Monday, Sep. 15, 1975

UPSTAIRS/DOWNSTAIRS AT THE FACTORY

BRITAIN/SPECIAL REPORT

"This battle will continue when I have finished. This will always be the case. I shall never solve it. There will always be people like myself to carry on and do this. There has got to be us and them. There has always got to be us and them. "

-Doug Peach, Union Convenor

"I think the unions have got so much power now in our plant and in the country as a whole that they don 't quite know what to do. If they wish, they can prevent management from doing anything. We are no longer in a position to manage except with the consent of the unions."

-John Owen, Managing Director

The battle between labor and management in Britain took a small, hopeful turn last week. At the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress in Blackpool, delegates representing more than ten million workers voted to accept Prime Minister Harold Wilson's recently announced program of wage restraints (see box page 61). Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey called it "a unique achievement" and there was euphoric speculation that the "I'm All Right Jack" era of union truculence might be over. The optimism is probably premature. The social conflicts that underlie Britain's labor problems are nowhere near being resolved, and the budding spirit of union self-sacrifice may well prove too fragile to withstand the forecast winter of continued inflation.

Labor conflict is by no means limited to Britain. In the U.S. most industrial unions have acted with restraint during the recession. But last week one big American city after another faced walkouts by workers who were making difficult demands in a time of shrinking resources. The "English sickness" -the affliction that makes work almost an afterthought amid the ceaseless shop-floor broil of whispered conferences, noisy confrontations and tense negotiations -is most virulent in its native land. But the rest of the industrialized world knows that it has no guarantee of immunity against what is happening in Britain.

In the early 18th century, the question "Who rules Britain?" could be answered with a simple tautology. Britain was ruled by the ruling classes. More specifically, although swayed by commoners and clergy, it was ruled by one monarch, 25 dukes, one marquess, 81 earls, twelve viscounts and 63 barons. In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution brought with it the need for a new cultural catechism, and by 1843 Historian-Seer Thomas Carlyle was prophesying the emergence of new leaders: from an "Industrial Aristocracy as yet only half-alive, spellbound amid moneybags and ledgers," would arise noble captains of industry to lead Britain's work-hosts in the fight "against Chaos, Necessity and the Devils."

During the sun-drenched days of Empire, some believed that Carlyle's prophecy had come true. But today Britain is still bedeviled, and the captains and the work-hosts have been fighting each other instead of chaos. Indeed, the conflict of power between workers and employers has produced such widespread havoc in recent years that it has come close to destroying Britain's future as an industrial nation. Inflation, fueled in part by excessive union wage demands, is running at a disastrous 26.3% rate, and Britain's very economic survival depends on whether these two rival forces can forge at least a temporary truce in the long-running war between labor and management. With so much at stake, the question of who rules Britain has become almost totally identified with another and perhaps more urgent question: Who rules the shop floor?

The war between labor and management has many battlefields. One of them is a 70-acre tract of plants in the industrial Midlands town of Darlaston, eight miles north of begrimed Birmingham. The headquarters of Britain's largest privately held company, Rubery Owen Holdings, Ltd., the Darlaston plants are among the country's largest suppliers of components to the British automobile industry: frames for Jaguar, axles for Rover, gasoline tanks for Rolls-Royce. The plants are also the foundation of a family empire established by A.E. Owen in 1893 that now includes some 20 companies in seven countries. The Darlaston plant alone accounted for more than $56 million in sales last year; the group as a whole grossed some $200 million, but made a pretax profit of only $7 million.

The question that surfaces almost daily at Darlaston is "Who runs Rubery Owen?" Is it John Owen, 35, managing director, son and grandson of the Owens who have run the plant for 80 years? Or is it Doug Peach, 57, the son and grandson of bricklayers, for 33 years one of the company's 3,000 employees, now a full-time "convenor" for the largest union at Rubery Owen, the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU)?* Whether such men can find some bond of common self-interest will determine the fate of Britain's economy and Wilson's Labor government -and quite possibly more. To help assess the conflict, TIME London Correspondent William McWhirter spent two weeks with managers and workers, observing a company at war with itself.

