SocialistAction 1983–88

The paper of the Socialist League, formerly the International Marxist Group, 1983–88

Victimisation at Fords

Socialist Action No. 136, 4 April 1986 · p. 11 of the scan · 344 words

The scan: 136-apr-04-1986-SA-UK.pdf (PDF, Marxists Internet Archive, opens at this page)

Uncorrected machine reading. This text was read by machine (Apple Vision OCR) from a scan of a newspaper page, and the page was cut into articles by machine, at the headlines found by their type size. Nothing has been corrected: expect misread words, text from a neighbouring article, and titles that are the machine reading of the headline, some of them only fragments. Quote from the scan, not from this page.
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page 11 of the scan

sacking of two new women workers.

In the first case, company refused to plain its reason. When her shop steward establish what had happened, Lne company first maintained that she had resigned! Finally they admitted sacking her was sacked, allegedly for failing to reveal on her application form that she La degree. Ford is claiming that it does CHOI employ graduates on line production work.

In fact many line have such qualifications The TGWU district official who will be representing this woman at her appeal is himself a graduate who worked on the at Dagenham for eight years.

Both sackings have been challenged by shop stewards in the Paint, Trim and Assembly plant 4000 which women women are the victims of blacklisting. 200-H1U1. Both had Decl shop stewards in their previous Worked for several years. where they had whole basis of Ford's recent recruitment. Sèven thousand people applied for 340 jobs, and were initially screened by a top West End personnel agency. Applicants past this hurdle then hac to go through a further two interviews and aptitude tests.

During these interviews some applicants were quizzed about their previous trade union activity even political views. There was a clear attempt to weed out pro-union people TGWU branch believes that further checks are now in progress on successful applicants The flimsiest of pretexts will be used to sack union activists.

It is feared that this could be extended to the existing workforce. Assembly plant stewards have long memories of the sacking of 17 leading ac tivists at Dagenham 1962.

also alleging racial sexual bias in Ford's recruitment. On the production lines the present workforce roughly equally divided between black, Asian and white WULNCID claims one in eight of the The company SUBSCRIBE

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strong meiers They believe ine

The sackings have led the union to challenge the

THE FORD Dagenham TWU branch, the largest in the union is alleging racist, sexist and anti-union bias in the company's recent recruitment of 340 workers. The issue has been brought to a head by the

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