Bob Sutton spoke to two Midlands carworkers about the jobs fight, the construction workers’ action, and the environmental issues in their industry.
Larry Gathrie (worker at Landrover’s Whitley development site)
We’re all waiting to see whether we're going to get the guarantees from the government for the £140 million from the European Investment Bank. Otherwise it’s very much hand to mouth at the moment.
We’ve just concluded talks with the company on cost-saving measures which aren’t very popular, but the aim of them was to stave off a thousand compulsory redundancies. The cost savings are people working some hours a week unpaid, cutbacks in production areas and similar measures.
We've got several major motor manufacturers in the UK. Jaguar Land Rover, whom I work for, are the major company in the UK working on product development. The others are Vauxhall, Toyota and Nissan. With the component industry as well you are talking about a quarter of a million jobs. And the problem with the car industry is once you let a plant go, it never comes back.
I have very mixed feelings about the “British Jobs for British Workers” slogan in the strikes.
I think what some of the contractors were doing was very unscrupulous. They were attempting to bring in cheaper workers from Europe and trying to side-step recruiting locally. But at the same time I’m not opposed to movement of workers between countries. I think is a good thing. But it should be done on our terms and not the employers’ terms...
We don't want them bringing in workers from Europe on worse terms and conditions because there's some legislation that allows them to do that, and undercutting locally hired labour. The union was in a somewhat difficult position. I feel generally they handled it well. The “British jobs for British workers” smacks far too much of the BNP.
It should be jobs for workers regardless of where they're from. We’re a multicultural society anyway, and we should be embracing our brothers and sister from overseas. There are hundreds of thousands of UK workers working abroad now anyway. There is a two way flow of workers
We are all under pressure to reduce emissions. The problem for a company like Jaguar Land Rover is that were handicapped — when we we’re owned by Ford they were able to offset the production of smaller cars against the gas guzzlers. So we’re being forced, quite rightly to make our vehicles cleaner, but a company like Ford can still make the most polluting vehicle in the world and sell it, simply because they could offset it against other vehicles.
The future lies in hybrid vehicles or hydrogen cell vehicles. Trouble is in capitalism there's so many vested interests in the oil industry and everything else. That's what you've got to counter; and at the end of the day it takes money to invest in new technology, it’s not cheap.
Paddy Brennan (Unite convenor at Honda Swindon)
We’ve just had an unprecedented four month stand down. The issues were pay and job security. Unite have just negotiated a pay deal, which safeguards 489 jobs. We’ve taken a temporary three per cent pay cut to allow these job protections to take place.
There are going to be employers who are going to exploit the recession to drive down pay and conditions. However, in our case the initial offer was a 12 per cent pay cut and for Unite to negotiate that down to three percent and save five hundred jobs is a benchmark within the car industry
On the Lindsey oil refinery dispute? I understand the sentiments of protecting jobs for the local economies and countries, but there’s ethical issues involved, and exploiting people from European countries that have a lower rate of pay. Is that what the hidden agenda is? The jobs aren’t being made redundant, the people are being made redundant — at the cost of pure exploitation by the employers.
There is a conflict between the economic and environmental issues. A lot of employers now are looking more proactively at what they produce and what they do after the end of the production cycle. We have recycling campaigns and scrappage allowances. It’s dog-eat-dog; if that fails then we get mass unemployment as well. It’s a sign of the times we're living in.
