LONDON DOCKS TO LOSE MEAT TRADE

MITCHELL THOUSANDS of jobs London's dockland axed through a conspiracy by the employers the port's traditional meat trade.

In future the huge meat-importing business will ferred to Sheerness and Avonmouth where non-dock employed in the privately-owned cold stores.

In two weeks the giant Borthwick's meat firm will close its cold store at Deptford, thus closing the sole surviving private cold store on London's riverside. This will throw 140 dockers onto the Temporary Unattached Register (TUR), which is already climbing to 1,300.

The Vestey empire, headed by 31-year-old multi-millionaire, Lord Samuel Vestey. is closing its Riverside store, Nelsons Wharf. in November, adding a further threatening to close his Thames 750 at the Royal Group.

On the surface, the people demanding that the huge New Zealand meat trade be taken away from London is the New Zealand Meat Producers' Board. In a letter sent to 2,000 Royal dockworkers this week, the two companies who handle the New Zealand trade, Scruttons Maltby and Vestey's Thames Stevedoring, make these menaces:

'The poor outputs in London in the last season, resulting in higher costs, have seriously endangered the future of this traffic in the port. It is vitally necessary that between us we achieve immediately an improvement of at least 50 the output per gang, per cent in Who are the men of the NZ Meat Producers' Association demanding this 50-per-cent increase in productivity and threatening the men with massive sackings?

The association, formed in 1922, comprises seven representatives from NZ producers and two government appointees.

And two of the board members at present are from Vestey's and Borthwick's!

'No vendetta' Thus the extent. of the conspiracy against the livelihoods of dockers becomes much clearer. Vestey's rear sheep in NZ, slaughter it, ship it, stevedore it, store it and then sell it.

Yet Vestey - whose family motto is appropriately 'Stability arises from labour' (YOUR labour)—said in an interview the other day: 'We have no vendetta against registered dock labour.' And he went on: 'We are making strenuous efforts to keep our business in London.' As we have already shown, Vestey and his friends are calling the tune in the NZ Meat Producers' Association which is sending pilot shipments of meat through Avonmouth and Sheerness and closing down one cold store after another. Since January 1962 the Vestey group has shutdown eight cold stores in London. in London's dockland will be acy by the employers to end be translabour is 87 to the TUR Now Vestey is Stevedoring firm which employs And Vestey and the other meat monopolists have been gradually taking the meat importing business away from London.

These figures prove it:

• In 1963 a total of 750,000 tons of meat (chilled and frozen) came into London.

• In 1970 the figure had dropped to 369,000 tons and last year 288,000.

• The total for meat and dairy tom a 1971, 16.00 Lo25.000 (butter, eggs.

tons and 1971, 460,000 tons.

Overtime ban

In the face of this onslaught on docks jobs, what is the union leadership doing! Well, we know what Jack Jones, leader of the Transport and General Workers' Union, wants. He has engineered a deal with Lord Aldington, Tory chairman of the Port of London Dockers, disgusted with the recent Jones-Aldington report, make a bonfire of the document.

Labour

LECTURES THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF MAR given by (SLL national London Marxism as the theory ledge Sunday September 17 Development of Ma through working-class Sunday September 24 Nature of the capitalist Sunday October 1 Historical materialism Sunday October 8 EAST HAM TOWN HALL Lister Room Barking Rd, 7 Marxism