This is the story of workers’ struggles in the British car industry, from the Second World War until today.
Told from the viewpoint of the workers, the book chronicles how they responded to a variety of management and union strategies, from piece rate working, through measured day work, and eventually to ‘lean production’ beginning in the late 1980s.
Focusing on two companies, Vauxhall-GM and Rover/BMW, this book shows how they developed their approaches to managing labour relations. It highlights the success of various forms of struggle to establish safer and more humane working environments, as well as their failures.
Table of Content
Foreword
1. Understanding the Lean Automobile Industry
2. The Pre-history of Lean Production: Employee Relations in the British Automobile Industry since the Second World War
3. From ‘Embrace and Change’ to ‘Engage and Change’: Trade union renewal and new management strategies
4. Striking Smarter and Harder: the new industrial relations of lean production? The 1995-96 Vauxhall Dispute
5. Abridged version of a roundtable discussion on lean production (The ‘Sandcastle’ Liverpool TGWU office)
6. Rover-BMW: From Rover Tomorrow to the Longbridge closure and the bitter fruits of Lean Production
7. Lean Production: From ‘Engage and Change’ to Endless Change
Conclusion
Appendices – workplace surveys
References
Index
About the author
Vicki Wass is Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Cardiff Business School. She is the author of We Sell Our Time No More (Pluto, 2009).
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