Union agreements with the police mean that only eight pickets are now allowed at each of the three gates of T Bailey Forman in Notting ham. This firm closed the Guardson Journal morning newspaper after priat ers and journalists were locked out six weeks ago for refusing to operate a new printing process before national negotiations on the issue had started. While the pickets have been reasonably success ful in turning back supplies of ink for the scaboperated Evening Post, newsprint is being brought in by cowboy drivers. However attitudes are now hardening and it is Ekely that mass pickets of strikers and their supporters will be organised withur a tew days to prevent the continued production and distribution of the Evening Post.
The determination of the 300 printers and Journalists to fight the declared redundancies has been strengthened by daily mass meetings, with invited speakers such as Bill Freeman of Briant Colour, and the support won by The Dess, the 10-page newspaper which they are collectively producing. The five print unions involved in the dispute have now been officially joined by the AUFW, although eight of tho stine engineering members are still inside, encouraged hy the management's L100 handmus. Mass picketing will no doubt change tbeir MIKE HAMLIN selected through the unions rather than by all employees, as the EEC and the CBI suggest in their plans. Their strongest demand is for a neto for the workers' representalives on major decisions about investment, mergers and relocation; significantly, the TUC calls for this only in the context of worker-directors (no doubt seen as a new arm of the trade union bureaucracies) and not more generally. At least there were no capitalists on the TUC's committee. Other union leaders were more openly collaborationist: Sir Sid Greene (NUR) and Frank Chapple (EPTU) have actually produced a report with Sir Val Duncan (Rio Tinto Zine), Lord Kearton (Courtaulds) and Derek Ezra (the Coal Board). This finds even worker directors too radical, and takes some modest proposals for consultation. PROFITS BY CONSENT Neither selected workers In the boardrooms nor workers share ownership (which the Labour Party links with worker-directors) can make one scrap of difference to the way in which capitalism is forced to satisfy hunger for profits in constant opposition to the workers' needs. Jack Jones characterises the TUC's plan as an 'extension of the shop steward system" to produce "management by consent", that can only mean profits by consent. There are only two ways for the working class to react to the actions of capital in pursuat of profit: one is elass struggle, the other is class collaboration. All proposals for workerdirectors fall in the second category, Jones. Scanion and the TUC seem to think that worker directors will carry on the class struggle over sherry in the boardroom. The capitalists know that if this happens they have only to take their important decisions somewhere else. The presence of workers on boards of directors is ahout as similar to real workers control as a lock-out is similar to a strike. Micheal Price.