In 1962 Fords Motor Company broke the workers' organisation. Seven years later in February -March 1969 a five-week strike showed that the men at Fords could fight a united nation-wide struggle. Now they have put in a claim for a £10 a week minimum rise based on the demand for Parity-an equivalent rate to the highest-paid Midland car workers. This dynamic and aggressive demand is not only posed at Fords; it threatens Britain's biggest motor company BLMC and the Vauxhall plants of the US giant General Motors.
Black Dwarf interviewed two Dagenham men actively engaged in the fight for Parity: Jock Macrea and Sid Harraway. Neither are full time Union officials. Nor, however, are they shop-floor workers. Jock Macrea is the convenor of the Body Plant at Dagenham, the old Briggs, and Sid Harraway is the Deputy Convenor there. Both are in the AEF and Sid Harraway is a member of the Communist Party.
A convenor is a shop steward elected by all the shop stewards in the Plant to represent them. He is full-time and is paid by the company at the rate he would get on the floor. There are 23 Fords plants across the country, six of them in Dagenham. Jock Macrea is chairman of the association of the 23 convenors and their deputies, and along with four other convenors is on the National Joint Negotiating Committee which slapped the demand for a £10 minimum increase on the table.
- The Dagenham Ford workers are now putting forward very militant demands and have rebuilt their organisation which was smashed eight years ago. What happened in 1962?
Jock: Bill Francis was sacked; that was what started the dispute off. The PTA went out on strike and then two-thirds of the body plant went out-the river plant didn't go out-then the company closed the gates, and after a protracted strike only those people that they agreed to could go back. They victimised 600 workers, to start with Then the government, a Tory government ironically, reduced the purchase tax on cars-November it was-and there was an upsurge in sales, and the 600 was reduced to 78, and then the 78 was reduced to 36, and that came down to 17 by negotiation.
I was part of the 78. I was out for about five weeks; the workers had gone back and I was still out. I wasn't the last back though.
- So if the government hadn't reduced that purchase tax, you wouldn't be here now.
Jock: You could say there's a possibility I would would have gone. (Laughter)
- What other issues were involved in 1962?
Jock: See, the strike was really about work standards, about the speed of our job. There were lots of disputes leading up to it. In the PTA there's 95% on production, and all on line work. Now, you find on line work the boys get really angry, you know, get frustrated. When you get static jobs, the workers can make time, if you know what I mean. They can make time by working a bit barder, so they don't feel the environmental pressure so much. On line work, you're tied like a dog on a leash, aren't you, because every job keeps coming at you, and you really can't make time and you can't get off the damn job.
- And they're the most frustrated set of workers, then?
Jock: Oh, terrible, terrible. Line production I think is the worst.
There must be trouble almost every day.
Jock: Almost invariably, yes. But we've got in-built procedures. A worker can't be sacked generally unless it's referred to me; suspensions come to me if the steward can't resolve them.
This is the key thing about our procedure, all plant problems come to the convenor. It doesn't matter about the union; I mean I can deal with an electrical today, a janitor tomorrow, a pipe-fitter the next day; a production worker the next day. So if you've got a good works committee and your organisation is working, it should be good, within the terms of what you can do within a procedure anyway.
But in the ultimate you've always got to have workers ready to strike in my opinion. I don't believe there'll ever be a procedure that won't overtake hat set of circumstances-and we're in danger of losing that now, I think. -How do you mean?
Jock: Well, we become so bloody sophisticated, I'm talking about the nation as a society now, that people believe in procedures as an end. You find Labour relations people say to us they're going to look at everything in depth. They've got all these bloody professors and youngsters from university and that, and they say, "We'll look at everything in depth". This is their promise to us, and if we say, "Well, look at this angle, you haven't considered it," they say, "Oh yes, we've considered it, we've considered that... and that... we've considered all the mitigating circumstances, we've considered this.. all that.. "and then in the end you get so carried away with these procedures, all of us, that you don't see the ultimate bloody thing as being the workers' right to strike. You see, if there is any suspension or sacking you they cav "Oh, piss off, Now kers hadn't been ready to do something; because the company know that weapon. Unless that lever is there, you can be the best bloody negotiator in the world and you won't bloody win, I believe this. You've got to have the forces ready, either half committed, or committed totally to doing something if something doesn't happen. - How did you regain your strength after the 1962 defeat?
