themes city rates - It's been a real gift to the press: two of their favourite rolled into one. Unlike the workers taking industrial action, the people who make the news actually enjoy filling their pages with details of when your lights will go out: people huddled round shop windows trying to puzzle out the Electricity Board's cryptic tables; and the supposed threat to life and limb caused by the power workers action. CHRIS O'BRIEN reports.
You will have to read you power workers actually the moment they are only operating a work-to-rule.
For the recerd, work in the power stations is one of the mos diu could at antine thin Ania fuel dust, ish, and o with going down the pits. of all sorts the power workers work a dizzying shift system, with seven different stints chang lhey are demanding a rise i their shilt and travel allowances as a compensation for anti-social hows, and concessionary electri just as the miners got concessionary coal. But the ignificance of the dispute is not that the power workers are a ike millions of workers th are hit by the effects of Govern ner the month rule Thi will have to wait until next. March to setle their next pay claim. And the worker about a quarter of all the явшя workers in the powe aren't prepared to wail that long.
NEGOTIATIONS Not so their union leaders. lt - the Dunkirk spirit and bash-the-workers -into the power scations. the hogey raised in 1994 - an immediate one. At the moment within the ranks of the trade Foremost BUTLIMI among them is Prank Chancie of the EETPU, the electricians! union. He maintains that, "The men should now realise that wi have done all that reasonable people could expect."
SELL-OUTS This is explained by his ad ditional comment that the workers sere now out of our con trol. Chapple knows what he is a better track record on sell-outs than any other union leader— His latest effort was over the Port Talbot seel workers dis here was a whiff of trouble wi WIC to send personalised lecrers to all TO WETKED LEE DICE CALLE so he coith they rea consistently refused to MAKE TOE SHIKE OTTLIS.
But his refisal to back the workers" action has wider signaticance. He exphoilly accepts the Electricity Council" argument that an immediate award could not be made with out an Act of Parliament!
Chapple descrites the action a ROSLE COSE BULL WORR is doing his utmost to make tha prophecy self-fulfilling. The res son? Quite simply, the 12-mooth rile.
That is the part of the pa policy that no main union Jeader has challenged, because it now provides the Jyachpin for the strate a1 holdine down LivIng standards and dividing workers by separating claims.
And quile apart from the tue duse and muck and anti-social hours, that is why the power