DEFEND THE RIGHT TO WORK MADANIES •Crash programme of public works • Smash the to limit Sheffield steel firm of Balfour Darwin is entering its eighth week. And at last the District Committee of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers is getting off its backside to develop some solidarity action with the workers who are occupying against 28 redundancies - the second batch this vear.
Following a recent Sheffield meeting of all AUEW stewards a rally wås called for 24 October outside Balfour Darwin. But the level of mobilisation was pathetic. Many factories didn't know about the rally; one steward from Laycock's engineering plant told Red Weekly that he had only found out about it the day before through the local paper! No more than 100 people turned up.
The rally was addressed by Balfour Darwin convenor Derek Simpson, AUEW district president Albert Knight, and Tony Hope convenor of BSC River Don steel works. All the speakers blamed the Wilson Government for the present level of unemployment. Furthermore, they pointed out that it is the betrayals of the Wilson leadership which have disoriented the working class and created a situation where we have yet to see the kind of mass fight back against unemployment which took place under the Tories.
Tony Hope told Red Weekly afterwards that the Balfour Darwin struggle could provide the focus for a fight against unemployfor the most bankrupt and inefficient sections of the capitalist economy. All this does is to reinforce the view that there is no alternative to capitalism, tying the future of the working class to a system that can offer nothing but unemployment and reduced living standards.
SOCIALIST CAMPAIGN The real way to save jobs lies not in helping the bosses but in fighting them. A socialist government would take control by imposing not merely selective import controls but a total monopoly of foreign trade - not as a substitute for measures to attack the British capitalists, but as part of the campaign to expropriate them. The struggle for jobs and the struggle for socialism has to do with the fight for the shorter working week, for work-sharing with no loss of pay, for opening the books, for nationalisation of all firms creating redundancy, for taking over the capitalist monopolies which dominate the economy. It has nothing to do with the reactionary and diversionary campaign for import controls. NO RIP DARWIN 1. OMIsica
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TE DEMAND JACUR S CHUKS