Word: darlaston
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...John Owen and his brother David, 38, who directs all the Rubery Owen operations outside of Darlaston, took control of the company. Shortly after that, "Mr. John and Mr. David," as Doug Peach refers to them, commissioned a behavioral study from an industrial-consulting firm. The consultants concluded that the company seemed more involved in labor relations than in producing
Whether the image of managerial shock troops was fantasy or not, it provoked a strike that cost the company almost $1.5 million. The piecework reform was dropped. Straw was transferred from Darlaston. The effort to centralize management control was abandoned for the more peaceful if ultimately unworkable status quo. Most important, the strike forcibly impressed the Owens with the limits of their power. Says David Owen: "We realized that paternalism was out, that the old gaffer-worker approach had become blurred. The old demarcations of upstairs/downstairs were out the window and well into the past. Coping with that change...
...felt but unseen influences that dominate the collective memory at Rubery Owen is John Owen's 67-year-old father, Sir Alfred, now bedridden within New Hall, the family's vast 14th century manor in Sutton Coldfield, twelve miles from Darlaston. Sir Alfred has not been seen at the Darlaston plant since...
...Alfred is also remembered as the man who, in the opinion of the shop floor, exhausted the assets of the Darlaston factory to invest elsewhere, leaving both men and machines in poor shape to deal with the more streamlined industrial competition from Europe. That is part of the reason, says Peach, why "the unions have now got the loyalty that Sir Alfred once...
...major work stoppages at Rubery Owen. But there still has not been the kind of cooperation between management and labor that is necessary if the company is to weather Britain's current economic crisis. The recession within Britain's strike-prone automobile industry has hit the Darlaston plant hard. Orders have dropped by 30% to 35% in the past 18 months. Three hundred jobs have been lost this year; hundreds more will be at stake over the next twelve months...