Points system - next step in Emerson Plan

IN your nows bulletin, Outlook', Volume 3, No. 5, January 29, 1965, you publish a statement on what you term "the Wandsworth incidents'. waged by Mandel, yet you denounce them as 'ultra-left' Presumably, they should have avoided this struggle and capitulated. Then why did you not give this advice to Mandel?

Are there some special conditions governing what took place in Belgium different to that which took place in Britain.

Pompously you demand to not a single article in the United States paper, "The Militant' or your small circulating European journals which have protested about this.

Yet this movement of young people in Britain is the most significant thing that has happened on the world scale at any time in the history of the international Trotskyist movement.

And all you can do is to blame the Socialist Labour League and its newspaper The Newsletter for telling these young people to fight back against the right wing.

We fully support the struggle of all left-wing socialists Belgium against the right-wing traitors, although we will in all probability disagree with the way the struggle was organised.

Your ambiguous middle-ofthe-road position is, we repeat, untenable. . We ask you to break from this and join the Socialist Labour League in fighting the renegades from our movement such as Mani and others whilst at the same time we unite to defeat the right wing of the Belgian social democracy and of the British Labour Party.

Editorial Board a new agreement covering redundancy.

Under the guise of protecting workers against sackings, the firm is pressing for the acceptance of a package deal which creates a division between workers who are required by production schedules and those who are 'pooled' awaiting work or awaiting the sack.

As many as 350 workers may be sacked during the next few weeks unless the management can push through its plans. The firm claim that this is inevitable due to cuts in production of car bodies for Ford Motors and Rovers and the ending of a contract for rail hopper wagons.

Both craft unions, the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the National Union of Vehicle Builders, have rejected the new revisions to the Emerson 'Linwood Plan.

In spite of pressure from the national officials of the National Union of Vehicle Builders, workers on the production line have strongly resisted attempts to operate : the labour "pool' which is the central part of Emerson's new version of how to get unions to co-operate in sweating out more profit for Pressed Steel.

Production line workers refused instructions to work overtime since they knew that men who had been transferred to the "pool' were still waiting regular jobs.

Potential split

Compare this action with that of Gallacher, Assistant General Secretary of the National Union of Vehicle Builders who called two meetings of the union's district committee on successive days in order to get agreement pushed through to operate the management's 'pool' scheme.

The position in the factory is, therefore, one of a potential split between the craft unions and National Union of Vehicle Builders by means of which the Pressed Steel management can hope to push through its plan.

This is how the first version of the Emerson Plan was manoeuvred in-by first frightening craft workers with possible and some actual redundancies and then getting the cooperation of some pliable shop stewards who thought that all that had to be done in order to defend their wages and jobs was for Pressed Steel to sell plenty of car bodies.

The same weak stewards now stand in the way of a united factory struggle which is the only way to prevent mass sackings.

What is essential at Linwood is a united fight for a reduction of working hours with no loss of pay. When this demand was raised by militant stewards at a recent meeting, sneering reference was made by the convenor to a reduction to 35 and then to 25 hours. 'Education' for the poor education issued by the Department of Education and Science (Report No. 17) deals with 'Education under Social Handicap'. This report arose out of a meeting held recently of 32 headteachers who had experience with children from poor social and physical environments.

These include children from broken homes, children whose parents are in prison, children who had experienced evictions, who lived in slums, etc.

In addition, many mothers who live in such conditions have large families and are forced to go out to work for long hours in bad conditions. Not surprisingly, these women are so worn out that they are unable to attend properly to their children.

These are then labelled 'problem homes' and the parents are accused of showing little interest' in their children's education.

Report No. 17 reveals that children from such homes lose Exactly! This is the only way in which workers in a plant such as Pressed Steel can protect their livelihood from the ups and downs in the market demand for the firm's goods. It is also the only way in which such schemes as the one now brought forward by Emerson can be fought.

