Striking workers outside the Riverstone meatworks On 9 August, the management at the Riverstone Meat Company works near Sydney in Australia announced that the company was closing down half its operations and making 696 workers redundant. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that the owners of this meat works are none other than the Vestey family owners of the Midland Cold Store, who have also just announced the closure of their last dockland store, Nelson's Wharf in London. The Vestey operations in Australia are a salutary warning of what lies behind the company's refusal to employ well organised men like the dockers.
In Australia the Vestey group is notorious primarily for its savage exploitation of Northern Territory aborigines and for its criminal destruction of land which it leased for a few cents per square mile and turned into an eroded desert through overstocking and neglect. But at the The London Evening News seems determined to outdo even the Daily Telegraph (see out last issue) in its stop-at-nothing campaign against the IRA.
Not content with repeating (with further embellishments, of course) the Telegraph's old fantasy about the IRA offering help to Rene Desr amault, the Evening News really went to town in its issue of 21 August with a front-page story headlined 'IRA thugs rape girls at gunpoint". This story, which claimed that four Belfast schoolgirls aged 13 to 15 were pregnant after being raped by members of the Provisionals, was however so completely and transparently fictitious that even the Daily Express felt compelled to deny that there was any truth in it.
Nothing daunted, ace reporter lain Macaskill then merely switched his attention to the Officials. Here he discovered a major split in the offing. Indeed, "already some militants have broken away and formed their own terrorist organisation - called the National Liberation Front" (Evening News, 24 August). As lain Macaskill and his masters must surely know, however, the "National Liberation Front" is in reality nothing more than a term used by the Provisional IRA to describe the (one and only) Official IRA. Its usage dates from the November 1969 Army Convention, when a resolution to set up such a front with other anti-establishment groups was one of the reasons cited by ghe Provisionals for the subsequent split. But then, what are such facts compared with the urgent need of British imperialism to attack the strength of the Republican movement with every means at its disposal? Riverstone meatworks, Vesteys are gaining a reputation with a more familiar ring to British workers.
In announcing the Riverstone sackings, the spokesman for the company said that they were necessary because of a series of "crippling and unauthorised strikes". In fact the reason for the unrest was quite simple: the working conditions at Riverstone are appalling. In 1970, for example, a fire broke out on 29 July, killing 3,000 sheep and 500 pigs. Despite the warning no precautions were taken to prevent a further outbreak, and on 8 October another fire killed six workers.
More recently the company has tried to divert the workers' attention from its drive to maximise profits while minimising outlay. Instead of improving working conditions, it has attempted to promote competitive feelings at the expense of of the Free Areas in the North of Ireland on 31 July. The picture shows a picket outside the Committees.
da. ity with the continued struggle for national and social emancipation of the Irish people".
workers' unity through a series of bribe schemes. These included a weekly lottery (first prize $ 150) open only to employees who did not hold a stoppage unauthorised by the union, a weekly bonus of 10 per cent to workers not participating in a stoppage, and an extra week's holiday to workers who went through a year without participating in a stoppage.
But these schemes failed in their purpose.
All the workers at the plant struck as soon as the sackings were announced. As a result, the company announced on 16 August that the meatworks would remain open. This is not proof of the company's generosity. On the contrary, it is prod of the fact that meatworks are still profitable and that the company's aim was to smash effective union organisation. And that, as British workers know only too well, is a marked characteristic of all Vestey companies.
Danish revolutionaries responded rather more commendably than those in Britain to the invasio British Embassy in Copenhagen organised within hours of the invasion by the Socialistisk Ungdo Forbund, Danish section of the Fourth International, and supported by the Copenhagen district the DSU (Labour Youth Organisation), the VS (Left Socialists) group, and the Danish Vietnam A resolution was handed in to the Embassy from the picket expressing "its deepest contempt of the brutal suppression of the Irish population committed by British imperialism and its full soli
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Once again on the Press and the IRA