WORKERS have occupied Crosfield Electronics in North London in a bitter fight to save 300 jobs —a third of the workforce employed at the factory, The occupation began on Wednesday 26 March following the unanimous decision of a mass meetIng.
Management has now been excluded from all bulldings by the workers, who are mostly members of the Amalgamated Union of Eng ineering Workers, TASS (the staff section of the AUEW), and the National Union of Sheetmetal Workers and Coppersmiths.
Its widely believed that the 300 redundancies are part of a plan to close down the London factory completely and transfer all productjon to the parent factory, De La Rue in Peterborough All the work from the wiring shop is being sent there.
Crosfield's only merged with De La Rue last August, and at the time all employees were sent written assurances that there would be no redCont. from page 1 and should be contained within the Terns of the Docks Labour scheme which defines what dockers' work is redundancy Recently Michacl Foot announced a Bill to give dockers conrainer-bundling jobs in a corridor five miles each side of the river, but at best this will get through Parliament in the late Autumn and merely slow down the speed of redundancy.
One of the reasons that national support has not been forthcoming is the lack of any clear understanding antonget the mass of dockers about how redundancies can be tought. By itself, demanding container work be defined as docks work, would only save a handful of jobs and that oiten appears to be at the expense of the workers already employed by companues such as Vestey a who move out undancies. The company's claim that the world slump in trade is to be blamed has been rejected by the Labour MP for North Islington, Michael O'Halloran. 'I think this is all part of a plan to make everybody in their London branch redundant and transfer all their work to Peterborough, he sald.
An urgent task for the unions at Crosfields will be contacting the workers at the Peterborough plant to get all transfered work blacked Meanwhile the occupation is preventing any attempts to shift equipment out.
There has been a rash of smaller redundancies in North London reccotly, particularly in light engineering. and the Local District ConIng, and the local Distriet Committee of the AUEW -which has already made the action official- is considering making Crosfield's a test case. Support has already been forthcoming trom several Labour MPs (loading and untuading), is docks work to pay the wages and better conditions won by years of struggle in the docks Again the 'pool system by which dockers without work were guaranteed and provides very limited cover against a fairly high rate of lay-off pay has been the first step to the dole queue in many instances. Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers Union who has ssued vicious denunciations of the strikers, helped draft the Jones-Aldington report on which he forced a return to work in 1972 which has done noth -ing to stop the loss of jobs. It is essential to extend the Docks Labour Scheme to all ports and container depots outside the scheme. But within that a policy of work sharing with no loss of pay, with the dockers stewards dividing up the work avalabic amongst the whole ADDRESS workforce is necessary both to extend the London strike, and provide a long term solurion to the chrunic unempl who attended a Trades Council meeting at which the stewards committee spoke.
As well as the redundancies, another 100 workers have been put on short-time. What is desperately needed is for the occupation to force the company both to re-employ those sacked and to institute work-sharing with no loss of pay amongst the whole workforce, John Spendiff, the assistant press officer to the occupation, told Red Weekly: We're going to see this thing through to the end'. Solidarity must be forthcoming to make sure that cad la victory.
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