Car industry: Honda and Rover plan first British non-union car plant
Labour Briefing1990sTranscribed by hand from the printed page.
Rover is a car manufacturer with a fully unionised workforce.
It has obtained a stake in a new plant to be built by Honda at Swindon, which, Honda have announced, will be non-union from the outset.
Unions which organise in the car industry have been informed that they will not be recognised at the Swindon plant which will eventually employ up to 2,000 people.
The Swindon Rover/Honda link is a part of a wider deal in which Honda has paid BAe £104m for a 20% stake in Rover, which BAe bought from the government in 1988 for a mere £150m. On these figures Rover is worth at least £520m.
It is actually worth very much more because the Honda deal did not include any part of Rover's massive property assets, currently being exploited by BAe at Cowley and Bathgate.
Nor did it include any part of its other companies such as Unipart and the heavy vehicle manufacturer DAF.
The Honda Swindon project would be the first non-union car factory in Europe as well as the UK. The fact that it is linked to an existing unionised manufacturer makes it even more ominous.
It would bring a completely new factor into a British car industry which is already undergoing massive changes to the detriment of the workforce and the unions.
Even at Nissan in Sunderland there is some union recognition through a single union deal with the AEU; although membership has been kept very low and they have remained tied down with restrictive agreements.
Honda's decision means that Japanese manufacturers establishing plants in the UK are now ready to move away from the stage of single-union, no-strike deals (which they could have obtained for Swindon if they had wanted) to no unions and no deals at all.
This is a door which has been opened to them by the New Realists who have given way to every one of their demands in the past and have thereby encouraged them to go further.
It is not the first time Honda has gone down this road.
Strategy
They are basing their move on the strategy they have already employed in the USA where both their car and motorbike plants in the South were established as non-union plants and largely remain so.
The move also makes it very clear, if it was not clear already, why Honda prefers to build a new plant in Swindon with a completely new workforce, rather than purchase the Cowley South works 30 miles down the road.
Cowley has a trained workforce in place; they could buy the plant for a fraction of the cost of the Swindon development; and it is linked to body building facilities.
Although the plant is now controlled by the right-wing, removing the unions from a plant with decades of struggle and tradition would be a near impossible task.