Although they inhabit the same world, John Owen and Doug Peach still begin their day in ways that are closer to their own fathers' and grandfathers' than they are to each other's. On a typical morning at 7, Doug Peach sits slowly stirring his tea in the small front room of his two-bedroom row house on the main street of Bloxwich, a small village 5 1/2 miles from Darlaston. Doug Jr., the youngest of the Peaches' four sons, all of whom work at Rubery Owen, was married that weekend and is now off on his honeymoon. For the first time in years, Doug and his wife Hilda face the morning routine alone, and the change is tacitly registered by the somewhat uncomfortable silence. After slicing Doug a piece of leftover wedding cake to take to work, Hilda gets ready for her trip to the neighboring village of Wednesfield, where she has a textile stall at the outdoor market.

Before leaving for work, Doug takes a brief stroll down the narrow path to the bottom of his garden. Barrel-chested and brisk-gaited, as befits a onetime gymnast, he is a compact man who gives his height as "5 ft., buggerall" but is more like 5 ft. 5 in. He pauses to check his tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbages, beans, potatoes and onions. "These are my pride and joy," he says. "I look after them like my union members."

By 7:30, Peach has driven his year-old Ford, its seats still protectively covered in their original showroom plastic, through a working-class neighborhood of government-subsidized houses, down Owen Road and through the back gate of the plant. He enters his ground-floor office, a drab room whose walls are bare except for a few scattered snapshots of former Rubery Owen union officials. Spoiling for the day to begin, he makes his first phone call to a works manager. When it goes unanswered, Peach thunders: "Management is just getting out of bloody bed."

By 8:30, John Owen has left Four Ashes, a 16-acre estate near the pleasant village of Knowle, 25 miles from Darlaston. The rambling, rose-covered "cottage," which Owen bought three years ago for $73,000, has a main section that dates from the 16th century. It is surrounded by spacious lawns, well-tended flower beds, a small pond and a paddock for Granby, the family pony. Later in the day the Owens' two oldest children -Rebecca, 8, and Sarah, 6 -will receive riding lessons from their handsome blonde mother Elizabeth, 33, John's stepcousin as well as wife, the adopted daughter of his Uncle Ernest Owen. Now Owen, who has the tall (6 ft. 4 in.) athletic frame of a man once celebrated for playing rugby for England, packs the girls into his red Jaguar convertible with their younger brother Simon, 4, for the ride to their private day schools. After dropping them off, he continues driving through countryside that remains green with grazing pastures right up to the area bordering Darlaston. Like many towns in the Midlands, Darlaston resembles the fictional Coketown of Charles Dickens' Hard Times: "It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black ..."

The difference between the fiction of Coketown and the reality of Darlaston is that "you saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful." At Rubery Owen, an average workday seems more like a raucous political convention -or a cinema verite version of the 1959 Peter Sellers movie, I'm All Right, Jack. Shop stewards and managers alike frequently spend half of their day on labor disputes, but because the men do not actually leave the plant, these countless lost hours are not even logged among the 70,000 man-days the company now loses a year. "It's like a holiday camp here," says Michael Peach, 29, a press setter operator and Doug Peach's second son.

In the steel-storage department, a 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).

"That has nothing to do with us," says Peach. "More bloody fools them." "We have two men who are prepared to drive it," says the manager. "That's fine," says Peach, "as long as we get the pay right. In the meantime, that machine will stay in that corner."

The meeting ends formally with one more failure to agree passed up to the next higher level. "We have hundreds of little incidents every week," says another manager. Only three of the ten supervisors who were working in his department several years ago remain; the others suffered physical or mental breakdowns. "They slowly crack," the manager continues. "Eventually, enough is enough."

Welding sparks fly behind the rows of green tarpaulin stalls in the blackened work barns. The ventilation in one building comes from flaps in the steel skin that are braced with odd pieces of wood. The interiors of most departments are dimly lit and cavernous. "Sophisticated equipment wouldn't necessarily go well here," says a senior executive. "Black-country laborers [so named because of the region's soot-grimed landscape] prefer physical effort, and if they're dirty, sweating and completely knocked out at the end of the day, they feel satisfied."

