Car Workers Criticised

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32233, 27 February 1970, Page 13

Car Workers Criticised

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyrisht) LONDON, Feb. 26. Lord Stokes, head of British Leyland Motor Corporation, has blamed anarchism in the car factories for threatening Britain’s place as a leader in the world market. Lord Stokes, who rose from being an apprentice to head of Britain’s biggest car manufacturers, launched into an attack on workers after he had announced that British Leyland had not made any profits in the first four months of this trading year. He put most of the blame for this on wild-cat strikes—what he called “the unprecedented spread of industrial

disputes, mostly unofficial, which have arisen to alarming and chaotic proportions,” , but also put some of the blame on the Government’s ■ credit squeeze. As a result, he said, Bri- . tisb Leyland had been unable to supply markets where there was a demand for Bri- . tish cars and lorries, and potential customers were turning to other countries. “Unless some halt is called in the current round of wage 1 increases and ,in the inflation we are being subjected to—and which our overseas competitors are not suffering to the same extent—Britain faces a financial crisis through pricing herself out of overseas markets,” be said. Although he did not believe that the majority of workers wanted industrial anarchy, the strain on fac-

tory management because of it was becoming intolerable. “Perhaps this is the aim of the people who are stirring up the trouble,” he added. Underlying the situation, he said, was the real possibility of massive unemployment on a scale only remembered by the older generation. Sales resistance on the home market, he said, had reduced turnover by £2l million but overseas sales were up by £lO million. Lord Stokes’s announcement came only two weeks after Vauxhall—the British subsidiary of the American General Motors—had said that labour troubles and the Government squeeze had cost it more than £7 million, and that there would be no dividend payment after the worst financial year in the history of the company.