JUST THREE days after returning to work, the strikers at Colman Fasteners in Manchester face the prospect of a major redundancy. The Company has announced its intention of axing 65 of its employees including 51 of the 162 shop floor workers! If the Company is seeking to build on the 3-week strike over then it has certainly misjudged the mood of the worktorce and another controntation in the future seems certain. JON SILBERMAN, Convenor at the firm, explained to Socialist Action:
'The wage deal was only reluctantly accepted by the worklorce pushed the skilled rate up £12-£15 the average for the al ca which was our target. But the return work In no way signalled that we had been defeated. On the contrary, we accepted the deal the ware knowledge that we now have a new fight on our hands — to save our jobs.' The considered stayilig LABOUR'S NEC has confirmed the expulsion of two members of the Labour Party and the refusal to admit two ap plicants to its Birmingham-Yardley constituency. A third member has also effectively been expelled, in that despite appealing against the refusal of the constituency to admit him he has never been interviewed.
The decision an ominous for three reasons. First, the three members excluded from Were transfers other branches. Their membership was in order. wages in order to push through the job cuts AUEW until the ment gave a commitment that there would be no enforced redundancies. "The will to fight on was there' Silberman says 'but UUl Executive Council member, Ken Cure, strongly advised against staying out on the basis that the jobs issue was a new one, and that we should go throught the 'recognised procedure'.
'In fact, there was strong feeling for staying out on the wages question too, but again Ken Cure advised against, saying that in his view the ofter was the highest we'd get So we decided to recommend a return to work and seek a mandate for a fight against enforced job cuts.
the event, the mass meeting voted unanimously for immediate strike action in the event of any victimisation or compulsory redundancies, and the proceedings ended will chants of 'here we go, here we go!' As the strike began to bite, so the strikers' confidence soared. At each mass meeting, the majority in favour of staying out increased, day, 21st March, despite threats of closure and legal action against the union, management actually mobilised for the meeting, only seven votes were cast for going back.
Within of that Ken Cure had arranged a gle. meeting with the nationa engineering Federation over the heads of both the strikers and the local Cure plained to the shop stewards to John Tocher, the local Divisional Organiser, that because the had been made official by Executive Council it was then under the control of EC This view is certain to be hotly contested by the locally generally in the run-up to the Union's Presidential election contest, in which John Tocher is the Broad Left candidate. In the went ahead, excluded by the Company, return to work was reachsalutory lesson to — one which they strikers the next stage of the strug-