TRADE UNIONS OR LACKEYS OF NIRC TUC AT THE CROSSROADS

THE TUC General Coun cil meets on Wednesday under circumstances which must inevitably have the profoundest implications for the future of trade unionism The Tories hope the rail leaders' retreat, endorsed by the TUC last Thursday, will become the official General Council policy.

General Secretary Victor Feather, who pledged the TUC at its September 1971 Congress to co-operate with the Industrial Relations Act, has already declared it is possible to participate in the National Industrial Relations Court and still finds ways and means not to co-operate with the Act.

Do we have to emphasize again that the NIRC is the main legal enforcement agency of the Act? Without it the Act would be unable to function.

If the TUC General Council participates, it will be legally bound to apply NIRC rulings and decisions inside the trade union movement.

Trade union executives will become a kind of unpaid sheriff's department for the Tory court's anti-working-class policies.

If the Council accepts Feather's participation advice the jaws of this treacherous trap will snap shut.

Co-operation with the courts of the capitalist state, which allow the Tory government to wages, is the end of trade unionism.

The Tories and the monopoly capitalists, headed by Partridge of the CBI, are very clear about what they want. The NIRC in junction against the railway unions and the T&GWU, like the Taff Vale judgement of 1901, is a 'judicial coup d'état' conceived in order to create an atmosphere of shock and surprise.

This is aimed at intimidating the TUC reformists. Indeed, visions of TUC luminaries being dragged off to Brixton jail have already been conjured up by the Tory mass media to intensify the air of panic which the court's findings were deliberately designed to create.

But every trade unionist in his or her right senses knows that there has never, at any time, been the slightest possibility of any TUC leader going to jail. These are faithful men, or, as the 'Daily Telegraph' would put it, 'decent men' tied hand and foot to the establishment.

A 'Sunday Times' editorial yesterday about Victor Feather's week of 'agony' said:

'It takes courage for a TUC general secretary to speak up in public against the intransigent attitude of his most powerful superiors. in the union establishment. Mr Feather showed last week that he had that courage.

The TUC gentlemen have done the dirty work of compromise for so long that the Tories must themselves feel embarrassed to have so crudely caused them 'discomfort'.

The TUC leaders also know that participation in the court would give them a powerful legal basis to expel and discipline militants who fall foul of the Act in the course of their trade union duties.

The Tories' immediate objecsplit i within ate trade onion tive is to movement through legal intimidation. They know very well that they cannot defeat the working Actors press to deregister Norman Rossington (centre) and blonde actresses queueing for yesterday's meeting.

A SPECIAL meeting of Equity, the actors' union, was called at the Adelphi Theatre, London, yesterday to demand that the union deregisters under the Industrial Relations Act.

The fierce discussion, closed to the press, was still in progress when we went to press late yesterday. BY G. HEALY class with a court udgement alone. History supplies the proof on this score.

As a backlash to the Taff Vale judgement, affiliations Labour Representation Committee jumped to 100,000.

Between 1902 and 1903 the figures escalated to approximately 850,000. This trend continued to the General Council of 1906 when, for the first time in history, out of a total of 50 Labour candidates, 29 were elected to parliament.

The Tories realize that the working class will fight back with enormous strength against the Act. If they can coerce the TUC General Council to join Chaired Peter Vaughan The meeting was summoned by a group of 400 actors and actresses who signer d a petition deploring the d ecision of Equity's council to register under the Act.

The decision to register was taken without the consent of the membership; it was also them in the functioning of their court, then they will have acquired an important strategic advantage to face the coming storm.

The Industrial Relations Act was designed to destroy trade unionism. •In practice this amounts to nothing less than the destruction of all basic democratic workers' rights.

If the TUC General Council agrees to participate in the Tory court then the working class have only one remaining democratic right. We must force the immediate convocation of the Trades Union Congress which decided not to co-operate with the Act, reaffirm this decision and expel those General Council members who have violated it.

array of actors completely against previous union policy and breached the TUC'S policy of non-cooperation.

Leading the right-wing i at yesterday's meeting was Marius Goring, who resigned from the executive during the miners' strike because of 'political influence' in the union.