While all eyes in Britain's key engineering industry are fixed on the fierce, localised pay struggles that have followed the abandonment of the national across-the-board wage claim by the engineering unions, an isolated news report appears. *Mr. Hugh Scanion, President of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, has offered to resign if it helps to smooth the path towards a merger between his own union and the electricians" union" (Guardian, April 5, 1972). This detached news item is a reminder that very important issues in the class struggle, in this instance involving the organisational form of future conflicts in the largest industry in the country, are frequently decided and virtually settled behind the closed doors of union executive meetings. The rank and file has been permitted just a glimpse of the current manoeuvres among their leaderships.
INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM The contest between the notion of a federation of separate engineering unions and the principle of amalgamation into a single organisation for the whole industry is not new. The AUEW's forerunner, the AEU, supported the latter concept to the extent of refusing to affiliate to the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions until 1946. Today, the AUEW consists of four sections (formerly the independent AEU, Foundry Workers', Constructional Engineers and Draughtsmens Unions) and a total of 1,300,000 members. Internally, it is now engaged in welding its sections into tighter unity and, externally, in negotiating further mergers. Here, the electricians union, the WAVE OF REPRESSION IN PERU The Peruvian regime is clamping down on the revolutionary left. After three years in power it cannot tolerate the signs of 'a new rise of independent activity by the revolutionary leftas the massacre of last year's miners'strike also showed.
The military came into power at the end of 1968, in a situation of crisis for imperialism, and of growing struggle by the masses. The pseudo-revolutionary language of the new government, and its first measures- oil nationalisation and agrarian reform at first caused confusion among the revolutionary groups, which had no programme for struggle. In Peru, the army had throughout history played a most reactionary role, and this made it more difficult to carry out the necessary analysis to provide the revolutionary vanguard with an immediate clear political line: until then its main demands had been for agrarian reform and oil nationalisation.
Complete inexperience of bonapartism in Peru produced even greater confusion in the working class, led by no party able to put forward a revolutionary programme in this situation. The pro-Moscow CP gave immediate unconditional support to the military, and this was the party which controlled the Peruvian Workers' General Union (C.G.T.P.), the main trade union federation.
Only the F.I.R. (Peruvian section of the Fourth International), escaped the general contusion, and attempted to advance revolutionary demands in the working class, but its small size and the heavy pressure of stalinism have physically prevented it from reaching a mass audiVanguardia Revolucionaria, the biggest and most strongly organized revolutionary organisation, was formed in 1965 by dissidents Student action against the West German ban on Ernest Mandel continues to mount. Next to the 2,000-strong protest at the West Berlin Free University February 28, the largest rally was the March 22 meeting in Frankfurt.
There, some 1,200 young students, workers.
and intellectuals met to protest the ban on Mandel, as well as all other repressive measures taken in the last months against the German left.
The high point of the evening was a speech by Mandel himself, played from a tape recorder. Mandel analyzed the objective roots of the current intensification of repression throughout Western Europe. He stressed the necessity for a united front of all tendencies in the workers movement, aimed at rolling back the slightest restriction on civil liberties.
The principal objective of the bourgeoisie, EETU/PTU, has special attractions. A history of genuine militancy in several industries was wiped out when the capitalist press and courts were able to seize upon proof of ballot-rigging by the union's stalinist leadership in 196l. The resultant right-wing leadership of the EETU/PTU today is an embarrassing obstacle to the AUEW and the "left" union leaders In engineering the electricians are the fourth largest union in the (SEU and at times have acted as a brake on militancy above the shopfloor level. To give one example, resent ment still lingers from the three-week strike at Fords in 1969 when the EETU refused to join the other large unions in making the strike official. Bringing the 420,000 strong EETU into effect. Certainly, the research and financial resources of the organisations nationally will be pooled. But will the new structure provide sufficient accountability of union officials to the membership, to allow the exchange of experiences from different struggles permitted by the merger really to influence national union policy? Will the new sections of workers brought under one organisational roof really be called upon to add their industrial strength to other comrades engaged in struggle? The undemocratic structure of the EETU/PTU under the leadership of Frank Chapple, and the current wages strategy of Scanlon and the AUEW leaders render the question of amalgamation inseparable from the fight to destroy bureaucratic control of the As an advocate of multi-industrial ("general") unionism, Jack Jones of the T&GWU recently quoted in Tribune the historic "A malgamation Call" of 1921 which initiated the modern, unified Transport Workers' union: "The great industries on the employers' side stand together! Labour must do likewise." In fact, that document continued "the new machine... will ultimately not only talk of wages, but exercise greater power and control." Fifty years later, the giant T&GWU is still talking of wages, reminding trade unionists that amalgamation alone is insufficient. As merger rumours are leaked to the membership, engineering workers should bear that lesson in mind.
J.C.