As the situation in the car industry showed, workers had their backs against the wall. In September 1991 union leaders at the Rover car plant were presented with a package entitled Rover Tomorrow – New Deal, which supposedly offered a job for life in return for total flexibility of labour. Previously, Rover workers had rejected similar deals. However, after being recommended by the unions, the new deal was now narrowly accepted by a wafer-thin majority of 168 votes (11,961 to 11,793) in April 1992. This brought in lean production and the most radical changes ever introduced into the company. “The company continually improve its performance and competitive position through the elimination of waste, increased levels of efficiency and reduced levels of manpower – working smarter rather than harder”, stated Clause two of the agreement.
“Partnership for us is about co-operation,” stated Bill Morris, the then general secretary of the TGWU. But co-operation eventually meant acquiescence, as management introduced changes, including the increase in line speed, with little resistance from the unions.
“Ten years ago many of its plants were riven with bitter unofficial disruption. Now many of them are showplaces for enterprise unionism”, stated Robert Taylor, industrial correspondent of The Financial Times. “It is no exaggeration to talk of a new cooperative spirit between management, trade unions and workers in many areas of British manufacturing industry which were once a byword for industrial conflict.”[2]
This picture of bliss, however, was far removed from the realities on the shop floor. Take the Rover’s Cowley plant in Oxford for example. In the mid-80s, Rover was producing seven cars per worker per year. By 1992, this had increased to 18 cars per worker per year. And by 1996, this was to grow to 39 cars.
“Yes, the new machinery is important but we are becoming its slave. At the very time workers should be treated with understanding, management is depersonalised. Production is all. We are merely an adjunct to the machine”, said a production worker at Cowley.[3]
Such sentiments were prophetically described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of over 150 years ago, where we read the following: “He (the worker) becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him… Not only are they slave of the bourgeois class, and the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine.” This is precisely the situation we are experiencing in the first decade of the 21st century.
Eventually, Rover was purchased by British Aerospace in 1988 and then sold to BMW in 1994. The new owners forced through further changes in terms and conditions of the workforce, this time in the face of stiff resistance. Despite all the sacrifices, despite all the changes to working practices, these were still not enough for the owners of BMW. Within a few years, BMW bosses threatened to close the entire Longbridge plant and sack thousands of workers. This threat to thousands of jobs, despite years of belt-tightening, speed-ups and increased productivity, brought 100,000 onto the streets of Birmingham in the biggest demonstration in the city since the early 1970s. Later the firm, with the support of the unions, was taken over by the private Phoenix consortium. Instead of demanding nationalisation under workers’ control, which would provide a real way forward, the union leaders looked for “practical” solutions. However, private ownership has solved nothing, despite all the chopping and changing. Today, MG Rover is struggling against falling sales and is planning to sub-contract production of a new small car to a manufacturer in Maharashtra, India, in order to cut costs. Although there has been a complete failure to invest sufficiently to modernise the plants, Rover’s fundamental problems are not rooted in Britain, but in worldwide overproduction (overcapacity) in the car industry, reflecting the anarchy of capitalism. The carworkers in Britain and elsewhere are now being asked to pay for this anarchy.
Workers in the service industries were increasingly subjected to the same regime as manufacturing. In February 1993, British Home Stores made a third of its full-time workforce redundant, replacing them with employees on flexible hours contracts. Zero hour contracts were introduced at the Burton retail group in January 1993. They were also introduced at the Storehouse group and Kingfisher Company. Such contracts required an employee to be constantly on standby without any guarantee of work. The contract only comes into force when the worker is actually working and there are no minimum or maximum hours. As a consequence, inequality in wages became greater in Britain than almost anywhere else in the developed world. It was greater than at any time since records began over 100 years ago. “Did you know”, asked The Economist, “the bottom tenth of manual workers earned only 64 percent of average income in 1991, compared with 68 percent in 1886?”[4] In 1993, the UK had 3.9 million children living in poverty, more than any other of the 12 EU member states. According to research from the National Children’s Home charity, 1.5 million families in Britain could not even provide the diet of the Poor Law workhouses! Families on Income Support received an allowance of only £4.15 for a child’s weekly diet, which was 30 per cent lower than a 1876 workhouse diet. Meanwhile, between 1977 and 1992 the salaries of most senior directors of the Financial Times’ top 100 companies increased by 133 per cent compared with an average increase in earnings of only 48 per cent.
In the same year, the Timex Corporation’s circuit board production plant in Dundee dismissed its entire workforce of 320 workers when they refused to accept a pay freeze, lay-offs, and cuts. The bosses hired a new scab replacement workforce and, as expected, were faced with mass picketing of the plant. The pliant AEEU officials, alleging the need to stay within the anti-union laws, opposed this tactic and shamefully repudiated the actions of the sacked shop stewards. Eventually, Timex closed the plant down. The closure illustrated the callous way in which corporations are able to uproot and relocate their businesses in different areas and countries, leaving behind a trail of human desolation and misery. “Nowhere else in Europe are decent men and women being sacked for taking legitimate and legal industrial action”, said Jimmy Airlie, the AEEU’s executive officer for Scotland.[5] Of course, once again the AEEU’s partnership deals had turned out to be rotten. It also showed the feeble response of the right-wing unions to the bullyboy tactics of the employers. A decade later, Dyson, the bag-less vacuum-cleaner manufacturer, would show its “patriotism” by taking their “entrepreneurial” skills to low-wage, low-cost Malaysia.