“Good news for the bosses! magazine which is described…”

Good news for the bosses! 2 magazine which is described jevelopment and investment" or workers, Some sceptical people might think that al! this talk of productivity is all very well, but what about all those businesses that have been affected by the "troubles" all the investment which went elsewhere as the Provos bombs and incendiaries reduced industry and commerce to rubble? Well, the same magazine has done a survey and it seems that 81% of firms here have never suffered as a result of the troubles, All in all it appears that the 6-Cos, is something of a bosses paradise, Further proof of this has been provided by the Dept. of Manpower who have just released the April unemployment figures, These indicate that there ‘are some 64,270 people The Business Location File -as reporting on "industrial in plain language, where a capitalist can make a quick million or two - has been singing the praises of Northern Irish workers in its latest issue, Workers in the 6 counties it claims "work harder to compensate for the bad image which is painted of their province," Airey Neave was also striking the same note a couple of weeks ago when he compared the leaping productivity of workers in the North to the falling productivity levels of British without jobs in the 6-Cos, at present ~ that's 11.8 @ of the working population -and some 1,475 of these are Fiaster school-leavers, With almost l2 % unemployment the North has the highest percentage of workless of all the regions of the FEC, So its certainly no paradise for the worker and particularly for the catholic worker, The sectarian character of the 6-Counties! statelet has always ensured that catholic workers have borne the brunt of unemployment and that the better-paid, skilled jobs have been almost exclusively reserved for protestant workers, The April unemployment statistics tell the same old story -the highest unemployment levels are all catholic district : Strabane 27.5% Strand 39%. Newry 23.5%, Cookstown 22.9%, Dungannon 21,2%, Derry 17%, For heads of households the facts are even more dramatic, Take the catholic ghettoes of Belfast : Ballymurphy 52%, Clonard 46%, Falls 45%, New Lodge 45%, Short Such figures haven't really changed all that much from the old days of Stormont when the Unionist bosses made no secret of their efforts to exclude catholics from skilled jobs and ensure that catholic workers paid dearly for their opposition to Orange rule in the 6Counties, But under direct rule discrimination is supposed to have ended, a nasty horror from the past, Promises to this effect were heaped on the anti-unionist opulation after the suspen ton of Stormont in 1972. And if private employers could not be persuaded to recruit catholic labour then the FRritish state would itself provide the jobs, Many people thought that the British were making good their promises when the Kennedy Way industrial estate was opened in Andersonstown offering jobs to the hardpressed catholic workers of West Belfast, With state-managed firms like Strathearn Audio and so--called co-operatives like Antrim Crystal, both largely gover-ment financed, a brighter future seemed assured for the Falls Poad unemployed, Though firms like Strathearn never employed more than a few hundred workers there were high hopes that the number of firms and the number of jobs would multiply before long. Thus even the paper of the West Belfast Workers Action Council (set up last year around the strike for union recognition at Fiastwoods’) could carry an article which talked of "a healthy future" for Strathearn and described the firm as"a shining example to industry anywhere", The same article heaped praise on the Strathearn management stating that it aimed to make Stratheatn "into the best"! if not the biggest of its kind anvwhere in the world.", That was only last summer just just a few months later hundreds of workers,more than three-quarters of ‘the

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