Building employer on 'conciliation' panel

THE SUGGESTION is being mooted that the building workers' strike for better pay and hours should be referred to the CBI-TUC voluntary conciliation machinery which comes into operation next Friday.

Two of the promoters of this plan are Victor Feather and electricians' leader Frank Chapple, whose members are still working on a large number of sites under union instructions.

George Smith, general secretary of the biggest building union, UCATT, and chairman of TUC General Council, believed to be not unsympathetic to the idea.

There are immense dangers in this proposal. They can be seen if the names on the 12-man panel of conciliators are studied.

The list, published on Thursday, is a neat division of trade union bureaucrats and labourrelations men from big business. One of them, in fact, is a former director of the building employers' federation.

The union side includes Bob Wright, Labour 'left' member of the executive council the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, who is often supported by the Communist Party; Will Paynter, ex-Communist Party member who was former secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers; and Dick Seabrook, president of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, one of the unions now trying to extricate itself from registration under the Industrial Relations Act.

Other union men are Sid Robinson, former president of the National Union of Footwear, Leather and Allied Trades; Jack King, general secretary of the National Union of Textile and Allied Workers: and Les Williams, staff-side secretarv of the National Whitley Council.

The management team consists of representatives from some of the most profitable and ruthless businesses in Britain, which are completely tied up with Tory policies.

They include G. Gilbertson, personnel general manager with ICI. The new chairman of the CBI is Michael Clapham, one of ICI's top executives.

ICI, Britain's biggest industrial complex, has just become the world's largest chemical company. According to the magazine 'Chemical Insight', the £1,400m ICI giant has just wrested first place from the American-based Du Pont corporation ICI figured prominently MAINERS Would-be concillator Wright confronted by miners' pickets during their strike. supporting the Tories' drive into the Common Market.

Another management executive on the panel 1S also from a staunchly pro-Market company.

He is D. J. Flunder, a director of the Dunlop Rubber Co which is now merged with Pirelli of Italy. A director of Dunlop prior to his appointment to the Cabinet was Reginald Maudling, the ex-Home Secretary.

Also on the panel is P. Bradbury, the director of industrial relations with the Imperial Tobacco group whose chairman is Sir John Partridge, former head of the CBI. Partridge was knighted by the Tories.

The others are A. J. Nicol, deputy managing director of Joseph Lucas; G. E. D. Halahan, managing director of Round Oak Steel Works; and Peter Trench, chairman of J. Lovell (Holdings), one of the firms currently fighting the building workers. Trench was NFBTE director and a member of Labour's Prices and Incomes Board.

Workers should put no faith whatsoever in this TUC-CBI body in their fight for decent wages.

It represents a scheme scrambled together by the rightwing leadership in the trade unions in the aftermath of the Tories miners' strike.

The trade unions were at no stage given a mandate by their members to join this treacherous enterprise with the employers.

Every worker knows the phoniness of arbitration. And with unemployment now million, rate of investment falling, big business cannot and will not pay decent wages. Ihis joint panel is a prescription. for wage-cutting. The : building workers, in particular, must be warned Moscow Trials Anthe Paperback, 62гР Behind The Moscow Paperback 75p ROBERT BLACK:

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