The hopeless future which faced the shipyard over a year ago will return'-the North East's

DATELINE:

will emerge.

IN TWO PARTS: P/ WILL APPEAR IN IN THE North East-a land of shipbuilding, mining, engineering and unemployment—the labour force can be divided into two groups.

There are the unskilled, who suffer from low wages, lack of job opportunities and undoubtedly bleak prospects, and there are the skilled, who suffer from the unfortunate delusion that they are indispensable to the capitalist In reality they • face equally grim future Tory government.

IN GREAT SHAPE On occasion the contrast truly remarkable.

One can meet a member of that elite force the boilermakers.

Dressed smartly in expensive mac and matching gabardine trilby he will explain carefully over a pint of the best that BOOKS L. TROTSKY: GERMANY 1931/32 paperback WHERE IS BRITAIN GOING?

HISTORY OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 3 vols AGE OF PERMANENT REVOLU REVOLUTION BETRAYED PROBLEMS OF CHINESE REVOLUTION paperback cloth PERMANENT REVOLUTION, RESULTS & PROSPECTS BLACK: STALINISM IN BRITAIN paperback cloth PAMPHLETS L. TROTSKY: DEATH AGONY OF CAPITALISM (The Transitional Programme)

CLASS NATURE OF THE SOVIET STATE CLASS AND ART YOUNG PEOPLE STUDY POLITICS MARXISM AND TRADE UNIONS Please tick those books required NAME.........

ADDRESS.

Complete form and send with money to Fill in the form below and SECRETARY, SOCIALIST 186A CLAPHAM HIGH ST, Name Address 'Unless productivity increases with increases in earnings a grim future leading shipbuilding employer speaks out. NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS cloth pape cloth Amount enclosed f S d plus 6d postage for each pamphlet 1s 6d postage for each book.

New Park Publications, 186a Clapham High St, London, SWA.

I would like information about THE SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE shipbuilding is booming. dustry is in great shape.

Palmers' closure and the yard's 300 jobs axed unceremoniously?

'Well it will open again one day—the docks, the plant, it's still all there?

What about productivity drives, the attempts to end craft demarcation?

UNFORTUNATE

A slight frown may cross his beaming countenance: Yes this is a problem, but on the whole it's under control.

Really it's the unskilled we worry about. We must fight for these boys; they are the ones taking the real beating on the dole' You think at this point of our boilermaker's unfortunate brothers on Clydeside who are taking a beating from shipbuilding employers, but refrain from destroying an illusion.

Then the scene changes and the reality of the North East is driven home.

In a gloomy block of ageing council flats a boy of 17 who has never had a job since he left school faces the prospect of 47 hours work for £7 on a milk round. With the job goes the near guarantee of the sack within 25s 0d 373 6d 78 6d 30s Od PO 56 25s 0d D 22 od 8 Od Od Od 9d 6d send to NATIONAL LABOUR LEAGUE, LONDON, SW4.

queueing at a Labour Exchange the year make way for a younger and cheaper replaceFor thousands like him life in the North East offers no prospects. So he takes a hopeless job rather than be idle and face the bullying official who threatens to withdraw his meagre benefit if he doesn't 'shape himself and get a job'.

Other youth have gone bald with worry because they cannot find a job and one 18-year-old lay down in his room covered his head with a coat switched on the gas.

It's hardly credible, but the coroner diagnosed the cause of death as 'unemployment'.

The privileged youth who work as apprentices in the shipyards are acutely conscious of their position. They fear to criticize the harsh regime of discipline in places like Swan Hunter and Vickers because it may lose them a highly-prized job.

In truth North-East workers ADVANCE NOTICE the employed and the jobless, the demoralized and those that work on with happy illusions in the munificence of the systemall face hard times.

Unemployment now approaches 5 per cent. On Wearside 59 men chase every job, at Hartlepools 43 apply for every opening and on Tyneside 15 queue beneath every 'vacancies wanted' sign.

