The Equal Opportunities Revolution
Page 17
threats made by an LCB Chapel to take industrial action if a woman were employed as a binder at a craft bindery [which] amounted to an attempt to induce the management of that firm to discriminate against the woman contrary to… the Act.
The Equal Opportunities Commission’s investigation of SOGAT coincided with the publication of Cynthia Cockburn’s book Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change in 1983. Brothers is a brilliantly researched account of the print industry in Britain which highlights the way that the jealous defence of craft skills served to secure men’s domination of the industry. Cockburn’s account also echoes some of the employers’ criticisms of the printers’ ‘phenomenal earnings’, that the compositors’ ‘wage levels were indeed staggeringly high’, and that the linotype operators were ‘virtually writing their own pay cheque’.20
When the Commission first talked to them in 1984, ‘SOGAT and the Branches were unwilling to put an end to this serious and continuing discrimination’. The union ‘maintained that their practices were justifiable and that alterations to these arrangements were both impracticable and incompatible with the Union’s democratic organisation’. At that time the Equal Opportunities Commission ‘decided therefore that it would have to enforce the necessary changes, and in June 1984 the Commission informed SOGAT and the Branches, in accordance to the Act, that it was minded to serve on them non-discrimination notices requiring to change their call room and seniority practices’. At this ‘the two Branches asked the Commission to defer the final decision on the issue of the non-discrimination notices, so as to give them time to amalgamate’, and a ballot was held which ‘returned majorities in favour of amalgamating the LCB with the LWB’. Welcoming that decision, the Commission heard that ‘owing to a series of internal and external difficulties the Branches were unable to complete the amalgamation’. For that reason, the Commission served its notice of discrimination at the end of 1984.21
They reviewed the case in 1986 and found that ‘the parties continued to experience difficulties’. When they met with SOGAT that year, they thought ‘it was apparent that the impetus for change had been lost’: ‘In September the Commission accordingly issued non-discrimination notices in a form almost unchanged from those prepared in 1984.’22
What the Equal Opportunities Commission did not explain in its reports was that the external difficulty that the union was experiencing was a dispute over the introduction of new technologies that would lead to the destruction of their trade and the end of their union. News International, which owned the Times and the Sun newspapers, moved the whole operation from Fleet Street to Wapping, sacking 6000 print and clerical staff, and introducing a new computer graphics system called ATEX. Already, Times Newspapers Limited, under its previous management, had faced down a year-long strike in 1978-79 over manning levels, at the end of which the new technology had been brought in, but still operated by the printers. As Cockburn wrote in 1983 just before the change, ‘often a new labour process implies a new labour force’, as ‘a company sacks one lot of workers and engages others’. But in the aftermath of the 1978-79 strike the employers’ side was ‘forced to convert its existing craftsmen’, which was, Cockburn thought, ‘an unusual situation’.23
The Wapping dispute
In 1984 the General Secretary of the SOGAT union was Brenda Dean, who had just taken over from Bill Keys. Before going ahead with his move Murdoch had secretly negotiated with Dean who offered a reduction of manning levels at News International. What Murdoch wanted to know from Dean ‘was whether I could assert my new authority over the London members of SOGAT’. In her memoirs, Dean felt she had to explain how it was that she had secretly met with Murdoch and his chief executive Bruce Matthews. People would be surprised, she thought, to know how many such meetings ‘have littered industrial history and to find that quite often, when harsh words are being hurled across the headlines, remarkable trust and complete confidentiality can co-exist between the two sides’.
Explaining her willingness to push Murdoch’s line, Dean explained that ‘I was looking at the wider picture and wondering how I could break the logjam of the Fleet Street workers’ attitude’, adding that ‘change, like it or not, was coming fast’. Murdoch was impressed by Dean but had his doubts about her ability to deliver the traditionally militant print workers: ‘I looked him straight in the eye and told him I did not know but I was going to have a bloody good shot at it.’24 But while he was talking to Dean, Murdoch had secretly arranged a ‘sweetheart’ deal with the electricians’ union, the EETPU, and its leader Eric Hammond, to replace the print workers with their recruits.
Gender was key in both Brenda Dean’s relation to the London print workers and also to the Wapping dispute. When Dean won the vote for General Secretary she became the first woman to lead a trade union. Dean saw union militancy as intrinsically male, writing about the ‘left-wing macho clique’ that opposed her. Her base of support was outside London, where more women worked in the trade. She was facing down the ‘London Central branch who ran the union and where the power lay’, trying to rein in the ‘bloody-mindedness and strong-arm tactics for which the London print workers were infamous’, as she saw it. When the conflict with Murdoch came, ‘the testosterone amongst London print workers, who loved a fight, convinced them that they would win it’. In Dean’s mind, if only the London Central Branch had been faced down earlier, the union ‘might have avoided the ultimate disaster of Wapping’.25 Dean’s charge of testosterone-fuelled, macho militants echoed the allegations of ‘picket line bullies’ that could be heard from the Tory backbenches and in the tabloid press. Feminist Beatrix Campbell wrote of the characterisations of trade union ‘Barons’ and ‘bully boys’, that ‘trade unionism is constantly represented in Tory women’s discourse as the unacceptable face of masculinity’.26
The dispute was very bitter, and the sacked workers protested outside the Wapping print works for a year. Though you might not have known it from the press reports, hundreds of women, mostly clerical workers, were also laid off and took part in the campaign, as did many of the male print workers’ wives. The violence was intense, with mounted police baton charges made in narrow streets against strikers and protestors, and one 17-year-old protestor, Mike Delaney, was run over and killed by a News International lorry. The strikers fought hard too.
