...in the NEW WORKER
Rolls Royce workers lobbied shareholders of the aerospace group last week.
Some workers who own shares entered the group’s annual general meeting to make their criticisms.
The 34,000 workforce had been angered when the company issued them contract termination notices in order to impose a pay freeze.
Threats of legal action and industrial action forced the company to back off, but it still wants the pay freeze and 6,000 aerospace job cuts.
Trade union negotiators were meeting the company as we went to press.
Workers at the Leavesden site, which is threatened with closure at a cost of 1,760 jobs, are preparing detailed proposals for keeping at least the engine plant open.
Rolls plans to sell the site, which it recently purchased from the Ministry of Defence, a move reminiscent of the British Aerospace-Royal Ordinance scandal.
Lord Tombs, Roll’s chairman, announced he would cut his salary by 10 per cent, from £150,000 to £135,000 in 1991.
Soviet soldiers have clashed with nationalist militias in renewed tension in the Baltic states.
No-one was killed but the Lithuanian and Latvian authorities claim Soviet soldiers held their militiamen at gunpoint and then burnt down the border check-points which they have illegally set up across their frontiers.
The Soviet forces, Black-Berets from the Interior Ministry, were involved in bloody clashes with nationalist groups last year.
The nationalist regimes have demanded their withdrawal from the Baltic region.
In Moscow attention is focusing on the forthcoming Russian Federation elections.
Yeltsin is leading a high-profile campaign, promising to retire from public life if his challenge fails.
His rival, Soviet President Gorbachov, is trying to remain in the limelight by giving publicity to the private visit of former British premier Margaret Thatcher, who has arrived fresh from a similar jaunt in South Africa.
