Word: owen
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...Owen's efforts came to an abrupt and traumatic halt in a bitter, five-week, factory-wide strike from which the company has never fully recovered. "It was pure hell," says Owen. "I couldn't live through anything like it again. For 18 months, issues were coming in at the rate of eight and twelve a day, mostly invented." The issue that finally triggered the strike was a management proposal to equalize the piecework pay system. Under the old system, wages for comparable work could vary by as much as 20% from department to department. "What they were...
...dispute over what to pay the driver of a side-loader truck has bogged down at the worker, foreman and department-supervisor levels. Doug Peach enters the negotiations at the fourth stage of a ritualized dispute procedure that calls for as many as seven steps leading up to John Owen's office. The difference in question is $5 a week. At a parley in the manager's office, Peach is told that another Rubery Owen plant pays the lower rate ($87.55 a week...
...Doug Peach. He thinks that Rubery Owen employees might be more interested in producing if they were not trapped among the depressing relics of wartime plant and machinery. Says Peach: "I was sure that I would have liked to have been a loser in the last war when I went to Volkswagen for four days in Germany and saw the batteries of machinery the U.S. had given them.* I could look along and see presses as far as I could see at Volkswagen; and when I look at Rubery Owen, I think if there is anything that didn...
...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
...things. "Management had to become more organized," says John Owen, "almost in response to the increase in organization by the trade unions." That meant exercising more control over departments used to operating with relative autonomy...