Who? Me?
Wasn’t aware that I was… 
lol no i meant the copyright infringer
Not to mention our resident Sun Style reporter type, who just puts any old ■■■■■■■■ on here…
Just to correct an oft repeated misconception. The unions didn’t kill the british car industry, rubbish management did. It wasn’t the unions that decided that was was required was a square steering wheel, it was management. VW, BMW and Mercedes are all 100% unionised and it doesn’t seem to do them any harm. Unions should be a good thing, it provides a balance in the employer employee relationship. The problem is that in the UK we seem to be crap at it. I find somebody like Bob Crowe personally offensive, but say what you like about him he seems to get a decent deal for his members.
But the unions forced the issue when there was no way the government would step in to help like they do elsewhere in Europe. Also, VW, BMW, Merc et al build vehicles of a far higher standard than almost anything out of the UK, so the strongest survive.
Management were not the designers, workers were. The square steering wheel didn’t ruin Austin, the whole crap Allegro did.
So unions are alright if you build decent cars, but not if you are making crap ones, you will have to explain that to me ?. It wasn’t the union or the workers job to come up with decent designs, it was management.
bobthedog:
But the unions forced the issue when there was no way the government would step in to help like they do elsewhere in Europe. Also, VW, BMW, Merc et al build vehicles of a far higher standard than almost anything out of the UK, so the strongest survive.Management were not the designers, workers were. The square steering wheel didn’t ruin Austin, the whole crap Allegro did.
I remember seeing a documentary about BL Management in the 70s, they were all dressed in comfortable shoes, brown flares and nylon shirts with bad hairstyles and NHS glasses, they looked like they spent their lunch hour taking down train numbers in notepads and lived at home with Mother, it’s no wonder the best they could come up with was the Allaggro and the Marina
No, unions are only any good if the workers are making a product that is worth paying for. A BMW is an expensive car to buy, but it has quality and backing behind it so people will pay for it.
The Allegro, the Metro… They were horrible cars. Hell, my friends Metro, and A reg and less than 3 years old at the time, needed to be baled out after driving in the rain. The sills were so high that the water would build up and up. The dealers always said they couldn’t find the leak, but they never seemed to be interested anyway. The product wasn’t good enough to be worth buying, and the unions believed they could bank on the “buy british” campaign to force the employers to give them more. It didn’t work.
Now had the workers been more enthusiastic about the product they built, instead of thinking that they would get more enthusiasm after they got their pay rise and shorter working week, then things may well have been different. And say what you want, but the likes of BMW, Merc, Audi… they are genuinely enthusiastic about their product.
So your saying they should of been more enthusiastic about building the Allegro and the Maestro ?.
I think the fact is that they knew it was crap and going down the toilet so they thought get what you can while you can. I stick with my view that it was the management who ran it all into the ground, just look at the truck side of it.
Spacemonkey.
My response was to BTD not you, although I agree that I should have made it clear.
Ex Haulier:
So your saying they should of been more enthusiastic about building the Allegro and the Maestro ?.I think the fact is that they knew it was crap and going down the toilet so they thought get what you can while you can. I stick with my view that it was the management who ran it all into the ground, just look at the truck side of it.
No, I am saying that they should have been more enthused at the idea of building quality vehicles that people wanted to buy and that dealers wanted to sell.
There was no middle ground. You had an Allegro, or you could get a Rover SD1 and pay twice as much to buy it, insure it and run it, or you could buy a Jag… And that was pretty much it.
The Germans built cars where you could spec what you wanted, get the car you requested without having to take it back to the dealer 36 times to get the steering wheel aligned properly, or to get the brakes bled up, and those faults were the fault of the workers. Yes, management were responsible in part. they were all convinced that they wouldn’t fail because of the Buy British mania that was being pushed, but the product was plain awful. They should have studied other makers and learned how to listen to what people wanted. Peugeot did, and see how they grew. Renault did. They had huge ranges of cars that would cover most incomes and most requirements.
As for the trucks… If you were given the option of an ERF with a Gardner 180, or a Scania 111… which would you choose? And, funnily enough, the truck industry sort of outlasted the car industry in the UK, didn’t it>?
