We Sell Our Time No More: Workers’ Struggles Against Lean Production in the British Car Industry is by Paul Stewart, Ken Murphy, Andy Danford, Mike Richardson, Tony Richardson and Vicki Wass.

Reviewed by Alan Thornett.

The authors of this book have done something rather unusual and very important in this day and age — they have written in detail about the struggles and problems of a section of industrial workers.

The research for the book was coordinated by Paul Stuart the — author of The Nissan Enigma in 1992— through the Auto Workers Research Network which was set up in 1993 to research the impact of Japanese inspired “lean production” on the working lives and health of car workers in Britain.

Lean production is a system of super-exploitation pioneered by Japanese car manufacturers in the 1970s and 1970s and 1980s and promoted, famously and to great effect, in The Machine That Changed The World by J P Womack, Dan Jones, Daniel Rods which was published in 1990 and designed to promote the system to the rest of the world, first in car manufacture and then beyond.

On the looming issue of the future of the car and global warming the authors say that they considered this issue, and the important question of alternative production ‘in the era of concern about carbon emissions’, but decided to focus at this point on the politics and effects of lean production.

To this end they have conducted extensive long-term research amongst car workers on the effects of these techniques and have given voice to shop stewards and workers who have been on the sharp end of them.

The book traces new (and not so new) management techniques (NMTs) from the early days of Fordism and Tayorism to the Donovan Report of 1968 — which advocated the rationalisation of wages structure in the face of a growing shop stewards movement — to the introduction of Measured Day Work into the BL Cowley plants the 1970s to facilitate a management fight-back against a strong and strengthening shop stewards movement.

It looks at the various components of lean production introduced in the 80s and 90s: ‘just in time’, ‘smarter not harder’, ‘continuous improvement’, ‘team leaders’, ‘harmonization’, ‘quality circles’, and other forms of ‘employee involvement’ designed to harness the workforce more effectively through the idea of common or joint interest.

The book has a near verbatim account of a series of round table discussions organised in 2002 by Paul Stuart with car stewards about how to confront lean production techniques in the era of globalisation, in particular whether to reject them and confront them or try to neutralise them from within — which seems to have been the predominant view. A steward from Vauxhall Ellesmere Port put it this way:

“We need to know and understand how we can combat it. Because I think the only way you can combat it is to negotiate, understand it, understand it and minimise the effects that it has on our people, because I don’t believe for one minute that we can stop the capitalist drive for lean production.” If we say no, he goes on to say, they can move production to anywhere in the world.

It would have been useful in this regard to have included an account of the disastrous BL ‘worker participation’ scheme in the mid 1970s, which was also designed to undermine the unions by promoting joint interest with the employer. The scheme sharply divided the left as to whether joint it or remain outside and defend trade union organisation. It was fully backed by the CP, for example — who called it a step towards workers control — and Derek Robinson became its Senior Employee Representative.

The book does cover the sacking of Robinson in 1979 by Michael Edwards (and indeed mentions my own sacking in 1982) but it fails to draws out the full implications of it as a watershed for the unions in the industry — or the fact that Robinson’s sacking was opened by the ‘worker participation’ and his own role within it.

The book rightly sees the drive towards lean production in the 1980s and 1990s as a response the crisis of profitability in the car industry, but it underestimates the extent to which this was facilitated by wider developments in that period — in particular the defeat of the miners and the resulting rapid decline in trade union strength.

The book includes several case studies of restructuring packages forced into the car industry in the early 1990s which were heavily based on NMTs and lean concepts. These include the ‘Rover Tomorrow’ deal and the Vauxhall ‘engage and change’ deals in 1992.

The most interesting of these studies is in chapter 6 which covers the introduction the ‘Rover Tomorrow’ deal into the Cowley Body Plant in 1991 and the implications of it for the Rover Group crisis in 2000 and the eventual collapse of the resulting MG Rover Group and the closure of its huge Longbridge plant in 2005.

In 1990, Cowley Body Plant workers had voted to oppose the introduction of team leaders and a hard line was adopted against them. When management tried to hold ballots to elect them they were boycotted and they were obliged to appoint them. Any shop steward becoming a team leader was expected to resign.

In 1991 the Rover Tomorrow deal called for: team leaders, ‘harmonization’, ‘continuous improvement’, flexibility, discussion groups and management briefings. It also involved a clamp down on absenteeism, and new and onerous shift patterns. It would clearly be hard to get it accepted.

The book describes two remarkable seminars for Rover stewards organised by the unions to sell the deal. Amongst those invited to speak at the first of these was Rover managing director John Towers (later of notorious ‘Phoenix Four’ fame) and Dan Jones one of the authors of The Machine that Changed the World and of the Cardiff Business School — who said that the unions had no alternative but to accept the deal. Bill Morris, then General Secretary of the TGWU, was there and spoke in favour of the deal as did Tony Woodley, then TGWU National Automotive Officer.