It was generally a miserable time in Britain in the winter of 1986, when one of the most popular television shows was the darts, where a top score would be greeted with the chant ‘ONE HUN-dred and EIGHT-ee’. On one of the many protests held outside the Wapping plant, I saw protestors pull up iron railings to throw at the police. A rail sailed over my head like a javelin and hit a policeman’s shield, sending him sprawling on the floor. Behind me were a row of women in fur coats who, like a Greek chorus, called out, ‘ONE HUN-dred and EIGHT-ee’.
One protestor, Deirdre, told John Lang and Graham Dodkins that she had often attacked the trucks: ‘peaceful demos were hopeless. It sounds terrible, but I really think we should have done more damage. I think it was war, I really think it was.’ Another, Joyce, took issue with the tenor of the SOGAT leadership’s campaign:
There was a Women’s march at Christmas time… [A] girl at the front next to Brenda started singing ‘Little Donkey’ through the loud hailer. I couldn’t believe it, I thought, ‘this is a farce’… [T]hat was the idea, that it should project the usual symbol of women as the Earth Mother. But I said, ‘what is this, peace and love and make the sandwiches, is this what we are reduced to after all these months? Peace and love and light me a candle sister: Come on.’ But I can see that Brenda would think it was a good image: women the peace-makers instead of big, macho pickets beating up the Old Bill and chucking smoke bombs.27
Writing in Spare Rib, another striker Liz Jones saw the struggle as:
[A] war where the people who were called out to fight for their union, find their union reluctant to fight for them, and stand accused of being ‘wreckers’ when they tiresomely persist i
n fighting on for reinstatement and union recognition long after their leaders have decided the fight is unwinnable. 28
Eventually Dean announced that despite successive votes against, the union would abandon the print workers, to save the union office: ‘This has been a very difficult decision for the executive to take’, she said, ‘but what they were faced with was the sequestration of our total union and a fine’.29 In any event the union did not survive. Once the print workers at New International had been defeated, all the other newspapers adopted the new technology and the jobs of compositors and other metal-type print workers came to an end. With the union wound up in 1992, the difference between the London Central and Greater London Branches of SOGAT was no longer an issue.
Racism at Ford
Even more than the Equal Opportunities Commission’s intervention in SOGAT, the Commission for Racial Equality’s at Ford UK Limited had a lasting impact on the firm. Ford UK’s website today boasts: ‘Ford is a leader in the practices of diversity and inclusion and established a formal equal opportunities policy more than 30 years ago.’ In 1978 Ford UK’s Industrial Relations manager Bob Ramsay became a member of the Commission for Racial Equality, beginning decades of collaboration between the company and the Commission. ‘We believe that a key ingredient to business success is the diversity of our workforce where differences are valued and everyone is included’, Ford UK says today.30 The company has also supported a wide range of community activity with large donations, from sponsoring 80 young black students at the Eastside Young Leaders Academy, to contributing to Gay Pride. Ford UK have worked closely with the former Commission for Racial Equality chair, Herman Ouseley, and are active sponsors of his Kick Racism Out of Football campaign.
In 2011, for the sixth year running, Ford hosted the Kick Racism Out of Football campaign event in East London. Mitra Janes, Diversity and Inclusion manager for Ford of Britain, said: ‘We are delighted to continue our support for Kick It Out. Football is diverse and inclusive and is a great platform for our involvement.’
Lord Herman Ouseley, Kick It Out chairman, said:
Ford has once again put on a fantastically engaging event. We are very proud to be working with Ford, and partners in the Dagenham area, on an initiative that will have a lasting impact on young people. Ford is to be congratulated for an enlightened approach to issues that impact on its local communities.31
As we have seen, Ford has often been accused of discrimination, and used a racial hierarchy between overseers, skilled, and unskilled workers into the 1980s. In the mid-Eighties Ford workers at the Dagenham car plant walked out after two supervisors were seen handing out racist leaflets, shutting down the production line (one of the supervisors, Tony Lecomber, had long been active on the far right). Afterwards the company worked closely with the Commission for Racial Equality, and with the unions, to try to repair its reputation and its equal opportunities policy.
In November 1985 Dagenham management wrote to workers to say ‘how seriously the Company takes its commitment to Equal Opportunities’. With the Joint Workers Committee, managers set up the Joint Equal Opportunities Committee. At that time 38% of Dagenham’s 12,000 workers were black, though they were mostly in the lower grades.32
The Paint, Trim, and Assembly plant at Dagenham
Despite the paper commitments, race troubles kept on coming up. In 1988 union stewards took up the case of a black applicant for the truck fleet at Dagenham, who was turned down because informally the drivers were all white.33 Nine years later Ford payed out over £70,000 to eight Asians who had been refused work on the truck fleet.
