By P. Henning The Tories' package of anti-union curbs was finally unwrapped in the Commons on July 9. Although no mention was made of the threat to reduce benefit to strikers' families, the proposals include attempts to:
* erode the right to 'secondary picketting';
* undermine the closed shop by demanding a two-thirds agreement among the workforce;
* halve the statutory period of redundancy notice;
* extend the qualifying period for claims of unfair dismissal.
Such proposals stand in a long line of similar anti-union legislation which can be traced back through Heath's ill-fated Industrial Relations Act to Wilson's 1969 In Place of Strife which also sought to cut back the right to strike.
The provisions of the EgyptianIsraeli treaty signed in March are being carried out on schedule. El Arish, the Sinai Peninsula's main town, was returned to Egyptian rule on May 25 after twelve years of Israeli occupation.
On the same day, negotiations over the future of the Israelioccupied West Bank opened in Beersheba.
These events made page-one headlines in the big business press. But other moves, which are just as much a part of the Mideast deal worked out under President Carter's prodding, have not been played up in the same way. These include: * Approval by the US Senate of 4.8 billion dollars in additional armaments for the Israeli and Egyptian regimes; * Stepped-up attacks on the people of Lebanon by Israeli military forces; * A tightening of the Zionist grip on the occupied territories; * And finally, broad hints that US military forces might be stationed in the Sinai.
MURDER Since April 10, well over 100 persons-the vast majority civilianshave been killed in Israeli air, naval, and artillery raids on Lebanese villages. Hundreds more have been wonded.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin boasted in a May 7 speech that "we struck at the Palestinian murderers," and called for the expulsion of the 400,000 Palestinians in Lebanon. Begin declared that "there should be no difficulty" in resettling the Palestinians in other Arab countries.
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AIM The aim of such anti-democratic moves Is crystal-clear. racea witn a growing economic crisis, the Tories and their big business backers are seeking to shift the burden of it onto the shoulders of working people through a growing jobless total and low wages.
In order to ram home this offensive, curbing the rights of trade unions to defend their members' interests becomes as central to them as it did, previously, to Ted Heath or even Harold Wilson.
Undermining the right to strike (by curbing pickets) or eroding the closed shop is a clear attempt to the heavy blows the Tories have in store for manning levels and living Canards GAMBLE The Tories are taking a gamble however. Previous attemots to hammiddle east fraud Although there is nothing new about the Israeli regime perpetrating mass murder in Lebanon, the new treaty with Egypt has given the Zionists a freer hand.
AUTONOMY
Begin has also spelled out his proposal for Palestinian "autonomy", as promised in the treaty with Egypt. Under his plan: * Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would continue, as would Zionist colonisation. * Israel would retain control of more than a million acres of "state land" in the West Bank, * Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza would be subject only to Israeli law. * The 1.2 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would be allowed to elect a local council-after the candidates were OK'd by Israeli authorities-but the council would not be allowed to pass legislation. fund drive SOCIALIST ACTION, unlike the bourgeois press, has no vast funds to promote it. It relies purely on sales and on what readers If you would like to make a donation-however small, it all helps SA Fund Drive, c/o 58 Auckland Road, London SE19. string the unions were notoriously unsuccessful. Wilson's In Place of Strife had to be shame-facedly withdrawn under mass protest and Heath's Industrial Relations Act led to massive strikes which culminated, in 1974, in the miners' action which threw him out of office.
Whether or not the Tories are successful this time will depend, of course, on the resistence offered by the labour movement. Already there has been a lot of fighting talk. T&GWU leader Moss Evans, for example, has pledged 'maximum opposition' to the Tory proposals and has called on the TUC to give a strong lead in 'defence of basic trade union rights.
It will need more than words, however, to force the Tories to withdraw their threat to democratic rights. What determined the defeat of the Heath government was not protests from union headquarters but the mass actions-notably that or une mmers —me sureets. TI FRAUD Israeli Minister of Agriculture, ment's view of Palestinian "selfChristian Science Monitor.
to go into the cashbah of Nablus [the largest West Bank town outside Jerusalem]. go in there are arrest people. search for weapons. and so on," Sharon declared.
-about our military presence and settlements there-that will be forever."
Post had to admit on May 7 that "plainly, from the viewpoint of plan is a fraud."
SOFT COP These comments reflect the diplomatic stance of American imperialism. Just as it did in the years leading up to the deal between Begin and Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat, Washington is striving to play soft cop to the Zionist regime's hard cop.
tiations are drawn out long enough, and if Sadat manages to hang on to power in Egypt, there mine Arab opposition to the treaty THREAT risks. What if Sadat's position is challenged by the Egyptian masses, or revolution threatens to triumph elsewhere in the Arab world?
of force to defend our vital interests in the area," Secretary of Defense Harold Brown told Newsweek Such leaks by lower-level officials are used as trial balloons by the government, to try to accustom the American people to the idea of stationing US military forces in the area.
June 11th, 1979] ACTION such actions today that are needed and not the trips back and forth to Downing Street by the TUC in their harmless 'negotiations' with Jim Prior or Margaret Thatcher.
Trade union and Labour militants should vigorously protest this 'dialogue' going on between TUC leaders and the Tory government about trade union rights. As far as we are concerned, none of our rights won after years of long and bitter struggle-are 'negotiable' Rather than discussing with the Tonies. what the trade union leaders should be doing is preparing massive resistence to the Tories' proposals. They should let them know that any attempt to tinker with union rights will meet mass opposition and that the entire movement will rally round if Thatcher's ТО SPEP DASh Это ЖоЛота section of trade unionists.
It is resolutions along these lines that should be pushed through trade union and Labour Party branches and which should also be raised at the coming TUC conference, in the autumn. If the Tories steamroler is to be stooped priority must be given to organising a real fighting campaign to defend our democratic rights.