The
stakes
in the
Ford
strike
THE TWO-WEEK long strike of Britain's 32,500 Ford car workers ended on Monday, February 22, after a 70% vote in favour of accepting a revised two-year deal. The strike in Britain led to Ford laying off 10,000 workers in Europe, notably affecting the Genk assembly plant and Antwerp tractor plants in Belgium, and Ford's Saarlouis assembly plant in Germany.
The following articles look at the present offensive by bosses in the car industry internationally and, in this context, why the deal signed in Britain is a step backwards for car workers. ALAN THORNETT
OMMENTATORS in the British financial press generally identified the key factor behind the strikes by Ford workers, and other car workers, as being the so-called "Nissan factor" — the influence of working practices introduced at the new Nissan plant in Sunderland (in the North of England). In doing so they take a very narrow view of what are, in fact, world-wide developments in the car industry. The fact is that if the Sunderland plant did not exist, car workers in Britain would still face a similar situation.
What lies behind the recent struggles is a new generalized offensive by the car companies designed to increase efficiency and productivity to new levels. The successful Japanese companies are the primary (alInternational Viewpoint • March 7, 1988 though not the only) model used by much of the industry.
But this is not a new thing. Ford's "AJ" or "After Japan". plan was drawn up in the early 1980s after Ford UK executives visited Japanese plants. The detailed plan was designed to achieve Japanese productivity levels in their British plants. This plan remains a central factor behind Ford manage-
Fiat plant the most advanced in the world
What is new in the car industry today, however, is the scale of technological development and the scale of investment in new models now taking place. This is introducing new pressures to which Ford and other producers have to respond.
In Europe, the lead in this is being taken by Fiat, Europe's second largest manufacturer. They are in the process of launching the Tipo — a new family car in which they have invested over £1 billion. It makes their plant in Cassino, Italy, the most advanced in the world. They claim a 100% automated paint facility and 55% automation on assembly — a record previously held at 40% by Europe's biggest car manufacturer, VW/Audi, at their Hall assembly
Productivity levels produced by investment and automation, however, are only one side of the equation. High investment needs to be linked to high productivity of labour, which means brutally hard work, continuously carried out, and subject to repeated speed-ups — a factor which has become dominant for workers involved in the mass production of cars all over the world. It is in this area that the Japanese care bosses make their major contribution. They have developed techniques that have led the world in harnessing workers mentally and physically to continuous hard work at very high speed - although many of the others are now catching them up.
These techniques have been developed in Japan since the mid-1950s and are central to the profitability of Japanese industry.
The Ford package precisely contains the main principles involved in these techniques (see following article). They want the introduction of short-term contracts; the ending of all demarcation and the introduction of complete flexibility, including making skılled men a part of the same groups; the introduction of "group leaders", ing a higher-paid force of company spies on the shop floor. They also want so-called Quality Circles, as have been developed to a sophisticated level in Japan.
Quality Circles have far more to with productivity than quality. In principle they are the same as the "worker participation" scheme which the last Labour government introduced into British Leyland (now called Austin Rover) in 1975, in the shape of the Ryder Report. It had disastrous results for the shop stewards' movement and the workforce. The objective of these techniques is to attempt to change the thinking of the workers from starting from their own wages and conditions to starting from the problems of production and profitability, and to undermine trade-union structures — particularly the shop stewards' movement, which is more responsive to the demands of
Following the Japanese model
In Japanese car plants everyone is involved in a Quality Circle. They are required to meet regularly, generally weekly, in their own time, to discuss ways of improving their production performance. In some plants, failure to produce positive proposals from such meetings is regarded as "uncooperative" or "anti-management" and can lead to dismissal.
Clearly, Quality Circles could not be introduced as effectively as this in Britain at the present time. In Japan these techniques began to be introduced following the smashing of the independent unions and the creation of company-controlled "yellow" unions. Their most extensive use in Britain is still in the Sunderland Nissan plant. But that factory is still in a honeymoon period.
