DEP refuses dole to

By a polltical correspondent EDWARD HEATH'S Tory government aims to crush working-class living standards under a mountain of price increases. There is no other way to explain the concerted assault on workers' wage packets from every boardroom, council and nationalized industry in the Yesterday's news of gas price increases — due to come into effect this winter—will add up TWO-AND-A-HALF thousand Midlands car workers have again been refused unemployment benefit for the four weeks they were laid off during a strike which ended Monday.

MINERS'

BALLOT IN KENT 'Daily Mail' witch-huntsagain BRITISH-LEYLAND shop stewards yesterday. angrily condemned stories in several Fleet St newspapers on Birmingham's Austin Longbridge plant.

Headlined The Man who Fines the Hard Workers', , the story claimed 'Communist Mr Alan Hinks, 58, walks down the assembly lines at BritishLeyland's West Midlands body shop at Longbridge each pay day and demands to see the men's wage slips.

'Anybody earning more than £40 a week before tax faces an on-the-spot fine of the exact amount he has earned over £40.' A leading British-Leyland steward told Workers Press in Oxford yesterday:

"It's standard practice in most piecework plants to impose — either unofficially, or with the management's agreement—a ceiling on earnings.' What the Tory 'Mail' failed to point out in its carefullyangled story is that the essen.

purpose of piecework ceilings is to defend workers' livelihoods.

Under piecework, a pool of money is available for a given schedule of work. Labour would inevitably be reduced if individuals were allowed— through what car stewards often describe às 'the cut-throat rat race of individual piecework' — to work others out of a job.

'Alan Hinks' membership of the Communist Party is used by the "Mail" as a slur,' Oxford stewards said yesterday.

'But that's irrelevant — the fact that he operates this system is to his credit.' died is scare rong had he They however, that refused to talk to them.

CORRESPONDENT Paisley mill workers face similar attacks (see p. 4).

All the indications are that a tough new Tory-inspired interpretation of the Been issued from unite ali., Morris plant at Cowiey, Oxford - yesterday rejected RETREAT Militants see this decision as a dangerous retreat on an important principle.

Moves for a demonstration began on Tuesday afternoona few hours after, work resumed following the sixweek-long strike of 1,500 pieceworkers which led to the lay-offs — and quickly won widespread shop-floor support.

But an emergency shop stewards' meeting yesterday morning refused to erdore. this action.

"This means that they are really accepting the Tory interpretation, one steward told the Workers Press afterwards.

It's really a matter of whether you accept the "normal channels of procedure" for these matters — channels which are controlled by the government, of course -or whether workers themselves use their strength to fight it out?

Stewards involved in test cases concerning the dole payment say that two reasons were advanced by the DEP's local officials for their refusal to shell out: that the workers laid off stood to gain financially from the strike, and that as union members they were contributing financially to what was an officiallybacked strike through their subscriptions.

When it was pointed out that benefits had been paid to workers laid off at the factory during the recent GKN-Sankey strike, also officially supported, the response is said to have been that the Act involved is open to interpretation on this point in each individual case and that in future payment would not be made in similar situations.

Such an interpretation would amount to a national penal clause—on the lines of the 1968 Ford agreement— policed by government departments!

A DEP spokesman in London refused to comment on the Oxford case.

• See 'Wishful thinking!'— page 2.

MEETING Hands off the unions!

GREET THE SIX-DAY SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18 Poplar Civic Hall, Bow Road, E.3 7.30 p.m. Adm 2s SPEAKERS G. Healy (SLL National Secretary)

G. Caughey (Chairman Pilkington's File Committee )

Roy Battersby John Simmance (YS trap for Britain's 770,000 manual workers.

town-hall Their one respect from the one already the unions.

gives a £l6 l0s earnin arantee to the lowest-pa This will however include any overtime or service payments.

The employers are still silent • ON the 55s demand for all grades to give a basic rate of f16. 10s excludi Overtime and other pa! ON the demand for an equal increase for women workers as a step towards of • ON the dem service payments.

ON the demand for a 10 per cent pay increase for workers not on incentive bonus schemes.

Encouraged

Even to negotiate on the basis derisory offer would be a retreat by the They would, in effect, b laying into the hands of th ary)

Slau! DESPITE the pay offer, officials of the three unions said they were planning to extend the strike from Monday.

Dustmen and sewage workers throughout the W Riding of Yorkshire will be called out on Monday bringing the total out in the coun try to 12,000. 'A NUPE spokesman said yesterday that the union would be concentrating their action on smaller sewage plants.

The total now out is 62,000 and NUPE rept that the strike has raused a boom in rename to arrase cun bers joining the union before the strike was 50 a day. The figure had now reached 190.

improved Yesterday a National Union of Public Employees spokesman admitted to me that the new offer was clearly a reshuffle of the old one plus a tew extra pence.

'I can't see anyone accepting it, but if it gets negotiations going it might break the deadlock."

These are dangerous attitudes. Are the council workers to be next for the Sankey site