STEEL

Part five. Scotland: 10,000 jobs will go BY On a foggy winter's day the Glengarnock steel works lies inert among the gentle Ayrshire hills like some awful sleeping monster with great spikes sticking out of its back.

The huddle of cent ry-old, grey stone houses that constitute Glengarnock passed in a few seconds to give way to the cramped shops but somewhat brighter houses of Kilbirnie.

Forty years ago the same narrow streets rang with the sound of hobnail boots as police baton-charged starving iron workers out of a job—-the plant closed in 1930 because of the slump.

Now up to 700 of 1,300 men at Glengarnock sentence once again.

Tory Industry Secretary Peter Walker has said that open-hearth steel-making at the works will end.

The rolling mills, turning out primarily railway products and employing about 800 men, are to stay open.

But even with the mills intact, the loss of 700 jobs in a town of only 6,000 will be serious. If the entire works shuts it will be a disaster and it may not be long before the No definite date has been given for the closure, but it is expected to be within the next two years.

The steel-rolling plant at Glengarnock is considered modern, but few people in the works believe that when the time comes to replace it— which could he in twn to four years—the machinery will be replaced there.

In the first place mills of the semi-automated, computercontrolled type being developed at Scunthorpe require a third of the labour.

And in the second. once steelmaking at Glengarnock is ended it would be difficult to justiny the cost of transporting steel from Ravenscraig, near Motherwell, to within spitting distance of the Irish Sea merely to get it rolled.

The same arguments apply to other rolling mills in Scotland Clydebridge, Dalzell and Lanarkshire and also to Ebbw Vale and Shotton, in Wales.

According to Ayrshire (central division) Labour MP population of Kilbirnie and Glengarnock work at the steel plant. Allowing for women and children, 13,000 men represents almost the whole of the male work force.

It was this sort of effect that STUC deputy . general secretary Mr James Milne had in mind when he told me the axing of 7.000 inhs in Scotland in the next two years was "your juan a lot worse than it looked.

Far from being spread all over Scotland, most of the job losses would fall into two compact areas, turning them at a stroke, into employment black spots.

ALTERNATIVE Glengarnock is in a particularly vulnerable position. Isolated deep in Glasgow's agricultural hinterland there is no alternative work nearby.

The town would have been saved had the much-talked of Hunterston steel complex got off the ground.

But it has not. And that the Tories now

tion to steel after 1870 found Scotland without suitable ore and by 1930 even scrap had to be imported.

These drawbacks still apply. But for political and social considerations it is near certaln there would be no steelmaking and rolling capacity anywhere in Scotland-even at Ravenscraig.

In addition to the 2,500 job losses at Cambuslang and Glengarnock, up to 4,000 more of Scotland's 25,000 steel jobs will be axed in the Motherwell area.

The six open-hearth furnaces at Dalzell, Motherwell, will be closed and about third of the 2,185 labour force sacked.

A similar proportion of the 1,377 jobs Lanarkshire works, also in Motherwell, will go when the six open-hearth furnaces are blown out there.

Unemployment at Motherwell totals 1,386, which at first glance does not look too bad. new electric-arc works at Hallside, which would provide up to 500 new jobs.

But on the whole the plan would concentrate steelmaking, rolling and tube plants around the single big complex at Ravenscraig with the loss of about 7,000 jobs and the closure of about a dozen smaller units.

Redundancies would almost certainly not end there.

Once the rolling mills at Glengarnock and Clydebridge, already top heavy with men compared the near automated mills being built at Scunthorpe, become obsolete, they will almost certainly close with a further loss of up to In the long term—up to 1977—the future of rolling plant at Dalzell and Lanarkshire works in Motherwell, involving. another 2,000 men, would be in doubt, especially since rolling plant at Gartcosh, near Ravenscraig, is to be expanded.

If all this happens by the