of reducing immediate delays.

It advocates the planning of shift work from the outset of a project, using double and possibly treble shifts.

The working party commissioned a special study by members of the Cranfield School of Management which estimated that a net saving of £10 million on a power station costing an initial £100 million would be possible with this type of work.

There is no doubt that the employers have an eye on subreduotions in hiring costs of equipment by reducing the building time with round-theclock operations.

ON DECASUALIZATION, the report concludes that the provision of more stable employment would be the most important single step that the industry could take to improve employer/employee relations and This outlook is similar to that put forward under the Devlin Scheme on the docks, where 'decentralization' has led to a continuous run-down of the work force in London since its original implementation.

On the docks, permanency is as applying : to a small, mobile labour moving from jab to job, working shifts and being paid on the principle of Measured-Day Work.

In this report, it is quite clear that the working party is aiming to prepare the way for the same situation on the large sites; in particular by leaving a large section of workers outsidè the permanency arrangement:

Because of the uncertainty of demand on individual contractors . .. and the fluctuation in total demand on the industry, we consider it impossible to provide permanent employment for all, but we suggest that by mid-197( the industry as a whole (through register and through the employment policies of individual contractors) could offer permanent employment to between 20,000 and 25,000 craftsmen, ar about three-quarters of craftsmen at that time employed on mechanical and electrical construction; it would look to casual men to provide only a quarter of its skilled force.'

ON JUNE 18the date of the general election-thousands of young people from all over the country from the age of 18 upwards will have the opportunity to vote for the first time in what is going to be a most vital electoral battle for the working class.

In Its five-and-a-half years of government the Labour leadership has opened the door to the dangerous possiblility of a Tory return.

Wilson's policles of wage-freezing, unemployment and immigration control have betrayed the interests of the working class.

No one must doubt that the Tories present a great danger to the working class. They are the traditional and hated enemy with their policies of anti-trade unionism, retention of hanging, attacks agalnst social services, racial superiority, Increased taxation and That Is why the Young Socialists, since the beginning of the year have prepared for this General Election with thousands of leaflets calling on all young people especially those voting for the first Next week the Young Socialists will be sending out teams Into the provinces to work during the election campaign to bulld the Young Soclalists and the Workers Press in the fight to bulld a mass revolutionary youth movement as the only means of defeating The Young Socialists have no Illusions about the Wllson leadership; they say that If the working class is to ensure the safety.

Its future then Toryism can only be defeated by bullding a soclalist This is the basls of their appeal for a fight for socialist policies of natlonalization of the basic Industries without compensation under workers' control, for the defence of the trade unions, for the defence of Immigrant workers against racialism, for the victory of the SE Aslan workers peasants against US Imperialism, and the withThroughout the summer the Young Socialists will be for a massive anti-Tory rally at Alexander Palace on October 16 with a programme of working to bulld the YS for an International conference of revolutionary youth, which will be united behind the slogan Below are the comments of six members of the Young Socialists who will be voting for the first time on the reasons why they will be voting Labour at the General Election and why they will be working Experimental: tements some of is eat.

atomic preen and a dei —like the gases helium, neon, number remains one, the atomic decades of work?

May 28, time, to keep the Tories out.

Toryism for good.

alternative to Wilson.

drawal of all troops from N Ireland.

for a United Socialist States of Europe.

to persuade other youth to do the same.

GARMENT worker FLORENCE ERSK.

INE from Sunderland:

WILL vote Labour with the lajority of the working class in le NE to keep the Tories out. he workers in the NE know hat the Tories will do if eturned to power.

They will start off by trying › smash the trade unions and ring in massive unemployment ad poverty.

In the NE there are already 3,000 unemployed. In Sundernd there is 15 per cent unemand the rationalization Tories be driver 'ages. ack to these Lis is why they will abour.

• The NE. As soon as fou Tea dole Th and s lassive unemplo Dead-end jobs; the activities lose ecome dance halls. They are xpensive youth earning › wages to go to.

The growing support inside the Tory Party for Enoch Powell is the real mood of the Conservatives. They want to put an end to all immigration and repatriate many of the people from other countries.

GARY

GURMEET The 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act is just not enough for them.

This was an Act passed by the Labour government and it has created tremendous hardship for thousands of Kenyan Asians with British passports.

Racialism is being developed consciously by the Tories through the daily papers.

The Labour government has not done much better, but we have to vote for them because the Tories will be a thousand times worse.

It is absolutely necessary to fight against the attacks of the Tories and for a socialist system. For us in the YS this means above all building the youth international.

JOHN BURKE. North London engineering worker:

THE GENERAL Election is one voting Labour class policies, the Labour government has not been able to do these things.

Wilson bears responsibility for the abstentions by workers in recent elections which have helped the Conservatives.

The campaign for a Labour victory must proceed alongside a fight to replace Wilson by a socialist leadership in the Labour Party, because this would be a big blow against the Tories and the employers.

