Big campaign to split the dockers

THE EMPLOYERS ment realize that strike.

available at once.

and the Tory governwhatever the Aldington Committee recommends will not be enough to end the national dock Now they are mounting an all-out offensive to split the dockers by bullying and intimidating workers at the smaller unregistered ports After 14 days of talks the Jones-Aldington Committee is believed to have come up with only a tiny handful of jobs and not all of these will be A shock report out on Friday disclosed that by 1975 the number of registered dockers would be slashed from 41,500 to 'fewer than' 30,000. T&GWU leader Jack Jones is as aware as any employer of the impact of containerization on dockers' jobs and from his position on the National Ports Council, which commissioned the labour-study, he has a front-seat view of all future trends.

The report, submitted by the National Ports Council to 'senior members' of the Jones-Aldington Committee, warned that London, Liverpool and Hull would bear the brunt of the cutbacks. Ports in Lancashire, South Wales and Scotland would also be affected.

Yet while one of the committees on which he sits reveals the loss of thousands of jobs, Jones sits on another with Lord Aldington talking in terms of a few hundred jobs as a solution to the crisis. Jones, the employers and the Tories know the dockers will not be hoodwinked back to work for a mess of Jones allows the employers and the government to drag out the Committee's talks and engineer a split in his members on the docks. All the signs point to a concerted campaign by port employers to intimidate small groups of workers at unregistered ports into Massed Tory police have been used as shock troops against dockers to protect scab workers at unregistered ports like Keadby, Lincs. The threat of military intervention to break the strike was made good at the weekend with the first RAF planeloads of supplies to islands off the Scottish mainland.

In Cornwall Tory MPs, shopkeepers and the 'captains' of local industry, including executives from the china clay industry, led a 6,000-strong march through St Austell to intimidate a handful of isolated local dockers. The 108 men have shut the ports of Par, Fowey, and Charlestown and shop stewards representing china clay workers have sent a telegram to Jones requesting a meeting not later than At the unregistered port of Harwich navyard 150 strikers have been told there is no guarantee they will be re-employed once the strike ends. Chairman of Harwich Dock Company Phillip Mann claimed dismissals and a phased return to work had been caused by traffic being diverted from navyard to British Rail's container terminal at Harwich Parkeston. But Bernard Taylor, shipping and port manager at Parkeston, hotly denies the allegation. He said:

I have not taken anybody's business. I have kept my word to the unions that only regular routed traffic would be handled and all of my management staff have had a very difficult time making sure that this is so. We have turned back a whole train and sent a whole freightliner ship back to Zeebrugge because they were carrying some black cargo.' While the port employers offensive gathers momentum, big warehouse operators like Vestey and Hay's Wharf, together with the Road Haulage Association, have made it plain there are no circumstances under And whether dockers' solidarity is maintained or not, the Tories have left no doubt that they are ready to use their emergency powers either to send troops into all docks or even just into those which would almost certainly go it alone after a splitThe longer the Jones-Aldington talks go on, the greater the danger of splitting the dockers. Jones must break off the talks immediately and recall the T&GWU biennal conference to mobilize the labour