Turner, Clack and Roberts have written an excellent book.footnote1 They show that two distinct general demands have arisen among carworkers: for ‘fair wages’ based on principles of comparability, and for ‘job rights’ based upon a conception of property in the job. Both of these challenge the traditional prerogatives of management. The extent of the change in mood, and of the challenge, can be measured in the following table which contrasts the number of striker-days in the car industry between the wars and since 1945:
Thus, during the inter-war years, barely a sixth of the days on strike were attributable to non-wage disputes: since the war this total has increased almost tenfold. Challenges have been increasingly frequently made to managerial ‘rights’ to hire or fire, to determine workloads and speeds of machinery, and to decide ‘working arrangements, rules and discipline.’ Care is taken to document changes in the intensity of disputes over particular matters: disputes on union relations, for instance, have become considerably less frequent but markedly more weighty. The result is a work which provides a valuable corrective not only to official statistics, but still more to the figures put out by the car employers themselves, which are shown to have no definitional basis, and to comprehend a whole series of minscule incidents (including a dispute at Vauxhalls which cost 17 manhours and a series of lunchhour meetings at Rover that ran over their time, and which together accounted for one fifth of the ‘strikes’ reported by that firm.)