'GET BACK TO WORK' Tory 'plan' for vouth

Scan page 12

Stan "BACK to work, the lot of you!" This was the piece of advice which Mick McGahey, President of the NUM Scotland and leading member of the Communist Party, had for the 640 workers at the Bedlay colliery in Lanarkshire last week, when they went on strike to defend their jobs.

The strike began when National Coal Board (NCB) officials announced at a meeting of the pits' consultative committee on Thursday 17 September, that the pit was to close in two months time.

None of the workers at Bedlay had had any warning that this announcement was to be made, and shop stewards on the consultative committee had not even received an agenda for the meeting. But the miners were unanimous in the opinion that McGahey had had advance warning of what was coming up.

"McGahey must have had a backhander and a case of whisky before the meeting - it's a pity it wasn't a case of whisky over his head," said one of the canteen women at Bedlay, expressing the feelings of the rest of the workforce there.

The NCB. officials claimed that Bedlay had to close because reserves of coal there were near exhaustion, and because there were "severe geological problems" with the faces now being worked.

But it reserves of coal were running out, why wasn't Bedlay on the Tories' hit-list of 26 collieries produced in February of this year? And why did management, only a few months ago, say that reserves there were large enough to guarantee jobs till 1986?

Vote

A mass meeting was held on Monday 21 September after the consultative committee meeting. The vote to strike was unanimous, supported by all members of all unions at the colliery: NUM, NACODS (colliery overmen and deputies), SCEBTA (tradesmen, engineers, and electricians) and COSA (office staff).

An NUM member at Bedlay summed it up:

"With near enough three million on the broo, every job is needed. We can't afford to let 640 jobs go. This pit can take on local labour, but only if we keen it open. There's enough unemployed in the country without us adding to it as well."

McGahey seemed to be of a different opinion. Having failed completely to argue against the proposed closure at the consultative committee meeting, he now came out in open opposition to the strike and called for a return to work.

"McGahey sold us down the river," explained the steward from Bedlay. "We got in touch with him but he didn't want to speak to us. He just said that the pit had to close and that we should get back to work. In February he said that no nit with workahle reserves would be shut down, but now he's for letting Bedlay be shut down."

But the Bedlay miners were in no mood to follow McGahey's advice. Flying pickets were sent out to other pits in Lanarkshire and Ayıshire. Sorn, Highhouse and Barony came out straight away, and there was a partial response at Cardowan.

On the third day of the strike, miners from Bedlay, Cardowan and Polkemmet (where miners had by then also come out in solidaritv) lobbied the meeting of the Scottish Executive of the NUM in Edinburgh.

One of the Executive members turned up late because he had been to a funeral. "Not McGahev's, by any chance?" the miners asked hopefully.

Early

McGahev didn't turn un late though. He had arrived 1½ hours early to avoid the lobby. McGafferty, too, tried to slip in unnoticed but failed. He promised the same as all the other members of the Executive cornered by the miners on their way into the meeting: "to do everything possible to prevent the closure.

After the meeting, to which none of the strikers had been admitted, Executive member Jim McCafferty addressed the miners. In the face of a constant barrage of McGahey: miners in no mood jeers and heckling, McCafferty stressed the need for a return to work.

"That's the smart thing to do. You've shown your anger, vou've proved vou're opposed to the closure. So go back to work now and let us get down to negotiations with the NCB," he told the Return McGahey and the rest of the NUM Executive got what they wanted. The day after the lobby the Bedlay miners voted to return to work in exchange for promises that NCB engineers and NUM engineers would look into the possibility of opening up new seams in the mine. The threat of closure, therefore, still hangs over the colliery.

• Faced with a rapidly snowballing miners' strike, MeGahey, despite his left posturing, acts no differently from any other union bureaucrat. He lined up with the employers to get the strike stopped McGahey's role in this strike must not be forgotten. DETAILS of the latest Tory scheme to "help" alleviate youth unemployment as a result of the recent riots, are just beginning to emerge.

They constitute a much wider attack on employment conditions than at first envisaged: an emplover can claim ElS per week for each employee aged 18 or under whose gross earnings are less than £40 a week. Gross earnings are defined as including overtime day, commission or tips, productivity payments and London allowances.

If an employer is so generous as to offer £45 a week, the subsidy is cut by hall to £7.50 a week.

This is quite obviously an attempt to limit pav, to. prevent people "pricing themselves out of the market" - pricing themselves out, no doubt, in the same way as hairdressers have: for a basic 40 hour week, with unpaid evening sessions and often no lunch hours a first year apprentice would receive the exorbitant amount of £26 a week in London and £25 a week Thatcher outside Lonaon.

This scheme will largely affect those employed by small firms, which are usually not unionised and therefore have no negotiated wage rate.

It will particularly affect London workers where wages have always been higher than in the provinces.

The scheme will come into effect on 4 January next year.

Under the previous youth employment subsidy introduced by the Wilson government, each employee under 18 was subsidised by £10 a week a considerable amount in when the amnunt in 1072 whan tha scheme ended - regardless of wage levels.

It is evident that the Tories are reintroducing the scheme with a twist in order to reduce the wages paid to young employees to make them cheaper than adults.

After all, older unemployed people get precious little media coverage and they do not riot.

It smacks of the usual capitalist tactics of divide and rule - even down to dividing the dole queues.