No buyer for Briant's

THERE IS virtually no chance of a buyer for Peckham, a spokesman for the liquidator said yesterday.

Since the work-in began 1l weeks ago, 60 firms have responded to adverts for the factory placed by the liquidator.

But only eight or ten materialized as serious offers and now there is not even one firm buyer in sight.

Liquidator's spokesman H. B. Blandford Baker told me yesterday turnover at the works was so low that no employer could afford to take on the existing labour force at current pay rates.

He said the five-year-old factory needed an annual turnover of flm a year, but in the previous 12 months had only notched up £66,000.

As turnover dipped over the past four years because of market conditions, the proportion taken up by wages rose fron 31 to 51 per cent.

Yesterday's bleak news was thai any new employer would be forced either to reduce the workforce or slash wages-neither of which has ever been acceptable to the work-in.

With hundreds of printers unemployed in London, the 120 men and 30 women felt they had everything to gain from taking over their factory.

Factory occupations will, without doubt, be central to the fight against the blanket sackings which will follow Britain's entry into the Common Market.

But Workers Press and the Socialist Labour League have

Brave and selfless

struggle of 150 in danger VE DEMAND WE DEMAND RIGHT WORK THE RIGHT &TO WORK Workers seen inside the printing plant always insisted that unless these take-overs were linked to the political perspective of mobilizing the trade union and labour movement in the struggle to force the Tories to resign and elect a Labour government pledged to socialist policies, they would be ineffective.

We warned from the outset that work-ins could not save what even the employers had given up as a bad job. This has not been more bitterly illustrated than at the upper Clyde shipbuilders' yards, where thousands of jobs haye been lost.

Until at least the end of July cash for paper and electricity to operate the Briant printing machines was provided by the liquidator to clear £20,000 worth of business half finished when the company collapsed.

This more than anything else allowed the fiction of a successful work-in to be maintained.

But since that time the work-in committee has been responsible for the wages of people employed at the plant and the total cost of all materials and electricity.

Now the liquidator, P. Granville White, has warned work-in leader Bill Freeman that the workers will be liable and he has sought to impress upon him that if no-one can be found to buy the plant as a going concern the workers will have to leave, even Let left press print demand to unions PAINTERS UCATT in the Wimbledon, London, south branch have unanimously supported a call for special dispensation for Workers Press and other papers in the labour movement in the event of a stoppage of the national press.

Their resolution to the Merton Trades Council calls on all its affiliated branches to demand of the executive of the printing unions - NATSOPA, SOGAT • PERIODICALS • NEWSPAPERS PAPERBACKS CENTRE JBE Faste if it means a High Court it means a High Court order, so that the assets can be sc that the assets can be sold off to the highect hidder the highest bidder.

Blandford Baker told me there was no chance of the work-in making the business pay.

He revealed for the first time that the real cause of Briant's downfall was that management borrowed too much money from finance houses in their efforts to modernize and had then been prevented by the slump from recovering the cash from turnover.

Bill Freeman refused to discuss the liquidator's bleak predictions yesterday. Recently he admitted that many of the offers to buy the plant had been bracketed with demands for redundancies or wage-cutting.

Now he will either have to give in to these demands or wait until he and the other 150 workers are thrown out into the road by police armed with a court order.

Either course will mean that the brave and selfless struggle of the men and women who have loyally followed the work-in leadership over more than two long months will have been in vain.

We repeat again: The closure of Briant Colour Printing is a direct result of the trade slump and the drastic fall in employers' rate of profit.

It is part of a phenomenon common not only throughout the print trade, where hundreds of small firms have been axed in the past year, but also throughout British industry.

The fight for the right to work can only be brought about by mobilizing the trade union and labour movement in a General Strike to force the government to resign and return a Labour government pledged to socialist policies.

These would include the nationalization of the printing industry without and under workers' and NGA-to grant special dispensation to •Morning Star and all labour press to print during any future strikes against the Tory govern'This is vital in a situation such as the jailing of the five dockers under the Industrial Relations Act, where all the printworkers immediately came to the support of trade unionists fighting for their basic rights.

'As a consequence, it continues, 'the press of the workers' movement was also interrupted while the Tory propaganda through other channels' NOW OPEN Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs Fri 9 a.m.-7.30 p.m.

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