at the time that they would continue production which made it possible for Lucas to take over all brought their letters in to us; we'd prepared Introduction The headquarters of the Rotax Company at Willesden, which makes aircraft components and is a subsidiary of Joseph Lucas, is threatened with closure. The staff and workers there are united and determined to fight the closure.
We interviewed Jim Cooney (AEU), who is convenor at Rotax, Willesden, and also chairmar of the shop stewards Combine Committee which represents the 20,000 workers on the aircraft side of Joseph Lucas: and Ernie Scarbrow (DATA), who is on the DATA Office Committee (roughly equivalent to a shop stewards committee) and Secretary of the Combine Committee.
This is what they told us:
In the last few years, Joseph Lucas has been systematically taking over its competitors. The company claimed this was to "augment" its production. But actually the point of the take overs is to get rid of competition. They have made sure that whatever aircraft work is available, they will get, They were given a grant of E3 million by the Labour Government's industrial Reorganisation Corporation; Lucas stated in the present plants, although the IRC, and the Labour Government, did not ask for any guarantees that there would be no redundancies.
What happened was that Weinstock decided to sell off the aircraft accessory part of his bustness, which was in direct competition with Rotax: Rotax bought out AEl at Coventry:
English Electric Special Products at Luton, Bradford and Netherton; and they also bought Vatric and Hobsons of Wolverhampton. Within four months they had reduced the labour force at AEl's factories in Coventry from 2,500 to about 400, in other words they bought the factories to close them. They have announced that two of the EE Special Products factories at The company say there are 300 jobs at Here! Bradford will be closed, and their factory at Luton is threatened, They bought up Premier Precision Products, and said the reason for doing Chase Row. They want us to uproot our homes so was to take the overflow of their work; a month later they closed the factory. When they the company happens to want to do its work bought Hobsons, Hobsons had just bought up and closed down another factory: so it was a case of dog est dog. Now they are threatening to close us at Willesden. And they have recently They're not going to get this. We have said we announced that there is to be a 25% reduction of the labour force throughout the Combine; which means that 5,000 jobs are threatened.
"Lucas already hold a monopoly in the car industry•.. now they want a monopoly in the aircraft industry.
The point is that it's not as though the company similar type of plane themselves; they handed are hard up. They are not coming to us and saying we're sorry, we're hard up, and there's nothing we can do about it. They are getting bigger and bigger and more and more powerful. they are. But there is still an order for 100 In September last year, a month before they announced the closure at Willesden, they bought eight pages in the Financial Times in preparation for the Farnborough Air Show, telling everybody how profitable they were, and we got a "Queen's Award" for the gas turbine that they were the biggest manufacturers of aircraft outside the United States; and they bought 5,000 copies themselves to distribute at make the award and all, the Air Show. When they bought EE Special Products, this meant they also bought a 37%% have formed two other companies in Germany.
Joseph Lucas already hold a monopoly in the car industry for certain components; now they want a monopoly in the aircraft industry. Rotax were arranging coaches, and so; the coaches has three quarters of the market outside the United States.
We say that the plant at Willesden could be kept open. At a meeting last Monday, which Iscted for sir hours we told the comnanu that available, complete jobs, They were not interes ted, they made vague excuses that there was not enough aircraft work to go round the group: we argued that there was, and we gave the example of CAV Acton, which is part of the tried sending letters to all the workers indiviLucas combine, sending out big contracts to companies outside the group.
The sore point at Willesden is that they are the parent company, the average worker at Willesden has had 25 years with the companyThey are the people who made the money the other places. Vatric was bankrupt when they took it over, but they're keeping that factory open. Ever since the company went public after the war and its profits were pub lished, the profits of the two Rotax factories at Willesden arid Hemel Hempstead have never been less than E% million a year; EE Special Products, with five factories, made no more profit. So the people who built up the com pany are being chucked on the scrap-heap; that's how they reward long years of loyal service.
The Road to Hemal Hempstead Hempstead. There are 800 of us here, including 250 at another Rotax factory at and just go to Hamel Hempstead, Just because somewhere else. They want to transter the know-how on the Harrier VTOL aircraft gasturbine starter engine to Hemel Hempstead.
