That is my humble opinion on the matter; it would have been good money after bad in part due to the culture of the British worker circa 1979. At this time and up until recently there was the scourge of ‘restrictive practices’ in most large unionised industries and even in some small to medium ones, as we shall see.
Restrictive practices are where tasks in a given business are clearly delineated along trade and job boundaries to what seems now days to be anal infinities. Example:
My father was an electrician in a breezeblock factory responsible for the electrical maintenance of amongst other thing the production lines. If a line went down and he needed to remove the front from a relay panel or the such like he had to find a fitter as he wasn’t allowed to remove the few bolts and screws as this task was not in his defined tasks. So the line could be down for hours until he could find one or they could be bothered to turn up. Fed up with this he went self-employed eventually.
Another example, whilst self-employed my father got a contract to install several new American electrical furnaces into a few medium and small engineering companies, these not only were more stable and produced a higher quality product than the coal fired ones but also required 3 fewer men to operate as they no longer needed stokers. The contract was cancelled as the unions wouldn’t wear it, you can guess what happened to most of these companies.
Even into the early nineties it was still prevalent, my brother was a junior manager at the copper works in Leeds and they were losing trade to eastern European manufacturing at an alarming rate, they invested in some new presses but the labour cost was still too high, due again in part to restrictive practices. A machine fitter was only there to fix and maintain machines and other people were there for the more menial tasks and operating the presses. They tried to reduce the labour force for efficiency reasons by getting rid of the menial workers and the fitters becoming more deployable to different tasks. There was an outcry and threats of strikes etc, and it must be pointed out with the advancements in machine reliability there were sometimes weeks where a fitter would actually perform no work at, just drink tea and read the paper all week. There was one heated meeting where my brother held up two copper fittings and said to them ‘ this in my left hand costs a plumber 50p and this in my right hand costs 75p, which would you buy?’ So he managed to drive through the required changes and the factory is still going under a different guise.
It wasn’t until the likes of Nissan and Toyota turned up that British industry started getting the message, back in 1979 any money invested would have been used to prop up these practices and most definitely not in labour saving machinery etc.
These Thatcher hating socialists are just angry they missed out on the chance to be a Napoleon or Squealer whilst keeping the workingman down as a Boxer.
Restrictive practices are where tasks in a given business are clearly delineated along trade and job boundaries to what seems now days to be anal infinities. Example:
My father was an electrician in a breezeblock factory responsible for the electrical maintenance of amongst other thing the production lines. If a line went down and he needed to remove the front from a relay panel or the such like he had to find a fitter as he wasn’t allowed to remove the few bolts and screws as this task was not in his defined tasks. So the line could be down for hours until he could find one or they could be bothered to turn up. Fed up with this he went self-employed eventually.
Another example, whilst self-employed my father got a contract to install several new American electrical furnaces into a few medium and small engineering companies, these not only were more stable and produced a higher quality product than the coal fired ones but also required 3 fewer men to operate as they no longer needed stokers. The contract was cancelled as the unions wouldn’t wear it, you can guess what happened to most of these companies.
Even into the early nineties it was still prevalent, my brother was a junior manager at the copper works in Leeds and they were losing trade to eastern European manufacturing at an alarming rate, they invested in some new presses but the labour cost was still too high, due again in part to restrictive practices. A machine fitter was only there to fix and maintain machines and other people were there for the more menial tasks and operating the presses. They tried to reduce the labour force for efficiency reasons by getting rid of the menial workers and the fitters becoming more deployable to different tasks. There was an outcry and threats of strikes etc, and it must be pointed out with the advancements in machine reliability there were sometimes weeks where a fitter would actually perform no work at, just drink tea and read the paper all week. There was one heated meeting where my brother held up two copper fittings and said to them ‘ this in my left hand costs a plumber 50p and this in my right hand costs 75p, which would you buy?’ So he managed to drive through the required changes and the factory is still going under a different guise.
It wasn’t until the likes of Nissan and Toyota turned up that British industry started getting the message, back in 1979 any money invested would have been used to prop up these practices and most definitely not in labour saving machinery etc.
These Thatcher hating socialists are just angry they missed out on the chance to be a Napoleon or Squealer whilst keeping the workingman down as a Boxer.
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