Jock: The first day I went back, my superinten dent called me up in the office and said, "Now, your job is on the line. You go on there and stay on there. It's only in extreme circumstances you ever come off your job." I said, "I shall continue to operate in exactly the same way today as I did before we went out, and take it from there." That was a fairly sharp exchange, and other stewards were doing the same as me. The workers had turned their backs on us, no doubt about that, the workers wouldn't hardly talk to me, because some of my shop had gone in, and I walked down the middle of the line and they had all got their heads down. It was a few weeks before they held their heads up again, but I just conducted myself as shop steward. I raised issues myself, if I saw anything going wrong, I raised it; you know, anything, satety. -Why weren't they talking to you?
Jock: There were two reasons. I think the main reason was they were ashamed of their conduct really. I mean we're all bloody weak, aren't we, they sort of crawled in. - Did they feel that you were to blame at all for what had happened?
Jock: Oh no, they blame the unions, they don't blame the stewards, they very rarely blame the stewards. You get a few right-wing people who blame the stewards, but generally speaking, the workers at Briggs and Fords have blamed the unions over the years for letting the stewards down. This is always the situation; they very rarely blame stewards.
- What are your current demands?
Jock: Our demand is fairly straightforward. We want a £10 a week rise for all Ford workers.
This is something that has been put foward with a great deal of thought and purpose behind it. It seems a bit simple when you say it, but you have to combat people who want to fight on wage structure or fight on differentials Some workers want to see differentials minimised, others want to see them made bigger, on every claim you get a tendency to splinter a bit on differentials. There are also all sorts of views about the wage structure, including one that the whole thing should be re-examined. Once you start getting into that field we think you are up a bloody blind alley because that is what the company loves. We want to go for a minimum rise of £10 a week and get everyone behind it.
- Why have you put forward this demand for parity now? You had a strike a year ago and you got a rise then, so why has another one come up?
Jock: Because it has been our demand for the last fifteen years.
-But why has it come up now?
Jock: Now the time is right for us to put the most force behind it, and to crystallise all the things we have said. The strike last year pointed the way. The terms of the resumption said that there would be immediate discussions on parity. The company have now said to us that they meant parity within the industry as a whole, and they have accused us of picking out one company, Rootes, unfairly. They say we are being dishonest. They have put figures to us about the average in the motorcar industry which includes all the bits and pieces and they say that the average figure is 11/8 an hour or something and we come out of it well.
Sid: In the Union's submission the claim was based to some degree on the 17/5 per hour for production workers paid by Rootes at their Ryton factory, although the Union submission also talked about small firms, like Alvis motors of the BMC group, which get 21/- an hour. But the main thrust of the demand was based on Rytons where in order to implement measured day work, which we have had at Fords since the war, Rootes offered to buy the men off the piecework system. We are saying, well, this is what measured day work is worth and we want it as well.
- How is the claim being put forward? Is it already on the table?
Jock: The National Joint Negotiating Committee put it in during September, the company replied in November, and their reply was, arising out of all the bumph, that they would make a specific offer on January 23rd.
Sid: We have an outstanding case in relation te the expansion of the company and its success since the war. In 1946 Fords was only based in Dagenham; now they have expanded extensively in Dagenham, to Halewood and so forth;
they have invested over £140 million. They've never gone to the Stock Exchange for a loanit's all been done out of the success of the comof the change of leadership of the two major unions with Scanlon and Jones. - This £10 a week rise would in fact decrease the differential, would it not?
Jock: Well of course it will. That's why it's a job to commit people to stand on a flat round which is something a bit unusual these days, because it's always 10d an hour to Grade 1 and 2 or E and D, and say 8d an hour to Grade C and B, and so on. Our wage structure is very simple, you see, nobody gets anything on top of anything, it's a very simple thing, everybody gets a grade rate of pay, the only thing that you get is a service payment, but everybody gets that. -So a £10 a week rise is more than a simple wage claim, it includes the solidarity of all the workers in the plant.
