Conference Vote to Back Cuts Fight

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TGWU biennial conference this year voted to back a policy of occupations and supporting strikes to fight cuts.

It also defeated the platform on "workers' participation" and "planning agreements" • Former Talbot convenor Eddy McCluskey told conference that he had been the secretary of the planning committee drawing up a five-year agreement with Chrysler management - only to discover that the firm had been sold while the negotiations were in progress!

All amendments backing Benn were ruled out of order when the Executive withdrew the motion they amended. But there were only 28 at a fringe meeting for the support of Healey, while a meeting called to support Benn drew over 300 delegates.

By Thursday the bureaucrats were rattled. They ran roughshod, manipulating the agenda and brushing aside all objections, to obstruct support for Tony Benn as Deputy Leader.

Conference also voted for a motion supported by the platform calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament. But such routine leftism from the leadership was not combined with any break from support for British imperialism in Ireland, or any break from nationalist calls for EEC withdrawal and import controls to protect 'British' employers against 'foreign' competition.

The 'debate' on Ireland was as curtailed and reactionary as any in recent years. Acting General Secretary Alex Kitson delivered an almost empty and largely reactionary speech extolling trade unionism as the solution to the war in Ireland, and no resolution was put to the vote.

A resolution calling for wage claims to incorporate cost of living clauses to provide increases linked to inflation came within an ace of being carried for the second conference running. declare the motion lost was countered by demands for tellers to be brought out to count the vote. But the right wing hand raisers were chivvied out of bars and tea-rooms, and it was lost 348-437.

The 350,000 women members of the TGWU may as well not have existed for all the attention given to their problems by the Conference. During the whole five days, the only women to appear on the platform were the menial helpers handing cups of tea or paper-work to the leading male bureaucrats.

Region 5 Secretary Brian Mathers was stung into publishing a leaflet in reply to a damning account of his sell-out of the Ansells brewery strike.

The exposure, entitled 'The Strike Mathers Broke', was distributed at conference, but unsigned and emphatically disowned by the Ansells branch secretary feet to declare that Mathers' 500-word reply was a complete distortion of the facts. Mathers was unable to offer any substantive reply to the statement that his intervention resulted in a 'settlement' including:

'700 jobs lost. An ex gratia payment of £1,000 for the first two years of service and £100 per year thereafter. 300 jobs with approximately 250 wage cut, far worse working conditions and, so far, no representation or agreement. Re-engagement not reinstatement"

He offered no reply to claims that pickets hac been told not to operate outside Birmingham. or that TGWU drivers hac been told by Mathers b cross picket lines in order te avoid the threat of lega. action.

He also did not ders organising a secret ballo: using company envelopes and the company = addressograph.