* The number of homeless double the figure for ten years ago, with rents, rates and heating costs up £5 in nine months!
* Bus routes redefined as supplementary' and then chopped, with no recruiting from the 2,500 waiting list to make up for the 4,000 deliberate vacancies!
* Tube fares up a staggering 114% in 18 months!
* One in three schoolchildren in classes EARLS COURT branch of the NUR, the Workers at Grunwick Film Processing in Willesden - seen here leafletting a local tube station • are now in their elevent weel of strike action for union recognition. A boost to their struggle came last week when the Union of Post Office Workers finally agreed to act on Tom Jackson's pledge at the TUC in September and instruct their members to black deliveries. But why wasn't this action taken when it could have really affected Grunwick's trade in processing holiday snaps?
of over 30, with 2,000 newly London teachers thrown onto the dole queue! * At least fifty-two local general hospitals to close with over 50,000 people on waiting lists needing treatment now!
This is what working people and their families are facing in London even before the latest round of Mr Healey's cuts have bled them drier. These are the facts that trained Waterloo, bus Bush, hosnifal workore in faced the Labour majority on the Greater London Council in late July when they voted for more cuts, which were going to throw 300 more people out of their jobs. Now they wonder why workers might vote them out in the GIC elections in May!
But despite the refusal of the labour bureaucracy to fight back so far, London workers themselves have not taken this lying down. Led by the public sector workers, who see the vision of the dole queue coming closer and closer, demonstrations and strike actions have begun to spread all across London — and across ICHTHIS the different sectors: train drivers at in shepnerds пасклем, Camden, Hammersmith and Hounslow, student teachers and teachers themselves But we all know that these have not 'THE INTENTION IS NOT TO DISRUPT essential services but to make sure that there is good attendance at the lobby. A West Midlands official of the National Union of Public Employees commenting on the decision to send 2,000 of his members to the 17 November anti-cuts demonstration.
The West Midlands decision summarises the strengths and weaknesses of the action advanced by the leaderships of the public sector unions. 75,000 West Midlands NUPE members will be striking on 1 December. But not on 17 November. Only 3 per cent of the membership is being mobilised for the most important united working class action in several years. No attempt is being made to build a public sector alliance as a step towards united working class action against the Government's attacks on living standards.
This is duplicated throughout the other public sector unions. NALGO the CPSA and others are not prepared to go further than support for local strike action. None has taken the initiative in calling for such action on a national basis. The NUT, for example, wants each of its 564 local associations to send ten representatives. But there are half a million teachers in Britain, all directly threatened by the cuts! Already over 20,000 of them have been driven to the dole queue, yet the NUT will only mobilise 5,000 representatives.
Growing opposition This is because the 17 November lobby, called under the pressure of rank-and-file opposition, is seen as a way of 'holding the Government to the Social Contract rather than organising a national fight against it. But what is the Social Contract? Is it some generous deal arranged in 1974 which the Government is now selling out, as the leaders of the public sector unions seem to think? Or is it rather a term which covers any attempt by the Government to attack working class living standards with the connivance of the bulk Government could not break the Social Contract because it dictates the Alan Fisher of NUPE and the other 'new lefts' in the public sector unions are able now to dust off their militant credentials. Unlike Jones and Scanion, they are not implicated in the whole range of Government measures which go under the name of the Social Contract. But, like those twin 'scourges' of the Heath Government, Government's anti-working class policies could not be further from their Organise a 'day of action' to protest about the attacks on their sector and boost their popularity with the members? Certainly. Fight for united class action against the attacks on living standards - even just call for a national strike action on 17 November? Never. of the trade union bureaucracy? The actual opposition to the