Jock: Well, that's right, it means that people at the top end of the scale, the toolmakers and people like that, have at least got to accept that principle. We've got to face things as we see them. Some people are saying that we ought to go for a direct comparison with Rootes, which would mean that some workers would get about £13, others would get about £4. Now we say that's the worst possible basis to start a fight because, you see, our indirect workers like storemen and even our janitors are paid more in relation to production workers than at Rootes. Parity with the Rootes wage scale would mean that a janitor here would only gain about £2 a week where somebody else would get £12-£13. That's no basis to start fighting when you need solidarity. -How do you gauge the mood of the men on the shop floor?
Jock: Well, I think it's for the birds really, this type of question on how you gauge opinion. You have the boys flat today and tomorrow they can be raring to go... It's like a bloody barometer you know, day can be fair, the night can be changeable and tomorrow it can really be hard and raining.
This time more than ever before we've conducted a good psychological propaganda battle gans and that. And I think we've got company people, certainly foremen and general foremen and people like that, as much committed as they've ever been to understanding the parity argument. Now this has always been pie in the sky stuff in the past, I believe people have said it, but they've not really even thought they meant it, even the lads who were the leaders, and they've said it as a sort of target. But I think this time they know we mean it. Lots of the lads are wearing badges. These stickers are on all the doors, management doors. (Laughter).
I think the lads are geared to a fight. We said right from the start, it will need a strike. We said that really right from the first day. Of course, there've been regional mass meetings, one in the cinema up the road there, the Odeon, there was one in the Liverpool Stadium, about 5,000 Liverpool workers: There was one at Basildon, of about 300 workers. At all these meetings everbody votes for the claim of parity knowing full that it could mean the strike.
-Do you have any idea of what the company will offer you?
Sid: Well, that's awkward -Are you speculating on that at all?
Jock: Yeah, yeah. We're speculating on that. I think the company will make an offer which will be big enough to make people stop and think, and not nearly big enough to satisfy our demands. I mean an offer of something in the region of 9d or a bob an hour which is f2 or even £3.
-What if they offer you £5 or 66 a week?
Sid: Well, you're poised then. It depends on how the negotiating team conducts itself and what happens within a given period. You can't declare in advance. If our demand is for £10, then we ought to make sure the whole of the movement is geared to that. It's dangerous when you start prejudging the damn thing. You tend to commit yourself.
- Why are you in a stronger position since last year's strike?
Jock: One reason is that the workers for years have always believed that it was us against the company and the unions, so any strike we had was always unofficial as far as the company and the press and everybody was concerned, so we were always fighting a two-fold battle. Well, this time, within 48 hours the workers saw the strike being made official, which was something they gathered strength from. They had been let down so many times that it became difficult to tell them that they will get support. In other words if you tell them it can be made official, like we've been doing for 15 years and it's never come off, once, each time you say it with the company with our stickers and our slo-, there's the fact that the workers them get strength from having been engaged in a struggle. They've got strength from the fact that they can take part in a strike and not be starving. It was a difficult strike for the work to understand because the unions were divide All the press were saying the unions have entered into an agreement and the AEF and th T&G were seen as taking the government on. The lesson was that the AEF and. the T&G sa never again will we be outvoted on that Unio National Negotiating Committee. There is a goodish type of leadership in these two unio now; goodish because it may not stay that w You can't entirely rely on national leaders at any time because if you do, I think you are sunk. You have to rely on your own ability t organise the worker. - What is the big factor that really helps if th union says it's official?
Jock: It's a credibility thing, getting confide from the fact of being backed by the whole this massive organisation. It's also the simple of answers to give. We are fighting a battle a somebody asks what is it about, and you say the union has made it official. This is good lance from the worker's point of view, for h wife, his mother, the public at large. It's a w pon that the worker uses because he's mayb not au fait with every detail of the strike an what it's about and what it's for. Sid: As Jock says, he falls back on the reliar of the union, a million and a half T&G or o half a million AEF, and it gives him some sc of respectability in the eyes of the broad pu at large, so he feels a lot more secure. But e if it doesn't get official support, if he know that the principle is a just one, he will still e gage in unofficial action. But the recent dis sions around In Place of Strife, apart from legislation aspects of it, have all been direc at more improvements in negotiations, mor attention to strikes. Lads don't take strike sions just off the cuff as though it's like de ing to buy a cup of tea, it's a seriously thou out situation, and once he's determined tha the issue is just and that it's certainly right principle, then he goes on with it whether i official or not.
-Some groups said that last year's strike w defeat.
