Word: leylands
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Last week its prospects for survival suddenly improved. Rejecting the advice of militant shop stewards, Leyland's 100,000 car workers voted 2 to 1 for a package of bargaining reforms that holds at least some hope of ending labor anarchy. The results of the vote came on the first day in office of Michael Edwardes, who was named chairman by the government, getting his term off to an auspicious start...
Britain's biggest automaker is still deep in trouble, but a new boss and a turn toward moderation by its fractious workers are strengthening its chances to stay in business. When the Labor government reluctantly agreed to take over nearly bankrupt British Leyland Motor Corp. in 1975, it publicly warned the maker of Jaguar, Morris, Triumph and Rover cars that it would not throw good money after bad. The price of government cash for new-car development and badly overdue plant modernization was to be an end to the constant bickering that has pitted unions against management and against...
...other respects, Edwardes would seem to be taking over at the worst possible time. Leyland's share of the British auto market has dropped to just over 20% currently, from 27.5% in 1976. Though Leyland's truck and bus operations are still profitable, auto losses pared companywide pretax profits to less than $23 million in the first half of 1977 (on sales of $2.4 billion), from almost $97 million a year earlier on slightly smaller sales. And those figures mask a serious cash shortage; in July, Leyland had to borrow 5180 million from the government's National...
...Leyland was originally formed by a jerry-built amalgam of smaller companies, and that is now one reason for its troubles. Its crazy-quilt wage bargaining structure forces management to deal with 58 different bargaining units at its 34 plants; executives are involved in some kind of labor negotiation for nearly nine months of every year. Strikes, many prompted by wage differentials from plant to plant, break out frequently, with or without union authorization. In the first six months of this year, Leyland lost 9.3 million man-hours and production of about 120,000 cars because of strikes, v. losses...
...Leyland's car workers voted to replace this chaotic state of affairs with a single companywide labor pact, to be negotiated by November 1979. The centralized agreement is to provide that all Leyland plants pay the same wage for comparable jobs. Negotiating the contract will not be easy: the unskilled production-line workers who belong to the Transport and General Workers Union argue that they ought to be paid as much as the skilled craftsmen represented by the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, while the A.U.E.W. is determined to maintain the pay differentials. But the vote at least staved...