Plessey speed-up talks Threat to trade union

1970 marks the 19th year of the Young Socialists' official newspaper. Selling at 4d for 16 three-colour pages and with a circulation of 20,000, it is the foremost youth paper in KEEP LEFT INVITES ALL ITS READERS TO East India Hall 8 p.m.-ll Saturday, January 10 2.30 The Crescendos 'ast India Hall 8 p.m.-1l p.r Sunday, January 11 9.30 a.m.

CLASSIC CINEMA, POND STREET HAMPSTEAD, LONDON, N.W.3 STOP WILSON'S WASHINGTOI FOR THE DEFEAT OF US IMPERIALISM IN VIETNAM DEMONSTRATION SUNDAY JAN. 11 ASSEMBLE: Speakers' Corner (Marble Arch), MARCH: via Oxford Street, Regent Street, Trafalgar Square past Downing Street. MEETING: Lyceum Ballroom, near Aldwych, Details from 186a Clapham High Street, London, Tickets for the whole weekend 12s 6d munications group are at present completing discussions on a payand-productivity deal. The last stages of these talks took place away from the factories so that the negotiations should not be disturbed.

Plessey's have been preparing this deal for something approaching a year now. After several months the workers were given small increases ranging from 17s 6d for skilled men to 10s for women and 7s for juveniles.

These were given on the basis of an agreement, signed by all the senior stewards, that there would be no more claims until the productivity deal was finalized and that there would be 'continued co-operation in preparing the new pay - and - productivity agreement'.

In 1968, Plessey's invited a firm of management consultants-AIC-to conduct a survey with the purpose of implementing the new productivity scheme.

There was already in existence a 'Liverpool package deal'. Even the management themselves are forced to admit that: "This had effected considerable improvements, but had not contained any • automatic review procedures with the result that the wage structure had come under pressure from the employees. There was the added fact that employees believed the Liverpool deal had benefited management much more than it had the employees'.

Low pay The employees were dead right!

While management had benefited, wages at the Plessey the labour movement today.

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING London, E.14 Young Socialist National Speaking Contest DANCE IN THE EVENING The Element of Truth Special appearance VISIT! factories - employing around 10,000 workers - remained amongst the lowest in engineering on Merseyside.

One of the main features of the AIC programme of work at the beginning of this year was the organization of 'training and appreciation courses on work-measurement technique' for supervisors and shop stewards.

We have found no record of senior stewards at the factory organizing a course to 'appreciate' why the last package deal benefited the employers at the expense of the workers nor a 'training' course on how, in the light of that deal, trade union organization in the factory might better serve the workers.

The AIC survey concluded that the main aspects of a productivity 'bargain' should be:

a) The introduction of a standard form of workmeasurement.

b) A new wage structure based upon job-evaluation.

AIC and the management then proceeded to lay down the basis for job-evaluation and for a qualitative tightening-up on piece-work through the use of predetermined They laid down principles on which they would work.

These stressed that pay increases could only come from increased productivity and improved use of manpower. In other words, the only increases would be for speedCo-operation The management then stated that they wished to develop their productivity proposals 'with the unions at plant level'.

So from January 1969, the union leaders at the factory entered into co-operation with the management to work out productivity proposals-or, to put it more bluntly, speed-up proposals.

Every worker at Plessey's should understand that there have been no negotiations for a straight wage increase this Over the last year there have been discussions between the management and senior stewards .. on the management's ground.

The company's attitude throughout has been: co-operate in improving productivity irst and then we'll see if we can give the workers a small increase in wages.

A management report of a January 17 questions - and -answers meeting involving 150 stewards, members of management and representatives of AIC brings this out graphically:

'What.' asked the stewards 'is the worth, in terms of "cash", of the co-operation of the trade unions and employees in the attitude survey, job-evaluation and other aspects?

*It is inappropriate at this stage,' replied the management, 'to discuss financial rewards.

"The productivity agreement will be produced for negotiation in May or June of this year. It will be based upon the results of job-evaluation, attitude survey and an assessment of the financial savings resulting from increased productivity. stionate the the question share benefits should be raised.

