Solidarity Action Can Stop Dismissals
By Harry Finch
1959The NewsletterHarry Finch Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →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.
Tue sacking of Frank Horsman can well become the pattern in the motor industry unless any future attempts are met with united resistance by all British Motor Corporation workers.
This is the main lesson of the strike at Morris Motors, Oxford.
A meeting of the BMC stewards, called in Birmingham after the strike by the BMC joint stewards’ committee, pledged 100 per cent. support ‘for direct action in all BMC plants whenever a shop steward is victimized and sacked’.
Speakers talked of ‘withdrawing our labour, officially or unofficially’.
The BMC committee has made pronouncements before, but has failed to act in time when situations needing action have arisen.
Unless such correct sentiments are brought now before mass meetings of motor workers, and made the policy of these workers, the danger is that more victimization can take place, and that the workers can be divided and confused.
The BMC bosses are out to ‘discipline’ stewards in order to keep down piece-work and day rate wages in their quest for higher profits.
The BMC directors act as a co-ordinated machine. The workers must do likewise.
If this unity is cemented at the bottom, then the top union
I have just read your article in the August 14 issue of Motor Ty The incidents you mention where workers refused to handle goods delivered by drivers who could not produce a union