Jock: It would have been nice to have gon back with the penalty clauses completely e nated. It would have been much nicer, and the unions had been completely united at t level, then I think we maybe would have d that job. But it always happens at Fords th we happen not to do a complete job for ou selves but we do a terrific job for the natio scene. If you look back at our history, 195
back-dated wage claim, 2d I think if was, and that was an epic struggle. Then there was the women's strike, the women themselves didn't see it clearly, and it started off about grading... but it drew the whole country's attention to equal pay, and last year's strike put a nail in the coffin of the White Paper. - But do you actually think that the strike was a defeat?
Jock: I couldn't really say it was a defeat, because since the strike we have had dozens of stoppages in all plants, and the intention of the penalty clauses was to stop strikes. — That's very interesting about the national role of Fords. An obvious paradox here is that you are feeling stronger than you have for many years, and yet over the last few years you have * had a Labour government in power which has done some of the worst things against the trade unions that have been done by a government since the war, and we have also had a massive propaganda campaign against working class orJock: People have a lot of loyalties to what they call the Labour Party without having a real political understanding. A lot of the workers support the Labour Party partly because of their class in a sort of old working-class way.
The shop stewards are very active politically and you get stewards who are members of the Labour Party. We have got stewards who are - councillors and belong to the Labour Party loc-ally and participate, but you generally find they drift away from the centre of the industrial scene when they start taking over council jobs. But I think there is a reaction; we had an argument the other day about whether the Labour Party would get re-elected. There was all views expressed. I couldn't see the Labour Party getting back in. People may feel that a bloody bad Labour Government is better than a Tory government. I think we might as well fight the enemy we know rather then the one we don't. There are people who think you've got to change the views of the Labour government. Lots of workers believe that's been done by pressure over the White Paper. - Is there a growing hostility to the Labour Party, to Harold Wilson, to Barbara Castle and to the Labour Party as a whole?
Jock: Disillusionment really.
Sid: It's not really sharp condemnation as much much as disillusionment, but still the sort of hope that they will have learnt and perhaps be returned and carry out more leftish policies. Jock: You see, it becomes a battle whether you are prepared to see the Labour government go back in again and really do a job, and it's very difficult to muster enthusiasm and you have to Sid: You see, what happens is that every general election we get approaches from the Labour Party; their national agent comes to this office and meets convenors from the Dagenham area and says he wants assistance for people to go out, knock on the knocker and give out election addresses and so on. Then we break down the Dagenham area on a plant basis. We adopted Walthamstow East.
Jock: Will Roberts was the candidate. Well, I said I would never bloody well go out and campaign for him again, be cause I met in the House of Commons lobby one day and I said, "Come here, Will," and he ran away. Well, he's dead" now, dropped dead, God bless him, but you know he wouldn't even stop and speak to us, and Christ we did a good job for him. Sid: We won about four or five marginal Tory seats in Essex in '64. But if we had the election agent knock on the door tomorrow, whether the response would be as good today as it was in '64 would be a bit doubtful.
Jock: Unless you get that, Labour won't bloody well get back in naturally.
In '59 we only lost by about 500 votes; now Geoffrey Bing said we lost because the Labour people had lost their edge and he was right. Geoffrey Bing came up to the shop stewards and and thanked us personally; he lost but he was the only one to come along to the shop stewards committee, and we were very friendly with Geoffrey, he was one of the bloody best, he understood where the grass roots of the working class were. - What do the rest of the stewards think about the Labour Party?
Jock: I think, if you talk to our stewards, that a broad consensus of opinion would be that you've got to have the Labour Party in government if you can. I might differ a bit with that, but that is the opinion that would be held as the broad consensus of opinion. -Can we turn to some of the other groups, in particular the Communist Party? Has the Communist Party strength increased in Dagenham over the past few years?
Jock: Our plant has always been fairly well provided for, and there's always been lots of our lads have been Party members and all that in our plant. And there is a good sale of papers like the Morning Star. I make sure that it gets read. - Have you ever been in the Party? Jock: I haven't, no. - Are you a member of the Labour Party or anything?
Jock: No, no. - Do you think that the management can do damage by attacking Communists in the plant? Jock: I think they can do damage, less now possibly since '62, but it's a good propaganda lever for the company. - Why less since '62?
