The Americanization of Dagenham

British Ford long had some of the world's worst labor relations: its 65,000 employees in 22 competitive unions stopped work over everything from wages to tea breaks, averaged a strike a week and lost up to 1.5 million man-hours a year. Last week, after a period of improvement over the last two years, the wildcatting started up again. Two thousand men at Dagenham, the biggest of Ford's eight British plants, threatened not to work any more overtime because Ford, while granting an extra day's annual vacation, wanted to switch their holidays from July to August. The complaint seemed so paltry, especially in view of two recent wage increases, that labor experts thought they saw a deeper cause: Dagenham's workers were really agitating against the growing Americanization of what has traditionally been a British company.

After longtime partial ownership of its largest overseas plant, U.S. Ford assumed complete control of Dagenham in 1960, promised the government that Britons would continue to hold most of the jobs. They do, but no longer the key ones. Even at middle management levels, Americans are now responsible for engineering, styling, production, operating budgets and capital spending. Ford's board remains narrowly British by 7-6, but Stanley J. Gillen, an American, succeeded a Briton as managing director in July. In the past year, three directors and a dozen other British executives, all under 50, have quit Ford because they saw no future in it. In the shops, workers increasingly blame "the Americans" for anything that goes wrong.

By hindsight, some British executives of Ford also blame themselves for the situation. In 15 years Dagenham grew twelve times larger than its prewar size, but British management failed to keep up. When Ford of Detroit took control, it was faced with falling profits, a hopelessly hidebound pyramidal management and an inadequate pool of promising young British executives. To correct the situation, Ford rushed over some of its own bright young men, just as it had done without difficulty at the German Ford plant in Cologne. Some of the Americans are at Dagenham temporarily, will be sent on to other countries later.

It is not only the Americans' presence that seems to bother the British workers, but also the can-do attitudes that the Yanks display. When Ford bought up a pressed-steel plant at Swansea, the British waited skeptically to see how long it would take the Yanks to get it into production for Ford. They got a surprise: in an unheard of six months, three Americans got the plant rolling.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.