The Emerson amendment to the 'Linwood Plan' states that short-time working and work-sharing schemes are acceptable as temporary measures to deal with redundancy.

At the same time an elaborate 'points' plan is outlined on the basis of which the company will decide who is to be sacked and when, As with the Emerson bonus plan, all attempts by the factory workers to conduct a united struggle for all workers in the plant are then abandoned in the hope that each one will benefit by getting more 'points' than his mate.

Not even the craft unions would survive for long such a scheme. Factory organisation becomes simply a rubber stamp for the management's decisions.

Unless the whole of the Emerson 'Linwood Plan' is thrown out, then the redundancy package deal will be brought in at a later stage after 350 workers have been sacked.

Bound

Once the scheme has been forced through and endorsed by the unions, then all workers would be bound by its provisions despite the fact that none of those were brought forward for factory discussion.

It is very probable that Pressed Steel can get the support not only of the trade union leaders but also of the members of the Labour government since what they aim to introduce at Linwood is completely in line with the plans which have been advanced by such Labour leaders as Gunter, Brown and Wilson, for modernising industry.

The Labour leaders have made speeches in which they by Our Education Correspondent ground all through the infant and junior schools, so that by the secondary stage they are firmly rooted in the bottom 20 per cent, whatever their latent ability.

These difficulties are accentuated, rather than overcome, by the conditions of school life.

Pressure for GCE (General Certificate of Education) results and grammar school places leads to the rejection of children who have early failure in reading, numbers and grasping abstract ideas.

There is also a widespread 'status consciousness' amongst teachers against secondary modern schools, teaching "C streams and teaching in schools in poor areas.

The result is that the children with the most difficult home background are also 'educated' in old, ugly schools in slum areas which lack air and space and which have no facilities for art, dance, drama, music, etc.

These schools are often full promised workers they would receive 'severance pay, jobs would be guaranteed provided the workers accepted the need to move from job to job, to accept 'mobility of labour', and to drop restrictive practices, by which Labour and Tories alike, mean craft training, control of piece-work rates and other hard-won rights in the workshops.

A year ago Ray Gunter, then Shadow Minister of Labour and now a member of Wilson's cabinet wrote in 'Socialist Commentary', the right-wing Labour journal, that either the unions would undertake the disciplining of their members or this function would have to be undertaken by the courts.

Discipline

He forecast that special industrial courts would be set up for the job. "The unions,' he said, 'are not eternal. They will exist just as long as they are relevant to the times in which they seek to exist.' The trade union leaders have done their worst in seeking to discipline their members at Linwood, at both the Pressed Steel and Rootes plants. Emerson Consultants Ltd. are ready to work out for the Pressed Steel management the plans they need to use their workers to the maximum.

The state, says Gunter, must intervene. Under the Labour government that means Gunter's own department, the Ministry of Labour.

The aim of Emerson's phase two of the 'Linwood Plan' is to get workers to drop all ideas of independent class struggle, so stress is laid on the 'mutual interest in the Plan and in jobs, profits and bonuses. This point is hammered home several times.

Sacking is a word not liked by Emerson, who substitutes such terms as 'employment reserve, , "technological displacement, 'relocation' and 'redeployment'. The Plan talks about allocating jobs through the firm's other plants and drawing in the of old furniture because it takes up less room than the new type, and they are short of equipment because they have nowhere to store it.

They also have a high proportion of poorly-qualified, untrained and part-time teachers.

This report also reveals that these so-called 'problem families' are often left till last when it comes to re-housing, and when they are re-housed they are usually sent to pre-war council houses. In this way many councils practise a hidden form of social segregation.

Because of these conditions, it is not to be wondered at that there is a high rate of truancy amongst these children. This is encouraged by the fact that many of them are given casual employment at abysmal wages by small employers, shopkeepers, etc.

The Ministry of Education is concerned at the 'lack of communication' between teachers and these so-called "belowaverage' children, but this report has nothing to offer apart from a few cliches about 'instilling a back