Not 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't go on the ark, we have got it. Only once did anyone bother to try and fix up Darlaston. That was in 1960, when Princess Margaret visited Rubery Owen. The factory had such a face-lift as we couldn't recognize it. Wherever they decided she was going to go, the paint went on. I think they must've touched up the clouds. Looks as if we got to get some other monarch down here before it has another bit of paint on it."

Two men with clipboards and tablets walk into the gas tanks department. Within minutes, a hand signal is given by the shop steward. The workers stop and line up against the wall until the interlopers can be identified. They prove to be not inspectors but sewerage contractors, and the machines start up again.

"We're not producing as much as we used to," says one senior manager. "For reasons we can't explain, they've lost interest in working." Whether the decline in production is the fault of the men or their outmoded machines is, in most instances, almost impossible to tell. In either case, the effect is the same. In one department, a manager recently took a rare check of all his assembly lines on an average day. The results:

Line 1: 8-8:20, running 8:20-8:40, quality fault 8:40-9:15, running 9:15-2, mechanical failure 2-3:45, no crew available 3:45-4:30, running Total workday: 100 minutes

Line 2 was not available for operation at all because of faults in a new tooling operation. On the department's other three lines, operations were interrupted by mechanical and electrical breakdowns and two 90-minute union dispute meetings.

In 1970 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.

In 1973, 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 trying to do," as Peach saw it, "was take money out of the higher-paid workers' pockets and give it to the lower-paid workers. In two years' time everybody would be together at the bottom. It became a real battle of undermining the union."

Even more objectionable than the proposed wage reform was the industrial-relations expert who was selected to negotiate it -Fred Straw. Peach describes Straw as "a hatchet man," and even John Owen concedes that he was a rather aloof, overbearing man who gave the unions the false impression that "shock troops of management were coming in to sort things out."

Whether the image of managerial shock troops was fantasy or not, it provoked a strike that cost the company almost $1.5 million. The piecework reform was dropped. Straw was transferred from Darlaston. The effort to centralize management control was abandoned for the more peaceful if ultimately unworkable status quo. Most important, the strike forcibly impressed the Owens with the limits of their power. Says David Owen: "We realized that paternalism was out, that the old gaffer-worker approach had become blurred. The old demarcations of upstairs/downstairs were out the window and well into the past. Coping with that change is still the biggest thing in front of us."

The victory was Doug Peach's, but he also paid a price. In the midst of the strike, he collapsed with an attack of angina pectoris. He was away from the factory for five months. During that time, his 34-year-old marriage to Hilda came near to breaking up. "I wouldn't have liked any of my lads to have followed me into the trade union movement," he says. "It made me for a number of years become a machine."

The personalities and issues involved do not fully account for the impasse reached in 1973. Rubery Owen is at root a closed world, fixed in an intricate pattern of habits, rivalries, loyalties and hatreds. One effect of this has been to make the factory all but immune to change from the outside. Another effect has been to accentuate the profound divisions within the factory. "Inside these walls is our Berlin," says Peach. And within these walls, Hilda Peach refers to the Owens simply and without emotion as "the other side."

As a child, John Owen regularly visited the plant with his father on gala days. "At company Christmas parties, my father always played Santa Claus. Otherwise he always referred to it as 'the works,' and he must have devoted his life to it, as we didn't see much of him at home. I just thought of the factory as my father's way of life, and I assumed it would be mine some day too. My father always quoted the deathbed scene of his father, whose last words were 'Keep the flag flying.' "

Doug Peach first came to Rubery Owen under very different circumstances. In 1940, his arm badly wounded in a machine-gun attack near Lille, France, Peach escaped by sea from Dunkirk and was hospitalized for nearly 2 1/2 years. "My father was shot up in the first World War, and I used to hear him refer to the political slogan, 'A country fit for heroes to come back to.' Instead, when I was released, I was offered a clerical job for the magnificent sum of $8 a week. Well, I went to Rubery Owen as a spot welder and became involved with the union. The people in the department must have seen something in me they wanted, 'cause they elected me shop steward, as green as the grass."

