Tube engineers' rally Warning of dangers

make sinister trip to Nixon.

The motion submitted by the 70 MPs piously calls on Wilson to dissociate completely from US policies and to strive for a settlement of the war based on the 1954 Geneva Convention. Sacs TRADE! CENTRAX WORKERS - le!

IDA Ni ABBOT Your aGti LONDON'S tube maintenance strikers continued their dispute into its t yesterday with a mass r welfth determined week ally in Westminster.

On Thursday, strikers will consider plans to extend their strike.

•A number of people gave indications of what support they will give', ', said strike committee chairman Don Cook, yesterday.

'We're going to reorganize day methods as from ThursSeveral speakers at yesterday's meeting emphasised that national questions were raised by the dispute, which is over the alleged breaking by the London Transport Board of eleven-year-old agreement for recruiting craftsmen at its Acton railway workshops.

Behind the LT's intransigence on this issue, the maintenance men feel, are attempts to force through the terms of productivity deals on the railways with the help of the more amenable National Union of Railwaymen (NUR).

Yesterday's meeting clearly indicated that many other sections of engineering workers also appreciate this threat:

MONEY BACKING Workers at London Rank Precision Industries factories are to donate an hour's pay to the strike fund.

The strikers are still firmly resisting attempts, stepped up since the intervention of the Department of Employment and Productivity some weeks an interumondangle into the NUR.

They insist that the LTB broke the agreement and that the LTB must therefore reinstate it.

About Trades Union Congress intervention they are not so sure. Said Don Cook yesterday:

'There may be some possible advantages for us in discussions with Feather.' DANGERS There are dangers here.

Basic questions-the union leaders wholesale collaboration with productivity deals and their agreement with the government to stop strikes— are raised.

Maintenance men must demand that Amalgamated Engineers and Foundryworkers' executive councilman Reg Birch carries out his own advice to yesterday's meeting and demands that the union's leaders extend the strike.

See picture page four → at public meetings the film of the first issue being prepared printed and the film 'Young Socialists, 1969' The union negotiators, led by the T&GWU, backed down on this and worked out the joint basic rate-productivity formula.

An immediate return to work is not certain as some London stewards walked out of the meeting before the vote was taken and many stewards were dissatisfied with the size of the offer and the strings attached.

GUARDS WIN BONUS CLAIM: Under an agreement reached by the British Rail Board and the National Union of Railwaymen, guards will now receive overtime paid on their mileage bonuses.

Southern Region guards threatened a series of one-day stoppages two months ago to back their claim.

GLC RENTS APPEAL: The legality of the GLC rent increases is to be challenged in a test appeal by a council tenant to be heard in the Court of Appeal in the middle of January, next year.

Last month Judge Moylan granted eviction orders against three GLC tenants-three of several thousands-who have been refusing to pay the rent increases imposed over a year ago.

About 230,000 GLC tenants, all facing further rent inin 1970, wil be affecied by the decision.

FORD STRIKE ENDS: Production at Ford's Halewood (Liverpool) transmission plant resumed yesterday when 50 grinders and cutters ended their unofficial strike.

The strike began on Thursday over a grading claim on which talks are now to continue.

PARIS PEACE TALKS: US Secretary of State William Rogers has said that there are no plans to name an immediate successor to Henry Cabot Lodge, who recently resigned as chief US negotiator at the Vietnam peace talks in Paris. 'Barring a breakthrough in Paris' , US Defence Secretary Melvin Laird announced that the US would stress the shifting of the military burden in South Vietnam to the forces of the Saigon government.

This indicates fading hopes in the talks by the Nixon administration.

A National Liberation Front spokesman has proposed that if the US agrees to an unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam over a period of six months, there could then be discussions of 'guarantees for safety during the withdrawal'.

GREET Moses LIVERPOOL Sunday, December 14, 7.30 p.m. Shaftesbury Hotel, Mount Pleasant SHEFFIELD Sunday December 21, 7.30 p.m. Industries Exhibition Centre Carver Street (behind City Hall)

'E BANDA (Editor of Workers P 4 TORRANCE (National Secretar Young Socialists)