Socialists want worker-participation
Page 11
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in the new London Transport from our industrial correspondent
• Mr. Ted Castle, journalist husband of the Minister of Employment and Productivity, forecasts that the Greater London Council take-over of London Transport will be one of the biggest issues at the next GLC elections.
He adds: "What is at stake is whether the change is to be merely the old bureaucracy given a respectable facade—or an exciting experience in consumer-worker control."
Mr. Castle, writing in Hit Back, newsletter of the new Greater London Regional Council of the Labour Party, reports a one-day conference, organized by the regional council, at which more than 120 delegates discussed the GLC-London Transport issue.
The delegates, he says, sat the day out in constant debate on how the opportunity for "public identification" with the control of the system could be achieved.
"Busmen, railwaymen and passengers, coming as delegates from their unions and constituency parties, had their say after listening to a brilliant explanation of the proposals by Mr. Stephen Swingler," he says.
"Mr. Swingler stressed that whoever plans the roads, location of homes and industries and remedies for highway congestion, should obviously have the Government voice in planning the transport.
"That concept gained a general acceptance by the conference but Labour GLC members have urged from the beginning that there must be a role for the borough council with its intimate knowledge of local conditions and needs."
What dominated the conference, says Mr. Castle, was the demand voiced both by the platform and by a score of delegates that "workers' participation" in management must be a reality.
"Can anyone see the Tories accepting the job of pioneering industrial democracy in a public service?" he asks. "Labour accepts it with enthusiasm."
To further the building of Socialism into the new organization talks had "begun between the leaders of the GLC Labour Group and the 'grass roots' men of the trades unions to hammer out detailed proposals for real workers' participation, not merely some nominee on the new executive board, but at all levels of the organization."
(Comment on the GLC's plans for London Transport appear on page 16.)