This is what Chrysler UK (who lost £22 million last year) are offering their 27,000 employees • -if the 4,000 men at the company's key Stoke, Coventry, engine plant call off their strike action in pursuit of a 'substantial pay offer. Faced with crumbling car markets-foreign cars took a record 38 per cent of the home car market in Aprilthe car bosses have become suddenly concerned about involving their workers in the industry's problems.
The idea is simple. If workers help take decisions, it is hoped they will feel responsible for the effects of the capitalist crisis on their firm and accept short-time, sackings and speed-up, and wage increases which don't keep pace with inflation. What the bosses can't do themselves, they want worker participation' to do for them.
RYDER REPORT
The Chrysler decision comes hot on the heels of the Ryder Report on British Leyland. The Ryder Report bases Leyland's future on a 50 per cent increase in sales by 1982. But the most optimistic analysis of the world car market in this period shows an increase of only 25 per cent. So with firms savagely competing for shares of the market, Ryder projects British Leyland increasing its share of the European market 20 times to 30 per cent.
In order to get these results, Leyland needs a level of labour productivity at least equivalent to other plants. The proposed injection of £2.8 billion has to be combined with a doubling or trebling of the present productivity level, even on the basis of a 50 per cent increase in sales. And 25 per cent of the workforce, not including those affected in subsidiary industries, would have to goat least 40,000 jobs.
No wonder Ryder said that the "most crucial factor' in increasing productivity at BL was significant progress towards industrial democracy and a new spirit of reasonable cooperation from the trade unions.
THE ALTERNATIVE Behind the bluff of worker participation lies this savage reality. But instead of unifying and generalising around common demands the struggles that are continually breaking out over speed-up, union officials and leading stewards have accepted shorttime and voluntary redundancies as an alternative to sackings.
In fact this merely paves the way for mass sackings later on, when the of car workers. Meanwhile the unions leave the workers to get on with their struggles in isolation, meaning that tens of thousands of car workers are laid off without really knowing why. This can only lead to divisions and de moralisation among the workforce.
It is only fear of a wave of factory occupations that prevents the car bosses from carrying out mass sackings and plant closures now. The task facing militants in the motor industry Q. A. How can you tell when a firm's going bankrupt?
Government involvement.
VIIICU AINGUUNLIL WORKER AT