We will never know will we, the management never gave them a decent product to build !. You have summed it up, Scania or an ERF, if the product is rubbish, everyone know’s it is and just doesn’t give a stuff. At least this little discussion has shown one thing. There was more to it than just the unions. The most helpful workforce and most compliant union in the world wouldn’t have helped if they were building rubbish.
But the product did not need to be rubbish, that’s the worst part of it all. If the workforce had been more interested in what they did, and I think everyone is guilty on this score, then the products would have improved.
Think of any manufacturer of cars and look back at how they have developed. Almost all of them started to really invest in the late 70s and early 80s when competition became more fierce… You could buy a fiat for the same sort of money as the Allegro and it was twice the car… for a few years. Other makers made their products better as time went on… I remember when it was unusual to get a 5 year anti-perforation warranty on a car. Admittedly, with the Allegro or Cortina, a rusted wing meant a trip to the auto factors for a new wing and 3 cans of spray paint while a rusted wing on a Strada meant dropping it off at the scrapyard, but then Fiat improved while the UK makers didn’t.
And say what you like, the militant workers were egged on by the unions, and the picket lines on the news were really bad publicity and showed the contempt the workers felt.
the trucks, well they did improve, but the ERF was still a plastic cab, only it had an electric passenger window. It still had 3 feet of engine cover that you could have crawled on top of an L10 through. While the other marques were working on all aspects, the UK only copied a few of the details.
And say what you like, the militant workers were egged on by the unions, and the picket lines on the news were really bad publicity and showed the contempt the workers felt.
True, and also the fact that some of this type of action was encouraged, or even commenced by foreign powers using the unions.
Got to remember, at this time Russia was still an enemy. maybe not in the terms of bullets and bombs etc but certainly in the field of industrial action.
Very true… But you remember when the Polish shipbuilders went on strike?
The strike only started when the food prices went up again and there were food riots and massive shortages. And no matter how bad things got in the UK, we haven’t seen that, not ever really. And the government imposed martial law on the nation then.
Maggie Thatcher may have broken the unions, but the unions did try, it seems, to emulate the shipyard straike when they never had a chance of getting popular support. So any attempt they made for that degree of militancy was doomed to failure, and rightly so.
And the Russians, like the Chinese, know how to quell pickets… At least the police in the UK were there to keep order (in theory) while elsewhere they were there to arrest and imprison the strike leaders.
Too many Sun readers here. People talk as if unions and workers are seperate, unions are the workers if you are not happy with your union do something about it like the French but sadly the great british worker will sit on his fat a**e reading the Sun and moaning.
Not true at all. The people who ran the unions that ruined the industries were not real workers. They had someone they paid 8 quid a week to act as their go between and they stayed out of it.
Besides, The Sun was much better that The Mirror… The Sun had the ■■■■ on page 3 while the Mirror had ■■■■ like Scargill on the front page… 
And the Russians, like the Chinese, know how to quell pickets
and free speech, and democracy and opposition to the government.
Strange that you give praise to totaliterian states (as Russia then was) and yet choose to live in a democracy.
or did you just post that bit for the sake of an argument 
Ex Haulier:
So unions are alright if you build decent cars, but not if you are making crap ones, you will have to explain that to me ?. It wasn’t the union or the workers job to come up with decent designs, it was management.
Im pretty sure management didn’t come up with the designs, they pay a designer (worker) who works in the drawing office, to come up with a design for a new car. Drawings wont show management that a car will be crap. If the guys building the cars actually cared about what they building, maybe the cars wouldnt have been so rubbish after all.
BigJon:
Ex Haulier:
So unions are alright if you build decent cars, but not if you are making crap ones, you will have to explain that to me ?. It wasn’t the union or the workers job to come up with decent designs, it was management.Im pretty sure management didn’t come up with the designs, they pay a designer (worker) who works in the drawing office, to come up with a design for a new car. Drawings wont show management that a car will be crap. If the guys building the cars actually cared about what they building, maybe the cars wouldnt have been so rubbish after all.
The same thing happened in the British motorcycle industry, a motorcycle that cannot contain engine oil from new as opposed to a reliable leakproof engine from the Far East. There is a word missing in this whole thread,
Pride!