Failure of Leadership at Leyland Vehicles

Scan page 14

PAT LALLY examines the reasons behind the failure of the strikes to save jobs in Leyland Leyland convenor Mick Coyne (right) with pickets Vehicles.

AMIDST angry scenes following last Thursday's mass meeting of strikers at Leyland Vehicles Division factories in Lancashire, the Communist Party-led Strike Committee collapsed in front of a back-to-work backlash and agreed to abandon a clear majority decision of that meeting to stay out.

That was to be the beginning of the end.

Soon after, other, weaker white collar sections voted to return, and confused and divided workers at the nearby Chorley factories did the same.

Later in the day the Strike Committee formally called off the strike.

Inevitably, in the wake of these events, Friday's meeting at the Bathgate plant; Scotland, voted to end their action.

So another 4,100 people are set to join the dole queues of West Luthian and Lancashire and British Leyland boss Sir Michael Edwardes has written another chapter in his "success" story-a fairy story for the Tory government but one of gargantuan horror for BL workers.

Yet the Leyland strikers had confirmed only a fortnight before, their determination to fight on with an overwhelming vote to reject the company's threat of sackings and remain on strike.

Media

While it is true that management stepped up their media offensive subsequently, the reasons for the turnaround lie entirely in the actions and inactivity of the strike leadership at local and national level.

The Thursday mass meetings had been proceeded by talks on the Monday between national and factory representatives of Leyland Vehicles management and trade unions. The company maintained an absolutely hard line, typified by their one "concession" being to put off the sackings for a few weeks.

On the morning of this Equally, there was no hint from the Strike Committee that much new had happened. It only became clear later in the week, and for most people, at the mass meeting itself, that the union leaders had accepted unprecedented demands from the company about what would happen at the crucial meeting of the membership on Thursday and Friday.

Leyland mass meeting The unions had agreed that the strike committee would make no recommendation to the membership; that the company's 12 point proposal would be presented to the meetings and, most incredibly of all, the text of a letter from Edwardes to AUEW leader Duffy threatening to shut down the whole division at the end of the week, unless there was an end to the strike, would be read to the meeting by the Union's District Officer.

Such an agreement, with the union being seen as the mouthpiece of management, was tantamount to strike-breaking of the worst kind.

It is true that the Leyland and Bathgate strike leadership defied the agreement to the extent that they did call for the strike to continue, and in Preston the AUEW District Committee condemned the decision on Edwardes' letter before local Secretary, Len Brindle read it out.

But the fact remains that the mass meeting that led to the strike being called off had been run entirely on the company's terms, significantly loading the odds against the strike carrying on.

Still, there were other factors. The most decisive of them being the inadequacy and impotence of the leadership at factory level.

In Bathgate, where an occupation of the factory had correctly been organised, legal moves by the company for repossession were overturn a properly decided majority vote. The source of his inadequacy at that meeting was the strike leadership's complete inability from the start to offer a real chance of victory.

This was summed up in the actual resolution that he proposed —no more than to stay out until there was an honourable settlement"

In other words, he was openly dropping the demand for no redundancies which had been the sule principled basis of the strike in the first place.

And throughout, as the management became more belligerent, and the national officials bided their time and waited to move in for the kill, the response of the strike committee had grown steadily weaker.

This lack of commitment to the kind of the policies needed to win, was summed up by the strike committee's attitude to the rest of the BL workforce. Edwardes was forcing cutbacks in the Vehicles Division as another part of the corporate plan. He had proved in other BL Divisions that he was prepared to go all the way and a full-scale, BLwide confrontation would he needed if his closure plans were to be defeated.

Yet it was this policy that was resisted most tenaciously by Coyne and the Leyland leadership. No doubt Duffy and Russell strongly opposed it, but that should have been an even better reason for taking it up. All the way through, the line of Mick Coyne was against spreading the action onto a BLwide level.

A further weakness was the adaptation the strike committee made to the largely conservative influence the white collar unions.

While the unity between these unions and the manual workers was Polentally a great strength was progressive only insofar as the industrial unions dictated policy.

Fearful of alienating their support, the strike committee attempted to preserve the unity by avoiding giving a militant lead and this proved self-defeating.

The timidity of the Leyland shop stewards - far and away the most conservative layer of workers in the factorieswas born out of many years of union collaboration with management in job losses and low pay deals.

As convenor, Communist Party member Mick Coyne was following in the tradition of CP involvement in this in the Leyland factories where they have had a strong influence for many years, notably through former convenor Len Brindle. On no occasion, on any issue, were Coyne and the CP openly at odds with the right wing. Underpinning this alliance was the trades unions' alternalive plan -a set of proposals that were based on a solution to the problems of the Vehicles Division alone, through a combination of more government money and import controls.

What this meant for the strike was that the leadership never saw it as being more than a protest-a pressure on the company to be reasonable.

There was an alternative being offered to the strike committee's dead end. But it came not from within the strike but from members and supporters of the Leyland Action Committee, backed by Socialist Organiser, which has been active in the Cars Division over the past two years.

The LAC immediately took up a campaign from its conference, two days after the strike began, in support of the dispute. Recognising that the main danger was the isolation of the strike to the Vehicles Division, a fight was taken up for an urgent meeting of the combine committee.

When the combine met, it was LAC members from BL's Cowley Assembly that successfully raised a motion for Cars/ Vehicles conference to discuss extending support.

Mick Coyne's response was that the time was not right for such a meeting.

Nothing more was to come of it.

Through a series of bulletins, the LAC was local leadership and counterpose an aggressive policy of corporate-wide action.

It was able to prepare militants for the inevitable betrayal of the national officials and take up the vacillations of the local leadership.

In the strike's final week, during which the heroic Laurence Scotts strikers were the victims of a police-scabs raid, it carried an open letter from Scotts strike leader, pointing out the need to spread the fight in Vehicles to the rest of BL and the treachery of Boyd and Duffy. In return the LAC earned the support on the picket lines of the most determined strikers and the vitriolic hostility of the strike leadership who tried unsuccessfully to stop LAC leaflets being given out.

Had their energies expended on the LAC been directed against the AUEW leadership, the outcome of the strike might have been a lot different.

This anti-LAC hysteria, was given the blessing of the International Marxist Group members in the strike, though in the Cars Division, members of that organisation have been involved in LAC activities.

Not only was the Vehicles strike not regarded as an appropriate medium for joint work with other organisations with supporters in BL, the IMG were against the policy of making a turn to the Cars Division a central orientation, "favouring instead general labour movement support.

However, the IMG had developed a close working relationship with the strike leadership, in particular, Mick Coyne. This was confirmed following their attendance at an LAC public meeting in Leyland which had been witch-hunted and declared blacked by Coyne personally, after he had turned down an invitation to attend.

He subsequently announced that the IMG had given him a full report of all that was said.

Then Coyne made an Edwardes-style ruling that no-one was to hold meetings or distribute leaflets without the approval of the strike committee.

The LAC replied that they would not comply - it was a breach of basic labour movement rights. Coyne responded that the "ultra-left" had already agreed to it-as the IMG had asked his permission to hold a meeting and allowed him to vet their leaflet!

So a four week mass strike in defence of jobs has met with defeat. It means a further grinding down of the BL workforce and can only boost Edwardes' drive to exterminate militant trade unionism in the company.

Though there is nothing which can make up for that, still it provides yet more evidence of the worst kind that big changes are necessary at all levels of the trade union leadership.

----- pull-quotes -----

able to take up the limita- tions and passivity of the