At General Motors' IBC Vehicles plant in Luton, the unionists handed out leaflets to workers at the shift change together with shop stewards and branch activists. Practically every worker took the leaflets and several stopped to find out more about the fight. Mafiz Khan, a driver at IBC said, "It was good to meet them. If they don't continue fighting they will lose everything now. We need our union to back their struggle."

Members of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) at Friction Dynamics, an auto parts maker in Caernarfon, North Wales, held a one-week strike in April to protest the boss's attempts to break the union. Smith also controls plants in the United States. As they tried to return to work, union members found the gates locked. They immediately set up picket lines to continue the fight.

Under UK law, strikers cannot be fired for eight weeks if an official ballot has been carried out. Smith handed the strikers a seven-week unpaid holiday and at the end of the period sent a letter to each striker warning they would be fired if they did not return to work by June 27. In an emergency meeting all workers voted to disobey the order and continue picketing the factory.

Since then, the locked-out workers have maintained their picket lines and reached out for support locally and around the country. At the recent Trades Union Congress conference, Friction Dynamics workers met locked-out steel foundry workers from William Cooks in Sheffield. They too were fired after going out on strike, in their case for one day, in a union-busting drive by the factory boss.

John Davies said he and other locked-out workers at Friction Dynamics are giving £5 a week from their strike pay to go to the strike fund for workers at William Cooks (£1=US $1.47). Gerald Parry, another of the locked-out workers, said, "You could put our leaflets side by side, and with the Rossington leaflet, and not see hardly any difference." Coal miners at Rossington colliery in Yorkshire have been on strike since August 15 and are preparing to stand up to a lockout by UK Coal once they have been on strike for eight weeks.

Messages of solidarity have been coming in from unionists abroad as well. "I'm collecting flags from each country where we have support, and we're putting them up on the picket line," said Davies.

"Right from when Smith took over the factory in 1997 he showed he was a union buster," explained Parry. " When he arrived, we had 200 TGWU members in the plant. He systematically made union members redundant [unemployed], replacing them within a few weeks by temporary workers who were afraid to join the union because they might lose their jobs. As he continued this policy, our union was dwindling, and when we were one step away from becoming a minority we had to strike. We did it all officially, so he couldn't sack us," Parry said.

"But he forgot we are part of the TGWU. This is an attack on the whole trade union movement," he said. "We created unions to fight people like him and he mustn't win. Over the past two years or so he has been trying to provoke us to strike so he could sack us. This year, he told us that we had to take all our holidays every Monday in January, February, and March. We nearly went on strike then, but we decided that when we strike we'll choose the time."

"We have struggled for 30 years to improve our conditions," added Adrian Roberts, "we must maintain the standards we have striven for. It's for the people coming up after us."

Smith brought in a "measured day working," said Roberts, in which he specified how much each person should produce each day. The boss had a "three strikes and you're out" policy if a workers didn't reach the production quotas. "He made sure the day and night shifts didn't meet at work by introducing casual workers who did a few hours in between each shift," Roberts said, "and he made our union leaders work on their own in a room without heating where asbestos had been stored."

"It's all a pattern of cutting costs not profit," said Davies, "but they only seem to do it by attacking workers." Davies said Smith has polluted the Menai Strait, a channel between the North Wales coast and the island of Anglesey, which is next to the plant and a protected conservation area. The company is also piling up dust near houses and farms, "and although we don't use asbestos any more we still use dangerous substances," Davies said.

The locked-out workers report that in the United States Smith sold asbestos waste as landfill and threw it into rivers, leaving severe environmental problems in the state of Connecticut. "It's our planet," said Parry. "About 2 percent of the population owns it though, and can do what they want with it--like destroy it. We can't leave it in the hands of these people."

The visiting workers from Friction Dynamics met with members of the public sector union, the Fire Brigades Union, and the Communication Workers Union (CWU). Members in all these unions have been involved in fights against attacks on wages and conditions.

Last June 15,000 postal workers, members of the CWU, struck across the country. The locked-out workers also spoke with branch officials at the Ford engine plant in Dagenham. Ford made 1,350 workers redundant at the neighboring body and assembly plants in July 2000 and will end production at these plants altogether in early 2002 with a similar number of workers losing their jobs.  
 
 
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