The Building Workers' Charter conference on 10 March in Birmingham will take place against a rising employers offensive. They are pushing the lump back into the country's leading sites. National agencies have been set up to sell labour only to the main contractors. In Liverpool an agency called 'Side Services" provides employers directly with their labour. Such organisations also check for any signs of past militancy.
BLOC Meanwhile Charter is trying to recover from the failure of its newspaper to appear during the strike. It is trying to build a bloc between the rank and file and 'left' local and national REP MOLE Name:
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bureaucrats, and using the campaign against lump labour for this purpose.
UCATT is in a very dodgy financial position after the strike, and it is hardly in the interests of the union bureaucracy to have the majority of workers in the trade not paying union dues. At the same time Smith, the UCATT General Secretary, is determined not to be outflanked by the rank and file as he was in the strike or to be engulfed by the rival T&G. Already it is rumoured that some of the regional officials are seeking the easy way out through a merger with the T& GWU. Therefore he has been putting pressure on union officialdom to get on top of what the rank and file are up to.
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FOREIGN SUBS: Asia/Afinca/Australia/N. & S. America: £6 per year (airmail); E4 per year: (ordinary). Western Europe: £4 per year. BLIND The Communist Party leadership is a little blind to the situation. Originally they set up Charter to extend their base out of the main cities onto a national scale. (Inside cities like London, Charter was used as a CP front.)
But now some of the rank and file militants outside the main cities do not want to know Charter, as it did not appear in the strike. That is when they needed the organisation, the first time they had been thrown into local leadership. Therefore the CP reasons that it will mop up what base it can, while the going is good, and Pers have started to appear on Charter platforms, billed as nothing else but CPers.
But as any building worker will tell you, a shop steward in the trade has a much better relationship with his men than in many other trades. The reason for that is simple. When the steward wants the men to do anything he has to call them into 'the canteen and debate it out with them. The result is that even the CP stewards are very sensitive about moves in the rank and file. Many of them do not want to see Charter turned into a front for the CP. They want to struggle for a genuine rank and file movement, which they realise is in the best interests of workers in the trade, facing the disorganisation that they do. All this is likely to lead to some big tensions in the coming months.
LUMP The campaign against the lump is taking The problem is that the lump, like the poor under capitalism, seems to be always with us. Combine this with the way the campaign is being conducted (protest actions which do not embarrass the local bureaucrats) and you have a recipe for non action. Although some of the local actions that have taken place (for instance in Birmingham) have had some success, in no sense could they be said to have started a national snowball rolling. To maintain this unity with the local officials there has still been no call in Charter for coordinated national action against the lump, conducted and centralised through the national unions. By limiting the struggle to a series of small and local actions, however, the militants are in danger of isolating themselves from the mass of building workers. In this situation the mass of building workers want to see some sort of effective, national action against the lump.
PRACTICAL STRUGGLE Now, it is even more urgent to take up the practical struggle for the long-term solution to the lump, registration. We should see a campaign now for the national unions to take a register of all union members in the trade. We can begin at grass roots level for local shop stewards to take a register of all union members on their sites. The struggle against lump sites must be extended into the struggle for a closed shop. We must demand now that the building trade unions produce a plan for the registration of every building worker in the trade, with the necessary safeguards.
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