of occupation for the workers at the C.A.V. factory in Fazakerley, Liverpool. The long months of bitter struggle, especially over the socalled "festive season", have naturally taken their toll and the ranks of the occupiers now number about one-third of the original workforce of 1200. But, as the occupiers correctly point out, this is quite an impressive record: especially when seen in the light of the length and difficulty of the struggle and the large redundancy bribes handed out by the company to try and wear down the resistance of the workers. Many of those who left after the first weeks did so because of particularly difficult personal situations, and of ten retain a real sympathy for those who are sticking it out to carry on the struggle.
The occupation is now manned by almost 400 men and women who have come through the past four months with valuable experience, great courage and increased dedication to the fight: qualities which make them a formidable enemy, even for a monster like the Joseph Lucas combine. They are all convinced of the need for renewed effort and new offensives to bring their struggle to a vicEXTEND THE STRUGGLE There are two major ways in which the struggle must be extended and support built. First of all, the struggle must be broadened by making workers on a national scale aware of what is happening at CAV and the importance of this fight to their own situation. The following are concrete measures that can be used to do this: 1. Motions of support for the CAV struggle (if at all possible accompanied by financial ald) should be put forward at meetings of trade union branches, trades councils, shop stewards committees, local trade union or tenants action committees, student unions etc.; 2. All such actions of support should be communicated to the local and national press, television etc, and continual pressure put on them to publicise these actions: 3. Bodies which do agree to support should UNTIL I Rally in support of CA / workers organise the distribution of information among their membership about the CAV struggle; 4. Meetings should be set up at which representatives of the CAV Occupation Committee can address as large an audience as possible -especially of trade union militantson their struggle and the need for support. Secondly, the struggle must be deepened by starting serious industrial action against the Lucas combine. This has been one of the most serious weaknesses of the struggle so far: the lack of any really powerful industrial sanctions against the combine. While other workers in the combine and many transport drivers have agreed not to scab on the struggle, and are refusing to handle work normally done at the Faza kerley site, the only major offensives against the combine have been those taken by the CAV workers themselves: the occupation of CAV, the closure CAy SUPPORT of the Lucas Industrial Equipment plant on their site, the picketing of Merseyside car factories, and the recently established 24-hour pickets on the Lucas Victor Works factory in Liverpool. WARRINGTON SHOWS WAY Recently a series of meetings between the CAV Occupation Committee and the Warrington Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions produced an important initiative: it was agreed that the militants from the Warrington group would raise support for the CAV struggle throughout their trade unions, including the all-out blacking of Lucas Products. Ore of the most important results of this has been a motion, workers who try to fight back. The workers put forward by local NUR militants through their branch, to the Manchester District Council of the NUR to agree in principle with the blacking of all Lucas products on the railways. If this motion is accepted it could be a big blow to the Lucas management. This shows in practice the kind of action trade union militants should be taking across the country: 1. Move motions endorsing in principle the blacking of all Lucas products by the trade union movement, and pledging full support to any group of workers who carry out such blacking (this is very important: the Liverpool dockers have expressed a readiness to black, but first-not unreasonably they want assurances of trade union support if they are attacked by the NIRC for doing this; 2. Discuss what workers in your particular workplace could do to hit the Lucas combine (do you use or transport any Lucas products, do you provide any services to the operations of the Lucas empire); 3. Attempt to raise this question with other groups of workers, both through local trades councils and action groups, and regional and national trade union bodies.
AID THOSE IN STRUGGLE We must face up to the facts-the workers at CAV cannot hold out indefinitely by themselves. They are now committed to a strong push to extend the struggle with the beginning of the New Year. But unless their efforts are met by cooperation and active assistance from trade union militants and the organisations of the revolutionary left across the country, the working class faces a serious defeat, of national importance, in Fazakerley. The announcements of the closures in the steel industry shows that The Red Mole was correct when it argued that the problems of the CAV workers would soon face other workers across the country. It is not enough just to express indignation and wave the flag of protest, we must fight the plans of the capitalist class. That means giving concrete aid and assistance to all those groups of at CAV have been among the longest on the front lines of this battle: it is high time they received some reinforcements.
All messages of support, donations, requests for information to: CAV Occupation Committee, 46/48 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool 3.
Alf Jennings and Bob Williams explain why the politics of Scanlon and the Communist Party leadership are leading eng On the 7 December, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) was fined £50,000 by the National Industrial Relations Court for refusing to obey previous NIRC orders. A Mr. James Goad, a quality-inspector at CAV's, Sudbury, had successfully managed to get the NIRC to declare him a member of the AUEW, against the wishes of the local branch and had ordered the branch to admit him to its meetings. The fine has sparked off massive strikes by AUEW members all over the country. These actions are continuing, the latest being planned for Merseyside on I9 January.
