By MIKE PHILLIPS
STONEY CREEK — Every Tuesday
WABCO strikers turn out to their weekly
_ barbecue on the picket line to both col-
lect their picket pay and let management
Inside the plant know they’re as deter-
Mined to win a decent contract right now
as they were on May, 19 when they hit the
bricks. :

WABCO is short for Westinghouse
Air Brake Company, which is how the
Company was known until Westinghouse
sold the business to American Standard

Inc., about 20 years ago.
From the beginning there has always
been a close relationship between the
Wages and working conditions at

Westinghouse in Hamilton and WAB- ~

CO. In this strike, wage parity with West-
inghouse and the same COLA as West-
inghouse workers have in their recently
Negotiated agreement are the two most
Important strike issues, John Pickup,
president of Local 588 United Electrical
workers, told the Tribune, Aug. 11.

It isn’t as if WABCO can’t afford to
keep up with Westinghouse wages, since
American Standard is a very large U.S.
multi-national corporation and every
worker on the picket line also knows the
Company is planning to expand its facility
in Stoney Creek.

Besides, the workers point out, |

WABCO had its best profit year ever in
1980, and since 1958 the company has
never shown a loss at the end of the year.
WABCO workers have helped build the
company up by 33% since the takeover.

With the same kind of arrogance that
has forced the workers to strike for 12

earl t te ee Ae

proposed wage offer.

weeks, the company has refused to
negotiate with the union bargaining
committee since the May 19 strike
launching.

Yet, the company has managed to get
letters, hand delivered to each member
of the approximately 300-member

bargaining unit on two separate occa- '

sions, signed by aJ.R. Pier, general man-
ager and vice-president of WABCO,
making offers to the workers and by-
passing the negotiating committee.

The most recent ‘“‘communication”’
was sent Aug. 5 detailing WABCO’s
miserable offer for a COLA that is cap-
ped at an inflation rate of 12%. Adding
insult to injury, the proposed COLA
wouldn’t even apply until the last six

months of the new agreement.

Pickup and others on the line were
somewhat amused by the company’s

= LABOR
Parity with Westinghouse
issue in WABCO strike

claim that such a proposal would .

‘‘provide protection against accelerated
inflation up to 12%”’.

Based on WABCO’s proposal, the
union estimates that in the last month of
the contract they’d collect 20 cents
through the COLA. Westinghouse
workers, members of UE Local 504, on
the other hand, with a COLA formula
delivering one cent an hour increase for
each .32 rise in the Consumer Price In-
dex, will get 52 cents for the 12th to the
18th month of their contract.

The strikers also noted how current —

wages have dropped about 56 cents an
hour below Westinghouse wages. By the
end of 18 months the gap will increase to
$1.20 an hour based on the company’s

at» am 4d iy xf

TRIBUNE PHOTO — MIKE PHILLIPS

Scottish miners’ leader Mick McGahey (centre standing) was welcomed to the WABCO

picket line by United Electrical Workers Local 558 president John Pickup. The strike is -

now in its 12th week. -

The main reason the company hasn’t
had the guts to propose these offers di-
rectly to the bargaining committee, the
strikers note, is that they are worse than
the contract offer Local 558 members
rejected with a 97.5% margin last May.

Pickup said the local is ready at any
time to engage in sincere negotiations
with the WABCO. ‘‘But if they really
know what sincere means’’, he said,
‘they'll be getting back to us.”’

For a strike that is in its 12th week,
morale is very high and the militant pic-
ket line is very strong. The strikers noted
that a dance has been held, and every
Tuesday the picnic goes on outside the
gate.

On Aug. 10, the strikers’ morale was
boosted by the presence on their picket
line of Mick McGahey, leader of the
Scottish district of the National Union of

Mine workers and a vice-president of the

whole British union.
. Labor support has been coming
through the Hamilton and District Labor
Council, where the local recently made
an appeal for support, and from UE
Local 610 at the WABCO plant in Wil-
merding, Pennsylvania. A Local 558
delegation visited the U.S. WABCO
workers and was warmly received at a
membership meeting and when leafleting
the next day outside the plant gate.

To date, Local 610 has contributed
$2,000 to the Local 558 strike fund.

Pickup noted how management was
gloating a bit during the middle of the
summer when many strikers went ahead
with their summer vacations and the pic-
ket line started to thin out. ‘“‘But this
week we've been getting just about as
many on the pickets as we were getting in
the first week of the strike and manage-
ment aren’t gloating anymore,” he said.

Globe and Mail readers were treated, August 10, to an
article by Stan McDowell, syndicated foreign affairs
columnist and so-called expert on Soviet affairs and
communism. :

McDowell, with artful twists of the pen and a trust that
his readers have no solid base from which to distinguish
fact from fiction, attempts to use the events in Poland to
prové that world socialism is, simply put, a more
“bureaucratic, dehumanizing, alienating process by
which people are reduced to cogs”’ than is the’ West.

