FRANKS

Fairfields shipyard in I965 came as a golden opportunity to set up an experiment involving all the latest developments in the intensification of labour.

In many ways, the situation at Fairfields was ideal for the purpose. On the one hand the yard had closed down with £32 million worth of orders on the books and in the middle of a £5 million modernization scheme.

It was, therefore, not the most antiquated of yards.

On the other hand, the threat of complete closure put the workers in the yard 'over a barrel' and the new management meant to keep them that way.

That this basis of using Fairfields as the provingground for work-study techniques was the key to the plan to save Fairfields comes over clearly as a fundamental theme of this book.

For public speeches from ministers, commentators and union leaders, it was all a question of saving the jobs of the Clyde workers.

Wasn't this the reason why the unions chipped in with €180,000 ?

In fact, this contribution was to act as an essential part of the proof that the scheme was union-backed and supported.

The money could have been raised elsewhere without too much trouble.

GOVERNMENT

STOP-GAP The government unhesitatingly paid £l million as a stop-gap to stave off immediate closure (Wilson promised this after a brief discussion when he heard what it was for).

The book traces in detail the behind-the-scenes link-up to raise the cash for the second million pounds required to run the experiment.

The key man in the scheme to run Fairfields, who had seen the opportunity to try out the new measures, was Sir lain Stewart, chairman of a nearby firm, Hall-Thermotank, and a member of the boards of Babcock & Wilcox, The Dorchester Hotel Ltd., the Thomson Organization, Eagle Star Insurance, the National Commercial Bank of Scotland and Scottish Television.

While the government agreed to raise half of the second million pounds, millionaires Thomson (newspapers) and Wolfson (Great Universal Stores) invested large sums on the understanding that this was to go to an experiment into new forms of labour relations in British industry.

At the same time it was considered essential not to taint the enterprise with any suggestion of nationalization.

LEADING

ADVOCATE The government was not to exceed its 50 per cent stake.

The leading advocate of the scheme was George Brown, who fought to get it accepted in government circles. Stewart himself convinoed the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Callaghan, of the :

•.. opportunity to expose the problems of the industry and grasp the nettle of overmanning, demarcation and management problems.' The final monetary line-up was: the unions £130,000, the tycoons, including Wolfson and Thomson, £400,000 and the Board of Trade £530,000, a total of £1,060,000.

The Electrical Trades Union also lent £50,000.

Once the money was raised, the next step was to scour industry and the universities for the best possible workstudy experts.

First on the list was Oliver Blandford. He was to head the new productivity department.

Until then he had been general manager of Stephen's Engineering Works where he had been introducing workstudy, Measured-Day Work and a number of other advanced management techniques.

Blandford, in turn, took on Jim Houston, director of engineering at Singers (Clydebank), 'a fearless convert to Over the following months, Houston developed a department of over 130 work-study personnel, to examine the work of the 3,000 workers involved.

'Literally, scores of men were seen issuing from Houston's department armed with stopwatches, tape-measures and notebooks. Safety helmets were issued, colour-coded to indicate the nature of a person's employment. exclaimed, a bunch or bloods • "God" chocolate smarties"!

Work-study men began by attempting to develop some sort of rational system out of methods of working that had been built up on a 100 years of trial and error.

And their method of this ?

'Trial and error' WIDEST PUBLICITY If this experiment was to act as an incentive to the rest of industry, it was essential to develop the widest possible publicity.

Sean Connery of James Bond fame, who had held eight different union cards in his early days as a milkman, labourer and factory worker, visited the yard and gave up six weeks of his time to make a television film about what was going on.

The role of the üniversities in the experiment is also informative.

On the Fairfields Board was K. Alexander, professor of economics at Strathclyde University.

However, it was not his knowledge of economics that was required. He had promised lain Stewart that he would raise finance from the univerGeorge Brown who was the man to push the Fairfields idea in government circles.

sity towards research into the effects of the new techniques on the shipyard labour.

