Engineers and Communists
After the electricians and the tanker-drivers, the engineers. The 800,000-strong Amalgamated Engineering Union (or rather, its 52-man executive committee) decided on Monday to recom- mend to the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions a 24-hour token strike by all engineering workers as a protest against the rejection by the employers of their claim for a 15 per cent. wage increase. Encouraged by the partial success of the " guerilla " stoppages of the Electrical Trades Union and the walk-out of the tanker-drivers, the. 14 or• 15 C-ommunist supporters on the A.E.U.'s committee carried just over half of its non-Communists with them to Make a 35-17 vote. The A.E.U. magnanimously left it to yesterday's meet- ing of the Confederation to decide whether the. strike should be called all over the country on the same day or staggered town by town or firm by firm. " We don't want to appear to be bullying everybody because of our weight," declared the A.E.U.'s general secretary. Almost simultaneously Mr. E. J. Hill, general secretary of the Boilermakers' Society, warns the Government to arrest the increase in food prices, " otherwise the moral code regarding industrial action will have to be reconsidered." Such strike action represents a deliberate abandonment of the accepted machinery of negotiation and arbitration for wage disputes. It means stretching out a hand for a pistol. And Communists will hold the pistol to the head of the employers, the Government, or the country quite im- partially. Which is just what the Communist World Federation of Trade Unions ordered.
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