is a must for all engineers. hours demands. The unions offered to concede: different unions.
want us to work extra hours when busy rejection of these negotiations. THE LEFT in the AEU smell blood in their year long campaign io stop a catastrophic dose of new realism. Convenors and stewards who worked to get Bill Jordan elected president of the ABU are today organising petitions and attending stewards meetings to oppose Jordan's plans. The AEU Broad Left has called a lob. by of the Confederation of Ship Building and Engineering Unions (CSEU) executive committee meeting on 6 November. This is expected to be the biggest such lobby for many years and So what's it all about? In January 1985 Terry Duffy led the engineering unions in accepting a national minimum wage for a skilled engineer of $96.20. In exchange for this far from generous offer from the Engineering Employers Federation (EEF), our national agreements. The national agreemènts protect our wages and conditions and should no even be considered for use as bargaining pawns. The employers added the carrot of reducing working and the stick that all cuts in working hours would have to be financed by members sacrifices.
In July the Financial Times leaked the unions own proposals for conceding many of the employers • Complete flexibility. Workers 'will perform any task within the scope of their capabilities regardless of whether the task forms part of their normal work. and regardless of whether or not the task is tradi. tionallv nerformed by members of another union.' • No demarcations: 'unions and their members will cooperate with the employer in eliminating unnecessary job demarcations between members of • Management control: 'the employer shall determine the production hours necessary on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis.' The employers • say 55 — and when les busy to work a 25 hour week to average it out.
The unions made this suicidal proposal but still the employers didn't say what cut in the working week was on offer. Of course such weakness in the face of the employers only encourages them. The EEF now wants concessions on negotiating procedures and stewards rights. These negotiations have been carried out by a CSEU sub-committee • The secrecy with which this sub-committee has been operating has fuelled the widespread suspicion and The employers' image of the future is clear. They want an industry of flexible workers who can be moved between jobs at the whim of management. By increasing the proportion of these workers on short term contracts, casual labour, or 'contracted out', ley want to aner be size or we worklorce as de Unsocial hours, no dispute agreements, and sweetheart single union deals where militant trade unionists will not be tolerated, are The defeat of this deal would be a gain for millions. The negotiations directly affect one million workers in federated companies. But two million more employed in the industry, and many further afield, would be directly affected by this rewrite of • Lobby the CSEU executive on 6 November, 9 am at the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WCI