Scots steel fight

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Crothalls are on strike at Barking General Hospital Islington nursery strike WANDSWORTH Tory Council see themselves as the stormtroopers for Thatcher's plans for how local government should operate. They boast of leading the country in council house sales, privatisation and cuts. And they've selected Roehampton as their guinea-pigs. Their latest 'experiment' in privatisation is the care-taking service.

This Monday, April 16, roehampton caretakers struck, picketed the Roehampton District Housing Office and brought out the staff there before going on to demonstrate outside the Town Hall.

They were supported by tenants, the Fire Brigades. Union miners who are here building support for their dispute and many Town Hall workers who came out to join the demonstration. Unfortunately, Wandsworth caretakers (who are on a different contract to the ex-GLC Roehampton caretakers) voted not to support them even though their jobs will be next if the pilot scheme is deemed successful. Some Wandsworth caretakers, especially from the Battersea estates, did turn out.

The council is proposing to get rid of the 46 resident caretakers in Roehampton In their place, the service will be split between cleaning — which has already gone out to tender from private firms, and security which will be operated by 12 mobile council guards.

In typical Wandsworth fashion the cleaning side of the service was put out to tender, without any consultation and tenants were simply informed that this would be the new system. But they think that they have thereby short-circuited tenants' opposition, they are foolishly mistaken.

Over the last year especially a very high level of cooperation has developed between tenants' associations and council unions in Roehampton. This was first put to the test over the floated privatisation of housing management. Grandmet, who was invited to do a feasibility study on this, eventually withdrew after hostile reaction from tenants, a constant picket on the housing office and opposition from staff.

Wednesday's Housing Policy Committee is to be lobbied and delegations from the caretakers and tenants will urge the council not to go ahead with these plans. If, despite the clear opposition of their workforce and tenants, they do go ahead, then we'll just have to make sure that this plan too becomes inoperable.

Lefts WHILST the miners are now in the front line of fighting Ian MacGregor's attempts to ravage their industry, steelworkers in the West of Scotland are still fighting to overturn the BSC management offensive launched during MacGregor's term of office as head of BSC.

Workers at the Clydebridge steelworks, a heat-treatment finishing plant in Cambuslang, near Glasgow, are now into their third week on strike against management's attempts to introduce a new lump-sum bonus scheme.

If implemented, the scheme would immediately cost eight of the 180 shopfloor jobs remaining at the plant. But, even worse, it would mean acceptance of the principle of sub-contract work and thereby pave the way for even larger job losses in the future. As soon as management tried to put the scheme into practice, by having the heattreated steel taken out of the plant for testing at a sub-contract plant, workers at Clydebridge (members of the ISTC, AUEW, EETPU, and GMBATU) went on strike.

Clydebridge itself is now being picketed on a round-the-clock and Doing is beig in of oed, But members of staff (in APEX, ASTMS and SEMA) are still going in to work.

DESPITE lies in he Daily Torygraph, the waterworkers have still to decide whether to accept a two-year pay deal.

Three meetings with management (the first of which lasted only half an hour) have produced an offer of 5% this year with 4.3% next. With a rise in inflation admitted by the Tories as likely this would lead to another cut in the living standards of water workers following , the sell-out last year by their leaders.

Class 4 workers would get a rise of £4.56 this year followed by £4.12 in 1985. Management are also putting a pretty packaging on the offer by consolidating £1.98 of the service supplement onto the basic wage, giving the impression of a higher rise. But management are not the only ones to manoeuvre.

In recent years the wage claim has been put to a postal ballot. Not so this year. A series of regional industrial conferences (made up of delegates from branches) has been organised. These will decide how to mandate regional delegates to a national industrial conference. Perhaps the union bureaucrats think they can manoeuvre conterences MATIOKAL UNION Cleaners employed by the With 85% of the strikers volunteering for picket duty, it has also been possible to spread the picketing • to other steel plants in the West of Scotland.

Round-the-clock picketing was also organised at the Dalyiell plant in Motherwell. But when lorries drove through the picket lines, the workers there refused to unload them and came out on strike. The entire 600-strong workforce at Dalyiell is now out on strike as well.

But the major obstacle for the Clydebridge steelworkers, as it is, too, for the miners, is the Ravenscraig steelworks.

Workers from Clydebridge are picketing Ravenscraig. Workers from Dalyiell are picketing Ravenscraig. Miners are picketing Ravenscraig to check coal supplies. But Ravenscraig still works on.

This is a suicidal policy on the part of the Ravenscraig shop stewards committee. If the miners and steelworkers from Clydebridge and Dalyiell are defeated, then the future of Ravenscraig - at which 75% of production is already sub-contract - is more doubtful than ever. The best chance Ravenscraig workers have is to throw in their lot with miners and steelworkers fighting for their jobs.

The Clydebridge strike is unofficial. If it were declared official then Ravenscraig workers would be obliged not to cross picket lines. But ISTC leader Bill Sirs, along with Scottish ISTC full-timer Clive Lewis, want to keep Ravenscraig operating at all costs, even if it were to mean defeat for their own members and also the With the strike being unofficial, Clydebridge strikers are in need of money to keep going. Whilst donations and collections are being raised throughout the labour movement for the miners, this should not be to the exclusion of other workers fighting for their jobs, especially given the miners' and steel-workers' joint membership of the Triple Alliance.

Send donations to Clydebridge Joint Union Committee, c/o Cambuslang Miners' Welfare, Mill Road, Halfway, Cambuslang, Glasgow. MOTHERS and children from Islington Council's children's day centres joined a vigorous lobby of the borough's Labour councillors on Monday April 16.

The mothers were there supporting striking nursery workers from NALGO and NUPE who are demanding increased wages scales and improved staff:children ratios in the day centres.

The strike, which began the same day, has been brought about by an almost total refusal by the council to negotiate despite union claims for 'regrading' and more staff to cope with increased numbers, going back two years.

Even before the council made its budget for this year, the STEFANO CAGNONI (IFL)

Perhaps some hope that getting tough with "greedy council workers" who want more than £60.70 a week will save them from attacks by the press and the Tories.

The opposite is true. The councillors are digging their own political graves, alienating the very people who would most support a fight to defend the borough's services - who now have to defend them against the council as well as the Tories.

Messages of support, etc., to: Nursery Workers. Dispute, Islington NALGO office, Finsbury Library, St. John's St., London EC1.

Perkins

3,500 shopfloor workers stopped production and walked out at Perkins diesel engine plant in Peterborough last Friday (April 13), after rejecting a 4% pay rise offer.

This is the first strike for five years at Perkins over the annual pay award — the last being in 1979 when a five-day stoppage cost the firm about £10 million in lost production.

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Wandsworth stormtroops

I. The Broad

Water worker should act on wages

LOYEES ON SPRIKEY