This struggle is extremely important. It is a struggle to defend the AUEW, but it is also the second great upsurge of workers against the Act, and a test of the Scanion leaderships' policy for fighting the Act. At the very moment when the strike wave successfully freed the five, the House of Lords changed the law in order to prevent such a confrontation being repeated. Their decision that the union, rather than the individual steward, was liable in law, was an attempt to get back to the original aim of forcing the trade union leaders to discipline their own members. The Government placed its hopes on a prediction of how the trade union leaders would behave when faced with the choice between leading a struggle to bring down a piece of legislation passed by Parliament (and therefore most likely the Government too), and turning their guns on their own members. Jack Jones proved the Government right, reluctantly paying the fines while making every effort to get the dockers to call off the struggle. Following that, the TUC has allowed unions to attend the Court to defend themselves, thus capitulating in practice to the authority of the Act.
Scanlon and the AUEW leadership, however, have stuck to the old line of the TUC: "no recognition. Of course they have been right not to attend the Court, but this only has meaning if they are prepared to mobilise against the Act.
SOLID The Goad case boiled up in October. The first fine made on the AUEW was on 8 November: £5,000 for not appearing in Court to defend itself. The Court ruled that Goad was a member of the union and that the Sudbury branch could not refuse him admission to its meetings. When he was excluded on December Ist, the NIRC then imposed a £50,000 fine for contempt of its ruling.
From December 7 onwards, district organisations of the AUEW all over the country took the initiative in calling local strikes.
These strikes were very solid. On Monday 18 December for example, thousands of engineers in London, Oxford and Sheffield struck, and on the Wednesday, engineers in Hull, Merseyside and Manchester came out. In London and Liverpool, dockers and other workers struck in solidarity. At the same time, resolutions were passed in many areas calling strikes for various days in January. On the Ist January, 13,000 men came out in Leeds, on the 5th 13,000 in Swansea, on the 8th 20,000 in North Wales and 10,000 on Tyneside. Merseyside is planning to take a further step by calling an area general strike on the 19th.
FRAGMENTED This impressive series of strikes was marred however by its fragmentation. This flowed from the lack of any commonly understood policy among those taking action. This became painfully clear in the case of one of the most militant centres of working class struggle: Glasgow. Here, the district leadership had called a strike for the 18th, but then reversed its decision because it felt that local stoppages were not going to give results, and called on the Executive to organise a national stoppage instead. Several areas passed similar resolutions. Most surprising of all is the case of the Sudbury men themselves. They struck on the lith, thus taking the initiative nationally. But just as other areas were responding and getting their one-day stoppages organised, Sudbury voted to return to work on the 15th.
This reflects not so much the work of the organised right wing in the union, but a lack of a clear line from the leadership and therefore confusion and uncertainty. Of course, the right wing were organising. In Coventry, many workers voted against strikes and for a change of union policy. Nevertheless, it is only since the first wave of strikes that the right wing in the union have felt able to step up their offensive and change the course of events, catching hold of criticisms of the leadership and partial demoralisation and turning them against the struggle.
A PARALYSED LEADERSHIP The cause of the confusion and disorganisation was the paralysis of the AUEW leadership. What has just taken place is a tragic example of the useless line of non-recognition. The leadership was faced with a choice between leading a struggle against the Act and the Government or being fined. The response up until the imposition of the fine on 7 December was to hope that the Court could be prevented from collecting the money from the Bank. But the Court had overruled the distinction between "protected" and unprotected funds. When Hill Samuel, the union's bankers, paid up, the AUEW sacked them. But this was really little more than a demagogic move. They hoped Goad would be discouraged from trying to attend the branch meeting at Sudbury on December Ist. Unfortunately he tried to attend, hence the £50,000 fine. Throughout this period, the leadership refused to attend the Court or to pay the fine. But it did absolutely nothing to prepare the AUEW membership or the rest of the working class for a struggle against the Act. It refused to recall its NC to change its policy, but it made no plans for action. The first fine went by without any hint of preparation for a battle. After the second fine, Scanion felt forced to take a public position. He was busy with metaphysics at this time. No, he wasn't disobeying the law of the land. He was defending the constitution of the union. Then on 10 December, Scanion called on the membership to "defend the policy of the union'. But what was the policy of the union? This was never made clear and led to the fragmentation. Was the policy to initiate a struggle to bring down the Act? Or was it to make some localised gestures of protest against the fines and nothing more? Or was it to bring pressure to bear on the government via expensive strikes was made clear. The membership was left in the dark.