“*The Polish workers have not lost their class con-
sciousness. They’ve found it ...’’ says McDowell **. . .
And they are proving that neither history, nor class
Struggle, in the classic Marxist sense, ends with the

_ Ofcourse nowhere does Marxism state that “history”
disappears with the arrival of socialism. What does ap-
Pear however is a sense of history based on a true ap-
Preciation of the laws of human development, rather
than the ‘‘class history of bourgeois historiographers :
Rather than denying history, socialism places it at the
disposal of the people, instead of distorting it to provide
justification for the continual rule of the monopolies.
_ Neither does Marxism claim that the class struggle
disappears with the arrival of socialism. On the contrary
the ‘‘classics”’.of Marxism are replete with references to
the continuation of the class struggle for a considerable
‘Period, and even initially of an intensification of the class
_ Struggle, under socialism. What Marxism does say is that
Socialism, by eliminating the private ownership of the
means of production (a question McDowell neatly av-
oids — W.S.) lays the basis for the elimination of classes
and the consequent end of the class struggle. This is by
No means simply a spontaneous straightforward process
however, and the events in Poland give witness to this
fact, rather than to the distorted conclusions, based on
the equally. distorted premises, constructed by
McDowell.
What class consciousness is McDowell speaking ab-
out? Is it the kind of class consciousness which lies
behind his column? I have looked in vain for previous
columns by him in support of workers on strike, workers
demanding the right to equal voice in affairs of state,
equal timé on TV, etc. Is it the kind of class conscious-

‘Class consciousne

arrival of ‘real socialism’.’’ =

ness which brings the support of U.S. imperialism be-
hind it, along with all the most right-wing elements in the
world? Is it the kind of class consciousness which earns
the full support and active participation of the Pope and
the Catholic church? Is it the kind of class consciousness
which brings forward the praise of the fascist scum and
collaborators of Hitler who were forced to flee their
country after the defeat of Nazi Germany?

All these elements, including McDowell, are most
certainly class conscious. Their class however is not the
working class. It is the very class of rulers and owners
which the Polish working class dethroned following the
second world war.

Labor in action
| William Stewart

- What those elements see in the present events in Po-
land is an opportunity to reverse this victory for the
working class of Poland, and for working people world-
wide, and to restore capitalist rule in Poland.

What has happened in Poland is not what McDowell
describes as ‘‘the mass labor movement”’ in Poland tak-
ing up the cause previously championed by the ‘‘iso-
lated, generally middle-class dissident movements else-
where in Warsaw Pact Europe’ (Czechoslovakia, Hun-
gary — WS). Rather, it is the failure of the Communist
Party in Poland to win the working class for socialist
objectives; involve the entire working class in the run-
ning of the country; organize the economy of the country
in a manner which would provide for the continual ex-
pansion of the economic social and cultural development
of all the people and in the process of this do away with
private ownership of the means of production and the
collectivization of agriculture.

The Communist Party of Poland, and its working class
are in the process of drawing profound lessons from
these errors. As well the entire Communist and workers’
movement around the world will deepen its appreciation

*. but for which class?

of the need to scrupulously live up to the science of
Marxism-Leninism and the lessons of history.

It will, at its peril, however, draw the kind of conclu-
sions proposed by McDowell, who is calculating on the
experience of workers in capitalist countries, where
trade unions arise out of the very nature of capitalist
society and the necessity for workers to band together to
win the best deal they can from the owners of industry,
and from the state which is an extension of these same
owners. Confrontation is built into the very system.

In socialist society there are no private owners. All
production is owned collectively and operated in the
interests of the entire people. The unions are an integral
part of the state of the people and play a major role in
deciding on all matters of concern to them and to the
people in general.

That this relationship broke down in Poland is a sharp

_ criticism of the Polish Communist Party, one it has ac-

cepted and is working to correct. It will not and-cannot
be rectified by trying to imbue socialist trade unions,
with capitalist trade union principles. The former’s role
is immeasurably richer and more extensive, they are
organs of the working class which hold power in their
country.

It is the height of impertinence for capitalist trade
union leaders to pretend they are coming to the aid of the
Polish working class by wishing for it ‘‘capitalist-type
trade unions’’. Such “‘aid’’ is designed to replace social-
ism with capitalism, either per se, or by the name of
social democracy, or in the name of Maoist, or
Trotskyite inventions.

The Polish working class and trade union movement
was temporarily let down by its own Communist Party.
In the course of trying to find a way to resolve the
difficult problems arising from ‘this crisis they.are being
wooed, and in some instances used by elements at home
and abroad, who are hostile to socialism.

No part of the labor movement in Canada, the New
Democratic Party, the trade union movement or anyone
who calls himself or herself socialist, should lend aid to
this campaign.

If you don’t believe this then you will have to believe
Stan McDowell, or President Reagan, or Pope John-
Paul, or Peter Worthington, or Joe Clark or Margaret
Thatcher, or ...

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—AUG. 21, 1981—Page 3

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