Alexander was the link between the shipyard and the academic world. It was felt that also on the Board:

'Someone was required to represent the interests of Lord Thomson and Sir Isaac Wolfson, who between them had put up a quarter of a million pounds. The man who joined the board on their behalf was 'to spread to other industries throughout the country accurate reports of what was being achieved at Fairfields.' The work-study department set to work; every job in the yard had to be timed.

TECHNIQUES

INTRODUCED 'Oliver Blandford and Jim Houston had to introduce techniques of work-measurement, quality-control, valueengineering, operational - research, network-analysis, budgetary-control, job-evaluation, investment - appraisal, management-accounting and organizational methods.' But where was the incentive for the acceptance of all these new measures?

'One of the main stanchions in this new edifice was discipline. "The men were over a barrel," Stewart is not afraid to confess, "and I intend to keep them there until they understand our new techniques and trusted them, and until the yard was running as l wanted it to run"!

The authors explain that Stewart had no marketing or sales organization in the whole company.

'He expressly made no attempt to obtain orders until the yard had been totally and tightly re-organized, for he wanted to use the precipice of unemployment to keep the men on the narrow path he needed them to follow.

At the same time, for the new owners, the results had begun to arrive.

'Systematically, the labour force was cut down in the first six months by about 750 men.' Also essential to the scheme was 'good communications' The yard set up its own newspaper, 'The Fairfields News' edited by Bill Hawkins, a man co-opted from Thomson newspapers and one of the coauthors of this book.

CLOSE

Its aim was to foster close management-worker relations. Special efforts were being made to avoid any semblance of the paper being a management propaganda sheet.

A charge of 3d. a copy was made and :

"To underline the principle of free and unprejudiced communication, the second issue of "Fairfields News" in March 1966 carried statements specially contributed by local parliamentary candidates from Govan and Craigton giving their views on the Fairfield proving ground. There were two Conservative candidates, two Labour, one Communist and one Scottish Nationalist.' Another key operation was the recruiting of workers to hold the stopwatches. It was found:

"The almost automatic resistance to outsiders carrying stopwatches which causes so much labour trouble in many industries was avoided because many men carrying stopwatches at Fairfields were men who themselves, two or three Gower Press 35s.

cented hu their matec in tha LICH yard and they themselves were endowed with a conscientiousness th t only a new chance in life can inspire.' A section on how these men were trained is also particularly instructive:

'Plane-loads of Fairfields men were flown down to London Airport, driven into the Surrey countryside and, in the setting of one of Britain's most stately homes, Esher Place, they studied new productivity techniques at residential courses.

'Esher Place is the ETU Training College run by Jock Haston, the union's education officer. He was asked if he would allow Fairfields to use the magnificent facilities there Author tries to tie Indian workers to capitalist class IT WOULD be difficult to suggest that one can learn much from this book other than the complete bankruptcy of the author's liberalism and of its Stalinist apologists.

The book outlines the author's views on how the immigrant working class can be reconciled to the rule of the British capitalist class.

DeWitt sees no relationship between capitalism and racialism.

For him the whole problem is that there is a white community (of workers solidarizing with employers) and an Indian one and the two do not quite mix because of ignorance on both sides.

Not only is there no discussion on the origins of racialism, but there is also no discussion on the problems facing immigrant workers.

Only a passing mention is made of the role of British employers in recruiting abroad for cheap labour.

TOUTING

The dependence of immigrants on those who can speak English and 'deal' with foremen, government officials etc., is mentioned, as is the rise of wide-scale bribery based on this dependence.

Touting for jobs, overtime etc., and the use of traditional Punjabi kinship and Village ties in weakening the immigrants before the employers are all mentioned.

But 'it should be clear that the black marketeers touts, or "businessmen", ans they prefer to be called-are not unsavoury characters who lurk on the fringes of immigrant society. Without their services, the immigrants would to train shop stewards and deputies, because Jim Houston wanted the men to feel they were still "on union territory" There was a danger that the stewards might resist "brainwashing by management" as some of the unions from other yards like to call the re-trainREPRESENTATIVES The courses were called work-study appreciation courses.