Sid: Well, even the unions realised they couldn't allow themselves to stand back and let the employers move in and smash the workshop organisation and use a red bogey. I don't think it works so well nowadays. People think a lot deeper than just labels.
What about the groups?
Jock: Some of the stewards belong to the Com munist Party, some to IS, some belong to Solidarity, some belong to the Roman Catholic Church down the road here, also a political organisation of a kind. - What do you think of the groups as a whole? Jock: What do I think about them? Well, I suppose they serve some purpose. -Do they actually serve some purpose from your point of view?
Jock: Well, in their own right I suppose they serve some purpose. I don't believe in factions really. - Why not?
Jock: I think in the end they attack the workers more than they attack the bosses. You see, IS and Solidarity tend to attack the leadership in the plants, attack conveners and works committees. Now, I think you've got to have priorities. The whole machine may be bad but you've got to pick the rottenest apples out first. You see, these factions, they're more disruptive than helpful, and any faction which is disruptive of what we're trying to do, so far as I'm concerned, they're out, because I think we're doing what we ought to be doing as the workers' leaders. We may not be going fast enough, but at least we are facing in the right direction. Sid: We are opposed to people who come along and lecture us on what our tactics should be. Recently we've had leaflets that say we should take over the factory or all sit down or some stage of being able to take over the factory or effect a sit down. There may come a day when we say, well, let's take over, but we are certainly not at that level at this stage -You don't think you ought to occupy a factory?
Jock: We did something some time back that was a measure of where we are. It was 98% successful. We had a meeting in the canteen-we're not allowed to have meetings in the plant, a number of us got letters threatening us with the sack-and at the end of the meeting we carried the resolution that we march on the offices and sit down. This was because the boys were being shut out, suppliers kept drying up—we marched on the offices and we sat down, about three or four hundred of us sat down and started chanting "We want work" for about half an hour, and that was very effective. It frightened the management, frightened them, certainly worred them very much. Now, that's about the top what you can do. — What gave you the idea to march and sit down like that?
Sid: Discussion among the lads. - Had it been done before?
Sid: Oh yes. It had been done before way back, in the early days of recognition. - When was that?
Jock: '46, '45. During that period people had been demanding recognition of the shop stewards. You name it, we've done most things that organised workers have done, all sorts of tactics.
- Don't you think the advantage of occupation is that you can raise the strength of the men very greatly?
Jock: The thing that I was most worried about during the whole of my career at Fords was an official strike. Because official strikes tend to remove all the control and all the direction away from the worker, an official strike is more worrying than an unofficial strike. Because the unofficial strike is on the floor, in the plant, you're all together.
Sid: The workers will determine the views for settlement.
Jock: Now we are going to see more official strikes, that was Jones's sort of theme and it's obvious that that is the thinking among certain national leaders. Therefore we'll have to go up that way and come down again before you get real worker participation. Either through disillusionment with the national set up, or better understanding that what's down here is what works and counts. We're not at a level where you can have workers occupying factories because at the moment, the day they go on strike, they commit themselves to their families, apart from the lack of real deep understanding. Sid: Plant bargaining could raise the level of democracy in a factory. At the moment we've still got this problem of communication to some degree because we can't have meetings in the factory without permission from the company. But in plant bargaining like we used to have in Briggs we had a shop stewards meeting on a Tuesday night. Every Wednesday dinner time in every plant there was a report back, bloke would get on top of a box or top of a machine following the shop stewards meeting, and this was real workshop democracy operating because the boys voted for or against the policies being built up. We've got to return to that political level before you get into a situa tion where we could take over the factory. But at the moment we are not at that political level Jock: In the days Sid's talking about a shop steward didn't hold a report-back meeting. The shop raised it with him and said "Why weren't you at the shop stewards meeting last night?" If he didn't attend two or three times, they would throw him out. - But if you actually took the factory on the first day and had big discussions going on, not necessarily a permanent attempt to seize the factory but at least to establish very wide-scale lengthy discussions so that the men did start to really talk through what was going on and what they could expect.