The background to the rising tensions was Ford’s continuing push to dismantle the strong shop steward movement, and rank-and-file activism at its Dagenham and other plants. The company brought in new arrangements where people worked in teams under a leader. What management called ‘flexibility’ meant mostly working much faster. Managers put a mean pay offer in 1987 of just 5% over three years, but they misjudged the mood and the workforce voted overwhelmingly to strike in 1988. The deal that the union eventually agreed, though, was not much better in pay, and was still to be phased in over two years. More importantly the agreement demanded more ‘flexibility’ from the workforce. In all of these agreements the company went over the heads of its more militant shop stewards to deal with the union head office.34
At the same time as management were side-lining the local union, they were putting in place the system of group leaders ‘to encourage production workers to share management’s viewpoint’, as one worker commented, and also to cut staff by laying off more than half of the supervisors. A ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ in September 1988 set out a more ‘constructive way of doing business together’ and set down that ‘the Trade Unions have affirmed their commitment that employees will not be involved in unconstitutional action’. Two years later Ford brought in its Employee Development and Assistance Programme, its own kind of Human Resource Management package, that drew individuals into tailored training and assessment. Ford manager John Houghton said that ‘EDAP was seen as an enormous catalyst in changing Industrial Relations in Ford because it was nonconfrontational’. EDAP, of course, was an extension of the equal opportunities agreement, with managers taking control of relations with employees on an individual basis, with the collective action of the union playing less of a role.35
Despite the EDAP and the equal opportunities policy, racial persecution of workers by managers kept reoccurring. As well as the embarrassment of the ‘whites only’ Truck Fleet, Ford shot themselves in the foot when a publicity shoot of the workforce was weirdly doctored around 1995. Those that had modelled the part of themselves in this evocation of a multicultural workforce were astonished when they saw a version of the shot where all the black workers had been photo-shopped into white people. What few saw at the time was that the shot was doctored for publicity for a recruitment drive in Poland, where the black population is negligible. It was a crass decision by a designer who had not thought through what would happen when the Dagenham models saw themselves whited out. The episode seemed to show up the insincerity of the equality drive to many cynical workers. A walk-out was narrowly avoided and Ford compensated the insulted participants.36
The Dagenham workers’ distrust of the equal opportunities policy seemed to be confirmed in the hazing of Engine plant worker Sukhjit Parmar. Parmar recalled that the bullying went on for four years, led by the ‘foremen and the Group leaders’. He was dragged across the shop floor by a man shouting ‘You Paki bastard’; his food was kicked out of his hand into his face; and on one occasion he was sent into an oil mistifier unit, without the needed face protection, and locked in while people were laughing. ‘The company were aware of what was going on and they did absolutely nothing to prevent it’, said union representative Steve Turner. When Engine plant foreman Joe Hawthorn and group leader Mick Lambert were disciplined, they rallied white workers in the Engine plant to refuse to work with Asians. Around the same time Shinder Nagra took action against Ford after similar attacks. Long-time union activist Berlyne Hamilton argued that discrimination and racial bullying ‘has been going on for years’; ‘It is enshrined in the system.’ More than 1000 workers at the Paint, Trim, and Assembly Plant walked out, protesting against racist bullying.37
Around the time of the Parmar scandal, Ford’s global CEO, Lebanese-born Jacques Nasser, visited England. By one account he ‘was absolutely livid when his company was accused of being racist’. His conclusion, though, was chilling for the Ford workers, white and black: ‘I’ve had enough of Britain’, he said, ‘I’ve had enough of this plant — all I hear about is problems’. From the point of view of the global CEO of Ford that might have made sense. But from the point of view of the employees it seemed as if they were to be blamed — and punished — for the race discrimination that was coming from their line managers.38
In March 2000, ‘nominated CRE commissioners heard oral representations from a Ford delegation… to help them dec
ide whether to embark on a formal investigation’. Later that summer the Commission for Racial Equality suspended the investigation ‘following assurances by Ford senior management that the company would comply with stringent conditions for improvement’, and ‘representatives met regularly with Ford throughout 2001 to review progress’ under a Diversity Equality Assessment Review (DEAR).39
A special ‘Equal Opportunities Meeting’ between union and management representatives heard plant manager Jeff Body say that as far as racism went, ‘the company needed to take on the Trade Union’s issues and respond’, but that ‘the culture change needed to be within the Modern Operating Agreement’. Body led the unions to believe that Nasser had said that he could fix the problem by closing the plant if they did not agree. In disbelief, union representative Steve Riley had to ask whether ‘Nasser was saying that the plant was under threat due to Equal Opportunities issues’. Car production at the Ford Dagenham plant was stopped in 2002. Though 5000 were still working on diesel engine production, the rebellious Paint, Trim, and Assembly plant was closed. In 2013 the remaining jobs (related to production at Southampton) were lost and the plant closed.40