Throughout the 1980s, the tops of the unions were becoming increasingly divorced from the stressful life in the factories and workplaces. On the shop floor conditions were becoming increasingly difficult after a decade of ruthless attacks and the introduction of “lean” production techniques. Keith Cardwell, convenor at GEC/Alsthom’s plant in Preston, explained some of the difficulties.

I was elected works convenor in 1985. I can honestly say that ever since then I have been fighting a rear-guard action against job losses and the threat of closure. In the meantime we have to deal with the introduction of new technology – just-in-time principles, quality concepts and the various spin-offs – and these created many problems for us, including a certain amount of de-skilling. Only too often these days I’m seen to be – and I sometimes feel – that I am just a go-between the management and the shop floor, perhaps even a management mouthpiece. I’m fighting every inch of the way.[1]

How different from the life at the top of Britain’s trade unions! Something like a scissors effect was taking place: the worse things became for workers, the more remote and out of touch the leadership became.

The prolonged employers’ offensive, in effect a “counter-revolution” on the shop floor, had largely destroyed the elements of workers’ control that had existed in the workplace: trade union control over the track speed, control over hiring and firing, length of breaks, and so on. With the enthusiastic backing of Thatcher, the bosses had reasserted their “divine right” to rule. The new regime within the work places was creating all kinds of problems associated with Human Resource Management (HRM), or “stress management”, to give it its correct name. A whole battery of changes was introduced, which greatly increased the pace and intensity of labour, resulting in increased relative and absolute surplus value, to use the words of Marx. By these means, extra profits were squeezed out of the muscles and nervous systems of the workers, leading to all kinds of health problems and a dramatic increase in nervous breakdowns, accidents and death in the workplace, to which the advocates of “New Realism” remained supremely indifferent.

The buzzword in the world of work was now flexibility of labour. In the new “enterprise economy”, which the strategists of capital boasted about, deregulation, privatisation, casualisation, part-time working, fixed-term contracts, zero-hours contracts were introduced in a whole series of industries and services. Full time jobs were subjected to “down-sizing”, as skilled workers were replaced by semi-skilled, and semi-skilled by unskilled. Jobs were created without security, pension rights, sick pay or holiday pay. Hand in hand with these changes went the demise of national agreements and de-recognition of trade unions in a host of industries. In 1981, 4.5 million people were in part-time employment; by 1993 the number had risen to 5.8 million. Unlike those in full-time jobs, these part-timers had no legal protection at work and few rights.

The battle cry of this employers’ offensive was “Global Competition, Flexibility, and Deregulation!” Capital relentlessly drove down standards by pitting worker against worker in the dog-eat-dog competition of the market economy. “Deregulation may leave the consumer or the workforce helpless, but it is part of a growing global consensus”, states Joe Rogaly in The Financial Times. “So is the notion of ‘flexible labour markets’, for which read ‘crushing the workforce beneath the heel’.”

The new workplace methods of production were accompanied by greater intensity of work. Fordism was alleged to have given way to post-Fordism, with production geared to specialised needs. However, “management by stress” and “lean production” techniques were nothing new. In reality they were simply modern variants of old fashioned Taylorism. No longer was each worker assigned a single task to perform repetitively in the mass production process, but people were trained to perform several skills and become “multi-skilled”. This opened the door to new forms of exploitation, more intense than before.

Under lean production, the system resembles an anorexic: it is never satisfied with itself, no matter how lean it gets. It continually strives to push the levels of tolerance to the maximum. The principle is based upon the squeezing of all resources. The nerves and sinews of the workers are stretched to the limit. Absolute efficiency is the benchmark, which means the elimination of all “waste”: idle time, extra materials, inspection, repairs, extra space, and extra tools. Let us cite one example. In the traditional car plant workers work 45 seconds each minute. In the typical lean production car plant, workers are engaged in productive activity for around 57 seconds a minute. Assuming a ten-second-a-minute differential applied to a car plant of 2,000 workers, this rate of exploitation results in 2,667 extra work-hours being performed during the course of an eight-hour shift. 13,335 extra work-hours are added over a five-day week. This is equivalent to employing an extra 333 workers to work a 40-hour week. Or, put another way, equivalent to each worker performing more than an extra day’s labour every 5-day week.

Whereas in Fordism there are high levels of stocks, in lean production they are kept deliberately low. The introduction of “just-in-time” production and outsourcing was aimed at driving down costs. Here the concept of teamwork is employed to achieve greater control over workers. Each worker is dependent on every other in this chain of continual production. If someone is sick, the burden falls on his or her co-workers. In this way, tremendous pressure is created not to take time off and to submit to the established pace of work. It is do-it-yourself Taylorism, where each worker squeezes every other worker in the production process. In this system, “time and motion” work teams themselves undertake studies.

Where the assembly plant is dependent upon a host of subcontractors and suppliers, any breakdown along the chain of production or distribution would have disastrous effects, bringing things to an abrupt stop. Paradoxically, the “just-in-time” method puts greater potential power in the hands of the working class. Despite this, the bosses combined to use these new methods to break up and weaken the power of the traditionally stronger and more organised sectors of the working class. In the car industry, for example, the capitalists hived off one sector after another, splitting up the workforce into separate companies in an attempt to undermine their bargaining strength. The Ford Motor Company outsourced thousands of its jobs and established the parts company, Visteon, while General Motors created Delphi, leading to the break-up of national joint negotiations. New industrial parks were built in Halewood and elsewhere in order to provide modules (assembled components) on a just-in-time basis for Ford, using agency labour at lower wage costs.

  1. Quoted in Taylor, op. cit, p.100

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