Jock: You don't really understand the industrial scene at all really; you talk about it from an academic viewpoint, you see, you love talk because this is all part of your life, fair enough, but there's an opposite view held by lots of workers. You get to the meeting, in five minutes you tell the workers the salient point and you say we're on strike. You don't have interminable discussions because that leads to no bloody action, the longer a meeting goes on, the less chance you've got of getting a strike action carried, so therefore the industrial experience is exactly opposite to what you're saying. It's better to have a well-planned, well-orga nised meeting with all your own people ready to say the right things and do the right things, and you're in. You take your strike vote and that's it. Once workers have made their minds up, they'll stay solid, then you can have your talk later on. - But as well as putting forward economic demands, you must be fighting to shift the balance of power in the plant. The Black Dwarf 30th January 1970 Page 7 "You have got all the power and none of the responsibility," when we have a short exchange on something, I deny it. But at the same time, since the strike, the company is very very wor ried about anything that happens in the plant. In other words they are willing to be conciliatory more quickly now than they've ever been, because they can see this thing going on, and they can see the backing we're getting from the national people. -Aside from that, though, the struggle in Fords is also a class struggle, part of the struggle between the power of the working class and the power of the national organisation of the ruling class. And it links us back with the discussion on the Labour Party and of a political party for the working class. It's quite clear that although the union is a massive national organisation, in some sense you actually fear the national organisation taking it up because once it takes it up, then power is out of the hands of the workers. It seems to us that the question that this poses, aside from the little political groups, is in fact whether you see the need for national political coordination and a national political party, to carry on the struggle for working-class power at the grass roots level.
Jock: We are trying to do two things: we're trying to bridge the gap between the national people and ourselves by having more and more rank and file people on the national negotiations. There's five on our national committee now. We hope there'll be ten in a couple of years' time, so we will be completely away from the national officials. You see, the old way was to leave the national negotiations to some bloke in some small union who's got plenty of time, like Wolfe Baird who was about ninety84 he was, I think, when he retired as General Secretary of the Pattern-Makers-got no age limit in their union; but apart from that, he could have been quite an activist, but he wasn't.
On this point about the political factions that we're getting now, there's a need for an examination of that from an academic ideological point of view, or whatever you want to call it, of the Communist Party, the IS, Solidarity, all these people. But when we are in a struggle and we ask for their help, we only want their help, we don't want them to tell us what to do. We don't want anyone to start telling us what the strategy ought to be, what the tactics ought to be; if anybody tries to do that, we'll show them the door. In other words, there can only be so many generals. If we're all bloody generals, the war will never be fought and won. There's got to be people who can take orders, and that's the problem we get. During the last strike I had to do my nut in here a few times, because we had too many bloody generals and not enough corporals, and everybody wants to give the orders and nobody wants to carry them out. We get people trying to tell us what to do from various groupings; they say "Oh, we didn't ought to do that, you ought to do this." Now, you have got to have a good talk with your friends and analyse the things that are going on both politically and nationally, but once you've done that you've got to have the machine to do the job; for better or worse, for Fords the machine is the joint conveners move.
ment.
- What about the help you received from revolutionary students?
Jock: You see, you get this difficulty, you get the students coming to help you during strikes, they've all got beards and long hair and that sort of th on took to with you, and per ar , and people come along and say, "They don't work at Fords; what are they doing on the bloody gate?" And then you have an issue; people want to go in because the students are at the gate. This is a terrible problem for us to grapple with. We have to say, "We'd love you to help, we would love you to be on the gates, and we understand what you are trying to do for us, but the bloody workers don't understand it"
- But weren't students very helpful in the last strike?
Jock: Yes, down by the gates, down by the level crossing, they did a bloody good job. If it hadn't been for them on some of the gates, no thing would have been done. I'm not decrying it, I'm'only saying I was on the gate a couple of times and there were lots of students there, and we got involved with canteen women who kept going in. They were wrangling, people came up to take photographs, and it got reported and you got all the trappings, the police rushing out, you know what I mean. People use it as an escape route to go against the strike; they're maybe waiting for an opportunity anyway, but that just provides a little spark, and they say "Why don't they get back to their colleges where they belong?" It only creates something for them to use as the whipping-boy. It's not absolutely deeply-rooted, but we haven't really joined forces with students, nurses, and teachers in this country, because the workers see students, teachers and nurses as a different bloody class.
- How do you think you can make that link?
Jock: We can only do it by us stopping together and eventually it will break down.
The Black Dwarf -30th January 1970
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