the national claim, to be presented this month, the strike at a small tools factory in Sheffield begins to take on considerable importance.
The AUEW workers at Footprint Tools Ltd. have now been on strike for eleven weeks. The immediate cause of the dispute was the sacking of a steward, but the explicit aim of the management is to eliminate the Engineering Union as a negotiating force in the factory. They want to replace it with the General and Municipal Workers Union, which has been encouraging its members to cross the picket lines.
The strike has become an important issue at a time when the main preoccupation of the Communist Party-led AUEW District Committee is to mobilise the engineers in Sheffield around a struggle for the claim. They are faced with two problems: it is important to get workers on to the picket lines at Footprint, to prevent the scabs going in, but at the same time they want to hold back premature and ineffective local struggles, which have begun to break out over the second stage of the present agreement between the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions and the Engineering Employers Federation. The District Committee has, correctly, advised against action over the present agreements in order to preserve the energies of the Union for national action over the claim. OCCUPATION The District Committee realises that the strike must be won, but is determined to keep it under its control. However the militants involved have begun to dispute the District Committee's tactics; it is clear to them that the next step must be to stop production, and some form of occupation is seen as the solution. At the same time the revolutionaries (IMG, IS, and SLL), although at first treated with hostility, are now in a position to discuss the tactics of occupation The District Committee, on the other hand, is relying on an escalation of the picketing, following a pattern which proved successful in a similar struggle twelve months ago. But even this picketing is being done fairly cautiously, in the hope that the £15 a week strike pay will enable their members to hold out. The firm, however, is proving more tenacious than they expected.
In the next week or two the question of new tactics will be posed sharply, and it is increasingly obvious that an occupation, to stop production, will provide the best conditions for victory. The defence of such an occupation, through mass picketing and demonstrations, would help to forge unity amongst engineering workers, in preparation for the struggle around the national claim. Already new forces, often outside the influence of the CP, have been drawn on to the picket lines at Footprint. They will be an important factor in any successful struggle around the claim, to smash Phase 3, and prepare the way for a general strike to drive out the Tories.
James Wilson