LINDUSTRY YORKS SWEET FACTORY STRIKE VICTORY

After a week’s strike, 400 girls employed by DunhilPs Licorice Works (Pontetract, Yorks.) return to work on Monday with a resounding victory in their pockets. They had forced the employers to accept a 44-hour week as against the old hours of 464, they had rejected contemptuously his threat to take them back without their leaders, and they had shown an attitude of confident defiance that must have struck the fear of God into the hearts of local employers.

This is a strike whose lessons need consideration by socialists, for it was a strike of that younger generation of which so many socialists are all too ready to despair. More fashionable ‘New Left’ socialists cover this pessimism with a gloss of sociological rubbish about the coffee cult and the terrible effects of commercialized culture. But here were girls who were just as keen - as any others on rock and roll and the pops. Yet without any rank-and-file or political leadership they forced an employer to cave in.

Young girls supply militant leadership Every morning the factory was picketed by young girls in jeans and curling-pins. Blacklegs got home to find their houses decorated with paintings of shapely legs in long black stockings. FForemen left the factory at night to an accompaniment of boos and hisses that sent them scuttling home. On the last day of the strike the 400 girls marched through the town in a body, banners flying, to collect their wages; they returned to demonstrate solidly for two hours while the union officials negotiated with the manager, displaying their banners and singing improvised strike songs which gladdened the hearts of socialists—and made it difficult for any negotiator to emerge with anything but a good settlement!

The managing director, Godson, had announced on the first Monday of the strike that he would agree to a 44-hour week, and would take back the workers ‘with a very few exceptions, those exceptions being of persons who are not acceptable to the Management. Upon a return to work it is understood that there will be no victimization on either side’(!) The girls voted to stay out. On the Thursday, they all received a letter from the Managing Director, in which he said: class girls, in an industry poorly organized, without any sort of rank-and-file political leadership, knew how to struggle, defeat the employer and advance offensive slogans right in line with the current needs of the working class. There is no need for a continued decline in Labour’s vote among the younger generation, if only the new Labour youth organizations can tap the great source of energy that class issues have within them.

By our Industrial Correspondent