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Every student and worker in U.C.D. has felt the effect of the recent strike in Belfield where laboratory attendants, porters and cleaners sought to maintain their customary parity with college technicians. This is no isolated example, because the present economic crisis is having its effect among all exploited sectors of Irish society.

Government policy The government's deflationary policy (i.e. the attempt to cut public spending) is having important effects. Apart from attacks on worker's living standards through wage restraints, sharper hours (as a form of unemployment) and redundancies, cutbacks in the government’s social expenditure on health, education etc. are taking place. The latter means for instance that the building of student accommodation, sports centre and a promised stadium at Belfield have been abandoned, fairly indefinitely. This leaves just the economic essentials of the complex i.e. library lecture theatres and a restaurant.

It is evident then, that if the way in which workers and students are affected, is different, it is nevertheless part of the same developing crisis. Students and workers are allies in struggle because the capitalist system is trying to make both of them pay for its ineptitude.

Given this synonymity of struggle, it is obvious that this is particularly true on the college campuses themselves where confrontations with the authorities are quite commonplace. What then should student worker solidarity be about? Does it mean that students should go out and join workers picket lines? Not necessarily, because such an action: is just a helpless gesture. The strike is outside of the experience of students because withdrawal of their labour has no immediate effect whatsoever. So their THE PLOUGH — PAGE 6 methods of struggle must be different than those of workers and must take account of their real social position.

Solidarity in action The first action of solidarity by students this winter must be to make their own independent activities militant and powerful. This is the best way student militants can contribute to generating a fighting dynamic among the workers. The long-awaited grants campaign can be a useful starting point so that by winning our demand for a comprehensive grants scheme, we can push the struggle of all the oppressed forward considerably.

In a more direct way, on the campus itself, we should make real links with the college workers, so that in the event of future strikes we will be prepared and will know what action to take In the - case of the Belefield strike it is clear that one of the reasons why the college was closed, was in order to keep students immobilised and scattered. The SRC in the main, failed to understand this, and contended that no action could be undertaken without the students being on the campus. If a democratic student college worker body existed it would haye been possible to mobilise at least the Dublin students, against the college closure and the fee increases and to link these to the reasonable demands of the college staff.

But above all the lessons of this and other strikes is the one that student worker relations must be based on real concrete needs such as the objective nees of both sectors for a just, democratic socialist society. There is enough that is abstract and academic about the student's life for him/her to forget the reality of our oppression,

REVOLUTIONARY