The haulage busihess is one of the strongholds of small-time entrepreneurial capital. The pressure grouping which represents this section - the Road Haulage Associationand several individual companies in the business have in the past few weeks been frantically paddling against the stream. On one hand the R.H.A. have impotently screamed their intention to cross the dockers pickets while knowing full well that the most consistently militant section of organised labour will see any haulage company which does so banished from the docks. Individual haulage and storage companies have also been beating their heads against another wall - having run to the State for support they have simply been rebuffed by a judiciary sufficiently attuned or dragooned to reflect the same appraisal of the balance of forces shared by big business and its political agents. The last thing the bourgeoisie want is to provoke a controntation with a section of workers sufficiently deiermined to hold the line while militants mobilise the working class against the N.I.R.C.
But not only the small businesses are bemused by the present turn of events. The early arrogance of Sir John Donaldson, President of the N.I.R.C, has now been replaced by a plaintive cry for clarification of the law He has now asked in one case for an appeal to the very superiors who have overturned two of his previous over-eager legal decisions before being asked to commit the seven named dockers who refused to obey his order restraining them from continuing to picket the Midland Cold Store in Hackney. He has no intention of being made to look a fool for a third time following the reversal of both his decision to fine the T&GWU and his committal of the three shop stewards for contempt.
SERIOUS OPPOSITION Unfortunately the active opposition to the dockers' campaign does not stop with the hauliers and Donaldson. The dockers have more dangerous opposition, due to the policies adopted. They are campaigning for the return of "their" work from workers who have, in some cases, done it for two or more years. This has led to a barrage of press criticism which has in the last few days reached a real crescendo. What are the real arguments here? Firstly, the dockers never operated the depots now involved in the dispute. Their case rests on the definition of docks USDA W workers at the Midland Cold Store defines this as any cargo-handling within the vicinity of the Port". The debate is therefore confined to what constitutes this "vicinity. The Bristow Report suggested a five mile radius of the Thames, and the dockers want at least this. But the official body which has interpreted the Scheme since the 1966 Docks and Harbours Act has a more limited conception of what it means.
Though attempts have been made to secure the work by following the laid-down procedures, these were initiated by the men in the Regent Canal Docks and other small docks thep faced with closure. Only with the closure of Southerns and the threat of massive redundancies in the Royals did the big battalions, capable of leading an unofficial campaign, take up the issue in abig way. The effect of this delay has been to allow what would earlier have appeared as a straightforward struggle against the dilution of the labour force to new seem to be a particularly selfish and bloody-minded action by the dockworkers. Unfortunately, the possibility of presenting this issue in a very bad light can only confuse militants who would otherwise side wholeheartedly with the dockers.
The danger is that the State may, after a vicious press campaign, be able to move to stop the picketing without invoking the response which the threatened arrest of Williams, Steer and Turner did. This possibility is enhanced by the organised opposition of the non-dockworkers involved. In addition to the counter-picket of Chobham Farm, USDAW is now involved on behalf of its members in the Midland Cold Store. The United Road Transport Union has also joined in the growing wave of trade union hostility to the dockers. Again this can He used by the press and will not pass unnotieed by the rest of the working class.
In the event of the Courts pursuing this line the State would then appear to be piayipg the role of arbiter between conflicting interests. This would minimise the possibility of the working class seizing on the event as an excuse for a struggle against the N.I.R.C.. Obviously the dockers could make a good fight on their own but this would only tend, in the short term, to reimpose the sectoralism which is at the root of the problem E. Waring.
officials were asked if they would fight