will oppose the transfer of know-how and machines, physically if necessary; and we are not allowing anything to be taken from the factory. Twelve planes with this engine have been sold to the United States for £50 million, although the United States had spent E500 million, unsuccessfully, on trying to develop a them the planes on a plate, and they're negotiating to sell the rights to produce the plane in the United States; which shows how patriotic Mark I1 Harriers which they have to produce the starters for here, and that's why they want 300 to move to Herel Hempstead. A month before they announced the closure at Willesden, starter on the Harrier; we had Sir Gerald Templer, Queen's Equerry or something, down to This is why they are so anxious to get us to agree to go. We have refused to go; the factary Interest in a French aircraft company: and they is completely united. The company said we had misled the men on the question of going to Hemel Hempstead, and they said they were offering good conditions for the transfer; they were to be in our own time, mind you, and they'd leave at 6 in the morning; it was as if the company was asking us to start work an hour earlier, with no extra pay. Anyway, the company them in the canteen one day, and then we tore the statement to pieces in front of all the workers. They rejected it unanimously: I have never seen the factory so united. Next they dually; they sent three sorts of letters, one saying that they offered a job in Hemel Hempstead, one saying they'd offer a job if so and so agreed to go, and one saying there'd be no job after such and such e date. They were trying to divide us. But it didn't work. All the men typewritten slips saying that we didn't want to negotiate individually with management, the men signed these, and we put them in the letters and returned the whole lot to the manage: face facts; on our own as a factory, we will not ment. They can't divide us between those who get offered jobs at Hemel Hempstead and those who don't; who wants to uproot himself and his family and go to Hemel Hempstead? The company at first said vaguely that housing and accommodation would be arranged at Hemel Hempstead; but we contacted the local housing development corporation ourselves, and they said no more houses were being built for rent; so the company offered £250 settling-in allowances to workers who sold their houses here and moved out. At our last meeting, the penny dropped, and they understood that people weren't going to rush onto those buses at 6 in the moring: so they offered another 41 jobs at the Chase Road factory; that was just a sprat to catch a mackerel; they need to get the tools and the know how transferred, and they hoped to split us. They can plan nothing until they know how many will go. In the long term, no matter what the battle is (and we're prepared to wreck the factoryl, there is a feeling that they have given their lives to the factory, and they are being thrown on the scrap heap.
Cartoons on the wall Inside the factory there are all sorts of cartoons on the walls; somebody produces one and we make 50 or 60 copies of it and they're stuck up all over the factory, on foremen's doors and everywhere. The foremen are all with us. Once the management summoned the supervisory staff to come up and talk to them; we told them not to go, and they didn't. But they come to our meetings. The management bought shredding machines to destroy confidential docu ments; but it's no use to them, because the secretaries are on our side. One day somebody took down the Queen's Award flag, which they a any decision would be official. put to fly over the factory; they've gone mad looking for it, but they've never found it. We took a photograph of two blokes holding it, wearing masks, and stuck it up all over the factory; they've been trying hard to recognise them, but without success.
I think we have this unity because the staff have seen, over the years, the benefits of being organised. Willesden has been one of the fore runners in organisation. We are responsible for setting up the Combine Committee, and we they have not nearly reached our level. The would get a £5 or E6 cut in wages; this is one of the reasons why they want to fight. Some of us get £30 a week with no overtime. In Willesden we've controlled overtime very strictly; all overtime work is negotiated through the stewards; we don't accept the 30 hours a month recog nised as a maximum by the unions, we say 10 hours should be the maximum. All our membership turn up to meetings; we hold two-hour lunch-time meetings. When we've won a dispute, we have the practice that everybody puts the first week's rise into union funds; last time every body did it, without our asking them to.
This is the real reason why they want to close us down. We've been a thom in their side. They've kept open Vatric, for example, which was bankrupt when took it over; it's not coincidental that there's no organisation there, It's also the reason why they're giving so much work to sub-contractors; they are unorganised, they have no "labour problems", and they work all night. Even within the Combine, there are some places where they do a lot of overtime, while they starve us out of work. But we are determined to oppose the shutdown, physically if necessary. The danger is that they will hive off anything that is not too difficult, starve us deliberately of products, so eventually we will have no work. This will be the dangerpoint; we must get things moving before then. We have to succeed. But we can succeed if we get enough pressure throughout the Combine, and this is what we are trying to achieve. We have a meeting of the Combine Committee in Sheffield on January 23rd, and we plan to go on from there. We already have a ban on overtime and sub-contract work which is being operated throughout the group, by workers in all the unions, including DATA, AEU, CAWU.
Official union backing For the moment we have official backing from the unions. DATA have supported us all along the line. We are fortunate that three members of the DATA Executive work in the Combine: Mike Cooley, who is Vice President, works at Willesden. DATA, the AEU and CAWU are supporting us officially now; there was a meeting in Birmingham on December 29th between management and the unions, with members of the AEU and CAWU Executives and George Doughty, the President of DATA; they stated to Nichol, General Manager of Lucas, that they, including the AEU, officially opposed the closure of Willesden. But we'll have to see what they do; there's many a slip between cup and lip. When the closure was announced, DATA wrote immediately to the AEU; but they took six weeks to answer, and then only because we sent them a telegram asking what they were doing when we had a one-day strike. The crucial point is whether the AEU will call a delegate conference of Convenors in the group, as we have asked them to; DATA have already done this, and Doughty and the Executive sanctioned it, so that anything we decided would be official If the AEU call a delegate conference, this will mean that the rank-and-file would attend, and We don't know whether the unions will support us officially in the long term, and we are running our own campaign. We have been in touch with M.P.s, not that we put much faith in them; Pavitt has raised some questions in the House of Commons. We have nur own plans in mind as to how the campaign will be conducted: you should expect to see some things happening. We came out on December Bth, in spite of all the other things on our mind. Partly as a protest against the management, and partly have helped workers in other factories. Even so, because we realised that if the Bill went through we wouldn't be able to do what we are doing
Ernest M