Parsons staff-work in the balance

FROM IAN YEATS IN SCARBOROUGH THE 1,400 technical staff working-to-rule at C. A. Parsons' Newcastle factory will decide in the next few days whether to continue their action.

Production workers threatened with redundancies at the 8,500strong generator plant have already agreed to work normally in return for a management promise that there will be no sackings this year.

Six hundred technical staff have been dismissed for imposing sanctions on the company in a bid to prevent substantial redundancies due to take place in June.

Alternative employment for highly-skilled men in the Newcastle area would be almost impossible to find.

Now many workers are saying Parsons' determination to have their way, coupled with the threat of the Industrial Relations choice but to cut their losses and resume normal working.

Technical stafi-all members of the Technical and Supervisory Staffs Association of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers-have shown their willingness to fight for four months in support of a closed shop, now illegal under the Act.

But Stalinist TASS officials are urging the men to accept a 'no-redundancies-in-1972' formula along the lines of the agreement signed by the reformist leaders of the clerical and manual unions. as a means of resuming normal work.

International Socialist group members in the factory leadership say there is no further action they can take, adding that if the anti-union law is used against them the union will appeal to the TUC for help. Reveal metails of how remisill of how reformism, revisionism and Stalinism ganging un on the fight against redundancies at Parsons.

LATE NEWS EMPLOYMENT Secr etary Maurice Macmillan has invited Jack Jones, transport union leader, to meet him to the dock situation before today's dockers' delegate meeting.

LEADERS of the TUC and the Confederation of British Industry are concerned the Budget will not have the desired effect in reducing unemployment. The TUC said at a meeting of the National Economic Development Council under the chairmanship of Heath yesterday that they welcomed the government's decision to go for more reflation.

But they would have preferred to see more selective measures to reduce unemployment directly.

The CBI was not only concerned about whether the Budget would reduce unemployment, but also doubted whether it would contain inflation. The meeting was to have been devoted entirely to the Budget but a good deal of the talk ranged around low incomes and profits.