Conveners silent as Ford screws the shop floor

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JOHN STURROCK (REPORT) PRODUCTMIY DEALS ARE A Convenor Sid Harraum Lont the lid an Fard's tn are inhs FORD union leaders knew last June that the company intended massive attacks on jobs. They were told to keep it quiet both from the press and from their members - and they did so!

Worse, they sat mute while the moves to cut the workforce began with the transfer of 60 workers from the engine plant to the Body Plant, linked to massive speed-up designed to pressurise older workers into leaving.

Virtually the whole of the Dagenham leadership, including prominent. Comvolved in this scandalous cover-up and jobs massacre.

Now management are pressing further ahead. Last weekend they revealed plans to cut a further 2,900 jobs at the Dagenham body and assembly plants - 28% of the workforce -on top of the 600 jobs already lost since last June.

Bankruptcy

Since Ford - with profits running in excess of £200 million per year - can hardly use the standard BL, Talbot or Vauxhall argument of impending • bankruptcy as a threat to bludgeon union officials and convenors into line, they have come up with a new, multinational argument: equalling productivity levels in European plants.

This strong-arm tactic has already been employed at Halewood, where not long ago management anUUILYLIELI ruwuy nope in nounced that it wants to cut 1,900 manual jobs -14% of the workforce - by April, while raising levels of output to those of its Saarlouis plant.

Dagenham workers are being compared unfavourably with their fellow Ford employees at Genk in Belgium, which also produces the new Sierra model. Manning levels in Dagenham, say management, are unacceptably high.

And there are increasingly explicit threats that the multinational Ford corporation could switch its production out of British plants unless the workforce toe the line and accept drastic speed-up.

Management are ob viously encouraged in this tactic both by the generai miserable level of collaboration and capitulation shown by union officials and sections of convenors elsewhere in the car industry when threatened with possible closure, and by the particular attitude of the Dagenham leadership.

Commitment

Even now that Ford management are seeking to cut out all breaks, speed up the lines, and smash down job demarcation, union leaders are still declaring their commitment to maximising production in Dagenham.

The parallels with BL -in which successive management suria pars union officials and the practical collahoration of the Communist Party, as well as right wing convenors -should not be missed.

Ford workers can pull back from the slippery path to speed-up and redundancies opened up by their leaders: but only if management threats and their selective figures are firmly rejected Ford UK is the most - if not currently the only -profitable subsidiary of the giant corporation. While it is plainly possible under certain conditions for. management to supply particular components or even finished cars to fill gaps in production in Britain. they

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munist Party member Sid Harraway, have been in-