Ford steps up MDW

UNION officials meet Ford's Dagenham management this morning over the further suspension of body-plant torch solderers.

The solderers have been summarily suspended two Fridays in a row for refusing company orders to change over to a new method and for operating the right to washing time after handling allegedly poisonous metal.

Crane-slingers, on strike from the plant for the last five weeks over a grading dispute, return to work this morning, but will come out again with official union backing if talks on their 6d-anhour claim fail.

Discontent is also reaching explosion point amongst bodyplant doorhangers over their shelved claim for upgrading.

Determined

Ford appears determined to enforce an intensification of its vicious Measured-Day Work system, both as a means of weakening its workers in the fight for their national parity claim scheduled to go in on Friday of this week— and in order to ensure the profitability of its new Taunus Cortina.

Stewards allege that procedure is being completely abandoned, , the management coming straight onto the shop floor with immediate suspensions.

No bases-India INDIA opposes any moves by he big powers to establish military bases in the Indian Ocean, government officials said in New Delhi yesterday.

The spokesman, for the External Affairs Ministry, declined comment on the request by the US administration . to Congress for funds to build defence installations on British islands in the Chagos Archipelago. Unions Alliance Second Annual Conference THE CHARTER OF BASIC RIGHTS The right to a job, to strike and organize, to retain gains made, to fair prices, to welfare benefits and to decent housing. Defend and maintain these rights in a fight BIRMINGHAM Sat. December Digbeth Civic Hall, Digbeth 10.30. am r delegates' or visitors' credentials Alan Wilkins, ATUA secretary, 53 T Styvechale, Coventry. weather scientists about VOLUNTEER student relief workers in E Pakistan have beaten up an official who refused a jeep to take supplies to starving survivors.

They also assaulted a local police chief wiro came to the official's assistance. Both men are now in hospital, where the official is said to be in a serious condition.

danger of cyclones in. the crowded Ganges-Brahmaputra delta have consistently been shelved by international agencies.

The death-toll from the storm, which washed a 25-foot wave at a speed of 100 miles an hour through the delta islands, may well have reached two million, far exceeding original estimates.

Yet the military regime of General Yayah Khan has still All Trades force the Tories to resign.

declare national emergency, and food and medicine supplies for the storm-hit area are piling up at Dacca airport while bureaucrats fill out endless time-wasting forms.

There nothing predictable about the hurricane which struck the islands on November 12.

The Bay Bengal is a known breeding-ground for big hurricanes, and these storms can be tracked by weather satellites, and by the government radar station at Cox's Bazar, about 100 miles from the disaster area.

Yet despite clear evidence that a major storm was due to hit the coast-line, effort made evacuate coast-dwellers inland to higher ground.

Two-thirds This measure alone, experts say, would have saved two-thirds of the victims.

The military regime, centred on W Pakistan and completely corrupted by US aid, is clearly utterly unconcerned about the devastation.

Only a few companies of the army, which is a crack force benefiting from huge allocations of American finance, have been sent into the area.

The imperialist powers which have made Pakistan what it is—slicing it off from India and maintaining a clique of landlords and militarists the top of the regime - are now complaining hypocritically about the Khan regime's indifference.

Suffrage

The country is simultaneously facing a major political crisis, on the eve of its first-ever General Election with universal suffrage.

The Khan dictatorship anticipates widespread peasant unrest during and after the elections, which are aimed at rubber-stamping the military dictatorship.

Pakistan, where landhunger and poverty are their height, would have been a focal point for anti-government movements.

With calculating cynicism, the disaster has been neglected in order to give Khan the opportunity to make political capital.

It is no exaggeration to say that hundreds of thousands of the cyclone's victims were killed by imperialism and its corrupted military clients.

Vietnam