Rover workers to pay heavy price for BMW subsidy
BMW-owned Rover Cars started selling the new Cowley built R75 on June 17. This is the first new car since BMW took over 5 years ago, and the media has presented it as the "last chance" to save Rover.
This fits in with the campaign to make workers think they have no choice but to do whatever the employer wants if they are to save plants and jobs.
There is no questioning as to how Rover – a company which 10 years ago was as big as BMW – got into such a total state of collapse.
Whatever happened to the British Aerospace takeover of the then state-owned Rover? We were told then that this was " the only answer". Where did the money go from the sale of vast amounts of land, in Oxford and elsewhere? This was done by a property subsidiary of BAe.
Why aren’t the workers allowed to go through the books to see the answer to these questions? None of the media asks these questions because they supported what BAe did, and they don’t want the workers to question their ‘masters’.
Alongside the launch comes the continuing saga of government money to be paid to BMW to build the replacement for the 200/400 series at Longbridge.
Banking hours
Last November workers were bullied into voting for a "banking hours" agreement. If they accepted this, then the BMW investment would go ahead. Then BMW threatened to build the cars in Hungary unless it also got vast sums of taxpayers’ money, and succeeded in getting the promise of £150million.
Now the EU is threatening to veto this aid, because they say that BMW was not serious about the move to Hungary.
But the government is willing to give these vast sums of money to a private company, although they refused subsidy when it was state-owned. At the same time the government is backing the employer, by saying they will only give the money if the workers productivity is increased by 10-20% each year. So they are using our own money to speed us up! New Labour is proud of this ‘unique’ aspect of the deal.
The vast sums that BMW is investing in Rover are just one third of their overall investment. The other two thirds are going into BMW itself, which is only a little bigger than Rover, and whose plants are already mostly state of the art plants.
Longbridge has to be almost completely rebuilt. They are also insisting that many parts of it will be contracted-out ‘modules’, which will mean a lot more job lossess, and that many component purchases will be transferred to cheaper sources abroad, thus endangering many of the 50,000 jobs that the media say have been saved.
Stoppages
The reality of last November’s deal is now working itself through. Stoppages took place in Solihull that were not publicised nationally. Workers stopped work when they were told the way that they would have to pay back their ‘banked’ hours.
Straight after the signing in November the management in each plant worked out how to lay off workers so that they nearly all owe 200 hours, ready for the peak production periods. The Solihull workers were told that they would have to work from 5.30 to 11.30 on Friday evenings, as well as an extra 15 minutes every day, all for no pay.
Previously they wouldn’t work such a shift even if they had been paid. Under the old agreement, when workers were laid off with pay, they didn’t have to pay any time back. It would appear that they when voted on the deal last November, the implications had not been properly explained.
The hostile attitude of the TGWU to their members trying to defend their conditions can be seen by the statements of the National Automative Officer, Tony Woodley, in the Birmingham Evening Mail:
Longer hours
"People should not lose sight of the big picture. This agreement was voted in by over 72% of the workforce for the sake of the future of the whole company...
"Make no mistake about it - we have got an agreement that is needed to secure the long term future of the company. That democratic decision will be honored."
The "big picture" ignores the affect on workers’ lives of longer hours, and unsociable shifts. The same goes for the whole of Rover: the workers at Cowley will soon be on a 41 hour working week, but only paid for 37. There is to be no wage rise in Rover over the next two years.
If the workers did not know what they were voting for when they were blackmailed into the deal, then they have a right to resist and look to resist the issue of banking hours.
Instead of being played off against each other by management, Rover and BMW workers should be brought together in order to plan a joint fightback against the company’s "productivity" offensive.