Dundee-Glasgow WORK DIARY From STEPHEN JOHNS IN SCOTLAND
1972Stephen Johns Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
COWDENBEATH is one of the two big working - class centres in Fife and predictably we have had selfless support from the local people.
First mention to the strikers at GEC Elliott's plant in the town. They have been in dispute for four weeks, but immediately they heard of the march, they gave us their enthusiastic backing and Shared the marchers to share their morning tea with them tomorrow.
A delegation from the action committee that runs the strike came out in the rain to welcome the weary marchers into town.
In the morning over 50 Elliott strikers marched with us out of Cowdenbeath and gave the youth tea and biscuits to send them on their way.
The Elliott strike is part of the engineers' pay claim and it is viewed by both union and management in the area test case in Fife. The GECAEI combine has some of its top so-called troubleshooters up to Cowdenbeath and they have been publicly gloating before the strikers of the kind . of settlement that the electronics monopoly has won in Manchester.
Most workers I talked to at their strike headquarters in the local miners' hall, condemned the way the union leadership abandoned the national claim. This, after all, is still a big area and the whole of the working class was inspired with way the ICCCIL pit strike was fought.
To many Elliott men it seems inexplicable why Hugh Scanlon and his executive could not have fought out battle at national level while the miners were also out 1n dispute.
One of them Peter Duff, told me that unemployment, particularly among youtn, was very severe in the area.
'It's very bad at present for school-leavers. They are finding impossible to get places. None of the firms are recruiting. One example stands as an illustration recently worked out that there are as many as 50 for even low-grade jobs like labouring, ne sald As we move through Fife an industrial pattern begins emerge. It beoins with the massive 15Pit closures which began years ago. Take Cowdenbeath. the town as many as a dozen mines-all these have been closed. The newcomers are SUBNOS like AEI, Elliotts and trial concerns.
But now even these companies are beginning to cut back.
The Marconi-Elliott factory in Cowdenbeath, for example, is about to close throwing rothes, another dole elliott factory and at Glen-