Organize General Strike

DELEGATES from 13 north-west action committees yesterday voted for union leaders to call a national strike of building workers and for the TUC to organize a General Strike to bring down the Tory government.

They declared that the unity of the working class and the forging of a new leadership 'can only be developed in struggle against the common enemy organized in the Tory Party'.

A Labour government had to be returned pledged to socialist policies, including the nationalization of the entire building industry, the repeal of the Industrial Relations Act, the *fair rents' Act and the expropriation of all private landlords.

motion put £100-a-day airlift Lump' men fly in by helicopter A BASILDON, Essex, building employer is non-union workers over picket lines. The site, off Laindon Link, where 172 houses al major site in Basildon to stop work in workers' claim of £30 for a 35-hour week.

All 24 men at the site work on the 'lump' without union cards and claim they already earn £50 a week without joining the strike.

Pickets from all over Essex turned up at the barbed-wire capped gate for the first time on Wednesday to speak to workers as they drove onto the site in their cars.

They were thwarted when it was discovered the men had gone to work an hour earlier.

The next morning the non-union men arrived in a convoy of company trucks escorted by One hundred police lined the pavement while five of the 70 pickets on duty approached the company van. Drivers waved them away and police began clearing a path onto the site. The five pickets sat down in front of the van's wheels in protest and were immediately arrested.

Undismayed pickets were at their posts again yesterday, but neither cars nor vans appeared.

The mystery was solved when amid clouds of dust a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter landed on an open space between the halfcompleted houses and five workers got out.

Through the ten-foot high wire mesh fence across the site entrance pickets watched the helicopter land and take off six times until all 24 'lump' workers were on the site.

SEPTEMBER

FUND £132.25 THE SHIFT to the right by the TUC over the past week must strengthen the Tory government and encourage it to press on with its attacks on wages and jobs.

expose the dangers of these decisions by preparing the working class to build an alternative revolutionary leadership within the trade unions.

Join this fight. Start with an extra boost for our Fund this month. Our target is £1,750 by the end of September. Let's do everything we can now to raise it. Post your donations immediately to :

September Appeal Fund 86a Clapham High Street London, SW4 7UG. 13 north-west committees pass militant motion Wigan meeting also condemned company deals and declared 'our union leaders have no confidence in the working class'.

It further stated: 'We are totally opposed to the wage-cutting machinery set up by the TUC and the CBI which accepts the 8 per cent Tory pay norm.' There were demands for big delegations from the region to be sent to London next Thursday when union leaders meet employers to discuss the £30, 35hour week claim.

Delegates also demanded

TUC break off talks with Tories and failing that UC. ATT using a Globe ( re being support Ex-RAF pilot Bill Regan: Small price The helicopter airlifted the men home last night.

UCATT shop steward Ben Wilkinson told me: 'Using a helicopter shows the length to which was indispensable to the to go!

He added: 'All of the men inside are non-union. They say they are earning more money than us, but if it's so good on the lump why don't we do it.

'The reason is we want the security of a proper wage and an employer. These lump men will have to get a union card or be squeezed out.' The plan to use a firm's helicopter to beat the pickets was the brainchild of Bill Regan, chairman and managing director of Globe Construction.

An ebulliant ex-RAF pilot, Regan claims the £100-a-day cost of using the heliconter is a small prius to the he for keep as mall wheels of his construction business turning.

He said, "There has been no trouble but there might have been and that is why I decided to use the helicopter.' Wearing a blazer with an RAF badge on the breast pocket Regan told me with a sweep of his arm: 'I'm British and I'm a free man and I will not be dictated to about how to run my 'I've got as much right to keep my site open as any man has to come and work for me. I've got the best labour force in the world and I'm building the best and cheapest houses in the whole of England.' Tall, fair-haired Regan said the company helicopter would be used for as long as pickets were general secretary George should pull out himself.

Condemning company deals, a Vigan delegate, who called the meeting, said: 'Ordinary family men have now got criminal records from legal picketing. If ve sign company deals the union will be against us too. Who is pulling the strings in this society?' But Billy. Jones, chairman of the Merseyside action committee, and leading Communist Party member, told the meeting that 'we agree to company deals but they must be ratified regionally before the men go back. 'Personally I wish it had been helicopter to fly Construction Ltd built, is the last of the building GLOBE FELSTED €52 at the gate, which being rigorously Basildon police.

Pickets said the to the site in stren THE WAY FORWAF PENT-UP ANGER erupted in Aberdeen yesterday when builders demanded their leaders tell the facts about the agreement at Peter Cameron's where men are back at work following a company agreement. Local UCATT official Charles Kelly refused to answer questions about the Cameron situation and unplugged the microphone saying the matter was one for the Cameron workers. yesterday were controlled by i would return ith on Monday.

national, but our union says it's a regional strike. We must be réalistic. Is there any likelib lood ın the near tuture ot emplo yers agreeing to this claim?' said He refused to accept the resolution saying he could not speak for his committee and questioned whether the meeting was ofiicial.

