PROCEDURE TANGLE

OveER a hundred crane drivers and slingers employed at Fisher and Ludlows, Birmingham, the British Motor Corporation car body factory, returned to work on Monday. By strike action they had forced a breach in the negotiating procedure.

The management has agreed to have discussion at factory level again, instead of the dispute having to go to the York central conference in three weeks’ time.

The strikers had given an excellent display of solidarity in the face of vicious Press attacks. They were accused of being responsible for thousands of BMC workers’ being sent home by the management.

As usual, the strikers also had to face the pressure of their own union officials, who urged them to return to work as soon as the strike began.

Thanks to direct action ‘The men had submitted a claim for a 45s. a month ‘accidentfree’ bonus, after all other transport drivers at Fisher’s had received a rise (thanks to direct action on their part).

The claim was put into the ‘procedure’ machine, which promptly rejected it at factory and local conference leve'!s.

The men decided that it was no use waiting another three weeks for the -York central conference, only to be told ‘No’ again. They decided on direct action to expedite progress.

In the view of Harold Hutchinson, of the Daily Herald, ‘the men were wrong in taking direct action’. But this. Fleet Street pundit does not tell them what they should have done to win their claim.

After all, these slingers and crane drivers get only £12 a week for a job requiring great skill in handling heavy car parts.

He condemned official stoppage Hutchinson no doubt gets rather more than £12 a week for laying down the law to factory workers. (It was he, by the way, who in December 1953 condemned in the Daily Herald the official one-day national engineers’ stoppage.)

Brother E. Jones, secretary of the local branch of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and member of the TGWU executive, put the other side when he said:

‘The action may be unconstitutional, but the men have got fed up with long-winded procedure that seems always to lead to “failure to agree’’.’

The Birmingham Mail tried to make its readers’ flesh crawl when it wrote that the loss of production would mean the loss of thousands of vehicles, adding: “The value of the lost production is computed at between £250,000 and £500,000.’ _ But workers at Fisher and Ludlows told me:

‘If “they” had paid the slingers and crane drivers the 45s.

a month there would not have been a strike. It would have cost the BMC only £100-odd a week—£5,400 a year. Yet they are ready to lose over £250,000 in one week rather than pay these men their just claim.’

I asked these workers, all members of Pype Hayes branch of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, if there had been any hostility between the thousands who were sent home by the management and the hundred strikers.

‘Show-down coming soon’

They replied that in general no blame was attached to the strikers at all.

Bro. E. Bird, chief shop steward for all Fisher and Ludlow maintenance men, told me his own men had just lifted an eight-week overtime ban for the purpose of the management’s renewing discussion with them on a previously rejected wage application.

He went on:

‘My men told the supervisor that if any foreman dared to try to use any of the cranes or hydraulic lifting trucks, they would all refuse to work.’

The workers I spoke to told me that since the BMC amalgamation, they feel that Austin tactics are being introduced at Fisher’s, and that a show-down is coming soon. building workers could .have reimposed on them the wage. cuts and filthy conditions of before the war.

The conference agreed to the setting up of a campaign committee to carry on the struggle for full reinstatement.

The conference was called by the AUBTW’s oldest branch, Lambeth and Borough.