'At this point in time the preparatory work necessary for the production of a productivity agreement including the involvement of AIC is costing the company money rather than producing a saving.' Pity the company!

Abandoned

Having to spend out money to find the best way to exploit labour !

That senior stewards gave their co-operation on this basis indicates how far basic trade union principle had been abandoned.

Even Judas Iscariot got 3( pieces of silver for co-operating with Pontius Pilate. They were prepared to co-operate for nothing.

The experience of the last year in Plessey's shows more clearly than ever the dangers of this type of 'leadership'.

According to the management, the purpose of the AIC attitude survey was to 'assess attitudes towards factors important to productivity bargaining'.

Despite the fact that the stewards went along with this, it was nine months before the workers got even a small interim rise.

For union leadership to even enter into a meeting with the management to discuss co-operation in such an exercise was betrayal of trade unionism. It is the job of workers' organizations to represent their members, not the management.

The . aim of the Plessey productivity deal is to undermine the independence of the workers' organizations negotiation.

For example, AIC and Plessey's take an attitude survey made by a selected panel and taken from selected personnel who give their attitudes to productivity. It is on this basis that negotiations take place.

While the stewards accepted this, they put up no fight against the sacking of a young trade unionist recently for putting forward her attitude towards productivity in a workers' meeting.

A new job-grading scheme is proposed, based on a 'consensus method'.

Cut through the trimmings and this means setting up a panel which evaluates the jobs and institutes new gradings.

Preparing

Possibly even more important for Plessey workers is the fact that the management has been busy during the year preparing willing senior stewards ready for the introduction of pre-determined motion-time systems.

Pre-determined time systems start with the principle that all types of different operation can be broken down into very small basic motions.

Describing a pre-determined motion-time system (MethodsTime Measurement), Plessey defines the following motions in all operations:

Eight hand and arm motions. THE GROWING opposition in States to the Vietnam war places a historical responsibility upon Marxists.

Theirs is the task of fighting within this deeply-confused and socially-amorphous movement for working-class action against the war, based on the struggles now emerging within the US between the giants of labour and capital.

In this contradictory • context of working-class radicalization and middle-class protest, the Trotskyist programme, principles and theory become Without these political guidelines, Marxists will succumb either to sectarian abstention from the mass movement against the war, on the grounds that it is led by bourgeois reformers and protesters, or adapt to its lowest common political denominator in the so-called interests of "maximum unity.

The ability of Marxists to fight for and develop their principles inside such a movement is a sure test of their political calibre.

It is in this living context that we must evaluate the article by David Thorstad in the October number of 'Young Socialist', the journal of the Young Socialist Alliance.

Largest section

The Young Socialist Alliance is the youth movement of the American Socialist Workers' Party, which, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, became the largest section of the Fourth International on its foundation in 1938.

All links between the SWP and Trotskyism were severed in 1963 when its leadership took the party into the fold of the Pablo revisionists, who ten years earlier had proclaimed that forces other than the Fourth International were going to carry through the world. revolution.

Thorstad's article 'Dave Dellinger joins the Bodysnatchers' carries the logic implicit in Pablo's theories, and their latest acceptance by the SWP leadership, to their ultimate conclusion.

Pacifist Dellinger, in writing an introduction to a transcript of a discussion between himself, and, among others, the late biographer of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, attacked the role of the YSA in the peace movement.

Dellinger was not content with making his own criticisms, but attempted to involve Nine foot, leg and body motions.

Two elements of eye action.

Operations are split up into , these motions and the pre-determined times applied for each motion on a unit of time called the Time-Measurement Unit.

Reach, for example, is given 12.9 Time-Measurement Units (TMU), grasp is given 9.1 TMU.

27.8 TMU equal one minute.

Times for jobs or operations can thus be worked out "scientifically', 'in the office' by analysing the job and splitting it into its 'basic motions'.

Acceptance of this system by union organizations means the end of 'mutuality" (the piece-work agreement whereby values or piece-work prices of jobs must be mutually agreed by worker and management).

