Sky Swoop

A daring end to a sit-in

For months striking workers held six complex electric motors, worth $3.7 million, inside the sooty brick factory of Laurence Scott & Electromotors in Manchester, England. The machines, including two ordered by the British Admiralty for installation in NATO submarines, were awaiting shipment 28 weeks ago, when the firm's 650 workers began a sit-in after management announced that the entire work force of the ailing firm, which was losing $150,000 a week, was being laid off and the plant shut down. Despite repeated pleas from company officials, strikers refused to surrender the motors. As the weeks dragged on, the protesters exchanged their sit-in for angry picketing outside the plant gate. With negotiations at a stalemate, company officials last week successfully used a unique tactic for solving the labor-management dispute.

At 9:15 one morning, 100 policemen surrounded the factory, which sits amid the Victorian terrace houses of Manchester's Openshaw district. Officers calmly asked the workers to move away from the factory gates and the 15-ft. wall surrounding the compound. Slowly the picketers obeyed, glaring at police during a tense half-hour.

Suddenly, two chartered helicopters flew down from out of the blue to land behind the factory walls. Out of the choppers came a team of hired commandos in blue uniforms and white gloves, their heads covered by black balaclava helmets. "It was like a scene from a Hollywood jailbreak movie," recalled flabbergasted Union Convener Dennis Barry. As picketers climbed garbage cans to peer over the wall in amazement, the commandos dashed inside the factory, carried the six motors outside on pushcarts and flew off with them in the blue-and-white Bell Jet-Ranger III helicopters.

Predictably, the strikers were outraged, calling the raid "an Entebbe-style operation with eight helmeted and masked scabs aboard." In a postraid broadside, the shop stewards' committee warned that other companies might employ similar commando raids against their workers. Said the stewards: "The lesson is that no matter how successful your picket, this method will be used to break strikes, break unions and send us all back to the 1930s."

In the House of Commons, Charles Morris, Openshaw's Labor M.P., blasted the raid, which was conducted with the cooperation of local police and air-traffic controllers, as too hazardous for the local citizenry. Said he: "I am most concerned about an operation which could have endangered lives. The use of helicopters in an industrial dispute is unprecedented."

After the raid, the British government claimed that it was clean. Said a spokesman for the naval yard that had ordered the machinery: "We were certainly not involved in this James Bond escapade. The motors were overdue, but we were not pressing the firm for delivery. We have no idea who did it." A spokesman for the Ministry of Defense added, "We didn't know anything like this was planned."

Millionaire Arthur Snipe, chairman of Scott's parent company, Mining Supplies of Doncaster, was more informative. He admitted that he had chartered the helicopters and ordered the raid. Said he: "We tried every peaceable means, but some of these picketers did everything they could to stop us. They are not strikers from the factory; they are flying pickets, anarchists drafted in from outside the area. We have to show these bullies and anarchists that our group of companies is determined to survive." Meanwhile, Snipe is not telling where the motors are now stashed.

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