Sixteen years ago, John Owen received his first intimation that the factory workers regarded him as someone apart. "After leaving school, I spent nine months here in apprentice training as a welder. I was 19 then, and when I was on the shop floor, I was conscious from time to time that everyone would disappear, and I would almost think that it was the end of the world and I was the only one left. They were just having a meeting, and someone was shouting and that was the beginning of the union. I didn't know what it was really going to be like. I still had this idea that it was going to be more like a family working together. At that time I certainly never saw them as adversaries. I only met Doug Peach fairly briefly at that time. He was friendly toward me, but a few managers told me he was a bad lot and to be watched very carefully."

Says Peach: "In those days, anybody was taking his life in his hands when he identified himself as a shop steward at Rubery Owen. They have got to live with us now, but then they could still fire the steward. I knew them to close a whole section to get the man in that section they wanted. I started out with only about 300 members, but by 1958 Rubery Owen was really bottled up by one union or another. Many a time I stood under the clock and told management they had until noon to settle with me, and all the time they were standing there the clock wasn't stopping."

One of the felt but unseen influences that dominate the collective memory at Rubery Owen is John Owen's 67-year-old father, Sir Alfred, now bedridden within New Hall, the family's vast 14th century manor in Sutton Coldfield, twelve miles from Darlaston. Sir Alfred has not been seen at the Darlaston plant since

1972, when he suffered a massive stroke while attending church in nearby Walsall and was left incapacitated. But his small paneled office, with a Turner painting slightly askew on the wall, has been left completely and eerily untouched. A space in the factory parking lot is kept permanently in reserve for the gray Bentley he used to race around the countryside collecting speeding tickets.

Sir Alfred, a Methodist lay preacher and unabashed autocrat, is remembered with charged and mixed feelings on the shop floor. He often sided with his manual workers against the office staff, referring to the managers as "them." "Sir Alfred had more grease on the seat of his pants than any mechanic," says Peach. "Some of the old employees would think it was almost criminal to go on strike against Sir Alfred."

He signed into effect the first 40-hour agreement in the area with Doug Peach, and offered such advanced amenities for the time as company cafeterias, recreation fields and medical clinics. "His desire to help people almost got out of hand in the end," says a Rubery Owen executive. "He wanted to own people, like Krupp."

Sir Alfred is also remembered as the man who, in the opinion of the shop floor, exhausted the assets of the Darlaston factory to invest elsewhere, leaving both men and machines in poor shape to deal with the more streamlined industrial competition from Europe. That is part of the reason, says Peach, why "the unions have now got the loyalty that Sir Alfred once had."

John Owen's long days, rumpled suits, even his love of fast cars, are all reminiscent of his father. What he lacks is Sir Alfred's ease on the shop floor.

At noon, Owen leaves the upstairs canteen that is used by company officers -a large, spare uninviting room with curtainless windows, bare walls and a small central cluster of tables flanked by molded plastic chairs. He heads downstairs to the lower canteen, a far livelier place, where he is to have his picture taken while handing out first-aid certificates to a group of apprentices. The photographer poses Owen this way and that, trying to make him look comfortable among the long wooden benches packed with men who are loudly joking their way through hearty 500 meals. A few workers look over their shoulders. Then they quickly turn back to their plates, not out of any apparent dislike or indifference but with the embarrassment of proud men who do not want to seem too visibly interested in a visiting celebrity. Later, at a gathering of pensioners, Owen is introduced to say a brief word. "Certainly a brief word," he says. "I wouldn't want to keep you from your pork pies."

The awkward and pained formality is not regarded as personal inadequacy, but as the inevitable consequence of the distance that has grown between workers and management. Owen averages a "complete walk-around" of the plant once a month, and says that he knows some 400 or 500 of his 3,000 employees. Most of his time is spent within his narrow, paneled suite, its subdued interior of light grays and white comfortably sealed off from the din outside. Owen works so intently and noiselessly that his secretary sometimes checks through the open door to see whether he is there. "To be able to lead here in a more personal way would be more gratifying," says Owen, "but the rules of the game are different. I have to deal with the union rather than the employee. The employees become the faceless ones."