Instead of negotiation, so-called scientific synthetics or pre-determined times will determine values.

The very description 'predetermined' shows that it means the end of mutuality.

Betrayal

Some, if not all, the union leaders at Plessey's are obviously co-operating in extending schemes like this. This is a betrayal of the strength and independence of the workers' organization.

Mutuality means determining the highest price for the workers on • the basis of the strength of organization, for if the price is not agreed then the workers either work daywork, or, in a well-organized shop, refuse to do their job.

Then the price depends on the strength of the workers' Stewards who agree to predetermined times accept the trem endous AI nerican logic of Pabloite revisionism Deutscher's name in lending them weight.

It is this manoeuvre which inspired the title of Thorstad's article. The pacifists were, it seems, trying to 'snatch Deutscher's dead body' for use in a factional struggle against the YSA and the SWP.

Thorstad replies by snatching Deutscher's body back from the pacifists and claiming it for the Fourth International!

In truth, Deutscher was neither a pacifist nor a Trotskyist, but a centrist who at the crucial period of the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, retreated from his previous position of opposition to Stalinism on the grounds that the time was not opportune for the launching of a new International Deutscher's political hostility to the Fourth International is well known, and dominates the third volume of his biography of Trotsky, "The Prophet Outcast' :

'Only • two Polish delegates protested that "the Polish section as a whole was opposed to the proclamation of the Fourth International'.

"They pointed out that it was hopeless to try to create a new International while the workers' movement, as a whole, was on the ebb. "No significant section of the working class will respond to our manifesto. It is necessary to wait"' (p. 421).

Author

In a footnote to this paragraph, Deutscher makes clear that he 'was the author of the argument against the foundation of the Fourth Interdelegates advanced at two national which these conference'. management's standards and are assisting the employers to break the 'mutuality' agreeModern developments of time-study seek to take piecework out of struggle, leading ultimately to Measuned-Day Work in which a worker can be speeded up without any increase in pay.

The crime of the stewards at Plessey's is that for a year they have gone along with a management that is attempting just that.

They are thus collaborating in a further undermining of the independence of the unions.

Over a year ago, in expressing their aims in the productivity deal, the management quoted with approval a Prices and Incomes Board statement:

*Plant agreements should establish clear ground-rules which separate the process of negotiating pay from that of establishing work standards.' This means that they aim to make standards of work which they can impose upon operators without any pay negotiations.

Clear

There can be no clearer statement of an end to mutuality. Work standards and piece-work prices are taken out of negotiation.

No self-respecting trade unionist can accept the principles on which this productivity deal is based.

It is not just how much is being got for it. The trade union organization in this factory is being tied even tighter to the management. • No breaking of the "mutuality' agreement!

• A straight wage increase!

No productivity deals.

The late Isaac Deutscher., Before the unification with the Pabloites, Deutscher had been sharply attacked by SWP leader Cannon as 'the Bernstein of Trotskyism'.

But in his review of 'The Prophet Outcast', the volume in which Deutscher mounts his attack on the Fourth International, Joseph Hansen apologized for the sharpness of these attacks :

'From the viewpoint of the world Trotskyist movement, Deutscher's agreement on the validity of Trotsky's programme establishes the possibility in principle of practical collaboration with him.

• • • Some harsh and even unjustified things were said of Deutscher . . • : ('International Socialist Review', Winter, 1964).

This is the point where Thorstad and Hansen's other prodigies take over.

Hansen and company may even look askance at the crude forms taken by anti-Trotskyism in the YSA. But they are simply reaping the harvest sown by decades of theoretical betrayal.

The lines are written Sportian is Hanse pot: but the political 'Incorrect' 'There were several points' he says, 'on which American Trotskyists thought Deutscher had incorrect positions. He did not agree with the decision to launch the Fourth International in 1938 and the attempt to build mass Trotskyist parties, for example. He tended to think that Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe could reform themselves out of existence and that a mobilization of the THE SAFETY arrangements at the Ministry of Defence's chemical warfare research establishment at Nancekuke, Cornwall,