IN FIVE DAY'S TIME, its December meeting.

These guidelines, it is believed, will follow up the council's Downing. Street undertaking in June to stop strikes.

Their basis is the 'Programme for Action' agreed at the Croydon special congress earlier that month.

All the indications are that they may herald a new attack on the shop-floor strength of workers in the factories.

Unlike their leaders, the working class approaches the new decade confident and determined to fight the employers.

Politically, however, the stage has been set for the return of a Tory government, whose main aim would be to attack their strength.

Ten days a5u helpeu the Labour " Teftst:

Labour leaders to rush through - before Christmas, when it was anticipated there would be little open opposition from the working class— the re-activation of legal delaying powers against wages under Part Two of the 1966 Prices and Incomes Act.

Everyone knows that the IMF economic advisers Tory civil servants who are behind this move insisted on this so as to have some anti-union legislation the Statute Books immediately the Tories return to office.

Prepared

ground Not only the 'lefts' behave in this treacherous way.

From their acceptance of voluntary restraint in 1965 when-as the Socialist Labour League alone pointed out— they knew that the government had no intention of stopping there, the trade union leaders have prepared the ground for Wilson's anti-union legislation.

After 1966, there were almost three years of cowardly retreat before the prices and incomes policy, right up to the Downing Street undertaking of June 18 this year.

At every stage, these retreats have been covered for by the Communist Party and the 'lefts'.

But behind June 18 was a most sinister content.

Here is how the T&GWU's 'left' general secretary, Jack Jones, seconded acceptance of 'Programme for Action' at the Portsmouth TUC in September:

'Exposing and eliminating the causes of disputes will lead to dropping the authoritarian approach and applying the way of reason; not orders new "Programme for Action" instructions • The should lead employers to be THE GROWING militancy of the teachers' fight for their £135 salary claim has brought 10,000 new members into the National Union of Teachers since the strike campaign began.

This brings the union's strength above 300,000 for the first time.

The new members outnumber those few who have left in protest against the strikes by 100 to one!

The membership. l of the National Association 0 f Schoolmasters has risen by over 2,000 in two months to more than 45,000.

Treasurer Mr Arthur Jones commented: ALL FORART Above, the ATUA's demonstration against anti-striké intervention by the TUC through Croydon on June 5.

prepared to negotiate agreements close to where the work is performed, with provision for meetings at the place of work and in many cases during working hours, so that the members can be involved in the negotiations and in the decision-making.

'If that takes place, agreements will be kept because it will be the members' own agreements and not something negotiated in isolation and away from the membership.' So the purpose of 'union democracy, tor jones, is to negotiate agreements that will be kept!

Jones also had a lot to say about the role of shop stewards, saying that there should not be just 'seven all-powerful leaders at the top of the TUC, but 700,000 welltrained, intelligent shop stewards and ofice representatives throughout industry'.

All this fits in very well with the Tories' own industrial relations programme, laid out by Shadow • Labour Minister Mr Robert Carr at the October Conservative Party conference.

Tory proposals Carr proposed:

Compulsory election of works councils at all establishments above a certain size; availability of the same information to workers as is given to shareholders; shop stewards to be consulted before any public statements affecting employment are issued.

Behind this smokescreen of de Gaulle-style 'participation', of course, lies an iron determination enact stringent legislation against But the union leaders-and 'We have invariably put on membership at times of taking militant action.

'We are now seeing what we have always desired-a unity not so much of the unity of sociations, but a militants in the associations' The central question in the teachers' pay fight is how not to waste this militancy.

The NUT leadership will probably try to continue the policy of selective strikes if, as is likely, no agreement is reached in the January 5 meeting of the Burnham committee.

the 'lefts'-have, as we have shown, already prepared the ground for such legislation.

Mrs Castle's Commission for Industry and Manpower is the last in a long line of state and state-inspired committees on which prominent trade union leaders have collaborated--Mortimer on the Prices and Incomes Board; Woodcock, Paynter and Allen on the Commission on Industrial Relations; Scanlon, Evans and Roberts on the Joint Motor Industry Council.

It is all very well for Scanlon to tell the engineering employers that a Tory government might enact legal backing powers industrial contracts, but this ground has already been well-trodden.

Tory government would come to power under conditions where the trade union leaders already bound hand-and-foot to collaboration with the state.

The outstanding question is prevent workers acting from the shop floor outside this unholy alliance-and it is this that the TUC General Council may now be embarking upon.

Such attacks must be firmly resisted.

There are only six weeks to the All Trades Unions Alliance's engineering workers' conference in Sheffield and these weeks must be used to develop a massive campaign in industry against the union leaders' plans to tie workers to the state.

Union democracy-of which Jones and others speak SO much-is inconceivable without the absolute independence of the working class from the state.

All union branches, district committees and shop stewards' committees are invited to send delegates to the engineering workers' conferencewhich takes place on February 7, 1970.

It will be held at the Montgomery Hall (opposite the Town Hall), Sheffield, from 1l a.m.-4.30 p.m.

Vietnam

touchstone