I suppose that Schools Section is written by comrades suffering in schools. Could I come in from the outside to discuss the situation in Turner's School, at Redcar? I'm a psychologist working in the Education Service and therefore have some contact with both sides. The most obvious difficulty is that students don't have any part in the production process and there.
fore cannot withdraw their labour power; and unless parents are behind you on particular issues, you're bound to lose out in an open conflict. The movement has enough martyrs already Really it depends on what comrades at the school really want to do. If a "confrontion" is required (presumably excluding Ster ling guns!) it will end in the yellow press and a few "ringleaders" will get well and truly clobbered pour encourager les autres. If you want to pick your own ground and fight-on a few issues where there is a prospect of success you probably have a pretty good chance. No headpaster likes having a blazing-row going on inside his school as it means his name will get into the papers: at the same time he wants to "keep otherwise the Governors will want his lead on a plate. So most heads will want some orm of compromise; and this entails picking sues carefully and not forcing him into a corer. The master mentioned by name is a fair - Physical assault on pupils? He could lose his job for this. Don't you know the regulations governung corporal punishment in schools? Why not find out about them and quietly mention them to the gentleman concerned the next time that he raises his finger towards someone? A whisper of a formal complaint to the Chief Education Officer would have this teacher by the short hairs in the Head's office quite Pect Tr The same goes here-and parental sup- "Mocked openly for any physical deport for a quiet and polite letter of complaint o the Head would be very uncomfortable for cher probably has his difficulties: a whacking Mortgage, HP on the Ford, an overdraft, a (probably) mediocre degree N years ago-and Be of insecurity arising from that urs is a selective school, a as to teach modern European history. How much do you think he actually knows about it? Why not make yourself be better equipped in revol utionary history than he appears to be? This means work but it also am that you'll become all the more effective socialist agitators if it can be seen that you my can detend your version of what hap od in history. John Cornford's dictum from e "30s-"the best Communists are the best udents" - is worth remembering; an academically superior group of 6th form Marxists vould shake the roots of your establishment much more than any amount of agitation by peopie who can be stigmatised as "left-wing drop-outs". If you must go on using language as cliche-ridden as your quotes, by the way, virtually any head with an ear for language is going to writhe-Orwell has some useful remarks on the subject. Finally, your "silent demonstration" at speech day seems altogether admirable and the most embarrassing technique for admin. and spectators that can be imagined-and yet it cannot possibly be termed as a "riot".
Fohn Comley EDITOR Tariq Ali EDITORIAL BOARD Anthony Barnett, Vinay Chand, Clive Goodwin, John Hoyland, Sheila Rowbotham, Bob Rowthorne, John Weal.
DESIGNER Mike Newton CIRCULATION & ADVERTISING Dave Kendall DISTRIBUTION Peter Gowan SECRETARY Marie-Therese Ligougne Published by THE BLACK DWARF, 7 CAR.
LISLE STREET LONDON WIA 4PZ Distributed by Moore-Harness Ltd., 11 Lever Street, ECI Printed by Prinkipo Press, 182 Pentonville Road, London NI Dear Sir, Saturday 22 November, during the Springboks v. London Counties match. The alleged incident took place in a room at the ground which was used by the police to take the names and addresses of demonstrators. I would like to use your columns to appeal to anyone who was in the room during the match to contact me at the address below or at REGENT 9251 during the day.
The effect of the motor car is so obvious that we tend to miss its significance. The carrier of twentieth-century capitalism, it has changed our shopping, our holidays, our towns and subous related industries, many of which are important in their own right. The last twenty years have been the period of most conspicuous growth. The industry has become also in this time one of the main centres of conflict and the car-worker one of the favourite bogies of the capitalist press. Recently too these conflicts have been particularly crucial in effect-the sewing machinists, the dispute over penal clau ses at Fords, disputes at British Leylands, Vauxhalls and Rootes, Ryton, all these have had implications and consequences which are much broader than the actual plants concerned. This is no coincidence. Although profits have kept up to a high level, employers are uncomfortably aware that Britain's share of total car and commercial vehicles exports is falling. With the possibility of the Common Market threatening shares in the home market-the heat is on. The attempt to introduce Measured Day Work in varying forms is being tried as part of a co-ordinated effort to assert management controls over labour costs, because this can be effected actually within the plants. It is much more difficult to organise the supply of components in relation to the assembly of vehicles. Consequently they are trying to cut labour costs at the same time as getting long run predictability by introducing American-style long-term contracts based on established work content for set periods.
