The second conference of supporters of the rank-and-file car and components workers paa conference in May last year, after the long strike at Fords. It was decided then to produce a monthly paper, but due to difficulty in collecting articles, it has now become bi-monthly. The circulation has roughly donh led over the year and now stands at over 4,000.
It was also decided last year to call regular readers' meetings in the main centres of the industry, but these failed at first for lack of support. They have recently been started again in a few towns and have so far attrac ted a number of people.
The second conference was attended by 52 militants, representative of the main unions and most of the centres of the industry. The organisers were disappointed with the number present, (they had expected about 200). Although it was obviously valuable to bring together militants from all over the country, the conference in fact achieved very little.
THE POLITICAL ISSUES The conference only began to deal with the great political challenge facing the whole labour movement: the need to resist and counter the offensive against the living standards and organisations of the working class by the capitalist class, defending their declining profits. In the car industry, the Tories measures have complemented the various strategies tried by the employers to reak the back of shop-floor organisation and confine bargaiming to negotiations that can be sold out by the local and national fulltime officials: Measured Day Work, agreements on mobiity of labour, victimisations and all the rest.
Although obviously realising the central importance of the discussion on "carworkers and the Industrial Relations Act", most speakers made no attempt at all to develop a strategy for carrying forward the struggle against the Act. In fact the discussion was mainly concerned with how to oppose the introduction of the check-off system of collecting union dues. Of course this is a factor in maintaining a strong shop-floor organsation, but hardly the key to defeating the Act.
There was no consideration cf the way the Act has been used so far, the lessons to be learned from the railwaymen's and dockers' struggles, the implications of the decisions of the NIRC and the Appeal Court, the reactions of Jack Jones and the rest of the TUC leadership - all factors which must be fully understood if we are to decide what is required to defeat the Act. INADEQUATE RESOLUTION An examination of these events shows the inadequacy of the resolution proposed to the conference: "The dockers have shown that immediate wide spread solidarity action can defeat the Industrial Relations Act. We therefore resolve that we should all go back to our workplaces and undertake to commit factory policy to immediate industrial action whenever any group of trade unionists are threatened with fines or Imprisonment under the Act."
Industrial action in defence of victims of the Act is an advance on the idea that the Act can be beaten by just pursuing wage claims with more militancy, although sevcral speakers pointed out that the resolution gives no strategy for developing the struggle, since key sections of carworkers were already preparing for or even actually took strike action in solidarity with the dockers. And in Oxford, for instance, industtrial action in defence of any worker jailed under the Act is now official policy of the Engineers' Confederation.
But the total inadequacy of the resolution as a strategy stems from its first statement -the idea that a purely defensive reaction to the State's attack is the way to defeat the Act. The dockers did not defeat the Act: their readiness to take on the State in the form of the Courts, the police and prisons did force the Tories to beat a hasty retreat on enforcing the Act in a particular case, so their action was an important but partial victory. But although it cannot be ruled out that the government or the Courts may be stupid enough to provoke a movement towards a General Strike too strong for the union bureaucrats to control, the Tories are probably shrewd enough not to do this if they can possibly avoid it.
This means that only an offensive strategy can be relied on. We must bring home to all Trade unionists, especially those in parts of the car industry who at present find themselves relatively well off, the need for a political response to the capitalists offensive. WHAT IS A RANK AND FILE MOVEMENT FOR ?
The sccond main discussion, on "Do we need a rank and file carworkers' movement", had to take up the theme of a political strategy to be of any use. However, some speakers seemed to think of a rank and file movement as a sort of parallel Union, and opposed fighting for democracy within the Unions on the grounds that the official union structure was an irrelevance to their struggles. Others said that the main purpose of The Carworker is to overcome the feeling of holation of militants in different factories by putting them in touch with each other, so that they can share their experience and learn from each other. Unlike, say, the miners or the dockers, carworkers do not have a sense of of a tight-knit working class community which gives them unity in struggle, and the job of a paper like The Carworker is to fill this gap Although nobody would deny that this is one of the functions a rank and file movement should fulfil, we hold that it is not the main one. It is no good talking about a "fighting paper" and a "fighting organisation", unless it is clear what these are fighting for. The Carworker has an 11 point programme and the constitution approved by the conference says: *The purpose of The Carworker is to use all means available to get The Carworker's programme adopted within the trade union movement, and to assist all workers in struggle for these aims."
Yet there was absolutely no discussion of the programme at the conference We say that the rank and file movement must be based on a clearly socialist programme. This should say that the problems of carworkers, as for the rest of the working class, are primarily the result not of this or that management nor of this or that government, but of the operation of the capitalist system, and therefore the basis of a rank and file movement must be the struggle for the overthrow of this system of production for profit and its replacement with a system of production for social needs. It is this perspective, and not just their greater militancy which essentially distinguishes socialists in the Unions from the present leadership. In practice, if not in words, the leadership limit the unions to a struggle for reforms within the framework of capitalism - reforms which in time of crisis like the present the capitalist class cannot grant. Indeed they must erode them in order to survive. It is from this political basis that the parts of the programme should follow. These must include demands for the independence of the unions from the State, against all forms of incomes policy, against unemployment, redundancies and productivity deals, for democratic control by the rank and file of the unions, and so on.
WORKERS CONTROL OF THE INDUSTRY?
It is because the present programme for The Carworker does not have this clear political line, that its only explicitly "socialist" demand, for "nationalisation of the car industry under full workers' control" is unclear. The nationalisation of an industry within a capitalist economy, where the principles governing the organisation of production is still profit from sale on the market, does not begin to solve the workers problems. And even if workers control the administration of a factory. the basic problems of capitalism remain if the inducto lecill nroducino for nrofit calling its product on the market in competition with other producers. Even supposing that supporters of The Carworker were to take over the car industry, as long as the industry was still operating in a capitalist economy there would still have to be redundancies when the car market slumped, speed-ups and wage cuts when profits were squeezed and so on.
So when we advance demands for workers" control, we must be clear that we are not to participate in, or even to take over the management of the industry under capitalism, but rather using our organised strength to obtain demands which directly challenge the capitalist priorities on which the industry is run. These would include effective rights of veto on line-speeds, manning levels, all new methods of working, and payment, hiring and firing, and real security of employment -not just guarantees against short lay-offs, but work-sharing with no loss of pay when the car market declines again; also wage rises automatically linked to the rise in the cost of living - to be determined by the unions - as the basis for wage reviews, and so on.
THE CONFERENCE Revolutionaries in the car industry should have learnt one thing by the confusion on the way forward at the conference. We cannot proceed by stages in industry; first building up a strong rank and file movement based on more consistent militancy than is shown by the present leadership, and then at some point when this "spadework" had been done, unveiling our political ideas to give the movement a way forward. There are two things wrong with this: first of all, the development of the class-struggle always faces the working class with a political challenge which will unfortunately not wait till we have complete our nonpolitical spadework; and secondly, spadework on the shop-floor and consistent militancy are of course absolutely necessary, but unless carried out with a clear perspective of political action will be directionless and will lead in the end to nothing but frustration. Unless The Carworker can be developed from a trade union information sheet into a means of organising socialist militants in the car industry for united action on a clear political platform, it will increasingly tend to seem irrelevant to the questions preoccupying class-conscious car workers.
(for the IMG Trade Union Commission)
work in the 47 Docks Scheme. The Act
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per The Carworker was held in Birmingham on Sunday, 2nd July. The paper was started at