Fighting for support

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provoke an all-out strike on their terms by suspending six NUPE domestics who blacked the private patients' wing as part of the branch's selective action.

Meanwhile the officials were also employing another line in order to weaken the impact of the action that was taken - handing to management the initiative on the question of emergency cover.

Following on from the lorry drivers' strike, where pickets had undertaken the control of the flow of essential supplies despite a barrage of press vilification, public sector strikers too showed themselves willing and able to take over the running of the hospitals and other public services.

In the Westminster and St. Mary's hospitals pickets made agreements with stewards from the Esso tanker drivers branch which delivered to the hospitals, maintaining a supply of oil only sufficient to keep essential parts of the hospital heated, to be cut off at any time at the discretion of the pickets.

Despite this and many other incipient forms of workers' control, the bureaucrats used the issue of 'emergency cover , and their so-called 'code' for pickets, to withdraw support from and sell out many sections of workers.

Without making a single mention of the wide-scale army scabbing, the leadership refused to give official backing to striking ambulance drivers on the grounds that they had ignored the union's instructions to maintain emergency cover. After two • months of efforts to kill off the strikes. the bureaucracy finally managed to sell our the £60/35 hour sees car wit a series of blatant -arre wrich accepted the 9% * - a: a time when many sections ihraztout the country were still taking = 302. MANY nurses can't take all-out action because of the harm it would do to the patients. One answer to this problem is to ask other powerful sections of the trade union movement to take action on our behalf.

Last week a nurses' delegation went to the South Wales Area Miners' Ехесиtive to ask for the miners' support.

Unfortunately the full-timers of our union got to hear about it and sent one NUPE full-timer along with us which was inhibiting as he tried to tone down our militant call for an immediate pithead ballot of all the miners asking for strike action.

When we got into the meeting, attended by about 30 pit "delegates, Emlyn Williams, in the chair, asked a man in our delegation - the only man there was the full-timer - to speak. This didn't go down very well with the rest of us.

He spoke on our behalf and outlined our case but didn't put it very strongly that we wanted all-out strike action now so the miners, while declaring their solidarity, gave no promise of strike action.

In fact Williams sounded quite apologetic when he said that as the miners had been unwilling to strike over their own pay claim, they were unlikely to strike over ours in spite of the massive sympathy that miners have for nurses.

We have been promised to be allowed to go as a delegation to speak to the miners' Area Confernece in about a week but we have decided that we will go to the Joint Lodges Committee - a semi-official body which is more powerful than the Miners' Executive and ask them to take strike action on our behalf.

We've now got to start calling on other sections such as the seamen, the transport workers and the railway workers.