What kind of alternative for BL?
Socialist Organiser1980sTranscribed by hand from the printed page.
A discussion of the Leyland Vehicles stewards' "Alternative Plan", which ducks some crucial issues.
LEYLAND Vehicles: the Workers' Alternative, published by the Joint Works Committee of Leyland Vehicles (LV), Leyland, Lancs, was planned and written during the recent four week LV strike and published shortly after the return to work. It was compiled with the assistance of the Manchester Engineering Research Group (MERG).
It is an extensive 44-page pamphlet which contains a lot of very useful information about the heavy vehicle industry.
It exposes BL policy which is to run down LV — through the liquidation of its productive base and outsourcing the manufacture of major units and by preparing for further closures and hiving off.
It contains, however, many weaknesses which generally reflect the crisis of perspective which prevailed at leadership level throughout the strike itself. For example there is not a word about the central problem of the strike, which was the involvement of the rest of BL in the struggle.
Repeats
Instead it repeats the well established line of the strike committee of "seeking the support of the whole labour movement". During the strike, the strike committee and the convenor, Mick Coyne, a Communist Party member, actually resisted moves from within the Combine Committee to call a conference of all BL shop stewards in order to discuss support for the 12,000 strikers.
It highlights a weakness which recurs throughout the pamphlet which is to see things in the parochial terms of Leyland Vehicles in isolation and not BL as a whole. In reality the only way to win the strike was to crack the myth of Edwardes' invincibility and defeat his overall strategy and thus defeat the corporate plan of which the LV cutbacks are a part. It is difficult to do that from one division.
The pamphlet is certainly right to devote a lot of space to the Ryder Report, (commissioned by Tony Benn on behalf of the Labour government at the end of 1974), which still lies at the root of many of the problems facing BL workers today.
The conclusions it draws, however, seeing LV in isolation, have the same weakness.
Although there are two slightly contradictory chapters on Ryder, (obviously written by different authors), the general conclusion drawn is that the Ryder Report was an inadequate plan which was only half implemented!
Dismisses
It accuses Ryder of failing to establish a proper nationalised industry out of the report and dismisses the so-called 'worker participation' as a "farce".
It goes on to credit Ryder with 'exposing the inadequacies of private ownership' and accuses management of failing to implement the full investment programme for LV as proposed by Ryder — particularly new foundry facilities.
(The attack on participation directly reflects the influence of the Communist Party on the pamphlet since the CP have now switched policy and decided that they were wrong to back Ryder Participation in the way they did. Derek Robinson, speaking at a recent public meeting in Oxford said that it "had been a mistake to go into 'participation' as conceived by Ryder".)
But Ryder was not just a weak plan with a few good points and a few bad! It was a major attack on BL workers. Likewise, participation was far from just a "farce". It actually facilitated the dismantling of the trade union movement which took place during the 3 years of Ryder [1975-7] and gave Edwardes the power base to force in his closure programme, the latest phase being the proposed 4,500 redundancies in LV.
Under Ryder the trade union movement at shop steward level was hamstrung. After the adoption of the Report by Parliament in April 1975 the National Enterprise Board effectively became the top management of the Corporation. Sitting on the NEB were Hugh Scanlon and Harry Urwin representing the two main unions in BL — the AUEW and TGWU.
Breaking
Harry Urwin also sat on the Ryder inquiry team as the trade union representative. All this resulted in massive backing from the trade union leaders for Ryder, under conditions where the stated purpose of Ryder was to make BL a more efficient producer of vehicles by the more effective exploitation of the labour force, which could only be done by breaking the power of the shop stewards.
Its detailed objectives were to facilitate a major rationalisation programme, i.e. plant closures. To achieve "better manning levels", "less strikes" and "higher productivity" plus "greater mobility and interchangeability of labour".
The promise of participation also ensured that Ryder also received enthusiastic backing from the most prominent convenors — particularly the Communist Party who saw it as a "step towards workers' control".
[Photograph. Caption: Leyland convenor Mick Coyne with the Alternative Plan]
As a result the Combine Committee was castrated and everything channelled through the 'participation' bodies — the Cars Council and the Bus and Vehicle Operations Councils.
It is true that 'participation' has done more damage in BL Cars than in Vehicles. In 1975/6/7, the Cars Division was the main target of management because it was making a loss whilst LV was making a profit. When LV stewards pulled out of 'participation' after management ignored them and announced the arbitrary closure of AEC in Southall, it had not been used for wholesale reorganisation as it had in Cars.
False
Despite these differences it is false to separate the two divisions. A blow against the shop stewards movement in one part of BL affected the whole movement.
When Derek Robinson led a standing ovation in January 1978 to welcome Michael Edwardes into his new job as BL chairman, it undermined the trade unions and strengthened Edwardes in his role as an asset stripper throughout the whole Corporation.
