LOCK-OUT!

by our industrial correspondent Tory Chippenham at first sight seems an unlikely setting for one of the most determined battle fronts in the engineering unions' nationay pay campaign — yet that's just what it is.

Three days ago 2,000 workers at the Westinghouse Brake and Signal Co completed their fourth week on strike for a substantial rise.

Now, halfway through fifth week, there is still trace of a crack in their will to win.

The centre of Chippenham —a genteel country town in the heart of rolling Wiltshire —presents no surprise to those who know it returned Tory MP Daniel Awdry by a 25-10 majority in the last election.

The Awdry family own a lot of property in the town and the surrounding farmlands. Their solicitors business stands with a gaggle of others in quiet, expensive St Mary Street.

But down on the Westinghouse picket-line the strikers have given üp touching their forelocks once and for all.

'You still had a kind squirearchy here, with one Top: Pickets outside the Westinghouse factory. Their strike now enters its fifth week. Above: AUEW shop steward, Eric Cole. two families dominating the town, until after the end of the war' , Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers' shop steward Eric Cole told me.

'The way management's been behaving in this dispute, you'd think it was still in existence. We're not having it, though.' Average earnings for men are between £21 and £22 a week despite the high degree of precision to which they have to work and for which the company is world-famous. Some take home as little as £13. » Women working average £14-£15. TIS 110H) our Chippenham factory in the last few days', regretting that 'unfortunately, because of the action now being taken', there could be no further talks.

Clearly neither Pollock nor his labour-relations man, management executive Morley West, took their workers' action very seriously at that stage.

After all, it was almost the first such dispute in living memory. No doubt they thought the old relations would soon re-establish themselves.

But the company began to sustain real losses-estimated by stewards as amounting to £250,000 so far-and there was no sign of a crack in the workers' ranks, the tone began to change.

On June 7 West met fulltime officials led by Stan Franklin, district secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering . Workers.

He asked them to recommend a return on the understanding that the company was willing to 'negotiate a settlement on improyed terms'. The officials refused.

From this point on the company line hardened.

On June 23—significantly enough, the day after the Engineering Employers' Federation decided it 'could not come anywhere near' the unions'