Doug Peach does not feel that the union movement has made him faceless: "Fifteen years ago, I was crying out to be accepted as a human being instead of a clock number. But there has been quite a change. I cannot see anything I am crying out for so desperately now. I don't really want to change my life at all."

By the time the 4 o'clock whistle blows across the plant, Doug Peach is already out of the factory and on his way home. He changes into his gardening pants and worn suede slippers and heads outside. There are chickens to feed and the new greenhouse, just four months old, to attend to. After hours of puttering, Doug joins Hilda in the sitting room for a light supper of cheese and cold cuts while they watch television. Afterward, Doug's local cribbage team plays its weekly match against another workingmen's club in the area. Peach thinks that the clubs, bustling nightly with pool, bingo and card games, have become "too social." He and Hilda much prefer the small pub next door, the Why Not Inn, with its brass-pulled draft beer and front room packed with neighbors out for a quiet evening of chat and dominoes.

"I am still a member of the working class," says Peach. "There's no doubt about that. But if I go with a union card in my hand, I shall be a very happy man. I have no desire to be identified with the bow-tie class." And yet most of the bow-tie class at Rubery Owen -the managers that Peach spars with -are working-class men who were promoted from the shop floor.

At 8 p.m. John Owen arrives home. Although he keeps intending to mend the outbuildings at Four Ashes and expand the vegetable garden that he just got around to starting this summer, John limits himself to a brief stroll through the grounds before sprawling on one of the living-room lounge chairs with a double Scotch and a sheaf of work papers. He and Elizabeth usually have dinner trays in the living room while watching the 10 o'clock news. Once a year John travels to a reunion of boarding school friends for a weekend of cricket and camping out, but otherwise the Owens seldom venture beyond Four Ashes. Despite his athletic background, he rarely manages much more than a day of golf each week at the exclusive Little Aston Golf Club. He and Elizabeth regularly share an evening of bridge with a neighboring couple, and may go out one other night during the week. But they entertain at home only once or twice a year.

The changes in class structure that have made Doug Peach "a happy man" have left the Owens confused and somewhat embittered. Elizabeth Owen, who worked first as her father's secretary and then as John Owen's secretary, says: "I've lived with the company all my life. John is going through exactly what my father went through. He looks and acts older than his years. He needs about ten pints of beer in him before he will relax. The union men, they just start at 7:30 and finish up at 4. I still remember a power cut one winter when Daddy and I sat in our offices with our coats on and sent down our own electric heaters to the staff. But the temperature still wasn't high enough for them and they just went home. They were always niggling, riddling, shortsighted. They couldn't understand that we were trying to do things for them. That was what hurt me so deeply."

"I'm not complaining about my way of life," says Owen. "I don't go on overseas holidays or anything else, but I have everything that I want. I live comfortably at Four Ashes, but it will take me 20 years to pay it off. Outside of Rubery Owen, I don't own stocks and shares and I'm mortgaged up to my neck. My grandfather died at 60, my father had his stroke at 60, my uncle died at 56. Either we're a very short-lived family or it has something to do with the business. If we had been forced to sell out, we would have been better off than we are now."

Both Owen and Peach link -and sometimes identify -the fate of Rubery Owen with the fate of Britain. Both, in their distinctly separate ways, share a sense of loss about the nation as well as the company.

ON THE STATE OF BRITAIN:

Owen: Britain is like a ship without a rudder. In the past ten years we have had no leadership at all. Trudeau, Giscard, Schmidt all put our leaders into a cocked hat. The majority of people are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. There is the feeling that they will be looked after, come what may.

Peach: When you were a child, you had it drilled into you that Great Britain was great. But what are we today? When a twopenny-ha'penny sergeant like Amin takes the urine out of Britain, it's a pretty mean level we have sunk to. And now that we are in the Common Market, we are just like all those other countries who have foreigners making decisions for us.

ON POLITICAL PARTIES:

Owen: I cannot accept socialism, but I'm not very happy with the Conservative Party. It doesn't have any clearly discernible policy other than wanting to put the clock back 20 years. It just doesn't seem very realistic.

Peach: I am loyal to my class. It is the only reason I vote Labor, because the party is now run by bloody academics. It isn't the working class representing the working class any more.

