I like the complexity and detail of Keith's Coventry tale. To its credit,
there are several distinctly different interpretations one could take from
it. "Grasping the nettle" of redundancies is only one of them. Another would
be "cushioning the blow" -- how the impact on laid off workers was eased by
M-F not being able to lay everyone off in one go. A third would be the
pitfalls of "I'm alright, Jack" unionism and an overtime culture.
A fourth, unspoken counter-narrative is "the road not taken" -- M-F had the
resources to endure a six or seven year ordeal of attrition, why couldn't
those resources have been used to incubate new ventures and new work
arrangements such that at the end of the period M-F (and/or its newly
hatched "chicks") was more productively -- and profitably -- employing more
people?
Perhaps it was because the corollary to I'm alright, Jack unionism is an I'm
alright, Jack management mentality. A multi-faceted fellow like Keith might
get bored in such a milieu (somehow I suspect that Keith and I have more in
common than either of us would admit).
In point form, here are the the bones of the four policy narratives I would
X-ray from Keith's story:
+ grasping the nettle
+ cushioning the blow
+ I am (not) alright, Jack
+ the road not taken
Walter Reuther may indeed have said, "The biggest enemy of the working man
is an unprofitable business". He was also reported to have asked a Ford
manager who was demonstrating and extolling an automated assembly line
whether the machines would buy the cars. He was also a vocal but vacillating
advocate of a 30-hour work week. But the main message I take away from the
quote Keith cited is a sense of the fatal inevitability of "the working man."
The sentence refers implicitly to a class of beings who are by birth and
station "working men." They are not free, whole individuals who can choose,
as they see fit, to sell or to not sell their labour services on the market.
Their labour time is for all practical purposes compulsory, not disposable.
One could reply to and/or complete Reuther's quote, "and the greatest
nemesis of the free individual is the injunction to be a working man."
At 08:31 PM 07/01/01 +0100, Keith Hudson wrote:
>
>The firm I worked for then (about 1980-5) in Coventry was Massey-Ferguson.
>Like all other automotive firms in Coventry at that time, it was hugely
>overmanned both on the shop floor and the admin. Also, like all the other
>large engineering firms in the city, it was largely run by the union
>convenors and stewards, not the management. (We, middle-to-senior
>management, were fall-guys in the middle with a lot of responsibility but
>little power.)
>
>But costs were running away with themselves, and also M-F was meeting
>strong competition from John Deere and other firms elsewhere in the world
>and decided that they had to take a firm hand. The board directors knew
>they couldn't get away with anything like the redundancies they needed in
>one go for fear of a long strike and sabotage, so they did it little bit by
>little bit -- 2% here, 3% there -- then a pause for three or four months,
>then a bit more here and there, and so on, and so on. Each time a
>redundancy occurred, the unions threatened to ban overtime -- which they
>did for a couple of weeks. Then, when the redundancees were safely down the
>road, the workforce resumed their (well-paid) overtime. Everybody who was
>made redundant at that time didn't take long to find jobs. This ritual went
>on for about six or seven years. (Half way through this, I got bored and
>left to start my own business -- my first attempt -- which failed
>disastrously and cleaned me right out!)
>
>At the end of that period, when the work force was vastly reduced, that
>particular unit of Massey-Ferguson finally regained viability. Meanwhile,
>six or seven major automotive firms in Coventry* and also one of the best
>machine tool manufacturers in the world, Wickmans, which had failed to trim
>their sails, failed catastrophically. Then scores of supplier firms failed.
>This caused unemployment of many thousands in Coventry which lasted for
>several years. The city simply couldn't adapt its employment structure
>quickly enough. It has only been in the last four or five years that the
>city has finally recovered and employment rates have reached the norm for
>the country as a whole. Needless to say, the job structure now is totally
>different from what it was then.
>
>So, for everybody's sake, it's better to grasp the nettle sooner than
>later. I'm not flip when talking about redundancies and I'm aware of the
>unfortunate consequences for many but, as Walter Reuter, the great US trade
>union leader of the 40s/50s, once said: "The biggest enemy of the working
>man is an unprofitable business".
Tom Walker
Bowen Island, BC
604 947 2213
