Stay-in at C.A.V. (Acton) continues

QUALITY control workers at CAV's Acton works are continuing their stay-in strike against productivity proposals from the management.

On Friday, the management offered to couple a 15s. increase with the proposals—to paid later 'when the savings have been made'.

But the stewards replied that the jobs of the 13 men who would become surplus to requirements as a result of the proposals were not for sale.

In separate talks with the management, the convenors have proposed talks on 'grade rationalization' as a basis for a return to work.

The quality control stewards are opposed to this, however. They describe such talks as "a pig in a poke.

A full meeting of all stewards has demanded an immediate fl increase without 'strings'.

CORRECTION:

In Saturday's Work rs Press, we referred to a : rike by inspectors at Lucas's Birmingham area plant. Thi was, of course, a strike of foremen and chargehands. Vauxhall's wants to accept the deal and its just a nanatul of "troublemakers" who're preventing this happening.

'No, Mr Hegland!

It's not a handful. It's the working class on the beware of it! You'd better "The purpose of this conerence, explained the chairman, a British-Leyland senior steward, in opening the discussion, 'is to hammer out a policy for the motor industry —against the employers and against who won't fight them, Officials As the capitalist class was organizing on a national and even international scale, carworkers had to do the same.

In the discussion of common problems and the settingup of a committee, the conference would be making a start on this.

It's often difficult for

to understand even our own histough he went on, 'and the All Trades Unions Alliance has always insisted that the "boom" period is over, I think that many of us don't fully grasp this.' To fail to do this was to ignore the enormous changes that had taken place, the strike wave which had spread across Europe and the big struggles on the horizon in the United States.

What was required in all these struggles was the building of an alternative revolutionary leadership.

The basis for pushing up the rate of exploitation inside the Ford Motor Company, explained a worker from Ford's Dagenham body plant, was laid in the rout inflicted on the shop stewards in 1962.

It was only after that the company was able to push through a really massive speed-uP"been Measured-Day although there had Work in its plants.

Union officials were now saying that the fight for parity of earnings with carworkers in a 'pushover the Midlands was This was nonsense. Ford's were preparing for a fight in which they could completely smash trade unionism as an effective force in their factories.

COMBINE THREAT The lack of any real leadership at StandardTriumph's Merseyside plant, explained a young Standard's worker, meant that while the strike had been completely solid, it had been isolated for ten weeks.

Only when there had been the threat of combine action had Stokes made any concession to the strikers.

But many of them were convinced that if he gave them anything at this stage, he would fight to sweat it out of them later.

FRATERNAL greetings were brought to the conference by a member of the Alliance Ouvrière, a union delegate at Renault's Boulogne - Billancourt plant.

Giving details of some of the struggles in which Renault workers had engaged since playing a major role in the general strike of May-June 1968, he stressed that the Alliance Ouvrière-like the All Trades Unions Allianceset out not simply to pose questions of wages and conditions, but to direct the workers' attention towards the political implications of this struggle.

Workers wanted to fight but the official leadership of the Stalinist-dominated Confédération Générale de Travail knew that what was at stake was the whole policy of the government and the state.

So workers had to fight not only for their demands against the government, but also to control their own struggles.

The interchange of experiences and conclusions between carworkers in Britain and France, he concluded, would be of great assistance to the building of revolutionary leadership in both countries.