This is 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...