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8
They are not yet pressing the workforce as hard as they intend to. Also, it is not a highly capitalized plant.
Quality Circles and flexibility
More significantly, Quality Circles have already been established in some other parts of the car industry in Britain. In Austin Rover Quality Circles, under the name of "Zone Circles", have been forced in as a result of a deal done at national level between national union officials — the same individuals negotiated the current package with Ford. Mick Murphy, the Transport and General Workers' Union national officer, became well known (but not so well respected) for saying that he was "over the moon" with the deal, a deal to which the workforce has become increasingly hostile.
In some Austin Rover plants, including the Cowley assembly plant at Oxford, these Zone Circles are already in operation, although in most places they still lack authority. In the Cowley assembly plant they have been backed by right-wing senior stewards and convenors and exist extensively throughout the factory. They operate on the basis of those workers who are prepared to
Big profits from squeezing workers FORD's European operations increased their profits by 93% in 1987, with net income nearly doubling from the previous year to a mammoth $1.07 billion. In the USA, Ford announced a record group net profit of $4.6 billion, compared to $3.3 billion a year earlier. However, at the European level Ford was outdone by General Motors, which announced net profits of $1.25 billion for its
European operations in 1987.
Industrial action in Britain has taken place since pay negotiations began last October, and the strike cost Ford an estimated £500 million in lost production. * be involved and they meet in working hours. In the body plant, there has been more resistance due to the existence of a stronger left-wing there. They have now been pushed through by the convenors on the basis that the shop stewards will be involved in them as well. This actually makes the situation worse because it is then easier for management to use them as an alternative to the trade-union structures.
In Austin Rover, the introduction of Quality Circles has gone alongside the abolition of whole categories of workers — particularly grades such as inspection and rectification. This has resulted in selfinspection and self-rectification now being introduced on the tracks, involving many hundreds of job losses.
Radical changes in working practices
As important as Quality Circles is flexibility of labour. The ability of management to move workers from one job to another across grades and skill demarcations is crucial if work is to be continuous irrespective of breakdowns and other production problems. Also, if non-production workers can be switched to production when production workers are absent or there are abnormal production problems, management can cut down the number of absentee and relief
The only break the track worker gets, apart from brief official relief times, is when the track breaks down. With flexibility production workers are required to do running maintenance themselves, or help the fitters in the repair of bigger breakdowns. They are also expected to do general cleaning to cut out the need for janitors. This is all designed to ensure that there is never a break in the work-load from one end of the shift to the other.
Short-term contracts are another major innovation. They are used massively in Japanese plants and allow management to maintain a core experienced labour force that can work flat-out all the time, while employing casual labour to cover peak periods and sacking them with no rights at the end of it. It creates a labour force in the plant outside of trade-union control and vulnerable to management moves. Such contracts have already been introduced in some British plants. The newly privatized Unipart (Austin Rover's service division), for example, regularly use short-term contract labour to meet peak demand periods.
There have been disputes in Austin Rover over the introduction of these conditions. There, management had already successfully introduced into some of their plants part of the conditions Ford are seeking. In the Swindon body plant, for example, short-term contract workers already exist, although the idea would be strongly opposed in the main plants.
Alongside these particular measures go
BRITAIN other developments which are taking place across the industry.
Discipline has been stepped up. New disciplinary procedures have been introduced in many plants and the rate of dismissals has gone up enormously. In the main Austin Rover plants workers are sacked every day for "offenses" such as failure to keep pace with the track, failing to work to standard or for breaking the very strict management codes on lateness or absenteeism. In some Austin Rover plants, workers are disciplined as a matter of course (although not necessarily sacked) for a single error on the track.
It is these conditions — the strings attached to the deal - that have been central to the Ford strike. It is not just a matter for Ford workers either. The success of the employers in the next stage of this process in Britain will be greatly increased by the sellout of the Ford strike. A victory for the Ford management will lead to another round of speed-up. Car workers in Britain have to seek ways of confronting this.
