Who will control Stoke unemployed centre?

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-Time Out:

Giving in for utopia WHEN Socialist Organiser supporters set up the North Staffordshire Campaign against Unemployment last year, with the bulletin Dole Mirror, we demanded an unemployed centre. The local labour movement conference in Stoke last December decided to set up a centre, and we felt we were making progress.

However, when the local trade union bureaucrats found they were in a minority in the Campaign against Unemployment, they went off and set up their own Standing Committee for Unemployed Workers. This body of union officials and invited individuals goes along with the TUC guidelines for centres for the unemployed - guidelines which propose that the centres should be run by committees with a majority of Regional TUC people and local council representatives, rather than unemployed workers.

Structure

Socialist Organiser supporters had argued for a structure where the unemployed could play a full part together with affiliated labour movement delegates. The bureaucrats wanted a two-tier system: officials and full-timers with all the money on top, and the rest of us, who are actually fighting unemployment. down below.

The result has been what porters predicted. Dole Mirror has been forced to rely on donations from individual union branches and ward parties and its oWn fund-raising • activities.

Meanwhile the Standing Committee, when it actually got round to getting a building for its centre, found a lack of activists to do the decorating. Fortunately for the bureaucracy, the SWP had gone along with the StandTIME OUT journalists have abandoned their fight against the journal's owner, Tony Elliot, after 14 weeks.

The chapel split decisively when 40 members voted to leave the dispute and build their own little socialist island in a marriage between their strike paper, "Not". , and some unspecified city finance.

The I] who stayed behind are not expected to slug it out with Elliot. They seem happy to negotiate a return to work, which does not include equal pay or a greater share in editorial control, which were the original demands of the strike. glad to oblige.

The centre is now open - and the bureaucrats are trying to get rid of the SWP! They are horrified that the management committee wants real power to run the centre.

We can still make the unemployed centre into a useful tool in the fight against unemployment, but it will take a fight to ensure that control of the centre rests in the hands of the unemployed.

The majority includes all the most radical elements, as well as the Time Out chapel leadership. But whatever they say about working outside the constraints of capitalism, by abandoning the fight against Elliot, they have capitulated in the struggle against the employer for the sake of utopia.

Tony Elliot himself could be seen complaining on TV shortly before the chapel vote that Time Out journalists had always blurred the issue of what kind of publication they were working for. He himself had no doubt it was a capitalist operation. merchant firm of GrahamGratrix.

Whilst Tate and Lyle went down without a fight despite the fact that it was a citadel of trade unionism, thẹ 40 odd workforce at this small warehouse have battled on with grim determination against a cavalier management who locked them out on June 14.

This year's negotiations on pay saw the coming together of three branches of the Thomas Tilling group of which Graham-Gratrix is a part. This show of solidarity was met with a unilateral attempt by management to impose 7% pay rises. The Liverpool, Manchester and Wallsend warehouses called a one-day strike and management responded by declaring redundancies.

The NUJ Executive have cut off funds to the 40 and intends to investigate whether dispute money from the union has been used to research the new publication.

A sharp battle can now be expected not just between Elliot and his former employees, but between all the publications which are claiming the vacant crown in this highly It is doubtful whether good intentions and advice from the New Statesman which has been advising the Time Out strikers is the best recipe to survive. Peter Bryant to attend the dead man's funeral!

A few weeks later, five shop floor workers were given instant notice of redundancy. The five just happened to include the senior shop steward!

The five sat-in until a meeting was fixed up with the union officials, but police were brought in and they were forced out.

The rest of the workforce were working to rule in protest until they were locked out on June 14.

If the workers are unimpressed by the fraudulent management chatter about poverty, then it may not be totally unconnected with the fact that 600 managers and executives were recently given a three week holiday in Miami.

They are, apparently, planning to go to Monte Carlo next summer, presumably to demonstrate their concern about the viability of the firm.

Picket lines have been boosted by contingents from the TGWU 6/612 unemployed branch.

The dispute was made official on Friday 14 July by the TGWU and union blacking is said to be in the process of being organised. Meanwhile the workers have been round the combine to ask for support.

The Wallsend factory has been particularly supportive, whilst the unorganised Huddersfield headquarters of the Tilling group remains to be shut down.

Messages of support should be sent to Peter Dwyer, c/o Transport House, Islington, Liverpool.

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