Fisher-Bendix occupation March and picket may back sit-in

SHOP STEWARDS from all over the Kirkby industrial estate, near Liverpool, will meet tomorrow to discuss action in support of the Fisher-Bendix sit-in.

Plans may include a token strike, a march for jobs and a mass picket to be put to à special stewards' meeting called by the Liverpool Trades Council for next Wednesday.

Day three of the sit-in started yesterday with a stewards' meeting to plan the winning of nationwide support for the action.

Sparked on Wednesday, when Fisher-Bendix's parent firm, Thorn Electrical Industries, refused to call off plans to close by May 31, the 1,000strong occupation has already won considerable • local backing.

And Tom Staples, treasurer of the Bendix stewards' fighting fund, is confident that this will snowball.

"Thousands of workers are now seeing that the sit-in strike is the best way to defeat unemployment,' 'And I think the situation in the labour movement's very hopeful at the moment: the miners are going on strike against a ridiculous pay offer, the lads are fighting at AllisChalmers , in Mold, Plessey's and UCS. will back us up, Working class I'm sure the The source of this support is not hard to find.

Figures to be released later this month will show that almost: 4,000 workers living in Kirkby-more than 2,800 of them men over 18- are marindanal -- registerea as unemployea.

Local Department of Employment officials admit these figures underestimate the number of jobless, but are unwilling to hazard a guess at the true percentage.

'All I know is that more jobs are , going, more people are coming onto our books improvement, sign of any and there's told me laconically.

Unofficial estimates of the iobless rate in the town claim it now touches 25 per cent.

The Liverpool travel-towork area, of which Kirkby forms a part, is dotted with such pockets of ultra-high unemployment; they push its officially-admitted-rate up to 7.4 per cent as against the 4.7 per cent in the NW region as a whole.

Welder Derek Platt, a former textile worker, said there was no alternative to the take-over in this situation —'in fact it should have been done a long time ago'.

He complained that the labour force were being asked to pay with their jobs for years of bad management that were not their responsibility.

"They couldn't organize a beetle-drive, he said of the managers the sit-in hac banished.

Transport union rank-andfiler Tony Pennington recalled that the plant had had no less than 12 managers in the last ten years.

One reason for their decision to shut up shop at Kirkby rather than stage a further reshuffle was wages, he thought. A semi-skilled worker could earn up to £30 a week under the existing bonus system-higher than at some of the company's other plants.

But he added: Politics is at the centre of this.

Unemployment has been consistent Tory policy all through: remember it was Churchill who said in the LATENEWS NEWS DESK. 01-720 2000 CIRCULATION 01-622 7029 ¡blabed by Workers newspaper at the spham High Street, Rh Press Ltd. (U), High Street, London, THE HOUSE OF THORN: An investigation into the firm which owns Fisher-Bendix will appear on Monday.

1920s 'Give me 2 million unemployed and I'll sort out the economy".

'They want a pool of workless so they can use them against other groups.' Ted Dowd, T&GWU operator ten years Thorn is dancing Tories' tune.

'We think it's a political decision to try and force us back to' the 1930s,' he said.

'But we're not going. We are the union and we have decided what we're going to government.

'They're not behind it; if there was a General Election today they'd be slung out on their ear.' The slogan of the sit-in was 'We work, said Teathe right to I asked him who he was demanding it from. 'The government • no, the system I suppose,' he replied.

At first the Thorn directors had obviously thought talk of occupation was a bluff. AUEW shop steward Stan Ely told PAULINE CONROY, a lecturer at the Polytechnic of N London, was acquitted this week on a charge of conspiracy to cause coNRoYPrimitive CASE HOLLOWAY prison, one of the oldest prison buildings in Britain, stands at the top of Holloway Rise in N London.

It is one of the country's most secret social institutions. Women and girls from all over Britain are imprisoned there for offences which range from shoplifting to manslaughter.

The prisoners are crowded into filthy, stinking, cells.

They are denied decent training or recreation facilities. There is no proper medical or psychological help.

On November 24 Pauline Conroy was taken to Clerkenwell magistrates' court to appear on a charge of conspiracy to cause explosions. She found herself in the dock alongside eight other people on similar charges. She knew only two of them.

After the brief hearing she was taken to Holloway.

Miss Conroy explains what 'It is a terrible place. The physical conditions are totally primitive. For instance, you ate given one bar of soap per week, which is used for washing yourself, your hair, your clothes and your chamber pot. Toothpaste and deodorant are forbidden.

'Where I was, there were only four basins for 100 people. In these basins you had to wash clothes, chamber pot and your hair.

'Dettol, Vim or any disinfectants are banned. So even when the place absolutely stinks, you can't get them to allow the use of disinfectants. You have to get permission to have sanitary towels.

"The screws forbid singing me as he toured the silent factory helping to organize the 6 a.m.-12 noon sit-in shift.

'Now they've found out different, haven't they?' The first aim of the sit-in was to try and attract, if not Thorn, anyone else to take the place over and secure workers' jobs.

Pressure was also being mounted by stewards local labour MPs — including opposition leader Harold Wilson, in whose constituency the factory lies-for a freeze on redundancies pending a public inquiry.

He denied that there was a tendency for the stewards to try and separate these aims from the fight against the Tory government.

"The only way our campaign can embrace both the workers here and at factories like Gateshead - where Thorn wants to transfer the machinery — is if it includes this,' he said.

Added Stan: 'One thing that is certain is that a lot of other industrialists will be looking over their shoulder at what's happened here when they're thinking about closure.

explosions. In this second article, Miss Conroy tells staff reporter ALEX MITCHELL about and censorship Pauline Conroy and they also indulge in antiSemitism.

If a Jewish girl asks for kosher food, it refused. "dirty Sirls are told they are and called "whores" If they answer back, they are stripped and thrown solitary on bread and water' One of the more subtle aspects of the repression in the prison is the use of censorship.

Miss Conroy said a large blacklist operated against certain writers, including Marx, Bakhunin, Angela Kraft men to lobby AUEW KRAFT workers fighting against victimization plan a big lobby of the engineers' union executive when it meets next Tuesday. - . With the full backing of the union's Liverpool district committee, two coachloads of strikers from the company's Kirkby plant will travel to London for the lobby.

The district committee is sending delegates on the coaches.

Strikers are disgusted with the executive's refusal to back the strike - sparked by the acking of a union membe ithout warning in Novembe Their stewards say union leaders are looking for an Industrial Relations Act settlement giving compensation rather than reinstatement.

Only THE MCLEISH family of Hackney, London, are continuing against the threat eviction.

After a demonstration outside Hackney Town Hall on Monday by the local Tenants' Association, the 'None of us want this strike, but we're going lower and lower. If they had offered us a living wage there would have been