British Warned To Accept Losing Jobs

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31168, 19 September 1966, Page 17

British Warned To Accept Losing Jobs

(N.Z.P.A. Reuter—Copyright >■

NOTTINGHAM, September 18.

The Labour Minister Mr Ray Gunter, warned Britons yesterday that they must accept redundancies to cure the nation’s economic ills.

He affirmed the Labour Government’s determination to see through its “massive and maybe cruel” wage and credit squeeze as feelings ran high in the industrial Midlands at the prospect of smaller pay packets and autumn dismissals.

Union officials would prefer slashed hours of work to widespread unemployment. But Mr Gunter told a Labour Party meeting that keeping large labour forces together by short-time working would not give industry the flexibility it needed.

With thousands of car and television workers faced with finding new jobs this winter, Mr Gunter bluntly said that movement of labour, with all the hurt involved, was part of the price that must be paid to secure full employment.

Productivity in Britain in the last year had simply not matched higher earnings, and this was the road to national bankruptcy and mass unemployment, the Labour Minister said.

Mr Gunter’s tough statement brought little comfort to tens of thousands of workers who found their pay slashed and jobs threatened this week

under the economic clampdown.

The biggest single group of squeeze victims so far are some 30,000 workers at the British Motor Corporation's Midlands car .plants. They start two-to-four day weeks on Monday, with pay packets halved in some cases. And at the beginning of November, several thousand of them will be dismissed altogether. Another big motor firm, Standard-Triumph, has put 5500 workers on short-time working until further notice, reducing the working week to four days. Rover cars now have about 2000 men on short-time and small component manufacturers are also feeling the pinch. Luxury Goods

Car, television and textile workers are the worst hit so far by the credit squeeze, which has brought a slump in home sales of luxury goods. Radio and allied industries yesterday announced 650 workers would be dismissed. Many people could not afford the higher deposits on television sets, an official said. The market, normally at its most buoyant in autumn, had declined 30 per cent. 500 Dismissed

Another television firm, Rank-Bush-Murphy, has dismissed 500 workers. A Wales steelworks announced 100 workers would be dismissed on October 1. Imperial Chemical Industries, one of Britain’s biggest industrial combines, is dismissing 1000 nylon workers.

There was tough and angry talk among the car-workers this week-end, although official union policy is to back shorttime working as a painful necessity. More than 1000 employees at a B.M.C. carburettor-mak-ing subsidiary held a one-day protest strike yesterday, and there have been • calls for wider strike action at unofficial workers’ meetings outside the factories.

An emergency meeting of 18 B.M.C. shop stewards—the workers’ factory-floor reprebe held in Coventry on Monday to decide what counter-action can be taken to safeguard jobs.

Cousins’s View The former Technology Minister, Mr Frank Cousins, who quit the Cabinet in protest at the economic squeeze, is likely to support a tough line as head of the 1,400,000member Transport and General Workers’ Union—which has the largest membership of any union in the car trade. But some of the union’s local officers are known to feel strike action will not alter the economic situation, which is at the root of the industry’s troubles. The Conservative Opposition Leader, Mr Edward Heath,, in a speech yesterday labelled the Government’s austerity measures senseless and sterile.

“The Government keeps talking about redeploying manpower into manufacturing exporting industries. Why then does it throw men out of work in the motor industry?”