[page 43]
Track Reco
The Sto
of the
Caterpilla
Occupation 3y Charles Woolfso
and John Foster.
Published by Verso,
1988, £7-95.
Reviewed by Colin Fox, who covered the Caterpillar occupation from start to finish
for the Militant.
Woolfson and Fosters' book describes an industrial dispute in which 1,200 workers sent their bosses packing and took control of their factory, against a background of antitrades union legislation designed to prevent precisely this type of situation. This action was to have an immediate effect on the political landscape. One of the factors in the rout of the Tories in Scotland in 1987 was the Caterpillar occupation.
Although the widespread devastation of the Scottish economy was all too evident around them, the men and women of Caterpillar's Uddingston factory decided to take on one of the world's largest companies.
In September 1986 the Caterpillar corporation announced a plan to invest £62.5 million in their 'Glasgow operations'. . Malcolm Rifkind, the Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, heralded this as a great example of the strength of the Scottish economy through its links with successful world corporations like Caterpillar.
But within weeks the world had become a very different place not just for Rifkind but also for the 1,200 employees who had celebrated Christmas 1986 with an illusory sense of security. As Woolfson and Foster show, Caterpillar's US bosses in Peoria, Illinois decided to close their
44
IMI
JOC
TISS ABU EEP PATTE FRONTIERS OF TEC
HELP I:
TO SI
1200
Glasgow operations at about the same time as Rifkind's illfounded optimism was uttered. The 'Plant with a future', as the Caterpillar management had originally dubbed it, became the plant without a future.
The turnaround was explained by Peoria's mouthpiece in Scotland, Ken Robinson. Uddingston was a "victim of the corporation's worldwide remedy" for overcapacity. Caterpillar was in decline worldwide. From 1978 to 1984 its share of world markets fell from 44 per cent to 35 per cent and cumulative losses had surpassed $500 million.
Closure
Uddingston, however, was not one of Caterpillar's loss making operations and the closure decision was realiy politically inspired. Illinois felt that closing another plant in the USA would be much more damaging in business terms than the closure of a plant in Europe. They took what seemed, to them at least, the safest option.
The authors reveal that the original decision to occupy the biggest single factory in Western Europe under one roof, was made on the spur of the moment by the senior stewards. John Brannan, the senior steward and leader of the occupation, announced to a flabbergasted news con-
ference (called in fact not by the unions but by management!) that "on behalf of the hourly paid workers at Uddingston we are now occupying the plant".
Woolfson and Foster capture vividly the details of discussions, meetings and events of the occupation. They recorded all the meetings of the Joint Occupation Committee (JOC) on tape throughout the entire period. They outline very well the day-to-day events of the occupation and even provide a valuable potted history of the struggles of the AEU in the factory. But the book's single biggest weakness is that it lacks any analysis of the objectives, strategy and tactics of the various players in the Caterpillar struggle.
Anyone involved with the occupation would undoubtedly conclude that the strength of the occupation was due in large measure to the calibre of the leaders of the Joint Occupation Committee and to the many rank and file AEU members who sprang into positions of leadership during those 103 days.
Unfortunately, the spirit and feelings of these workers do not feature very strongly in this book. Woolson and Foster concern themselves almost exclusively with the leaders of the dispute and the recordings contain little material from the rank and file.
The would
workers be the
at Tannochside first to admit
CATERPILLA
WHERES
THE
262м
that they were no different from miners, steelworkers or workers in any other tactory up and down the land. Yet while workers at Gartcosh, Cardowan Colliery and Black & White Whisky (all factories in the immediate vicinity of Uddingston which had recently closed) had wearily walked down the road without a fight, those at Caterpillar stood firm.
What was the difference? Firstly, the loyalty of the vast majority of ordinary workers involved in the occupation was immense and indeed all the more remarkable considering the bulk of them had played very litle part in union affairs prior to the occupation.
I remember a conversation 1 had with Kevin O'Shea, Young member of the AEU
and a loyal supporter of the occupation, on the way to speak at the LPYS Scottish Conference in Portobello. He had said that before the occupation he had held no strong interest whatsoever in what his union was doing in the plant and even far less outside.
The occupation had changed all that. He had become intensely loyal to the union and the men and women of the union, many of whom he had never met before. For him now the union was everything and he was prepared to do anything for the success of the occupation.
