CLES ee ee

LABOR

Miners hold their heads high

By JIM TAIT

GLASGOW — Leaders of the Na-
tional Union of Mineworkers told strik-
ing miners and their families at a rally and
demonstration here, Jan. 25, to hold their
heads high and go on to achieve a prin-

. cipled solution to their 11-month old

struggle against pit closures.

Some 8,000 Scottish miners and trade
unionists made up the protest, organized
jointly by the Scottish Trades Union
Congress and the Scottish Council of the
Labor Party, as a show of solidarity with
the striking miners.

Two days before the demonstration,
the NUM National Executive urged the
state-owned National Coal Board to re-
‘open negotiations without any pre-
conditions from either side.

Throughout this long and historic dis-
pute, Tory Prime Minister Margaret

Thatcher has been directing every re-.

sponse of NCB leaders, so that their
immediate reply to the demand for
negotiations was — No.

With a few more “‘scabs”’ still slug-
gishly drifting back to work, with the
threat of dangerous splits in the NUM,
with breakaways from the Notting-
hamshire, South Derbyshire and
Leicestershire areas of the NUM, and
the lack of decisive solidarity action from
the British trade union and_ labour
movement, Mrs. Thatcher believes the
strike is crumbling, and she is no longer
looking for the NUM to negotiate, but to
surrender.

That’s why she and the NCB are trying
to force the NUM to drop its principal
demand of *‘No pit closures on purely
economic grounds’’, as a pre-condition
for negotiations to resume.

But Scottish miners’ leader and NUM
vice-president Mick McGahey told the
Glasgow protest: ‘“‘This government is
alienating itself from the people by its
demand for blood. But Margaret
Thatcher is not having the blood of the
miners.”

Fighting Spirit
Despite the Government’s campaign

to break the strike, some 80 per cent of

the NUM’s 180,000 members are still on
strike, and many feel they have come too
far to turn back now.

That indomitable fighting spirit was
displayed by the many miners, their

wives and children who marched

through the snowy Glasgow streets
chanting and singing their battle anthem:
‘**Here we go, here we go, here we go.”

It also found expression in the words
of Miners’ Women’s Support Group
leader Alice Dolan, who told the rally:

“‘Our feelings are so strong and so deep
we will never let Margaret Thatcher de-
stroy any more of our mining com-
munities.”’

Dolan lambasted the government for
deliberately creating unemployment,
and condemned the kind of future the
Tories are trying to impose on mining
communities, with 20 pit closures and
20,000 redundancies as the first stage in
that grim plan for the future.

No Secret Deals

By way of an answer, McGahey told
the rally that the full NUM Executive
would now take part in the negotiations,
and that while the talks might be secret,
he declared:
deals.”

He said the union’s aim was to fight for
every pit on the NCB’s closure hit-list,
and denied that the union would agree to
some pits being “‘sacrificial lambs.”

To demands of “‘NO SELL OUT”
from a section of the rally, McGahey re-
plied: ‘‘Never pose that question to me
about sell outs — it is alien to my voc-
abulary.””

Other speakers at the rally included
Scottish TUC Deputy General Secretary
John Henry; Labour MP and Shadow
Scottish Secretary of State Donald De-
war; and Confederation of Shipbuilding
and Engineering Unions General Secret-
ary Alex Ferry. All of them condemned
Thatcher for preventing the NUM and
the NCB from holding ‘meaningful

TORONTO — NUM spokesperson
and Yorkshire miner Frank Clarke
will be back in Canada this month
speaking to trade unionists and sup-
porters on behalf of the striking
British coal miners.

Clarke, who launched the cross-
country solidarity tour last fall which
raised hundreds of thousands of dol-
lars for the NUM, will be speaking at
the Feb. 16-17 annual Alberta Federa-
tion of Labor convention and on Feb.
19 to a Toronto meeting organized by
Local 3 of the Canadian Union of Ed-
ucational Workers, (CUEW).

CUEW Local 3 chairperson
Charles Doyan told the Tribune that
Canadian solidarity with the miners
has never been more crucial during
the 11 months this epic strike has
raged.

‘‘There’s a lot going on in Britain

“There will be no secret .

TRIBUNE PHOTO — JIM TAIT

Some of the 8,000 supporting the NUM in Glasgow. _

negotiations’ that would end the strike.
Whatever the outcome of talks bet-

“ween NUM and NCB leaders, the fact

Canadian solidarity crucial

will be recorded in the annals of the
British working class that the year-long
struggle of Britain’s miners against pit
closures is without parallel in recent
history.

A remarkable feature in the ‘struggle
has been the level of solidarity from
British workers, and most significantly,
from the international working class
movement.

Decaying, Doomed System
Outstanding as that solidarity has been

that doesn’t make it into the Canadian
media. We think it is critical for Cana-
dian workers to get the NUM view-
point and to step up fund-raising ef-
forts on the miners’ behalf’, Doyan
said.

