Guillebaud Report Does Not Provide for Lower

,Paid Rail Workers THE findings of the long-awaited Guillebaud inquiry into railway workers’ wages are at last out, but in spite of the ‘sugar coating’ of high percentage increases for ‘some, the problem of low wages still remains unresolved for the majority of the 300,000-odd railway workers covered by the report. / In the report increases of 8 per cent., 13 per cent. and 18 per cent. are suggested, but a glance at the relative numbers who will receive these increases will rid those railway workers who have been taken in by the report, of any illusions that it solves the pay problem on the railways.

The 18 per cent. increase, for example, will only go to 7,000, the 13 per cent. increase will affect 123,000, and 170,000, of whom nearly half earn less than £8 a week, will receive an 8 per cent. increase.

Already TSSA has welcomed the report, ASLEF can be expected to follow suit. For the vast majority of their members the report is satisfactory, in that the differentials have been re-established.

But what of the NUR? Most of those covered by the 8 per cent. are in this Union and justification exists for the feeling that they have had a raw deal. The NUR leaders must make this quite plain when they comment on the report.

At the moment suspicion exists that the Tories will interfere in the implementation of the report. A phased introduction of the new rates of pay could be forced on the BTC if the Government withheld the money to meet the increases.

Militant action gets results The lesson of the recent 5 per cent. increase demonstrates that these tactics can be cut through once militant action is taken. Before the 5 per cent. was conceded talks on a wage increase had been going on since September, 1957. All that had come from these talks was the 3 per cent. in June, 1958, plus the setting up of the Guillebaud enquiry. Even the demand for an immediate pay increase which was put in last year was pushed into the negotiating machinery in the hope that it would ‘get lost’? until the Guillebaud report came At present railway workers have only got 5 per cent. in their pockets. The demand should be raised now for the full and immediate implementation of the Guillebaud report after justice has been given to the lower paid railway workers, and the Tories given to understand .hat strike action will follow any delay.

The attitude of the Tories to the report will obviously be linked with the future of the railways.

As soon as the 5 per cent. increase was forced out of the BIC, sections of the Tory press were screaming for ‘drastic changes on the railways’. Supporters of the Tory Government are today talking of the ‘dispersal of profitable assets’.

These are not the voices in the wilderness; such demands are being echoed throughout the employing class. Every thinking railway worker can understand from this that a fight for decent wages goes deeper than first appearances show.

The cost of meeting the Guillebaud report is estimated at over £40 million. This money will cbviously have to be found from somewhere. The Tories will find it by taking it out of the backs of railway workers later by ‘improved organisation and further economies’ which mean a drive for more redundancy.

When these methods are discussed by the Tories, railway workers should bear in mind the £72 million which was paid out in 1958 to ex-owners and City of London loan sharks. The assets of these people, for which they are being compensated, are declared redundant every day with the modernisation programme. Railway workers should fight to make compensation and interest parasites redundant before a single railway worker is made redundant through the plans of Macmillan and Co.