ON BRITISH INDUSTRY:

Owen: Time is not on our side. Industry has become increasingly uncompetitive with other countries, and with our seeming inability to grow, it's going to be increasingly hard for people like me to stay in business.

Peach: We keep getting all this cheap stuff from abroad to put our own workers out of work. Somebody's unloading goods on Britain from countries where people are happy with a bowl of rice a day.

For 2 1/2 years there have been no major work stoppages at Rubery Owen. But there still has not been the kind of cooperation between management and labor that is necessary if the company is to weather Britain's current economic crisis. The recession within Britain's strike-prone automobile industry has hit the Darlaston plant hard. Orders have dropped by 30% to 35% in the past 18 months. Three hundred jobs have been lost this year; hundreds more will be at stake over the next twelve months.

John Owen is fatalistic: "The problem facing us is one of survival. I have asked the unions what they want. I even asked whether the fact that this is a family business was a stumbling block. They said it wasn't. I've talked about giving them more of an interest in running the company. The response was disappointing. They mistrust ownership shares because of what happened to companies like Rolls-Royce when they went bust. Workers lost not only their jobs, but part of their savings as well.

"I can't see for the life of me why there is no common interest. Maximum efficiency is good for both management and the unions because it produces greater profit. By all means let's argue how much of that profit is distributed to the work force, but for goodness' sake let's produce. The trade unions must accept, with all the power they have, some responsibility. I feel absolutely emotional about it because ... it is so bloody stupid. It's like trying to walk across swampland. You know where you want to get, but there are all these things to prevent your legs from moving."

Measured against some of Britain's more leftist labor leaders, Peach is not at all radical. "They tried to get in here," Peach recalls of some extremists. "I crushed the bastards." Nonetheless, Peach sees little ground for "common interest" in a factory that always seems to be divided into "them" and "us." "Management should understand that it is like the Yanks and Russia," he says. "You have enough strength to cancel each other out. If the unions were not as powerful, the clock would go back because I don't think that breed ever alters. We just don't work as partners. When they want something, they talk about common interest. But whenever we've needed anything, we have either had to knock it out of them or almost rape them for it.

"There is no satisfaction in ruining the company. Nobody would have jobs. If the Lord spares me, I hope to finish my working life here at Rubery Owen. But it's no good blaming the unions for the state of the company. Management are there to manage. If I were a part of management, I'd try to find the answers. Since I'm not, I'm not going to do their thinking."

While pugnacious Doug Peach speaks of labor and management as "the Yanks and Russia," John Owen speaks nostalgically of an elusive "family spirit of generations of people on the shop floor whose fathers and grandfathers came here to work." Peach's is the dominant reality. But once a year the clock seems to move back to a time that John Owen yearns for.

It is Friday night, and the Owen family is assembled at the head table in the upstairs canteen for the "24th Annual Long Service Employees Dinner." Five men who had worked at Darlaston for 50 years receive gold watches, and John Owen gives a report to satisfy the employees' presumed curiosity about farflung members of the Owen family. Elizabeth's stepmother, he confides, has married a horse surgeon and is living in the U.S. Sister Grace and her husband David are down with the mumps. Wife Elizabeth has been let down by the babysitter and is very sorry to be missing the dinner for the first time in years. "Sir Alfred has asked me to pass on his love and best wishes to you all," he concludes.

Board Chairman David Owen then gives a sober report on the state of the company. "Some of our equipment did get very old, and we did manage to find $10 million somewhere and put it in. But the well runs dry and we can't do this again." Still, he says, "we can all work together to solve our problems." Later an organist plays The Good Old, Bad Old Days. A vote of thanks to the Owens is proposed by A. Manning of the supply department, and the entire group joins hands to sing Auld Lang Syne.

* As convenor Doug Peach is senior spokesman for the 54 TGWU shop stewards at Rubery Owen. Although Peach is a full-time union representative, his salary -an estimated $170 a week -is paid by the company. John Owen's salary is estimated at $31.600 a year.

* In fact, Volkswagen never received any Marshall Plan aid. The company has financed almost all of its growth by reinvesting profits.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.