Committee puts ball bosses' court

WHETHER or not docks delegate conference is called next week now appears largely to rest with the chairman of the port authorities.

The Jones-Aldington committee, it is believed, is hoping to persuade the chairmen to back up section B (vii) of its interim report, which calls on them to 'consider how they might help in ensuring that all groupage containers brought into their ports are stuffed and stripped under proper conditions of work'.

In other words, it wants the authorities to pressure container firms into giving registered dockers more work at their inland depots.

The committee's joint chairmen put a brave face on things after a three-hour meeting yesterday.

'Quite definite advances' had been made, claimed Jack Jones, Transport and General Workers' Union secretary. 'We now have agreement as to how negotiations with other interests should gO forward, Lord Aldington, chairman of the Port of London Authority, commented.

They then went off to report progress to Employment Secretary Maurice Macmillan.

But whatever pressure the port authorities mount, the committee is incapable of producing a solution to the jobs crisis in the ports.

There are at the maximum 2,000 container jobs available nationally, while the committee itself accepts the employers' estimate that almost 6,000 dockers are surplus to requirements.

If dockers won all 2,000 an equal number of unregistered workers, many of them members of Jones's union, would have to be displaced.

Jones made much of a claim yesterday that 175 dockers in the London area are already involved in container work.

'If there are as many as this, why can't there be more?' he asked.

He did not comment on the fact that in the week before the strike there were over 1,500 dockers registered as temporarily unattached. dock gate.