At 07:23 02/07/01 -0700, Tom Walker wrote:
>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?
Ah well . . .! We were just one unit out of several in different countries.
I think that M-F was owned by a larger outfit (Rothman's I think) and this
part part of some even larger investment fund of some sort. I was never
quite sure and I didn't really care. Anyway, our function was to turn out
as many tractors as possible -- even if they had square wheels. There
wasn't the slightest prospect that our plant would be allowed to develop
anything new.
But this sort of thing is much easier to say than to do. To be tedious and
repeat the Biblical phrase I used in another message, you can't pour new
wine into old wineskins. Anything that's really new has to have a really
new bunch of people who can take it through. There was a great deal of this
sort of talk about shifting into new products by people (workers and
management) at armaments factories around here at the time of the collapse
of the Berlin wall and the rapid reduction in defence production at that
time. "If we can make a good aero engine then we could easily make good
washing machines" type of thinking. A great deal of effort went into
thinking up possible new products. But as far as I'm aware, nothing came of
this in England. And I think I'd be right in saying that nothing came of it
in America either.
(TW)
>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).
M'mm . . . I've often thought what it would be like if old-time subbers to
FW who've exchanged what must now be hundreds of messages were to meet
together. We'd have many surprises, I'm sure. You and I might find we're
really soul-mates. We'd probably sink a few beers but wouldn't discuss
anything serious . . .
(TW)
>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."
Ah, but he probably wouldn't have gone that far because the last thing
trade union leaders (and politicians) want are free individuals.
Keith Hudson
___________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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