A system of 'workers' representatives' was also set up. Two men were nominated by the workers from each department. These were the people who were supposed to represent the workers in any dispute over work-study. The authors comment :

'Fairfields probably paid over £250,000 in wages alone in 12 months for the productivity staff.' While the new methods continued to be introduced, retraining into new trades, ending of demarcation, flexibility and interchangeability developed under the same rules of discipline.

• "Well" , relates Houston, "when this chap says to me 'I want to be a sheet-iron worker all my life' I said, "O.K. then, go and be an unemployed sheet-iron worker. "..

How did the new set-up contribute to the smooth running of the new yard?

'Four days after the "Magna Carta" at Fairfields the procedure agreement was signed, midst national praise, when strikes and stoppages, were banned for ever, the boilermakers' apprentices walked qut. They walked out and in again five times between June and November, chalking up 21,722 lost attendance hours.

The apprentices had been promised a pro rata payment based on the adult ratepromised, but not paid.

CRANE-MEN

STRIKE This dispute was finally settled, but next came the strike of the crane men over the flexibility proposals.

Altogether, in the first 1l ublished for the Institute of Race Relations by for the Institute of Race WOR ASSOCIA BIRMINGI - GREAT BRITAIN Association be lost in Britain.' (p. 114.)

So three cheers for the capitalist market, it assures to every man his right priceeven if bribery is involved.

Our liberal stands four square with the system.

LEADERSHIP Indian Workers' Associations have sprung up wherever there are large concentrations of Indian-mainly PunjabiRepresenting two big business Fairfields board was none other then president of the engineers' months there were 24,746 working hours lost in strikes. Certainly less than the 96,837 hours lost in 1965, but hardly good publicity for the new methods, and the main scheme was still yet come.

It took from January 1966 to June 1967 to prepare the way for the introduction of the Measured-Day Work scheme.

This scheme set down standards per hour of every job.

Men were paid a basic rate for reaching a percentage of maximum efficiency.

Following close on this development came the proposed introduction of double dayshift working, but this was October 1967, more than 18 months after the publishing of the Geddes Report with its recommendation for mergers between yards.

Sean Connery, of Bond fame, made promotion Fairfields.

capi WORKERS' ASSOCIATIONS BRITAIN' OUP. 1969. Price 25s. Reviewed by G. Myers DeWitt is not concerned about the conditions and problems faced by its members, but only deals with the goings-on in the leadership.

Leadership, in fact, has fallen either to the Communist Party or to those traditionally influential in Indian village politics, 1.e. the heads of the larger landowning families, even if these are not particularly wealthy in Britain.

In fact, the only cause with which DeWitt seems to interests on the than Carron, the union.

The Fairfields experiment came to a sudden halt with its formation together with four other yards into Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Ltd. (UCS) and the new board of directors was dominated by the 'old gang' of shipyard owners who were not favourable to new methods.

THE SCENES This book, written by two industrial journalists, is useful for its descriptions of the behind - the - scenes developments-the meetings on aero planes, at golf clubs and cocktail parties between businessmen and members of the government which led to the setting up of the Fairfields experiment.

This is backed by a cynical frankness about the use of the 'precipice of unemployment' (The point is made again near the end of the book that: "Throughout all the preliminaries of the Fairfields experiment Stewart had avoided filling the order-books too full so that the threat of unemployment loomed during the "educational" period as a possibility'.)

Are we to understand that what was done by apparently good labour relations and communications' was really carried through with blackmail and intimidation?

The authors of the book regret the ending of the experiment and represent its termination as being due to a series of unfortunate circumstances — new unsympathetic directors, loss of interest by the government, and the implementation of Geddes.

However, it is more likely that the Fairfields scheme was quite deliberately and quite consciously brought to an end. solidarize in this book is the protest of the educated Indians who come to Britain expecting a decent status in British society only to find themselves forced to work in factories.

