The meeting
Bob Crow challenges all bosses, bureaucrats and bourgeosie to a punch up!
Alan Wilkins tells it like it is.
Tony Benn finally realises the awful truth about the Labour Party.
Jerry Hicks responds to attempt by Rolls Royce bosses to buy him out.
Applause for Jerry.
Next up was Alan Watkins a life long trade unionist and friend of Jerry Hicks now retired. Alan who was convener at the Coventry Rolls Royce plant for many years told the meeting how even retired members relied on the union. Rolls Royce could easily introduce cuts to the pensions being collected by its former workers if the present union was not there to stop them. Any successful attack on present workers could easily have repercussions for ex employees.
Tony Benn who was the MP for Bristol East for many years until the seat was done away with concentrated his attacks on the Labour Party and its total failure to anything of note since winning power in 1997. It’s hard to understand why he remains a member of an organization that he seems to spend his entire life slagging off.
Finally Jerry Hicks took the stage to tell of the history of the dispute. How his sacking is little more than vindictive revenge from a management who resent the fact that he successfully defended two workers that they had previously tried to sack. Since his sacking an ‘Interim Relief Hearing’ has ruled in his favour and accused Rolls Royce management of holding ‘Institutionalised Animosity’ towards Trade Unions. Rolls Royce have tried to engineer themselves an exit strategy by offering Jerry £50,000 to go quietly. He has refused. Unless he is unconditionally reinstated by next Monday the entire test area (an essential part of the factory’s operation) will go on indefinite strike. A march is planned for 2nd of September 1pm College Green in Bristol.
Unless of course Jerry has won and been reinstated by then.... .
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Comments
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please tell me again why
21.08.2005 18:26
Aperently the Bristol factory produces and services engines for military aircraft, such as the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Hawk and the Harrier so why is anybody supportig these people, they are part of the machine that kills and maims countless people around the world.
They should be ashamed of themselves for producing these things, what can they possibly say to justify being paid to help lay wste to others livlyhoods and neibourhoods.
another pixie
How clean are your hands, pixie?
21.08.2005 19:25
Of course, it's bad that arms are being produced that kill and threaten people around the world - but it is not the fault of the people working in the arms factories who, as Jerry Hicks said, would rather be making tractors, if they had a free choice of where they worked. The blame lies with the arms companies and the capitalist system, which fuel the need for arms and then force working class people to make the arms for them.
By struggling for control over their workplace, the Rolls Royce workers are, in fact, struggling against the capitalist system and so against the arms trade. They are working for a time when they, rather than their bosses, will be able to decide whether they produce weapons; or whether they turn the weapons on their bosses. That's the sort of struggle we should support.
Voluntary Slave
REALLY?
22.08.2005 13:57
What you say is not justifacation in helping to produce arms and directly helping to kill people and wipe out their ways of life.
The unions are part of the problem not part of the solution (in this country) they give millions to New Labour every year.
Lets face the fact that the unions arn't going to change the system in any way, they are quite happy with keeping the workers down letting them finance the labour party who do their part to keep capitalism in place. They are after all just another bunch of hierarchically structured organizations, who dictate top down.
Sure none of us are pristine pure white as snow but I for one dont make arms I dont contribute to any arms making manufacturers quite as directly as that, spending 7-8 hours a day building things that will directly result in others deaths, I would suspect that you dont either.
If the RR workers went out on strike to demand that RR stoped making fighter engines in that plant then I would support them all the way but the way I see things is their more interested in their wages and pensions and it dont matter what they were producing.
Would you support unionising a factory that made landmines or armalite rifles or hand grenades or cruse missiles or devices used to torture detainees?
would you?
zcat
zCat - what about the workers?
23.08.2005 20:21
Many of the people working at RR will have all sorts of views that you or I disagree with. But how on earth do you hope to change things unless people who don't agree with you yet change their minds? And how will that happen unless you support the good things they do?
People learn more from fighting back than they ever will by (not) listening to someone denouncing them from a distant moral high-ground.
Solidarity with the Rolls workers fighting back!
Take a look at
IanA
.
24.08.2005 14:57
Please listen to someone who nows the truth on the ground
02.09.2005 23:55
A RR Bristol employee
RRworker - are you in HR?
13.09.2005 07:35
"RRworker" claims that Jerry doesn't really represent his members. Odd that the rest of the site has had redundancies for years, but test have defended jobs successfully.
It's quite clear which side you're on. Did you copy your comments from the management Q&A, or are you the one that wrote it in the first place?
Even a tribunal, working to tory laws stacked against working people, found in favour of Jerry. Just how biased must you be to blame the victim?
IanA