Woolfson and Foster when Kevin climbed a
recall 200ft
[page 44]
cooling tower one night at
about 3am in the dead of
winter to bring down one
man who had become suic-
idal because of the financial
and social privations of the
struggle. This outstanding
feeling of comradeship grew
as the occupation went on.
particulary as the numbers
involved lessened.
But as important was the
tremendous leadership and
ingenuity of the JOC. With
the stocks which the occupa-
tion inherited, the workers
assembled a D6H tractor
which they intended to give
to Bob Geldof's Band-Aid.
To distinguish it from the
'cowardly yellow' of Caterpillar equipment they painted it in the only other colour avail-
able. Thus it became the 'Pink Panther'
While this was a brilliantly inspired publicity stunt it was also part of a retraining prosramme which was to allow in the words of John Branran "a typist to become a weider and a welder to become acquainted with computers There were finance committees, entertainment committees, DHSS committees eic. playing important supporting roles to the JOC itse:
Woolfson and Foster ic not fully evaluate the optors open to the JOC to win the dispute. Convincing Caterpi!lar to change its mind was the first response of the campaign, but this quick; became impossible. ever. with handsome enticemens tom the government.
So it was suggested that perhaps a takeove: by a competitor of Caterpiar. like Komatsu of Japan. righ: be viable. But giver. char the reason for the ciosure was supposedly through overcapacity' on the world market, this optior. soon collapsed.
Later some academics argued that a workers cooperative would be the answer. Initially this was attractive to the workforce because it kept the existing machinery and technology in the factory. The government even reportedly offered up to £5m to set one up. However more realistic advisors concluded that a
cooperative stood no chance
when competing against
huge multinationals and it
was finally ruled out when
Caterpillar refused to donate
the necessary equipment.
Finally there was the solu-
tion put forward by Militant -
to bring pressure to bear
through the entire labour
movement to force the Tories to nationalise Caterpillar. Only with backing of government money could this inodem, economic and efficient factory and workforce be saved
The JOC took this demand up and John Giler. the deputy convenor. used it in discussions with Riikind and Tory ministers. He roid them "if you can bail your iriends out at Johnson Matthey then you can take our plant which is much more profitable into public ownership".
If sufficient pressure had been brought to bear on the Tories by the leaders oi the labour movement then the option of nationalisatior: could have been made a reality. But no such pressure was mounted by the labour and trade union leaders. They bear the responsibility for what happened to the Caterpillar workforce.
Welcher
Entirely in keeping with his performance during the miners' strike, Neil Kinnock decided to keep well clear of the occupation, believing that to be closely associated with an illegal occupation would be 'electorally damaging'.
It was only after the occupation had been going 10 weeks that Kinnock was eventually persuaded to make a brief visit to the plant. He was politely heard but with no great enthusiasm. It was left to Brannan to voice the sentiment of the workers, when he said "thank you for coming Neil. We here in Tannochside know you as a Welshman, we just hope you are not a welcher. We expect your full support."
Woolfson and
count the only visit to the
occupation of the AEU gen-
eral secretary, Gavin Laird
who said " ...perhaps not all
the jobs can be saved". . The
occupation had barely begun
and here he was giving in
already. Not surprisingly the
JOC never invited him back
and Laird himself passed over
the mantle of Judas to his
Executive councillor, Jimmy
Airlie.
Laird however was much
more active behind the
scenes and Woolfson and
Foster imply that he was per-
sonally involved in negotia-
tions with Caterpillar man-
agement behind the backs of the JOC.
Certainly the AEU right wing circulated a rumour at the union conference that a government takeover was imminent. Right in the middle of the debate it was announced that word had just reached the AEU leaders that the factory and the jobs had been saved. The Scottish Development Agency were to take over the factory.
Amidst euphoric scenes the conference adjourned to congratulate the Caterpillar workers assembled in the visitors gallery. However in the cold light of day and on further enquiry it became clear that no such announcement had been made.
The right wing had slipped off the hook and the issue could not be rediscussed. Shamefully the left at the conference fell for the ploy hook, line and sinker. Woolfson and Foster imply that Airlie was also involved in this manouevre.
Airlie's role in events is an obvious problem for Woolfson and Foster. The tapes in their possession recorded the facts and those facts paint a miserable picture of Airlie's misdeeds. Yet as a member of the 'Communist' Party, he shares the same allegiances as the authors. They fail to apportion the blame on Airlie which the record of events clearly shows.