In order to get the present situation in perspective it is necessary to look at the background trend in the industry, examine current developments, including the kind of tactics workers are adopting to deal with the intensification of the pace of exploitation.
GROWTH From being a luxurious fad the motor car industry grew considerably after 1918 behind protective tariffs. By 1921 Austin had started producing the first model for ma ass consumpon-the Austin 7. By the mid twenties Motris Ont varied. cam, was but as a planned prouction unit but Morris of Cowley evolved simPly by buying up innumerable specialist firms supplies and rivals.
British output rose to 180,000 cars before the Great Slump and more than doubled in the 1930s. The car industry suffered relatively little from the depression because the export trade accounted for a fairly small proportion of total trade.
The number of car manufacturers gradually contracted from the twenties until by 1939 the Big Six dominated. Production was geographically concentrated around Birmingham, Coventry and London.
Reconversion after the war was relatively easy. With American exports down and Europe out of action, British car exports boomed. But since the mid fifties they have been steadily pushed out of the foreign market. Growth has been at home. The ending of the post-war Labour Government's policy of domestic austerity meant increasingly cars were bought at home. British makers also made too many different models which were adapted to home needs and neglected vital aspects of service and spare parts for the overseas market. These contributed to British cars proving non-competitive abroad. AMALGAMATION The tendency for combination has continued. After a f450 million merger recently, the large producers are British Leyland, Rootes, Vauxhalls and Fords. Three of these are owned by American companies. With increasing state intervention in industry, the determination of these big motor companies to try and exert a direct influence on policy-making is most noticeable. At the same time international investment has created a vast world-wide complex of plants -Fords have reached South Korea. Rootes have a plant in Iran.
ORGANISATION Most important is the internal organisation of the industry. Automation has accounted for most of the rise in output. Between 1948 and 1959 output of motor vehicles went up by 180%; employment in the industry only rose by 18%. Not only have wage rates not retlected this increase of productivity, but management have been able to use the introduction of automated machines to gain more control over the work cycle time. Even when the somewhat faster rate of depreciation and higher maintenance costs are taken into consideration, overhead and running costs per unit produced usually fall and management can achieve the introduction of a heavier work load, along with intensificaton of speed and greater continuity of the work process throughout the day. The struggle over the control of work time and the relationship of output to wages is an old one. Piecework means that wages depend greatly on the negotiating strength of the shop steward and the level of trade union organisation on the shop floor. In some cases workers lose out. But the structures and procedures which arise in this ad hoc fashion can be picked up, passed on and communicated. Measured Day Work is presented by management as a logical extension and rationalisation of this. It's rationalised all right, but on their terms. They do the measuring.
ALIENATION These developments have created an experience of modern capitalism in a particularly intense and bitter form. The intensity and bitterness affects both sides. The death rate amongst supervisory staff in the car industry is early.
They suffer invariably from different forms of nervous disorder. They die of ulcers and heart failure. Now the young ones are becoming more polite. They deal with the shop steward in the office. In the old days it was behind a machine.
But they deal still as category to category. They are under pressure all the time from higher up;
often they have to stay behind to be instructed in ways to extract more from the men on the shop floor. The workers have evolved their own forms of resistance to this pressure. They have made psychological and organisational defences.
But even so most car workers are relatively young. They get out early. They have to. They are being forced to live at the pace of someone who takes amphetamines regularly. Such a pace is only for the young. In the press shop at Fords, for instance, the operators on flex rolls are working with speeds in the region of 1,000 or more per hour. They have to be attuned to the hum of the machine and constantly alert in the feeding in operation to make sure the sheets are put in correctly. The effect of transfer automation on working conditions is not just a simple matter of replacement. In the press shop again at Dagenham, for example, it means that whereas before two men picked up the panel and put it into the press and two men took it out, now it comes up on the conveyor belt, one man puts it in and a mechanical hand takes it away. Three men aren't there, they're doing something else. Firms which introduce these machines are invariably expanding, and they are introduced gradually; cuts are made by not replacing men who leave. Stewards can become involved in struggles to increase the labour force to ease the work load which is often adamantly resisted by management. The one man who remains is doing the same job as before. But he's on his own, isolated; before he worked as part of a group. The monotony is broken only by the strain and irritation of the machines going wrong. The more complex the machine the more likely this is to happen.
