Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick, Slow
By JOHN COLE T GAVE a talk a few weeks ago to a group of 1personnel managers in Scotland, and during the period for questions had the temerity to act as devil's advocate for managements in the motor industry. I lost, convincingly. The jury seemed to be almost unanimously of the opinion that this was no way to run either a railroad or a great manufacturing industry.
Now it is fair to say that personnel managers are not expert in the economic or sales side of industry—much less of industries in which they have no personal experience. But what was inter- esting was the belief of many in this group that you cannot expect to establish proper labour relations against the Victor Silvester production rhythm—slow, slow, quick, quick, slow—which we have watched, with an awful fascination, in motor manufacture for four or five years.
Perhaps, after all, it is impossible for a car firm to prepare anything like an accurate long- term production plan. But if it is, heaven help the unemployed workers in Scotland and Mersey- side, who are looking to the industry's long-term development plans to transform their areas' gloomy economies; and heaven help the poor taxpayers, whose money will have been spent in vain in sugaring for the motor companies the pill so ruthlessly—and properly—prescribed for them by Mr. Maudling!
What is so difficult for the outsider to stomach is the fatalistic acceptance by some of the car firms of the inevitability of a minor slump in their production almost every autumn, leading to short-time working for their men. There must surely be something wrong with managements which cannot evenly spread predictable work at least over a twelve-month period. (This was par- , ticularly true in the period of long waiting-lists for new cars, now drawing to its close.) The thought of what the alternating periods of short- time and overtime do to the ultimate prices of cars, and therefore to sales and exports, is enough to raise the temperatures not only of the customer and the retailer, but also of the Prime Minister, who recently told the National Union of Manu- facturers yet again how badly we are doing abroad.
Still, the motor manufacturers have learned something about handling redundancies since their travail of 1956. I remember that spring and summer quite vividly, for I was trying to get some time in Manchester to prepare a flat for married life. The months were one chronic crisis in the Midlands, with weary weeks spent around Coventry and Birmingham, watching the Ministry of Labour's officials, called in far too late to mop up the flood of unemployment which the employers allowed to descend on their workers from an apparently cloudless sky. The Midlands learned its first lesson aboitt adversity in the midst of prosperity in 1956. (Judging by recent rumblings against the succour which the motor industry is to bring to the depressed areas, it pro- duced no permanent mood of charity towards others in the same plight.) The Mosleyites fished unhelpfully in the troubled waters. It was a relief that Stratford was so near. Automation was the scapegoat that year, lust as credit restriction is now. Perhaps the animosity aroused by the word and its effects should have sowed the seeds of a realisation which is 001Y coming slowly now : that the psychology workers in an industry based largely on rep( processes is very much more complex than that of craftsmen in the older trades. Alan Sillitoe's acute analysis in Saturday Night and Sande Morning of a cycle-maker's attitude to his lob might make it a useful set book for the labour relation's departments of the motor cony panies.
The bad news this year has been more tactfully announced than in 1956, and trouble has largely been avoided. Yet whatever the industrial °r psychological explanation, the motor industry has a stridency in its labour relations which is quite unique in this country. The hatreds in shipbotla' ing lie deeper, but the angry determination 1° grab all that can be got against a rainy daY i5 more openly shown in the car factories. Until now motor manufacture has been a boom in' dustry, centred principally on the boom areas' with all the breathless competition for labour and inefficient use of it which goes with those :ondi" tions.
Into this cauldron, Ford of Detroit now Pour a new ingredient-100 per cent. control of the Dagenham plant and of the proposed new F°11/ works at Halewood, near Liverpool. It is improlr able that this will make any practical difference to the conditions of the British Ford workers, at least for the present, but doubtless the fuss will COMPANY MEETING "(id to the feeling of insecurity which everyone the industry must have just now. It is worth Pointing out that the other American-owned motor company, Vauxhall, has better labour relations than anV of the British firms. The fact that it is situated in Luton, instead of in the labour-scramble areas, is a significant factor in
this, of course. It has always been a mystery why the other firms, when contemplating new fac- tories, had to be dragged screaming away from the areas of acute labour shortage around Lon- don and Birmingham. Perhaps they will event- ually come to regard the Government's strong- minded persuasion as a blessing in disguise.
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