Meanwhile, Britain’s National Coal
Board announced another breakdown
in contract talks with the NUM, Feb.
5. This followed the union’s agree-
ment, earlier, to go.into negotiations
with the state-owned NCB without
any preconditions.

The NUM has maintained its posi-
tion throughout the fight that the jobs
and miners’ communities will not be
sacrificed to the Thatcher govern-
ment’s ruinous economic policies and
the planned destruction of. Britain’s
industrial base to feed the profits of
British and U.S. transnationals.

in financial and moral terms, there has
been an inadequate response to the min-
ers’ declaration that for them to win,
other sections of workers must join them
in action.

Drawing the lessons of that inadequa-
cy, McGahey explained that had the 1984
British TUC decisions to back the miners
with action been implemented by certain
trade unions, the strike cguld have been
won months ago.

The many hundreds of engineering,
shipyard, building, printing, civil ser-
vice, hospital, public service and office
workers who marched behind their union
or factory banners with the striking min-
ers in Glasgow, represent the best of the
British trade union movement and its —
future.

From those rich roots of class struggle
grows the profound understanding that
the capitalist system is moribund and
doomed; for, no matter how hard its
leaders try, they cannot reconcile their
system’s profit-greedy contradiction —
that it cannot provide peace, jobs and
prosperity for all the workers whose toil
creates the nation’s wealth.

Scottish miners
thank CPC

TORONTO — The Scottish Miners
Relief Fund thanked the Communist
Party for its donation of $2,788 to the
British miners’ strike, Jan. 18.

In a letter to the Party, the trustee of

the Scottish Miners’ fund wrote: “I
would be pleased if you couldconvey to

your members on behalf of the miners
and their families,

support.”

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our. very deep =|
appreciation for their tremendous

TORONTO — Injured workers
want the Ontario Tory govern-
ment to “‘clean house”’ in the top
echelons of the Workers Com-
pensation Board when changes to
the compensation laws take effect
next April and July.

Denied a hearing by the Tory
majority on the legislature’s
standing committee on resources
development, which began its re-
view of the 1983 Workers Com-
pensation Board’s Annual Re-
port, Feb. 5, representatives of
the Association of Injured Work-
ers Groups released their 24-page
brief to the media at a press con-
ference that afternoon.

The brief charged that ‘‘mis-
Management or apathy at the
highest levels of the Board has
created a crisis in Ontario’s work-
ers compensation system.”’

The most graphic proof of
board mismanagement, the group
charged, was the $5-billion ‘‘un-
funded liability’’ in the current
benefits system. What this
means, AIWG’s Garth Dee told

6 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 13, 1985

reporters, is that the WCB by not
taking into account a realistic
assessment of the impact of in-
flation on future compensation
benefits, has failed to build up
enough assets in the fund for fu-
ture payments to existing injured
workers. If the board had to pay
out every WCB claim today, the
fund would be short $5-billion
dollars.

Other evidence of the crisis in-
flicted on injured workers by
WCB mismanagement, the
AIWG charged, includes:

e delays of up to a year in
scheduling WCB appeals and
issuing decisions on claims;

e failure of the board’s re-
habilitation division to find suit-
able jobs for injured workers or to
adequately retrain them for jobs
that will pay at least as much as
they were earning prior to their
accident;

e WCB doctors overruling the
opinions of the injured workers’
physicians;

e and, denial of pension sup-

plements to injured workers who Union of Injured Workers, one of

are actively looking for work, in-
cluding workers getting disability
benefits under the Canada Pen-
sion Plan.

AIWG member Alec Farquhar
told the media that the house-
cleaning at the WCB should start
right at the top with the removal
of the board’s $78,000 a year

chairperson, and former federal ,

Tory MP, Lincoln Alexander.

‘‘The buck has to stop some-
where’’, Farquhar said. “‘When
an organization can run itself $5-
billion in the hole someone has to
take responsibility. With the
major changes in the compensa-
tion act ready to be implemented
in Bill 101, the government ought
to show good faith by giving the
set-up a fresh start with new
faces.””

Dee pointed out there are only
two ways for the Board to make
up the $5-billion deficit — increas-
ing employer assessments or cut-
ting benefits to the workers.

Phil Biggin, president of the

the nine organizations and legal
aid clinics making up AIWG,
charged that the deficit could be
used ‘‘as a stick against injured
workers to cut their benefits back
year by year.”

Of the 80,000 injured workers — +

in the province, 80 per cent, he —
said, get monthly benefits, that

are less than 50 per cent of the full
pension. ‘‘We’re not talking ab-
out, or asking for, a free hand
out’’, Biggin said. “‘We’re asking
for justice for injured workers,
and for the government of Ontario
to give then decent pensions.”

Biggin also criticized the fact
that current policy makers at the
boardaredevisingthe groundrules
for the new board of directors
created by Bill 101. He added that
the new board of directors should
set as its first task the complete
review of WCB policies, and in
that process, ‘“‘labor and injured —
workers representatives should —
have a critical role in policy-mak-
ing at the board.” ‘