THE BLACK SPOT A land infamous for its unemployment in the 1930s looks like regaining this unwanted claim to notoriety in the 1970s.

This time the black spot has moved from Jarrow, where dole queues are long, to Sunderland on Wearside, where they are even longer.

Here male unemployment nears 10 per cent and there are more youth on the dole in Sunderland than anywhere else in the country.

All this has happened despite considerable government expenSUNDAY, FEBRUAI ALEXANDRA PALACE Wood Green London, N22 diture in the area.

A total of £250 million in government assistance was spent during 1968-1969 yet the net loss of jobs since 1964 has been around 33,000. In 1969 alone the net loss was 8,000.

The only new future of the situation Is that the promises of new jobs get more and more extravagantly above the numbers actually created.

But what about that shipbiulding industry beloved of so many boilermakers?

Swan Hunter, a consortium formed in 1966 which now monopolizes the Tyneside yards, made £1.6 million profit last year.

This, however, would have been a loss except for the regional employment premium of 30s a man paid by the governThe Tories plan to abolish this, along with investment grants which brought in over £100 million in one year.

14, 1971.

Young Socialists and All Trades Unions Allia GREAT NATIONAL RALLY AGAINST TORYISM ATE As one Labour MP has laconically observed the 'end of REP may mean RIP for shipbuilding on the Tyne'.

Not that Sir John Hunter, head of the Swan combine, entirely disapproves of Tory policy.

He recognizes that there is undoubted method behind what appears to be economic madness for Tyneside employers.

Since the Geddes report on the industry, Swans have been attempting to smash all lines of demarcation in the yards.

They have already reduced all the craft workers bar the boilermakers to an all-purpose flying squad that can be moved up and down the river at will.

The last pocket of resistance is the boilermakers. First Swans want demarcation within the craft to go, then the barriers between the boilermakers and other craftsmen can be breached.

A DREAM An all-purpose labour forcemuch reduced from its present level, needless to say—is Sir John's dream and, despite the tough government attitude to bankrupt captains of industry (Palmers), the Tories' ordeal by fire coupled with a drive for unemployment in the North East might make that dream a reality.

For Sir John any other prospect is almost too bad for words as he indicated recently warned his workers:

'Unless productivity increases in line with increased earnings a grim future will emerge.

"The hopeless future which faced the shipyards over a year ago will return.' CRISIS South Shields, where unemployment among males runs now at 9.5 per cent, was the first to speak out against these gathering clouds of crisis.

The Trades Council there was the first in Britain to pass a resolution demanding a one-day token strike against unemployment in the North East.

Gateshead supported it and, to the considerable surprise of many militants, it also received the blessing of the North-East Federation of Trades Councils.

But now it is buried in the bureaucracies of several unions who have been asked to back, and presumably organize, the stoppage.

It is bere, however, that any proposal for action will meet its greatest obstacle.

The craft union breed their members in a spirit of industrial militancy, but beneath the shipyard radicalism there lies a hard and pure vein of conservatism. The South Shields motion will

GENERAL

TIME E ENQUIRIES EACH AD U SION make little headway barren ground.

It is this predominance of craft attitudes among the apparently most militant union that divides the working class and makes their own members the most vulnerable to attacks by the Tories.

The traditional forms of struggle are totally inadequate to meet the challenge of the North-East situation.

These struggles only produce the kind of leader who, when faced with the Palmers' closure, engaged in a series of fruitless negotiations with a Tory minister who merely made the government's ruthless intentions embarrassingly clear.

POLITICAL

As Clydeside is beginning to prove, any policy in areas of high unemployment which rejects a political fight against the government's programme will end in failure.

Let Palmers be a warning to all Tyneside boilermakers and craftsmen. Complacency, and mere sympathy for the unskilled, will not safeguard their jobs on the yards.

They either stand and fight with all workers against closures or start saving for their own spell on the dole.

Continued

Monday, November 16, 1970 'IT MAY be that in the This THREE