THERE WERE a number of errors in my article on the Ford pay claim as it appeared in Socialist Challenge 25 October.
Firstly no 'B' shift shop meeting took place at Dagenham on 27 September. If it had, around 10,000 night shift workers would have been present and unanimously endorsed the Ford Workers Group proposals for a £125 basic and a Coventry stewards conference to decide the claim! If that had happened we would be on strike by now.
There was a meeting of around 100 workers on the Press Shop B shift who endorsed the FWG claim. The Press Shop is a section of the Body Plant which is one of five plants at Dagenham.
Secondly, one, not 'various' shop stewards committees, has called for reconvening the Coventry shop stewards conference — the Dagenham Body Plant.
These points are not small — the officials and full-time convenors are firmly in the saddle on the Ford claim this year. It is this complete absence of democracy, discussion and preparation for a fight in drawing up the claim which makes a Vauxhall type deal possible — not necessarily the inadequacy of the individual demands in the claim.
Finally the article said that Ford workers 'found out' what the claim was four days before it was submitted on Friday 26 October. In fact a steward at Langley who supports the FWG hassled his convenor till he spilt the beans. A few hundred of us were the wiser — something like 57,000 hourly paid workers may have found out in the news on Friday night.
The main points of my original article were the difficulty of confronting the bureaucracy even in a well-organised place like Ford, the centrality of trade union democracy and of mass participation in deciding even the smallest economic demands — a problem your Leyland correspondent is also painfully aware of. This was not clear in the article as it appeared.
Ford Dagenham correspondent