Airlie was and still is the AEU EC member for the Scottish division, with first hand experience of leading a successful occupation. At Up-
per Clyde Shipbuilders in the
1970s, he had been one of the leaders of a successful sit-in and largely on this reputation had been elected to the AEU EC.
Yet his first advice to the JOC was that "any sit-in can have its difficulties, obviously it can have a limited tactical value". From the first, Airlie wanted to abandon the occupation in favour of a picketing campaign.
He also told Brannan and Gillen that under the rules the union could only provide strike pay for 10 weeks. But when AEU head office was contacted, it was revealed that the rules made provision for strike pay to be paid for up to one year! To accept that an EC member was not aware of the rules governing strike pay is just not credible
Realism
Had the leaders of the STUC, Labour Party and the AEU shown even one hundredth of the will of the workforce then the outcome of the occupation would certainly have been different. Without being conscious of it, Woolfson and Foster prove that the leadership of the labour movement during the Caterpillar occupation acted as tools of big business, as they unfortunately have in other disputes in this era of 'new realism'
The final words should be left to the men who fought for 103 proud days: "I think we're something that should be looked at by the entire trades union movement. Remember we came in here knowing damn all about Marx, Lenin, Thatcher, rightwing, left-wing or anything. We came in here, raw boys off the street, and we achieved the most advanced knowledge and experience in the trade union movement just by practice - practice taking up the cudgels and not accepting 'no' for an answer.
45
[page 45]
MIR Spring 1989: Book reviews
imebends
A Life.
By Arthur Miller.
Published by
Methuen, 1987, £5.
Reviewed by
Waddingtı
Watching Casablanca over the Christmas holiday, I noticed how the politics of the 1930's intruded; it is revealed that Rick, the principal character, has been gun-running for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. This autobiography by Arthur Miller perhaps explains why.
Miller is most famous for his plays, standing up to the Mc- Carthy witch-hunt in the 1950s, and for marrying Marilyn Monroe, not necessarily in that order.
It is said that on the opening night of Death of a Salesman, the owner of the largest department store in New York was so moved that he ordered that from henceforth nobody was to be sacked for being too old. The Crucible, about the Salem Trials in the 1690s (in which John Proctor is eventually hanged for refusing to confess to witchcraft) forcefully condemns the activities of the McCarthyites and is Miller's most produced play. A production of the play in 1953 on the same day as the executions of the Rosenbergs (convicted of spying on dubious evidence) brought the audience to their feet at the end for two minutes silence. The play, All My Sons, about the death of American airmen in World War Il due to corruption amongst the armaments industry, was banned from a showing to American Gl's in Germany in the late 1940's. That, with a couple of exceptions, Miller's plays were originally flops, compared to the wide success of today, suggests that the plays are fundamentally a product of and a comment on - their times.
46
Arthur Miller.
Miller was the son of successful immigrants. The 1929 Crash "would once again transform their transformed lives". The family business, Miltex, was destroyed. All this had a profound effect on the young Miller as it did on many other American playwrights and authors like Ernest Hemmingway, Clifford Odets, Eugene O'Neil and John Steinbeck. Miller relates how, "The revolution in Russia...made terrific sense; from a distance it seemed a sublime instance of man's intelligence". Like many intellectuals in the 1930s he was attracted to Russia and the Stalin regime, mistakenly believing that the regime and socialism were the same thing. "We enjoyed a certain unity within ourselves by virtue of a higher consciousness bestowed by our expectation of a socialist evolution of the planet" . And further: "All that could save us was harsh reason and socialist production not for profit but for use"
However, Miller did not joir. the Communist Party, despite his sympathies, unlike many other intellectuals who went into the CP believing they were fighting for socialism. In 1937, he was sent by his university newspaper "to report...on the outbreak of sitdown strikes in the General
Motors Fisher Body Plant number one. I identified with the workers in no abstract way; in fact my work experience may account for my amazement at their new solidarity. It was nearly incredible to me that hundreds of ordinary factory workers, a large number of them recruited in the southern states, where hostility to unions was endemic, had one day simply stopped the machines, locked the factory doors from within, and refused to leave until their union was recognised as their bargaining agent" Miller further reports that Henry Ford had his factory sprinkler systems converted to gas should the dreadful disease spread to his factory! These feelings are further confirmed in a recent interview in Marxism Today, "You see, the big practical event of that time, after 1937, was the organisation of the unions, and that had aspects of revolutionary emotions, because it swept up all kinds of people". The workers' movement deeply impressed itself on the consciousness of Arthur Miller.