Workers, especially in the industrial areas and in the S Wales valleys remember how the Tories used unemployment in the 1930s to cut wages, break up trade union organization, sack militants and reduce working-class families to the bread line.

They are determined not to NEWS study and understanding movement.

After five and a half years of Wilson in this country we see the working class in this country more united than ever in the face of the betrayals of the Labour government, which has continuously tried to carry out Tory policies.

Returning a Labour government will see this process continue and gather momentum. Students can play a big part in returning this labour governIn my ward, which has a students' hall and a number of students' flats, the turn-out at the municipal elections was 40 per cent resulting in a massive swing to Labour. ONE OF the dangers from a nuclear explosion is radioactive fall out - the release into the atmosphere of materials such as strontium 90 which harms living tissue.

Although the Russian scientist Mendeleev first elaborated his periodic table of elements nearly 80 years before the explosion of first atomic weapon, the table indicates why strontium in its radioactive form is such a hazard to human life.

This element falls directly below calcium in the table, i.e. in the same group and the two therefore have very similar chemical properties.

Properties

Indeed, the properties are so similar that living organisms cannot distinguish between them. Thus the human body will use strontium in the same way as calcium—in particular for bone formation — and allows serious damage to take place to the living cells.

From the standpoint of bringing order into the chaos of elements and providing a means of predicting their properties, Mendeleev's table was an important step forward.

The properties of the elements, such as density, change smoothly as we move along row (period). We know that the atomic weight of an element must lie between those of its two neighbours in the same period and so on.

The set of elements therefore appears to have an order, a structure, but it was very difficult for further progress to be made without placing Dalton's atomic hypothesis on a firmer experimental footing.

In other words, certain important steps had been made in chemical theory by assuming that the atom existed but these developments then raised other questions which could not be answered until the nature of the atom and the laws governing its movement began to emerge.

It was the disintegration of atoms that provided the key to their structure.

Atom

In 1907, Rutherford and his colleagues were working on experiments with the high-energy particles (known as alpha particles) which are produced spontaneously by radium as it undergoes radioactive decay.

In an experiment in which a stream of these 'missiles' were SCIENTFIC WORLD BY MARTIN ZARROP fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.

It was then that I had the idea of an atom with a minute massive centre carrying a charge?

By 1932, the year in which the existence of the neutron was discovered experimentally, the chemists' current view of the atom was substantially established.

By this we mean that, although new fundamental particles are still being created the number is now around 100), for the chemist to understand the formation of chemical compounds through chemical reactions he needs only to deal with three for dating labelled atoms.

particles — the proton, neutron and electron.

An atom consists of nucleus (Rutherford's 'massive centre') and ane or more electrons, each of which has a negative charge. The sum of these charges is balanced by an equal positive charge on the nucleus so that the atom as a whole is electrically neutral.

Ths nucleus itself contains the protons and neutrons, both of which are nearly 2,000 times as massive as an electron. It is the protons that carry the positive charge which balances out that of the electrons while the neutrons are uncharged and simply add weight.

The terms 'atomic number' and atomic weight' are easily atomic is the number of planets.

Because the electrons are relatively light and a proton 1s almost the same mass as a neumost number of paris ne we can measure atomic nucleus.

For example, oxygen has atomic number 8 and atomic weight 16. This means that there sun eight "planets orbiting a containing eight protons and eight neutrons.

During : the development of chemistry the concept of atomic weight was the subject of a Highly complicated apparatus needed great deal of controversy, because it was found that there were variations in weight, which are now known to be due to the presence of isotopes.

Ordinary hydrogen has one proton, one electron and no neutrons and therefore its atomic number and weight are both one.

trom so that, ile weight increases to two.

The creation of isotopes of every element is possible and some occur naturally in nature. The additional neutrons may cause the nucleus to become unstable and to give off highenergy particles.

We then speak of a radioactive isotope. Strontium has an atomic weight of 88 and is not radioactive, but strontium 90 is a radioactive isotope which can be extremely dangerous.

However, these isotopes are also an important experimental weapon.

They enter into chemical processes in exactly the same way as the parent element with the advantage that they are easily detectable at any time by using a Geiger counter or a similar detector.

A tiny amount of radioactive calcium can be used to follow the process by which this element is incorporated into bone and an accurate measurement can be made of the rate at which this takes place.

'Labelled'

The use of isotopes in this way—to provide 'labelled' atoms -is a great boon to medical science and is being extended to many other fields, such as engineering to locate minute leaks, to follow impurities in fuel and so on.

Becaúse an element and its isotopes are chemically similar we can draw an important conclusion about how chemical reactions take place.

An isotope differs from the parent element in the composition of its nucleus, while having the same number of electrons. This indicates that chemical reactions take place away from the nucleus and concern the electrons of the reacting atoms alone.

form compounds whereas others argon and krypton-could only be made to do so in 1962 after Continued next week. PAGE THREE