immediately the rundown of production at the factory, which makes power steering components for Rover, Jaguar, Jensen, Aston Martin, Ford and other car firms.
This interview was given to Red Weekly by Peter O'Sullivan, a member of the strike committee, on behalf of the committee.
Are you expecting to win your demands quickly, or are you prepared to hold out for a long time? Trouble has been brewing at Awest for some time. Management have refused to budge an inch. As far as I can see, it may be some time before our action really ocuns to ore sewest components are produced mainly for the luxury end of the car market. Anyway, we are prepared for a long fight. We've organised a shift system for picketing where everyone does six hours one day, then has the next day the running of the occupation. Last week two mass meetings of all the strikers were held, and the strike committee, composed of shop stewards and staff representatives, meets twice daily. All its decisions are published and posted on the notice boards. Strikers have also been visiting local engineering factories - Sperry's in Bracknell, Prestcold, Thornycroft's in Basingstoke - to get support, and we're also in touch with other factories in the Adwest Group -Western Thompson on the Woodley estate, and Bowden Controls in Llanelli. Power Steering Ltd. in Sunderland will be coming out on strike next Monday if a claim for parity with us is not met, and they are blacking all materials from Reading. Other workers in the group have also promised support.
Already things are starting to happen out of our actions - for the first time we are discussing a group shop stewards combine, since we realise our fight is against the group as a whole, not just the management oL one Dans workers Irom inomycrotts, wno occupied their Basingstoke factory for several weeks, have given us the benefits of their experience which WO IC LYmE LO USC. - Adwest is a very profitable company at the present time. Why do they want to shift production away from the Reading factory?
Land speculation. The price of land in Reading is It seems almost certain that land speculation on a massive scale is behind a number of recent, moves by industries owning plants in Reading. Whatever the Adwest management may say, it seems clear that they intend to close down the factory altogether and sell off the site. Huntley and Palmer's, the biscuit firm, had already announced their intention to transfer production away from Reading and close down in 1974. They too own a large, potentially very lucrative site near the centre of town. Now the huge Courage brewery group has also announced plans to close its Reading plant -threatening 1,100 jobs. The reason they give is that they want to centralise their breweries onto a single (new) site. Their present brewery covers 13 acres of valuable land near the centre of Reading.
Next week's issue will carry a full report on these developments.
Over 200 workers at the Southgate factory of Strike Committee phenomenal, and Adwest are in tne tortunate position of owning hundreds of acres on the Woodley industrial estate. They could well be following the example of other local firms, who are running down Tactories in keading tor muen the same reasons. so un the long run, much more is at stake than just the jobs of the workers at Adwest Engineering. Several hundred people working on sites owned by the group may find themselves out of a job as well.
As far as Adwest components are concerned, management want to saint production or the main tem power steering gears - to Sunderland because they can take advantage of all kinds of factors: cheaper land, development grants, tax gains, and a plentiful supply of labour. All these things far outweigh their so-called "concern' for their Reading workers. - What problems are you being faced with in carrying out your sit-in action?
In many ways we are in a fairly good position, in that we nave virtuany lou% support in Ene lactory, Alle unions - AUEW, APEX, TASS, and my own union, the ASTMS - are supporting the sit-in action. OL course it's verv important that we maintain this unity by ensuring the fullest possible participation by the whole work force in the running and development of тле оссираноп Management are trying various tricks to stop the sit-in being effective, but so far we've forced them to back down. Last week they brought in a contracting firm to try to lift a generator over the picket line to provide essen tai services tor are factones descecutor Adwest, but when it was explained to the contractors that their strike-breaking wouldn't be the best advertisement for them in the area they gave up. And all scheduled deliveries to the factory have been successfully turned away since the sit-in started.
Donations and messages of support should be sent to: Adwest Strike Committee, Adwest Engineering Ltd,, Headley Road East, Woodley, Reading.
STOP PRESS: On Wednesday morning, about 80 workers at Western Thompson Ltd., another Adwest substalary in keaaig, votea win none against to strike in support of their fellow workers in Adwest Engineering. Western Thompson Ltd. control 70% of the market for thermostats in the motor industry.
and support of the majority of STC workers Eighteen months ago, the TUC embraced the idea of threshold agreements; it was then largely rejected by both the employers and th Tory Government. It has now, however, become an important part of the Government's Phase 3 strategy.
A threshold agreement is a pay deal which contains a clause guaranteeing additional wage rises during the lifetime of the agreement if prices rise by more than a certain 'threshold' percentage. So, if there is an agreement for a 5% immediate wage increase with a 3% thresh old (i.e. a 1% rise in wages for every 1% increase in price levels above the 3% mark), a if the rate of inflation is 10% per annum, ther in principle the result would be as follows: money wages would rise to begin with by 5% 3% of this would be eroded by inflation befo the clause became operative; before the end o the year, money wages would rise a further 7 with inflation; and at the end of the year, money wages would be 12% higher than a yea before and real wages would be 2% higher. So what decides the change in real wages by the end of the year is the difference between the initial wage rise and the size of the In practice, the protection against inflation ca be seriously undermined by the price index o which the threshold is based. It is almost certain that the retail price index, which the Tory Government wants to use, generally underestimates the cost of living increase for workers. Moreover, threshold agreements do nothing to compensate workers for the increa in the cost of living in the period before they came into operation.
It is significant that the Government is advoc ting threshold agreements after a year of wag control, at the end of which workers' real standards of living will have fallen by at least 4% - something which has not happened in any other year since the War. If the above numerical example were accurate, then by the end of a year of Phase 3, workers' real wages would still be 2% below the level two years earlier - which would be an unprecedented victory for the capitalist class.
The TUC originally espoused threshold agree. ments because they seemed to guarantee real wage increases in a period of inflation. One reason for the Tories' conversion to them is tr they can equally guarantee a limit to real wag creases But the Tories are also planning to trade thresholds in exchange for a de-escalation of money wage demands. This is needed because during rapid inflation, an initial demand large enough to secure a given increase at the end o the agreement would give workers more over the year as a whole than a threshold agreemen which produced the same percentage increase in real wages at the end of the year. In the first case, real wages would rise a lot at first and then be eroded over the year; in the secor real wages would rise very little at first, but would be eroded more slowly.
In spite of all these disadvantages from the workers' point of view, the TUC is on weak ground in the discussion. Most of the Tories' current arguments for threshold deals were supplied by the TUC itself in its propaganda fôr them last year. In this it accepted, as it stil does, that the Government's objective is to fight inflation, and not to fight wages and the workers' bargaining power for which the fight against inflation is a substitute.
Michael Pric The TUC's present counter-proposal to thresh old agreements is price control. This will be I discussed in this column next week.
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