Professor Paul Stewart (Human Resource Management) has recently completed a 15 year project working with car assembly workers and their trade unions at Vauxhall-Ellesmere Port and Oxford-BMW. The action research has been published in "We Sell Our Time No More: Workers' Struggles against Lean Production in the British Car Industry" (Pluto Press). The action research was used to assess the impact of new working methods on individual employees and their trade unions' responses to these practices.
The network research group which conducted the research - "The AutoWorkers' Research Network" - was co-ordinated jointly by Professor Stewart and Ken Murphy, a co-author and an assembly line worker with over 30 years experience of car production. The research for the book and other mainstream academic publications based on the project was supported over the years by both European Union Framework 6 and Nuffield Research grants.
The book tells the story of struggles against management regimes in the car industry in Britain from the period after the Second World War until the contemporary regime of lean production. Told from the viewpoint of the workers, the book chronicles how workers responded to a variety of management and union strategies, from piece rate working through measured day work and eventually to lean production beginning in the late 1980s. The book focuses on two companies - Vauxhall-GM and Rover/BMW - and how they developed their approaches to managing labour relations. Worker responses to these are intimately tied to changing patterns of exploitation in the industry. The book highlights the relative success of various forms of struggle to establish safer and more humane working environments. The contributors bring together original research gathered over two decades, plus exclusive surveys of workers in four automotive final assembly plants over a 10 year period.
Professor Stewart said, "It has given me great pleasure to see the work of the network published in book form, especially as it brought together the research and writing of a number of auto assembly workers who had been part of the research network for nearly 15 years, many of whom have worked on the line for over 30 years.
"Discussions and wider public meetings on the book and its unique character, including invites to carry out the research elsewhere, have been suggested and, time allowing, I shall be following these up."