HOW THE CP HELD BACK THE ENGINEERS IN 1957

Engineers' leader Hugh Scanlon this week toured the Midlands in what many of his union members saw as a desperate bid to save face over the disastrous results of his executive's pay rolicies.

The trip occurs on the eve of next week's conference, in Hastings, of all four sections of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, where the substantial failure of the union's strategy of fighting for its national claim on a plantby-plant basis is likely to provoke bitter comment.

When full-time officers of the AUEW engineers' section met three weeks ago, one of the officials from the Manchester district, Bernard Panter, attacked the executive for making no effort even to arm the membership with propaganda for the struggle. A Communist Party member, Panter was then himself attacked by Maoist executive member Reg Birch for taking the failings of himself and other officers out leadership.

The Maoists' line is that the decision to abandon the pay fight at national level is one of the best moves ever made by the union.

Birch told the AUEW engineers'-section conference at Eastbourne in April that it was the first time the membership had been given the freedom to fight in this way. In fact, it is not. The executive's policy today is merely a variation on the treacherous theme it played the last time engineers were involved in major struggle -in 1957.

On March 23, 1957, 20,000 heavy - engineering workers struck in the start of a 'snowball' action for 'a substantial wage increase'.

They were followed . on March 30 by 20,000 in the Greater London area. By April 6, more than a million workers organized in the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions were out behind the pay demand drawn up almost a year before.

Everything was set bitter struggle.

On the eve of the strike, Transport Minister Harold Watkinson, a former chairman of the machine-tool employers, tried to whip up middle-class chauvinism against the strike by declaring that 'the real winners •. • will be shipbuilders in Japan, Germany and elsewhere'.

The employers and the Tory government continued to insist that vital export markets were being lost, the economy was being shattered and that the stability of prices and wages would be disrupted. Police clashed on several occasions with demonstrations organized in support of the strike.

On April 11, 1957, Hugh Scanlon, then Manchester divisional organizer for the Amalgamated Engineering Union, headed at that time by right-winger William Carron, came under fire for calling out Lancashire Steel's Irlam facThe factory's welfare officer, Labour MP Jack Jones, accused him of being 'a known communist, a disrupter all his life'. Some sections of the press seized on the incident, to which an element of the spectacular was imparted by the sudden demise of Jones' wife while watching a TV confrontation between Scanlon and her husband.

Jones' description, however, was sadly inaccurate; Scanlon had turned in his CP card some two years before, and many Manchester engineering workers remain critical of his role in that dispute.

What is more, the policies of the CP itself were no danger to Jones and his employers. In fact they represented a necessary division of labour with the right-wing Carron clique dominating , the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions.

The CP uncritically backed the strategy of restricted action, thus maintaining the divisions between shipyard workers and engineering workers, and between engineers in one area and another.

It refused to organize independently of CSEU 'lefts' like Ted Hill, leader of the boilermakers' and Frank Cousins of the Transport and General Workers' Union. And it consistently avoided raising demand for the removal of Tory government.

Later in April, when the shipyard workers had been out for less than three weeks, the Carron clique sent their members back to work for a miserly increase of 57tp a week.

At the same time, they agreed with the employers to freeze wages for a year and to help crack down on so-called restrictive practices. Even some right-wingers were amazed—in some cases declaring the settlement an open betrayal.

By the end of May, engineers in Salford and a number of other areas were complaining of a ruthless enforcement of clocking-on times. Had the CSEU fought to the end, they said, far more than 57tp could have been won-and without any strings.

Much greater dangers face engineering workers today, which is precisely why Scanlon and Birch want engineering workers to forget what happened the last time union leaders divided their members' strength in a major struggle.

Saturday June 10, 1972 The only way to give