SCANLON Throughout this entire experience, Scanion has acted as a trade union bureaucrat. Rather than give a strategic line for the working class, he tried simply to defend the narrow corporate interests of his own union. His own position was indistinguishable from most other EC members. He therefore took the position that he was neither for nor Workers ar Sudbury vote to strike; but neither Scanion (inset left) nor CP leader Gollan (inset right) offered any way forward. against the strikes. Neither forward or back. But once the money had been taken by the Court, what other issue was there left but the Act itself?
Even before the Goad case blew up, Scanlon was only "left in the sense that he had not shuffled to the right like the rest. He had not moved away from a position which was useless anyway: non-recognition. But part of the confusion among the rank and file was caused by their looking to him especially for a lead. After all, he had called one day strikes against the Industrial Relations Bill before it became law. The Communist Party also gives Scanlon much support, refusing to criticise him even when he behaves in the same way as other bureaucrats, as he did during the Ford strike of 1971 for example. The revolutionary left has been warning against an uncritical attitude to Scanion for a long time. His rhetoric about shop floor power and leaving everything up to the democratic initiatives of the rank and file sounds very nice. But this was all very well in the Sixties when the tactic of local bargaining made sense because unemployment was low and the national attacks on the unions were only just starting under Labour. But in the engineering dispute of last year, leaving everything to local initiatives was just a get-out for the leadership, and it led to disaster. The Goad dispute is the same. When national leadership is needed, it is left to the localities to take uncoordinated and sporadic action with no clearly defined policy.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY The Communist Party refuses to point out these simple truths. For example, once it became clear that the leadership had no plan of action whatever, the CP tried to cover up this inactivity. The editorial of the Morning Star, following the EC meeting of the 19 December at which resolutions for national action were not even discussed, said that the workers were "making it clear that the Industrial Relations Act will cost the empl oyers far more in lost profits than opposition to it will cost the unions in fines". This is a very dangerous rationalisation. The engineering employers are not going to put pressure on the Government to "retreat". The CP line implictly reduces the struggle to the issue of the fines against which only protest is possible hitting a crucial sector of the economy? Nothing rather than the Act. It is not, for the ruling class, a matter of short-term cost, but a question of how to achieve the long-term aim of defeating the opposition of the unions to the Act. The CP were throwing their weight behind localised initiatives which inevitably lead to demoralisation if no national focus is created.
Instead of proposing extending the existing struggle through a rank and file lead, they urged *the EC to bring pressure to bear on the TUC General Council to call for a one-day stoppage as a signal to a serious campaign to get rid of the I.R.Act and the Tory Government... " (Morning Star 2.L73). In other words the AUEW EC was right not to call any action and should call on the TUC. Vic Feather should then call a one-day stoppage which would be the signal for a "serious campaign". In the meantime, continue the protest strikes indefinitely and hope that the TUC can be won back to a 'left position at some time in the future.
This attitude on the part of the CP urgently raises for militants the question of what its basic basic strategy is.
COMMUNIST PARTY POLICY The basic strategy of the Communist Party in the fight against the Act has been twofold. It has said that it is necessary to struggle now against the Act using the industrial strength of the working class. Secondly it has argued that there must be a simultaneous fight inside the Labour movement to get 'left' policies adopted, and to replace the right wing in the TUC General Council and the Labour Party leadership with 'left' leaders like Scanion. But the Goad case (and many other incidents in the past) has brought to light a problem: this "twofold' policy turns out to be two alternative policies: one - that of the militants, who put first the urgent needs of the workers to smash the industrial relations Act: those who vacillate on that must be replaced by leaders who will stand firm, even if the ditherers happen to be the official union leadership and if they happen to have a reputation as lefts' on the General Council. And the other possible policy - that of the CP leadership - is to give first place to unity with Scanion and the official leadership, even when it means allowing militants to be caught off their guard by the bureaucracy's total lack of preparation for a struggle.
UNITY The CP leadership tries to argue that those who want to publicly criticise Scanion are splitters. people who want to break the unity of the wor ing class, In fact, the very opposite is the case. If it was proposed to exclude bureaucrats from the struggle on the basis of their past mistakes or failings, that would indeed be a splitting policy.
But what has been at stake is not an attempt to exclude Scanion and the official leadership from participation in the struggle against the fines and the Act. The real issue for militants has been whether the develop ment of that struggle should take second place to the CP leadership's desire to unite with the official leadership. For the consequences of that unity with the official leadership has been to allow the leadership to fragment the unity in struggle of the engineering workers. For the fact cannot be hidden that the response of the engineering workers
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