Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Land Rover: why we walked out

Socialist Resistance no13  |  page 4

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

Migeurop can found at http://pajol.eu.org/rubrique42.html At the end of January thousands of Land Rover in from Jaguar. Solihull staged a 24 hour strike, the first since 1988. Socialist Resistance spoke to a Toolsetter within the plant about the background to the strike, and where it could lead "The dispute began when the company made a final pay offer to the Joint Shop Stewards Committee which represents members of Amicus, which I'm a member of, the TGWU

Together they represent 8000 workers at the plant. The ballot was in November last year, and it was won with a two to one majoriThe dispute has been brewing for months. At the end of November the unions agreed an overtime ban, then this escalated again at the beginning of January to refuse mandatory overtime - a thing called Operating Time Flexibility - because management insisted on a 3.5 percent pay deal over

But it was also about challenging manageThe strike was finally called after all this. There were hundreds on the picket line, actually, 5000 were involved in the dispute out of a workforce of 8000 because there was a mood

There were lots of other factors behind the dispute, like I said, we haven't had a strike

When BMW sold Land Rover to Fords they didn't think it was right that workers should have a cheap car hire scheme, we all had a

The new management didn't think workers should drive what they considPeople were also sick and tired of the attitude of the managing director, who came

With an extremely heavyhanded manage. ment style, he wanted to introduce new working practices on the shopfloor, really petty things which he thought would make us more professional.

There is also a big worry about moving production of The Freelander to the Halewood plant in Liverpool, people were worried about the future of the plant itself. We know that in Belgium our sister car plant has three new models on its books, but there is a crisis of overproduction in the European car market.

At the moment, our plant in Solihull is the plant for off road vehicles, and they have built a brand new plant here which cost millions So, we calculated that if they had made that investment, we could be confident about the future of the plant, and this fed the mood for