to bring shifts of 5-5½ days. At the same time, nurses will flock in response to Agency ads which run: "If you're energetic, work 6 hours a night, 72 hours a week for t29". It might be good money but in the long run nurses are doing themselves no good at all. They are beginning to solve the problem of under"staffing, and in hospitals with up to 100 agency nurses it's very much in the interests of the authorities to maintain this situation. The Nursing Council which since 1920 has been "safeguarding" nurses is unconcerned with the rapid growth of agency nursing, or with unjust sackings, victimisation of UNA members, the high failure rate in final exams, the equally high drop-out rate. But although nurses are by now very pissed off they are scared of taking any kind of militant action. In their isolation they are likely to be struck off the roll and left jobless.
This was as far as Sister Veal went. What she never touched on was the one thing that counts in terms of the equal rights struggle: the structure of the medical profession. Which car be summed up quite simply as that women are traditionally men traditionally doctors. The fact that the doctor's subordinates are nurses (i.e. women) makes it easier for him LO 15% of medical school places is kept push them around. And although a standard for women those women who are determined to become doctors are under great pressure to be shunted off into nursing. Thus the delineation is perpetuated. There is the argument that women doctors are of little use to the profession since they will leave to have kids almost as soon as their 5-7 year training is over. But this just reflects on the idea that women are not really in their proper place unless they're at home washing nappies.
The nurses struggle is obviously closely related to the women's movement as a whole, but more pay for nurses' is a somewhat different call from 'equal pay for equal work' in tactories. Blatant sex discrimination is different from simply being paid low wages, something which isn't solely confined to nurses. It was the blurring of the issues which ran through the entire meeting. Unfortunately, the confusion apparent there represents a confusion and disorganisation inside NJAWER itself.
One of the reasons why Equal Pay Day.was not organised on the national scale was that there is practically no co-ordination between local secretaries. Some branches thought the Day had been cancelled and throughout the • holiday period there was almost complete inactivity. National co-ordination would be •greatly improved if local secretaries were on a General Council; the present General Council was constituted at the founding meetino last Iron-ore had been stockpiled for months on the Glasgow docksides. The working people had seen nothing like it since before the Second World War. Carriers came on stronger each day and the piles of iron-ore grew and grew. That's April.
At the car plants all over Britain vehicles had been stockpiled all through winter, spring and the new end of summer.
Then the strike at Port Talbot. The steel industry being the mid-link in the chain from iron-ore to motor car.
One why answered... the owners were not making sweet bread. In America the owners of the car plants here were making no kind of bread either. They were trapped, and are, in an impasse as the foundations of their greed come apart all over the world. If the owners in America were not making pennyone profit, then, you'd better believe it, the owners' servants in this country would never be allowed to go out alone in their quest for greed.
Port Talbot produced strip steel for the motor industry. When the strike began the car industry was on holiday. The owners had been giving their work people high wages. Not out of the goodness of their hearts. They have no hearts. To enable them to stockpile. High wages BIvell of intention. The owners then provoked at Port Talbot a strike that they had created the patterns for with their huge overproduction. Work people were forced to act some bread saved for their own holidays. No one knew this better than the owners for they had paid the handouts. The owners then called the strike for at both ends of their greed-system, raw materials and consume Onions tre las over-pe direct.
Unions following directives of Wilson's crew tried to carry out the old myth. That the workers had been got at' by oddballs and their like and were striking for selfish reasons. So chatchat from Feather and his mob would be the bumfluff the work people would Port Talbot was one step forward by the community and the development was on every level of their lives. A community was organised in a just struggle. The Unions, the Government, the owners were seen for what they are...
enemies of working people. A small victory perhaps but a victory for the working people in Port Talbot. The mythical bullshit in Wales was exposed also. So they progressed and they hav laught all of us that when people organis themselves for their rights then they will always win if they are a community. They gain their dignity and above all they gain security among people and take up the confidence that the system shaved from them year by year since their birth. There is no way out of the fact. No adjective or processions of adjectival hang-ups will prove otherwise. The people will win. Have won and will continue in their day to day struggle to win their rights and their humanity. -Port Talbot is important and much more than the place the people. In a coming winter when great struggles will take place over this lan Port Talbot's lessons should be learned an practiced, developed and driven on as the people waken from the sleep the owners and their agents have carefully dropped them under for many years. The people will win! Ken Murray NEW thousand people, or more, participated in an impressive march protest. Town clerks protested, Members of Parliament were lobbied and joined in the protests, local authorities lent their weight to the campaign, work was blacked, and endless negotiations were undertaken with the company and the Government The sum of all this activity was precisely, and entirely, zero. Never can the labour movement in one centre of population have been more completely united for resistance: yet, with all the pressure and lobbying, Mr Weinstock went his own way as if his plans were no more untoward than changing the brand of the canteen tea.
Power did not lie in the hands of the local councils, or the MPs, or the union executives Mr Weinstock had the power, and the Govern ment itself was impotent to challenge him, if i were to continue its misguided policies for "economic recovery which depend upon the success of the Weinstocks for their very life. The ultimate frustration of the democratic process was to be found in this: the largest Constituency Labour Party in the country is at Woolwich, and it certainly did not labour night and day to elevate Mr Wilson to office, in order to rationalise nearly six thousand Woolwich breadwinners out of their jobs. The lack ot control, of elementary accountability, within