In a similar way, when Edwardes sacked Derek Robinson, and disciplined the then LV Lancs convenor Len Brindle, it was a massive blow against the trade union movement in the whole corporation.
Clear
Throughout this period it has been increasingly clear that Edwardes' corporate-style management requires a corporate-wide response from the trade unions if it is to be combatted. It requires a break with class collaboration and all that goes with it and to begin to seriously rebuild the shop stewards' movement on the basis of unity throughout BL, which would provide the basis to combat the repeated sell-outs from the top.
Unfortunately the opposite has been the case. The Combine Committee began meeting again last year after more than a year without a meeting following Robinson's victimisation. The meetings ceased again after Adams' weak role in the BL Cars wage review and his fear of being victimised for it.
Stewards from Leyland, Lancs, have not attended even these sparse meetings. Repeated calls from the Leyland Action Committee supporters for a more active combine beginning with a conference of shop stewards to discuss the offensive against the shop stewards' movement have been ignored or manoeuvred against.
Instead we have had a succession of "alternative plans for BL" — most of which are well documented in the pamphlet. They all present things in capitalist terms by calling for import controls or by suggesting ways in which the business can be run and organised more successfully.
The last strike committee bulletin, for example, said of the meeting with BL management "We agreed that the intention of all people concerned with BL was to return to profitability as soon as possible."
Illusion
Or like the recent Alternative Plan for Vehicles creates the illusion that it is possible to convince Michael Edwardes to see reason and adopt a different, more constructive course.
In concept they are no different to the Ryder plan. Quite correctly they say "keep the industry going" rather than shut it down, "increase investment" and "preserve the manufacturing base" which like reflation, is what the CP argue all the time.
But they, like Ryder, ignore the reality of capitalism which is the world economic crisis, particularly severe in Britain.
The investment programme proposed by Ryder was based on crassest market forecasts for trucks. It says the following:
"Partly as a result of the tendency to replace such vehicles more frequently because of more stringent vehicle legislation and the cost and scarcity of qualified maintenance staff, total UK demand for heavy vehicles seems likely to be about 30% higher than last year (1974) by 1980 and there should be some further growth between 1980 and 1985." (Ryder Report, page 2, para. 8).
The Ryder team based all their decisions for LV on that estimation. Before the period covered was half way through they were faced not with gradual expansion over ten years — but the complete collapse of the heavy vehicle market.
Alternative
The working class needs an alternative road which is based on a very different yardstick — their own independent interests as a class. They need a fighting policy to defend jobs and a programme based on the development of workers' control in the plants. Above all they need to develop a new leadership both at national level in the unions and within BL which break from class collaborationism and begin to fight on these lines.
Not a mention of an alternative appears in the pamphlet, of course. In fact it is far worse. The whole pamphlet goes out of its way to avoid any criticism of the trade union leaders at all. Yet the majority of workers at LV are in the AUEW, and the AUEW Executive Council subsequently played a key part in breaking the strike by instructing the District Officer to read out a letter from Edwardes to the mass meeting just before the vote was taken — which threatened the complete wind-up of LV.
This kind of attitude comes out of the politics of the Communist Party and their relationship with the right wing who controlled the strike committee behind the scenes throughout the strike.
In fact the pamphlet goes to astounding lengths to cover up the role of Duffy and Co. in BL.
For example, it completely covers up the role of the trade union leaders in the ballot on the 1979 "survival plan" which resulted in an 8-1 majority in favour of closing 13 plants and losing 25,000 jobs. All it says is the following:
"The success of the management's propaganda campaign was reflected in the overwhelming support of 86% given to the Edwardes plan in the referendum of the workforce."
It completely covers up the fact that the key role in this was played by the CSEU [and particularly by the AUEW] who wrote to every BL worker urging them to accept the plan!
The pamphlet even covers up the role of Duffy in Derek Robinson's sacking, which came out of the survival plan ballot! It says:
"There were strikes at a number of BL plants, notably Longbridge and Coventry. But other parts of the Combine, including LV, did not think the time was right for a major confrontation. The strike and support for Derek Robinson was finally dissipated despite a lengthy inquiry by his own union."
You wouldn't think from this that 32,000 were out in support of Robinson and were ordered back by Duffy! Nor was support "dissipated despite a lengthy inquiry by his own union". The fact is that the inquiry was used to end the strike and then found him guilty of breach of rule — thus ensuring that no further strike action would take place.
CP members would agree in private that all this is true, but when it comes to putting it in an important pamphlet like this in the middle of a struggle and when workers are about to be sold out by the same traitors, everything must be covered up. The cosy relationship of the CP with the top trade union leaders must prevail.
Such a method effectively ensures that the continual betrayals that occur with such monotonous regularity will continue unchallenged.