The generalization of this employers' offensive has some lessons which need to be taken up by car workers in Britain and internationally. A generalized offensive needs a generalized response. In Britain, where the multi-union set-up in the industry fragments the workforce and prevents the workers speaking with a single voice, there is an urgent need for contact at rank-and-file level, particularly through the shop stewards' movement. National and international coordination needed
Some shop stewards in Ford and elsewhere are calling for a national conference of car industry shop stewards to be held urgently to discuss and assess all these developments and develop a strategy in response to them. This would be a very popular initiative and could be the starting point of a fightback in the car plants in Britain. It could also lay the basis for greater links with car workers across Europe, the USA
The high level of militancy in the car plants in Britain is likely to continue and increase despite the sell-out of the Ford strike. Already the Land Rover plant in Birmingham has rejected a wage offer from management and voted to strike. The General Motors plants in Liverpool and Luton have voted for strike action over the decision by management to plunder tens of thousands of pounds out of their pension fund, using new Tory legislation.
There needs to be an international response to this as well. The employers are organizing their offensive across national frontiers. It is an offensive with internationally developed techniques of attack. There needs to be a forum in which car workers, at least across Europe, can pool their experience and develop a response beyond na 9 tional limitations. *
March 7, 1988 • International Viewpoint
BRITAIN
The Ford
deal - a
cynical
sell-out
T HE FORD's strike has been cyn-
ically sold-out by the national trade-union leaders and the Ford National Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC). The workforce has voted by a 2-1 majority to accept the revised deal. The only plant with a majority against the deal was the assembly plant in Dagenham (East London), which voted 3-1 against it.
Shop stewards at Ford plants in Dagenham and Halewood (Liverpool), who had called for rejection of the deal, were furious at this sell-out, particularly as it came when the strike was reaching its strongest point with European plants closing down and the strike 100% solid.
The stewards were absolutely right. The deal was the same as the original offer, the only change was from a three-year deal to a two-year deal, which means that the changes will be forced in in a shorter peri-
Everything else, the money and the strings, remain the same.
The acceptance vote was a direct product of both the recommendation to accept made by the JNC and the way in which they argued for it. They claimed that a massive victory had been achieved, yet every member of the JNC knew very well that this was not true. Some of them even claimed that strings had been removed from the document when they knew this was not the case. In fact, it is worse. Not only do the strings remain part of the document, but there is a precise commitment by the trade unions which provides for their implementation within the life of the
Flexibility negotiations to be held plant by plant
This could not be clearer in the revised deal: "To ensure that there are no misunderstandings... constructive discussion at local joint works committees will start within one month of the application of the principles. Implementation will be ongoing as required and as appropriate to each plant, and with the full support of the unions in this process. If, in spite of your agreement to the principles, areas of dif10 ferences occur in local negotiations, the issue will be referred to the JNC for positive International Viewpoint • March 7, 1988 resolution and may, if appropriate, be referred in turn to the relevant unions. With the above agreement from the unions we cannot envisage where these changes will
So the real position is that the unions have committed themselves to the full support of the introduction of the changes, and management will only implement if they are unsuccessful. Yet, knowing all this, Derek Horn, vice-chair of the national JC, told the London Evening Standard: "People are talking about conditions, but the simple fact is there are no strings at all attached to this agreement. We have an historic deal."
Nor is it just the right wing who are taking this line. The Morning Star [newspaper of the pro-Soviet Communist Party] was just the same. It quoted Jimmy Airlie, CP member and secretary of the national JNC, as saying that "Ford workers have won a terrific victory". Yet they all know that the JC has signed an agreement which contains strings. It may go to national officials if they fail to get agreement, but these are the people who have been in favour of the strings from the start.