RESPONSE One response is to dream, the switehed-off dream of unrealisable possibility. The other response is to act. Car workers are reacting consciously to changes and attempting to turn them to their own advantage. Concentration and international capital investment has produced an awareness of the importance of rank and file combine communication. Regular contacts are established between shop stewards groups in the major car firms so information can be circulated about conditions, rates, etc., and solidarity action extended. This makes trade union organisation a real, rather than a theoretical, force. It means too that shop stewards do not fight in the dark. The image created of them by the capitalist press-as all-powerful manipulators-is far from the truth. In fact, on meagre resources of time and money they carry on a herculean struggle. Quite regardless of the individual consciousness of the steward, he is very closely und by the perspective of the people he repi sents. Except for a few militant centres, people s ideas of action in the industry are still predominantly localised. Improved communications means important inter-union contact from the bottom as well as the top. The realisation is growing that these links must become international. Assembly operations could be and have been transferred to Fords works in other countries. Within plants too there is a tento a19dmom &A abel wontos oriw art not willid o1 bejosipa dency towards union amalgamation. This is a sticky problem. Everyone's for unity but everyone has their own terms. Unions change toothe AEF for instance. The reaction to technological innovations and alteration of the way work is organised is less clear. Workers have tried to insist that automation must be related to wage increases. This would be relatively easy if a plant was automated rapidly. But as the process is usually gradual, it is difficult to put this into effect. On the question of Measured Day Work there is division. Nobody likes it.
Some are determined to resist it. But other cal workers feel it is impossible to avoid the changeover to day work, and that it's vital to try to establish new forms of control from the shop floor over the new system. Rootes have signed an agreement which exchanges the loss of piecework for more cash.
In terms of demands, car workers are devel oping two main lines of argument. They are insisting on the principle of wage comparability Because of the way the industry has developed, both conditions and wages vary throughout the country. Car workers are consequently doing a bit of their own measuring and their own kind of rationalisation. They are looking at wage rates in different areas and saying "If that lot are getting that much, why can't we?" This is the significance of the developing campaign at Fords for parity of wages. At the same time they are fighting a continual struggle over the definitions and delineations of control. This means constant pressure about innumerable minor and immediate issues. At Fords, endless wrangles over grading, speed-up, the machinery for dealing with grievances go on all the time The discontent which springs to the surface during a strike is only the tip of this underground war. Even then you have to read between the lines. For instance, behind the statement in the last agreement at Fords— "The system of merit payments is discontinued and is replaced by a service increment scale"-there is a long history of the merit payment going to the "cooperative" worker and a new and impor tant shift in control. The final and ultimate indignity is personal relief time. What kind of society can it be which asserts in the terms of employment the right of supervisors to decide for other men when they are tired or how long they should take to piss? If such thoughts come uncomfortably in the bog, Whitehall is forcing other connections upon trade unionists. As the Government intervenes increasingly in the interests of the employers (national interest), workers find themselves involved in questions with implications extending beyond the confines of a single industry. Such was the question of penal clauses. As the ownership network becomes international, workers start talking new languages and devising new ways of fighting. The constant hope of the bourgeois sociologist of the tamed and integrated worker proves illusory again. Instead of becoming apathetic consumer zombies, the new working class comes up with a knowing militancy and political confidence. You don't have to wear a cloth cap to see who pockets the cash. The very people who are subjected to the most extraordinarily sophisticated forms of psychological destruction as well as economic exploitation are creating organisational and intellectual weapons to match. The very people who know the dirty under-belly of the beast learn where to stab.
This doesn't mean that socialists can sit back and wait for the car workers to take on capitalism single-handed. But car workers, like the rest of us, are engaged in a particular struggle with wider political implications. They are, not surprisingly, often cynical about the innumerable outside groups who hand them the formula for success in conflicting shapes and varying types. They respect the fanatical devotion of the paper-sellers but are understandably suspicious of any outside group trying to use them, be cause they have seen the destructive effect of this in the past. But at the same time, socialists can be extremely useful in providing a communications network, and helping to relate the very different forms of isolated attack. This goes on all the time in the labour movement; industrial support for the tenants is the most recent example. But this is because the links have been made over a long time; people have grown to trust one another in the only way pos sible, by proving themselves trustworthy. There are no short cuts. The new revolutionaries have a lot of work to do'and a lot of things to learn. They also possess extremely valuable resources -time, energy, information, for a start-which militant trade unionists throughout industry could well do with. Sheila Rowbotham
3) Johannesburg Sunday Times of 28/8/1967:
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the gentleman concerned. "Hysterical anti- Communist diatribes"-fair enough. The tea-
I was arrested for alleged assault on a police, officer at Twickenham rugby football ground on
urbs; it has established the conveyor-belt fact- ory and resulted in the development of numer-