BUSMEN SACKED

The Newsletter, vol. 2 no. 81, 13 December 1958 · scan page 4

Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.

TRIVIAL MISTAKES ‘BOOKED’ BY INSPECTORS:

From Our Industrial Correspondent Mass meeting of 400 Leicester Corporation bus workers demanded the resignation or relegation to the zank of conductor of an inspector who had been accused of submitting ‘Gestapo-like reports’ about It was stated that workers had been sacked every week as a result of the reporting of trivial mistakes.

In a letter to a local paper an inspector’s wife claimed that her husband ‘was called before his superiors and asked to explain why he had so few “bookings”’ and told ‘that it was part of his duty to “book” all mistakes, whether small or large’.

There has been much dissatisfaction about the way discipline is enforced, and the mass meeting was summoned as the result of a petition signcd by 300 bus workers.

ECONOMICS EXPANSION? IT’S MUMBO-JUMBO IN A duction important user industries might have turned over to the use of other materials such as aluminium, plastics and fibre-glass. Or they might have met the limits of their market and entered a phase of contraction.

This is not an impossible account of future relations between steel and motors.

After aH, the present problem of the coal industry has elements of this. ‘Expansion’ is hardly the key to this one.

Expansion, for private business, means profitable investment. For some key sectors it now means automation.

_No one denies that automation makes for surplus labour. The ‘best’ employers and the ‘responsible’ trade union bright boys speak of ‘planned reductions’, letting normal wastage do the job as far as possible and compensating those who become redundant.

In one of its characteristic phrases the Labour programme solves this by saying ‘full employment ensures that alternative work will be available’.

Will do the trick The government will do the trick with its magic formula of expansion. Presumably this will imply State intervention ad pted to the needs of big industry.

There will be a constant and increasingly frantic race to forestall and correct the system’s instabilities.