### Union leaders accept productivity strings
Jimmy Airlie said during the negotiations that the strings were necessary for Ford to compete in world markets. Mick Murphy of the Transport and General Workers' Union last year enthusiastically accepted similar strings into Austin Rover, where they have been enforced. Murphy, however, has been the most honest in the present Ford situation. He told the Financial Times that "the importance of what we have achieved is that the company will get the changes it requires, but will carry the workforce with it".
Ford management have said that it was a good deal, since they will get the changes they wanted. The effects of this betrayal, however, cannot be seen just in terms of P the conditions contained within this particular agreement. Flexibility strings were introduced in the last Ford deal as well, and conditions
Nurses and healthworkers fighting the Tories' cuts were not slow to support the Ford strikers - and car workers throughout the industry have been in the forefront of solidarity with those struggling to defend the NHS (DR)
in the Ford plants, as in other car plants, are one of speed-ups, victimizations and sackings over work effort.
A potential challenge to government policy
The Ford workers needed a victory, not just to stop this particular agreement, to reverse the management onslaught which has been going on for several years. This sell-out has robbed them of that and put management back in an even stronger position. Politically, the situation is the same. The working class needed a victory as a focus around which to mount a fightback. This has been denied them, although the present wave of industrial struggles are
The Ford's strike was a potential challenge to the policies of the Thatcher government, yet the same union leaders who make speeches about the evils of Thatcherism are prepared to employ the most cynical maneuvers and double-talk in order to stop that challenge. The sell-out was a political betrayal of the working class, as well as an industrial betrayal of the Ford
Ford workers now have to regroup and reorganize, and the conditions for this are created by the current strike of Land Rover workers, and workers in General Motors who have alco voted for strike action.
The issues involved apply to all carworkers, whichever company they work for. The methods employed by managements are nationally and internationally developed. There have been calls for a conference of carworkers and shop stewards from the industry to discuss this situation and to map out a way forward. Such a conference should be supported. *
Alan Thornett
Yora
FOR. WORKLA HEALTH LOLKERS SUPPORT - 04
Democracy
Aquino-style
PHILIPPINES selves in the capital, Manila-Quezon City. Corazon's relations also control the two main national parties in the presidential coalition, which is known as Lakas ng Bayan (People's Power). Jose "Peping" Cojuangco, her brother and MP for Tarlac, leads the Philippine Democratic Party (PDP-Laban), while Paul Aquino, one of her brothers-inlaw, leads the Lakas ng Bansa (Strength of
THE MUNICIPAL and provincial elections on January 18,
1988, were supposed to put the finishing touches to the
"re-establishment" of a stable democratic system in the
Philippines. They were the last of the big electoral consultations kicked off a year ago by the constitutional plebiscite of February 1987. The Aquino regime's institutions are now in place; the government claims to have a majority at all levels.
The latest elections, however, did not assure democracy and stability in the country, any more than did the preceding ones.
They confirmed the return in force to the political arena of the provincial "big families", excluded from power by Ferdinand
Marcos. They again accentuated the process of political fragmentation, which began in 1987 behind the facade of a charismatic presidential regime. The army is further than ever from having made up its mind to return to barracks and submit to civilian rule. As for the mass organizations, they were to all practical purposes excluded from the elections, given the extent of the crude clientelist rules prevailing in the electoral arena.
PAUL PETITJEAN
ROUND 150,000 candidates
A competed for the votes of 27.6 million voters to win the 73 provincial governments and some
1,500 municipal councils — in all, around
17,000 seats of varying importance. According to the Electoral Commission, participation in the elections was high (at least
80%). But we will probably have to wait a long time before the complete results are known. A number of disappointed candidates are challenging the count, and in 11 provinces voting was postponed for "security reasons".
In May 1987, at the time of the legislative elections, the presentation of national slates for senatorial seats had given a semblance of political clarity to the consultation.
There was a slate of candidates backed by the president standing against a left slate and two extreme right-wing ones. But already relations between the big provincial families — apart from any political programme — had profoundly influenced the composition of parliamentary alliances.'