He even argues that discrimination is not a problem for the poorest immigrant workers but only for those who 'by rights' ought to be able to move up in society (into good jobs, buying decent houses etc.) but find the way blocked!

The cynical use of the traditional kinship and village loyalties of the Indian immigrants by the IWA leaders in their bid for positions is outlined in some detail.

DeWitt finds it rather unfortunate because the traditional feuds tend to upset relations with British liberals, but otherwise the practice is acceptable.

ADVANCE

In fact position-seeking will have to be legitimized by the liberals if they are to overcome this problem: the leaders must be made able to 'commit themselves to working with British and inter-racial organizations with some hope of personal advancement and without losing all of their prestige within the Punjabi community. (p. 176.)

The Communist Party gives much the same leadership in the IWAs.

'The Communists generally co-operated with non-Communist leaders and even with "reactionaries", as long as a few Party members were named to prestigious posts in the Executive Committee' (of the IWA). (p. 67.) ... 'the programme which the Communists advanced for the IWAs included little to which non - Communist could object.' making of profit by the winning of orders, then the workers would have ceased to be 'over a barrel'.

They would have regained the Clyde man's traditional fighting capabilities. Faced with with this possibility, it was better for the employers, etc. to 'call it a day', at least as far as the publicity stunt side of it was concerned.

Fairfields may be regarded as the second productivity deal 'set piece' — Fawley was the first-the third appears to be a certain Alcan Works, Which 1s currently teatured in the television series 'Representing the Union' on BBC-1.

THEY WENT Finally, it is interesting to note what has become of some of the characters in the book.

lain Stewart got a knighthood from the Labour government as 'ex-chairman of Fairfields (Glasgow) Ltd.'.

Jim Houston ' •.. left UCS and set up his own Consultancy, Higher Productivity (Organization and Bargaining) Ltd. in partnership with four of the productivity managers from his Fairfields team.

"They invited lain Stewart to be chairman, he accepted and invested money in it personally.^ Houston, for his work at Fairfields, received the Gilbreth medal 'for outstanding services to productivity and work-study'-the highest accolade of the Institute of WorkStudy Practicitioners.

At present, he is the chairman of the Joint Industries Board of the Electrical Contracting Industry.

As for the first full-time convenor of shop stewards at Fairfields (Glasgow) Ltd., he is now 'transfers manager Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Ltd.' As the real aims of productivity deals — speed-up, sackings and closures-come more into play, there can be little hope left for the government to convince workers of the 'advantages' they are offering by national showpiece experiments of the Fairfields type.

Similarly, for the union leaders who have played a major role in the introduction of the employers' most vicious methods of exploitation, many chickens are rapidly coming home to roost as shown in recent actions by miners and car workers against union In fact it seems that the Indian branches of the Communist Party • were open to all who wished to seek positions in the IWA.

Many members who previously held membership in the Communist Party of India were disgusted.

The Indian branches led an existence in almost total isolation from the rest of the CPGB-that is until the Sino-Soviet dispute broke out and left-wing critics of the leadership raised their voices!

EXPULSIONS

Then separate Indian branches were abolished and explusions were numerous.

Over one half of the Indian membership of the CPGB resigned and since then the IWAs have never been the same.

No longer can the rank and file be so cynically manipulated.

Indian workers are refusing to co-operate with the 'integration' committees set up by the Labour government on which SO many Indian 'leaders' are pleased • to serve.

Immigrant as well as white workers, in fighting back against the employers, are breaking from bureaucracy.

DeWitt hopes that the new militancy will be restricted to simply fighting cases of racial discrimination.

Some hope!

Workers coming into struggle today will soon learn the class role of racialism.

Around the Workers Press and the Socialist Labour League the serious question of alternative leadership facing workers of all races will be thrashed out and answered whilst the DeWitts will be consigned to the dustbin of history reserved for those who attempt to stand in the middle of the class struggle.

Modern Reader Paperback, 308 pages. October 31, 1969 WORKERS' PRESS PAGE THREE