Word: dagenham
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...motorist in Surrey claimed that Roberts held him up and stole his sandwiches. Fifty armed bobbies combed through Dagenham when a bus conductress reported that a passenger had dropped a pistol (which turned out to be a toy). Singer Alfred Hancock, 46, was arrested five times in one day because of his vague resemblance to Roberts. "Why do I have to look like him?" complained Hancock. "Why can't I look like Mario Lanza?" At Sadler's Wells Theater, Tenor Emile Belcourt was singing the title role of Offenbach's Bluebeard when police broke in with growling...
...competitive unions stopped work over everything from wages to tea breaks, averaged a strike a week and lost up to 1.5 million man-hours a year. Last week, after a period of improvement over the last two years, the wildcatting started up again. Two thousand men at Dagenham, the biggest of Ford's eight British plants, threatened not to work any more overtime because Ford, while granting an extra day's annual vacation, wanted to switch their holidays from July to August. The complaint seemed so paltry, especially in view of two recent wage increases, that labor experts...
After longtime partial ownership of its largest overseas plant, U.S. Ford assumed complete control of Dagenham in 1960, promised the government that Britons would continue to hold most of the jobs. They do, but no longer the key ones. Even at middle management levels, Americans are now responsible for engineering, styling, production, operating budgets and capital spending. Ford's board remains narrowly British by 7-6, but Stanley J. Gillen, an American, succeeded a Briton as managing director in July. In the past year, three directors and a dozen other British executives, all under 50, have quit Ford because...
...hindsight, some British executives of Ford also blame themselves for the situation. In 15 years Dagenham grew twelve times larger than its prewar size, but British management failed to keep up. When Ford of Detroit took control, it was faced with falling profits, a hopelessly hidebound pyramidal management and an inadequate pool of promising young British executives. To correct the situation, Ford rushed over some of its own bright young men, just as it had done without difficulty at the German Ford plant in Cologne. Some of the Americans are at Dagenham temporarily, will be sent on to other countries...
Britain's organized labor has its own set of cobwebs. The archaic trade-union structure, a bewildering complex of 623 unions, is involved in continual controversy over jurisdiction. One firm may have to deal-as does Ford of Dagenham-with as many as 21 different unions within one plant. Still, the lack of notice, severance pay and worker retraining has made British labor among the least protected in all Western countries and often moved workers to resist whatever changes are attempted. This situation encourages overemployment -one of Britain's main labor problems -makes it more difficult and expensive...