Mafia
Not surprisingly Miller's first play was about a strike at a small factory. Just after the Second World War, Miller got involved in the case of Pete Panto: "a young longshoreman who had attempted to lead a rank and file revolt against the leadership of Joseph Ryan and his colleagues, many of them allegedly mafiosi, who ran the International Longshoreman's Association. Panto, one evening during dinner, had been lured from his home by a phone call from an unknown caller and was never seen again. The movement he had led vanished from the scene". In the 1950s Miller wrote a screenplay based on this incident. The Hook never reached the screen, as the producer and the FBI demanded that all references to the mafia be replaced with references to the Communist Par-
ty! Foreshadowing his imminent call to the House Un- American Activities Committee (HUAC), the would-be film producer telegrammed Miller: "It's interesting :c: the minute we try :0 mare:: script pro-America- ::- = out"
HUAC
The HUAC sent peop = :: prison, in some cases ior cie a year, for refusing to na.r.= names. Miller commers "Everywhere teachers we:= being fired for their associa tions or ideas, real or allege: as were scientists, diplomats postmen, actors, directors writers - as though rea. America was rising up agains: all that was not simple to understand". Miller recalls returning to his old university to be told by his old professor that the FBI had asked students and teachers to inform" on one another. Whilst on campus Miller met a state policeman whose job it was to go through the newspaper correspondence to dig out would be lefts or radicals. Miller himself lost jobs, in one case when Pontiac threatened to withdraw advertising if Miller's articles appeared!
When finally called before the HUAC, Miller refused to give the names of people who had attended various public meetings. He was held in contempt, fined $500 and threatened with a month in jail. On appeal the verdict was overturned.
Miller doesn't see that the events of the stirring 1930s that made him what he was, were precisely the events Mc- Carthy wanted to excise. The 1930s had been blighted by capitalism; the system had been fortunate to survive. McCarthy and his committee (including the vice chairman who was later to become President Richard Nixon) were determined to clean up, to remove any echo of those times and hoped to banish the ideas forever. While communists and 'subversives' were in the front-line of at-
tack, the McCarthyites went
[page 46]
much further. Describing the line of the New Deal as 'twenty years of treason', McCarthy wanted to ensure that the liberal capitalist policies of that time were revised or never resurrected. The 1950s were like a counter revolution, cushioned on the enormous padding of the great boom.
As for the CP today, says Miller: "My view of American communists was of a sect that might as well be praying somewhere in the Himalayas for all the relevance they had to any motion in the American world". He thinks that Gorbachev has to be taken seriously as "a remarkable new force" for change but his example of progress is not convincing - "when the Soviets close down a show, it is a committee that makes the decisions, rather than one man - at least since Stalin died"
Time bomb
Death of a Salesman got Miller a Pulitzer prize and tells the story of a man driven to suicide by failure - a failure to live up to the demands of capitalism. "On the play's opening night a woman... was outraged, calling it a 'time bomb under American capitalism'. I hoped it was, or at least under the bullshit of capitalism - this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last!".
The English theatre critic Ken Tynan said that to understand the effect of Miller's plays you had to appreciate that of the 26 plays in the West End in the 1950s, 22 of them were about the upper or upper middle classes. Tynan went on to say that Miller (and Brecht) had that "passionate desire to improve the human condition" Miller's plays punctured the smug. complacency of the Macmillan years, heralding ine arval of the 'angry young men.
The Robert
Tressell
Lectures,
1981-88.
Edited by David
Alfred.
Published by the Vorkers Educational Association, £4-50,
1988.
Reviewed by Tony
Aitman
Robert Tressell's brilliant
novel, The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists, has a special
place in the British labour
movement. It is about a
group of house painters in
Mugsborough - in particular,
about the life and ideas of the
socialist Owen. Here is a
novel about the lives and
experiences and ideas of or-
dinary working people - with
which every worker who
reads it would instantly iden-
tify - written by a working
man. Even the manner in which the book was rescued from oblivion and distortion is a testimony to the struggle of working people.
