A Rover worker THE BEGINNING of February sees the start of lay-offs at Rover's Cowley plant in Oxford. The two day week is part of the " banking hours" agreement that was voted through at the end of last year.
•Already its bitter fruits are evident. Longbridge was laid off at Christmas and Land Rover at Solihull has just announced that the same fate awaits its workers.
The aim of the company is to engineer a situation whére every worker owes 200 hours, so that when they require it they can use that amount of overtime - unpaid of course.
In this way the company is already making big gains from this agreement. The previous agreement, superceded by the latest deal, would have meant the workers had to be paid lay-off without having to pay the hours back.
Meanwhile workers at Ford Dagenham are facing a three week shut down at Easter on top of the present four day week. Under their present agreement, they are paid. But the company has already indicated that they wanı a Rover-type agreement. Stewards are clear that they will oppose any attempt to introduce "banking hours".
The biggest danger is from the national officials of the unions: These include Tony Woodley of TGWU who pushed through the Now Ford and other bosses want to copy the BMW deal Rover agreement, arguing that it was necessary in order to "save Longbridge".
In reality the future of the site is still in question, despite the agreement, as BMW has threatened to build the 200/400 replacement in Germany unless they get £300 million in government grants. Indeed there is much speculation about the whole future of Rover. Both of the national union officials covering Ford are saying that it is necessary to do something to safeguard the long term future of Ford in Britain". This is the same language that was used both in Vauxhalls and then Rover just before "banking hours" agreements were brought in.
The only way to save the long term future of the motor industry is by uniting workers to fight the employers' offensive.
By offering concessions, lower standards, setting worker against worker.
The accuracy of this view has once again been underlined by the fact that it is the employers who have grown in confidence since the banking hours deal at Rover, not the workers.