The three Liverpool men left the meeting before the vote was taken. The resolution was carried absentions® by delegates who supported the policies expressed, but were not mandated by their committees.

A demand was also supported for a national conference of action committee delegates as soon as possible.

The delegates : ilso agreed to meet weekly in Wi gan on Fridays :the central Li Ibour Club at 11.15 a.m.

Scottish deal angers builders FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT Cameron's were the first to sign the so-called Scottish agreeThe men are being paid £30 a week only if they earn a £5 bonus on the basic rate. They are not receiving the expected guaranteed £30.

Union officials are desperately hoping Cameron's will not break off the agreement as they have threatened.

UCATT officials failed to show up at a meeting arranged by management on the Haymarket Taylor Woodrow site, Leicester, on Wednesday, when a secret ballot forced a return.

Taylor Woodrow scaffolders claimed that only 20 men at the meeting were employed by the firm, the rest work for subcontractors.

The ballot was held with the clocking-in numbers of the employees at the bottom of the paper. This brought a 36-34 vote for a return on Monday of men who joined the strike ten weeks ago.

aim of the All Trades Unions Alliance is to build a new leadership in the unions which will fight to win economic demands and, above all, educate workers in the theory and practice of Marxism and expose, in practice, the limitations of economic struggles and establish the primacy of the political struggle for socialism.

The practical experience of the last eight months has shown militant trade unionists that those forms of struggle which rely. exclusively on picket-line militancy are inadequate.

The economic crisis, the entry into the Common Market and the urgent political tasks posed before the unions demand imperatively not only a new form of practical struggle but also a correspondingly higher form of working-class organization. This is the revolutionary party of the working class.

There is no other way to establish the political independence of the trade unions from the reactionary union bureaucracy and the ideology of the ruling class.

The All Trades Unions Alliance has decided to call a conference on October 22 which will be devoted to discussing the Swan Hunter 'STRIKERS throw out union help' screamed the Newcastle Journal' yesterday about the decision of the Tyneside boilermakers to stay out until their 17; per cent cost-of-living claim has been met in full.

The 'Journal's' anxiety about the overwhelming rejection of the officials' 'help' in the five Swan Hunter yards is certainly hearttelt. The boilermakers' action is unprecedented and the intensity of the feeling against union officials has reached boiling point.

They have rejected local official, Jack Oliver's plea to go back while their demand was negotiated.

They will stop all subscriptions to their Society pending a satisfactory solution to the dispute and they have appointed their own shop stewards as negotiators.

One resolution at the meeting —proposed but not put to the vote-—was that full-time officials should be banned from all future mass meetings.

By next week it is expected that all of Swan Hunter's yards, with the exception of the shiprepair yards, will be completely shut and 8,000 workers laid off.

Union officials and company executives are pinning all their hopes on the return of boilermakers' president Dan McGarvey from Brighton.

Judging from the men's scathing remarks on the Govan and Marathon agreements published in Workers Press, the hopes of the management seem to be entirely misplaced.

BUILDING societies, whose assets exceed £10,000m, yesterday raised their lending rates by * per cent to avoid a 'very acute nortgage tamine. Those wanting • buy homes will now have to pay 8t per cent interest.

AN INQUIRY is now likely to be held by the Transport and General Workers' Union into the dismissal of 37 men this week from the Metallic Manufacturing Company's factory in Ardrossan, Ayrshire. Patrick Frey, one of the sacked men, said: We had a verbal agreement with the management that it would be a case of last in, first out. I have been working here for four years, but they have continued to employ people who have been with them for only months.' Office. с clapham clay stet, London, Clapham SW4 7UG.

Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (TU), 180b Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UG.

vital experiences of the last eight lems of political leadership in lems political (leadershir the unions and to advancing the struggle for the implementation of the programme of the Alliance outlined in the Charter of Basic Rights and the Manifesto adopted in November 1971.

The Charter of Basic Rights includes complete opposition to sackings, to all forms of productivity dealing, to racialism, to social service cuts, to the Common Market and the Housing, Immigration and Industrial Relations Acts.

This defence of basic rights is inseparably tied to the struggle for a campaign to force the Tories to resign and to elect a Labour government.

Such a government must be forced to nationalize, without compensation and under workers' control, all the major industries, land and banks; withdraw British troops from Ulster; withdraw from NATO and the Common Market; and repeal all reactionary legislation.

We cordially invite all trade union branches, shop stewards and district committees to send delegates and/or observers to the conference.

September