On the other side of the argument stewards attending were given documentation by Paul Stewart arguing that Rover Tomorrow would result in large-scale job losses and a sharp reduction in the quality of working life.

The deal was put to a ballot of the workforce with a huge media campaign for a yes vote and with all employees including white collar workers and management grades voting. Despite this he deal was accepted only by the slimmest of margins — 11,961 in favour and 11,793 votes against. This meant that the bulk of blue-collar workers, particularly in Cowley were against the deal.

In 1994 the Rover Group — the last domestically owned mass production carmaker in Britain — was acquired by BMW from British Aerospace. The restructuring under Rover Tomorrow, however, continued apace.

In 1998 BMW management launched another damaging restructuring package — which involved the banking of hours, new shift patterns and redundancies.

The unions again gave massive backing to the deal. This time to the extent of transporting the entire workforce to the Birmingham Exhibition Center to persuade them that the future of the company depended on its acceptance. The deal was consequently accepted by overwhelmingly.

In March 2000 it emerged that BMW was discussing the breakup of the Rover group and the disposal of most of its components. Cowley and Swindon would remain a part of BMW, Land Rover would be sold off to a buyer yet unnamed, and Longbridge would be sold to venture capitalists Alchemy with the loss of 3-4,00 jobs.

The book has an important account of the meeting of Rover stewards called to discuss the situation. Arguments in favour of an occupation of Longbridge were resisted by the officials and the meeting called for two things: for Rover to be nationalised and for a demonstration through Birmingham against the sell-off on April 1st. Nationalisation was absolutely the right demand, but it would need more than a demonstration to get new Labour to do it.

The demonstration was a massive 100,000 strong and very militant, but the speeches at the end had nothing to propose. The nationalisation demand from the stewards was not even mentioned from the platform at the end.

But it was even worse. It soon emerged that far from nationalisation the TGWU officials were already pursuing an alternative buyer for Longbridge in the shape of ex-Rover chief executive John Towers who had been sacked by BMW in 1996 accused of concealing the true state of Rover’s finances from them! In fact this was being pursued by union officials even whilst the demonstration was taking place.

On April 19 Rover stewards were called to another meeting and presented with a trade union briefing paper supporting the Towers bid. It would, it was argued, result in less job losses that the Alchemy proposals — and the policy had to be one of damage limitation. The book puts it this way:

“Tony Woodley… made it clear that ministers had told him that there was no way that Rover would be nationalised… He said that he had been unsuccessful in attempts to persuade other car companies to take over Rover. He went on to say that he had persuaded John Towers to become involved with the bid, and that this could only be positive since Towers was ‘a car man’ who believed in mass production. (Page 155)

Towers, however, had no plans for replacement models and his bid had all the hallmarks of an asset stripping operation from the start. Yet after the meeting all the efforts of the unions went into promoting the Phoenix bid against that of Alchemy for the Longbridge plant. The TUC joined in with john Monks calling on the government to back the Phoenix bid with some cash. As a result the Phoenix Four bought the Longbridge plant for a token sum of £10, and re-launched under the name of MG Rover.

Five years later, in April 2005, MG Rover collapsed in heap with the loss of 6,500 jobs and allegations of asset stripping; there was no resistance from the unions. The government refused to intervene and allowed the collapse to take place. It did however appoint inspectors to investigate the whole Phoenix episode and draw up a report.

Four years later in September 2009 the 850-page report — which had ended up costing £16 million —was published. It was a dramatic sequel to these events. It revealed that the Four had paid themselves a total of £42m out of the deal through a web of subterfuge and financial manipulations.

It recommended that the four be barred as company directors for life — and proceedings are apparently being initiated against them to that end. Meanwhile 6,500 jobs remain lost and the unions in the industry are in an even weaker position than they were at the time of the Rover crisis in 2000.

What the book draws out, importantly, is that the long process of undermining trade union strength in which NMTS, lean production concepts, and ideas of joint interest with the employers played a key role when it came to defending Rover Group or MG Rover jobs.

When an occupation of Longbridge demanding nationalisation was proposed by the stewards in 2000 as they way to defend jobs the trade union officials had already moved so far along the road of collaboration with management that they were speaking a different language — and their disastrous their alternative was the Phoenix Four.

Meanwhile lean production having done its job in the car industry marches on into other industries — most recently into NHS hospitals. Resistance after the history outlined above will not be easy. But a read through We Sell Our Time No More would be a very good start.

We Sell Our Time No More is published by Pluto Press and can be obtained from Resistance Books at £13.00. Alan Thornett was a car worker for many years and is the author of From Militancy to Marxism and Inside Cowley.