Since 1981, the Workers Educational Association branch in Hastings, where Tressell worked, and the model for "Mugsborough", has held an annual Robert Tressell Memorial Lecture, and these have now been collected in book form. Some of the lectures throw fascinating light on Tressell and his book, as well as on the Liverpool socialists who rescued his burial place and Fred Ball his biographer, to whom we owe the recovery of the book in its original form. Others, however, tell us more about the lecturer than the book.
Norman Willis, for example, gave the 1983 lecture on 'Tressell and the Unions'. '. He starts by relating how he went to Liverpool and how he "flew to Manchester from Heathrow and was driven to Heathrow by a rather elderly gentleman in a car...(who) told me that he was a Tory voter". One wonders how Tressell would have treated,
and what name he would
have given, a rather portly
trade union leader with a
Tory-voting chauffeur.
Willis points to what he sees
as a weakness in the book:
...the immediate necessity to stand together, although put in general, doesn't emerge as an immediate objective" This might well be true, yet one year later, at the height of the miners' strike, the failure
of the TUC 'to stand together'
and mobilise full support for
the NUM led to Willis being
shouted down in South
Wales. Willis' contribution is a
rambling, sometimes incohe-
rent piece (what does his
description of the People's
March for Jobs as "not just a
protest, but a moving, self-
educating force" mean?), but includes one gem of self-perception: "I've been accused that in the class war I was only fit to be a hostage. Well, perhaps"
It would take a book to deal with the mistakes, half-truths and distortions of Raphael Samuel's 1985 lecture. To him, Tressell and all socialists, are people apart, a 'spiritual elect', separate from the working class, "bringing understanding from outside to the people". Workers are ignorant, and the socialist elite must bring them the gospel. This stands Marxism on its head; the socialist is not part of a separate vanguard, but rooted in the working class. Neither are workers "ignorant' - this is precisely the attitude of those who do stand outside the working class, and blame the workers for their own condition. Marxism is, after all, the generalised experience of the working class, and this is what Tressell attempts to do in the book, to generalise the experience of his fellow workers into a critique of capitalism. It is no accident that the talk of ignorance and divisions comes from those trade union leaders who seek to shift the blame for divisions, defeats and the failure to achieve socialism away from themselves and the rest of the right wing leadership and onto the shoulders of the workers themselves.
Samuel also sees socialist vanguardism" arising from Christianity, from "a deep religious culture"; "socialism was born as a new Christianity". He repeats the old chestnut that "it was a very deep Protestantism and above all Nonconformity which is the formative culture....on which English socialism grows". It is true that many early socialists had Christian beliefs, and that the Labour Church and the Socialist Sunday Schools had a large following, attempting to build a better moral life within capitalism ('not just bread, but bread and roses"); many more had a variety of weird and wonderful mystica! ideas ranging from the theosophy of Besant and the Fabians to the 'Religion of Socialism' of Bax, but this represented the weakness rather than the strength of English socialism.
Taken with other lectures in the book, there is an attempt to 'intellectualise' Tressell, to remove his book trom 1 the manual of the socialist activist into the discussion material of the academic circle. This is where John Nettleton's article stands out as the one written by an active worker. This, though, is the other side of the coin; The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists no longer plays the role it did in the labour movement. Tony Benn, in his essay on why we don't have socialism, points out that "one reason why Tressell's dream has never been realised is that the labour movement has given up analysis to explain what is actually happening". . The complete lack of theory within the leadership of the Labour Party is reflected throughout the labour movement. It is the task of the Marxists, in building the movement, to raise and discuss the question of theory. This process will also rescue The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists from the hands of the academics and return it, despite its weaknesses, to its place as one of the major novels of the socialist movement.
47
[page 47]
World Socialist Books Peter Taaffe and Tony Mulhearn - Liverpool: A City that Woolfson and Foster - Track Record: The story of the Ken Livingstone - If Voting Changed Anything, They'd Orders to World Socialist Books, 3/13 Hepscott Road, London E9 5HB. Please add 10 per cent to orders under £10, over £10 post counter-revolution... Dared to Fight Jan Valtin - Out of the Night Caterpillar Occupation. Abolish It Available from GERMANY From Revolution to Counter-Revolution 4083% ROB SEWELL Rob Sewell - Germany: From revolution to Arthur Miller - Timebends: ALife. free. Cheques payable to World Socialist Books. £2.50 £6.95 £7.95 £5.99 .. £7.95 £3.95