Читать книгу From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War - Geoffrey Owen - Страница 32

The Thatcher government, elected in May 1979, believed that loss-making state-owned enterprises were a burden on the economy which should be removed as soon as possible. In the case of British Shipbuilders privatisation was not feasible until the profitability of the company had improved, and there were no immediate steps to withdraw financial support. The corporate plan which had been prepared before the election was approved, and the government agreed to establish an intervention fund of £120m to cover the next two years. The management of British Shipbuilders was strengthened by the appointment as chairman of Robert Atkinson, an experienced businessman who had considerable knowledge of the engineering and shipbuilding industries. One of his first moves was to tighten financial control at the centre while putting stronger pressure on yard managers to increase productivity; he also brought a tougher line to the conduct of industrial relations. By the end of 1980 the order book was looking healthier, and the losses were reduced. Atkinson believed that break-even would be possible by 1983/4.

Employment continued to fall rapidly. The willingness of shipyard workers to accept voluntary redundancy angered some union leaders, but the combination of generous severance payments and the bleak outlook for the industry made it difficult to mobilise resistance. By the start of 1983 some 26,000 jobs had been lost since nationalisation, and in April of that year Atkinson announced plans for a further 9,000 redundancies. This prompted a strong reaction from union leaders, who threatened a campaign of yard occupations along the lines of the UCS sit-in. Implementation of the redundancy plan was deferred until after the election of June 1983, but the convincing Tory victory made it clear that there would be no softening in Mrs Thatcher’s hard line. Unlike the miners, who began their ill-fated battle with Mrs Thatcher in 1984, few shipyard workers relished the prospect of an all-out fight with the government.³⁸

Relations between Atkinson and the government were uneasy, mainly because of disagreements over the privatisation of the warship yards. Atkinson believed that the politicians were determined to get British Shipbuilders off their hands as quickly as possible, even at the cost of decimating an industry which, in his view, was capable of being rehabilitated, albeit on a smaller scale. Atkinson was succeeded after the 1983 election by Graham Day, the government’s original choice to head British Shipbuilders, and privatisation was set in train. By the middle of 1986 Vickers in Barrow, Yarrow on the Clyde and Vosper Thornycroft in Southampton had been sold. Swan Hunter, which since the early 1980s had concentrated mainly on naval vessels, was sold in a management buy-out. National union leaders opposed these sales, but they had little support at the local level. Most workers in the warship yards felt that nationalisation had been a disadvantage for them, since it held wages in the industry below what the naval yards on their own could have justified.

The future of the merchant yards depended on reducing costs and improving productivity. As Day put it, ‘The craft basis on which British Shipbuilders has operated – rigid demarcation lines, fierce protection of skills and the like – has to be altered. We’ve got to get from a craft to a system basis’.³⁹ With the unions weakened by rising unemployment and a general sense that the continued decline of the industry was inevitable, managerial control over the pace and allocation of work was tightened. At the end of 1983 the Confederation signed an agreement which showed how far the principle of craft control had been eroded. The terms of the agreement provided that ‘all employees must be prepared to acquire new skills and to remove customary practices where they are no longer appropriate’, and that ‘all levels of staff will be interchangeable as required according to their individual skills and experience’.

The reaction of most union members to these changes was resigned acceptance. They recognised that their job security now depended not on their union, but on the commercial viability of the yard where they worked. The two features of the labour relations system that had persisted since the nineteenth century – sectionalism and craft control – were finally crumbling. But the reforms could do little to protect the industry in a market dominated by huge excess capacity. In 1986, when world merchant shipbuilding capacity was estimated at 18m tons, new orders totalled only 9m tons, of which the British share was 2 per cent. There was no prospect of improvement until 1990 at the earliest.

For the Thatcher government, these figures underlined the pointlessness of ploughing money into an industry which seemed likely to make heavy losses for the indefinite future. The remaining merchant yards, the government decided, had to be sold or closed. The Govan yard was bought by the Norwegian Kvaerner group, and Harland & Wolff was sold in a management buy-out, with financial support from Fred Olsen, a leading Norwegian shipowner. No buyer could be found for North East Shipbuilders (including Austin & Pickersgill), which was closed at the end of 1988.

Subsequent events at Govan provided an interesting commentary both on the industry’s earlier history and on the state of the world shipbuilding market in the 1990s. The Norwegian owners brought two things which had been lacking in the yard, and in much of the rest of the industry, throughout the post-war period: a clear product and marketing strategy, and a rigorous approach to the management of labour. The owners were prepared to cooperate with the unions and shop stewards, but only as long as ‘the accountability of the unions and their representatives was properly defined by procedures acceptable to management’.⁴⁰ The shop stewards had to recognise that they were ‘first and foremost shipyard workers who were under the direct control of supervisors, and, in such a role, they had no authority to control the workforce’. Govan had survived as a loss-making yard for the preceding twenty years, thanks to government support, and it took some time for competitive realities to sink in. In 1991 a strike over three-shift working, called against the advice of the shop stewards, was seen as a last-ditch effort to turn the clock back. The collapse of the strike was a watershed for Kvaerner’s labour relations strategy. Meanwhile orders had been secured for four gas carriers. The first of these ships took 2.3m man-hours to build; the fourth took 1m hours, roughly in line with comparable yards overseas.

Yet despite these improvements Govan was competing in an over-supplied market in which fierce competition between Korean and Japanese yards was constantly tending to drive prices down. In 1999 Kvaerner, which had over-extended itself through an ambitious programme of acquisitions in engineering, construction and other industries, decided to put all its European shipyards, including Govan, up for sale. While the withdrawal from shipbuilding was largely due to the internal problems of the Kvaerner group, it was also an indication of the extreme difficulty faced by all the remaining European shipbuilders in building merchant ships at a profit. It is conceivable that if the changes in working practices instituted at Govan in the 1990s had occurred twenty years earlier the yard would have had better prospects of survival, but, as experience in Sweden and other European countries showed, harmonious labour relations were no guarantee of commercial success.