Blackbum, J. R. Clynes, Peter Gowan, Teresa Hayter, Alan Jones, Pat Jordan, Branka Magas, Martin Meteyard, Neil Middleton, Bob Purdie, Daniel Rose. DESIGN: Dave Edmunds DISTRIBUTION: Debbie Dodge Published by Relgocrest for The Red Mole, 182 Pentonville Road, London N.I. 01-837 6954, 01-278 2616.
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The Red Mole 20th October 1971 Page 12 Two days before the implementation of a £2 pay rise for all workers at the Standard Bottle Company. bounds Green, in ivorin London, tne tactory is to be closed down and demolished. Two hundred and fity men will be made immediately redundant as from 22nd October, and the final 50, retained as skeleton staff, will be out of work by the New Year.
Ine men were only told or the redundancies at a meeting with management on 6th October, a bare two weeks before they were due to be paid off. The managing director of the company justified this by saying that "an earlier announcement of the closure would have disrupted production and brought forward the shutdown." A printed company statement handed to employees says: "Although during the last year the substantial trading losses of the Company have been stemmed and the Company is now trading profitably. the return on capital employed does not justify the continuing operation of the plant." In other words, although they're making a profit, it's still not large enough for the investors, and so the workers will have to go. The factory will be replaced by warehouses.
Ine response or tne union Ine amwu. wnich is leading the way in registering under the Industrial Relations Act) has been pathetic. All they have asked for is a E10 handshake for all redundant staff who have worked for the firm less than two years, and slightly higher payoffs for those with longer service As there is a very high turnover of unskilled and, for the most part, immigrant labour in the factory, 190 of the 250 made immediately redundant fall into the first category. Once again, the struggle against redundancies has been shown to be as much a struggle against the class-collaborationist policies of the trade union bureaucracy as it is against the employers and the government. The fight to democratise the trade unions is an essential part of the struggle against redundancies, as the case of the Standard Bottle Company shows only too clearly. Hunterston Development.
The Tory government is soon going to have to decide whether it can scrape up £1,000 million and whether it wants to invest this in a 10 million ton steel works (annual output) at Hunterston on the Ayrshire coast. The site has already been chosen but the Scottish bourgeoisie are still very nervous, according to the Sunday Times Business News, that the government will back out having more profitable areas in mind for investment (e.g. petrochemicals). The site has the advantage of flat land next to deep water. But the scheme's key advantage lies in the boss of the joint public and private corporation to develop Hunterston ... none other than Mr. Stenhouse, ex-Scottish Tory Party Treasurer and present boss of the new Govan Linthouse division of UCS. No doubt Mr. Stenhouse will be urging the Tory government to pump the money into Hunterston on such "humanitarian" grounds as the high unemployment levels on the Clyde and in the West of Scotland generally!