MILLIONS of British people are facing a revolution at work - the so-called 'new management techniques' (NMTS). There are many faces to this new way of working -"flexibility', short-time and part-time working, de-unionisation, quality circles and 'just-in-time' production. But they all have one goal: to squeeze every possible ounce of labour out of the working day, to make do with fewer workers and to boost profits at a time of crisis. Here we publish excepts from talks on this topic by ANDY KILMISTER, CELIA DIGNAN and a car worker, made at a recent Socialist Outlook day school.
ANALYSIS The old days - good or bad? Rover pickets at Solihull Repress, Restructure, Reform, Revamp search on another book, which shows much importance the bosses place on this question).
It is clear that the Tories are deeply involved in promoting research on the NT's - for exmoney to bring in experts to make changes on these lines.
Most people don't see this offensive, but every day of the week there are seminars and courses for managers, business people and trade unionists and even MPs addressed by these NMT 'experts".
Dan Jones has lectured to people in the NHS. We now even have this ideology being introduced. into the police, the 'customer' there being private enterprise, whose property needs to be defended! They want limited contracts for the police and to move away from annualised pay rounds to indiIt may sound ridiculous; but it is linked with the ideology of consumer choice. which un derlies the various 'Charters' -charters- which the Tories have The argument is that the consumers and customers come are not being adequately sup plied by workers.
The idcology of the NT's is accepted completely by the Labour Party, with its notions of invidual nonts as opposco to the collective rights of workers.
The 'customer' ideology stretches right down to the factory floor. At Rover where 1 work, the next person on the track is your 'customer, who has to check your work. You are the 'customer' of the person on the track before you, and you have to chock their work. And you are told somehow the machine you run is 'your machine, and you are responsible for every detail of its - its cleaning. maintenance and so on One new thing is the utilisation of the NTs to deal with the problems of economic crisis, especially though the flexibility' of labour. The crucial thing here is the "flexibility' to be able to put people on and off the workforce.
So there is a huge expansion of short-term contracts. The last 1000 people taken on by Rover have been on six-month con tracts, something virtually ununtil a few years ago.
It has to be said tough tal the NT's can only work if the bosses have either no union or a compliant union working with