THE victory of the Gardner's workers against management's plans isn't just a punch on the nose for Thatcher, but a fundamental challenge to the right of multinationals to switch capital and technology from one country to another.
Hawker Siddeley, have been buying and selling companies like Malcolm Allison bought and sold footballers. But unlike Big Mal's team, Hawker Siddeley are topping the UK engineering league table, with £120m profits Photo: Pote Grant (Socialist Challenge) this year alone. Gardner's have nearly £12m in undistributed profits in the bank.
Already this year 350 gone bankrupt in Hawker's claim and investments are responsible for redundancy plans doesn't hold water. During the Gardner's engines increased to 94 a month.
come from the perienced a 10-12 per cent increase in demand for diesel engines this year.
So what has Hawker Siddeley been up It's now alliance is with the multinationals against their smaller UK rivals. celerating pace of take-overs of smaller companies redundancy For five years Gardner'$ parent company companies have the North-west, but that plummeting markets their eight-week dispute the order book for What's more, these orders may well have US market which has exronce bown tne ac for example, Gardner by Hawker's Socialist Challenge 3 December 1980 Page 4 CBI conference. Thatcher is sacrificing small firms on the altar of monetarism.
Hawker Siddeley's long-term project for Gardner's is still very likely that of stripping it of its assets and selling it for a profit at a later date. Today the machinery and stock in the Gardner plant is valued at £29m than Hawker's paid for it in 1977!
In this sense the struggle at Gardner's bears a greater resemblance to the Roberts Arundel dispute in Stockport in 1967 or Imperial Typewriters mentioned 1971 work-in at UCS - a genuinely bankrupt company.
Other Hawker have been confronter with 900 redundancies.
When a multinational decides to play ofi one subsidiary against inter-prest combine committe A piner inter-plant combine committees. movement can board by generalising the struggle inside the multinational.
The recent opening by Hawker of a diesel engine factory in Bangladesh with wage rates only about eight per cent of levels paid in its Western subsidiaries shows the direction the bosses intend to go in. organisation of workers must surely stem from the need to combat the international plans of the multinationals.
- £15m more 1974 than the oftsubsidiaries are hitting Workers at Mirrlees Blackstone, the ideal developed across-theThe Rule.
Lords Irish self-rule under British control. tain.
their deaths re-established Irish supported cause. ing overall control. In election after election in Ireland, the Home Rule party won a majority and eventually British prime minister Gladstone agreed to a measure of Home But Gladstone was blocked by his own Liberal Party and he was outvoted by the permanent Tory majority in the House of Eventually in 1912 a new Home Rule Bill was passed in the House of Commons. But this did not come into operation until 1921, when a new limitation had been placed on - the partition of the country with the north-east of Ireland remaining PEROES — the heroes of the 19 5 Irish • Rising, who took up arms to demano that all of Ireland should be free from BriThe leaders of 1916 were all executed bi the British authorities, but their action anc Republicanism as a modern and mass-