meatcleaver
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Politesub53
Meat your point about poor management would have happened whoever was running the government. You say Manufacturing declined 30% under Thatcher, this is not true.
Quotes
It is simply not true that all these jobs (about 23 million of them altogether) are in the service sector. Overall, the numbers employed in UK manufacturing have declined in the past 30 years (the high point was reached about 1970) but, according to figures published in Social Trends (January 2000), the total number of workers employed in UK manufacturing today is actually slightly higher than it was in 1901. However, there are two points worth making in relation to manufacturing jobs. The biggest single decline took place in the 1970s, not in the 1980s or 1990s under Thatcher and Major. And the decline of manufacturing does not mean that these jobs become less important, or indeed less powerful, from the point of view of workers. Increased productivity means that machines replace people to perform certain jobs, but then the workers who use the machines produce more wealth per worker for the capitalists.
Unquotes.
This is taken from a report in the socialist review. http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr248/german.htm
The truth is that since ww2 heavy industry has been in decline. Poor investments, by successive Governments of all persuasions have been the decline. There are many reasons the coal industry collapsed, the lack of a market being one, the constant miners strike being another. Thatcher was determined that no trade union should have the power to bring down an elected govermnet, and Scargill shares as much blame for the strike as anyone else.
The fact that more output is achieved per worker because of mechanisation is not an argument. I'm searching for the stats and then I'll come back. The very fact that real unemployment as it was measured when Thatcher came to power and before she changed the stats 21 times was 5 million compared to 1 million under the previous Labour government. Britain went through a deep reccession blamed by Thatcher on a world economic turn down which miraculously avoided other European countries.(I know, I was there). However, it has been widely recognized since it was the disastrous mismanagement by her government, particularly Howe that was responsible for it.
I accept decline was on going since the war but Britain's industrial base has positively shrivelled compared to comparable European countries. Just about all are more industrially efficient than Britain, which brings us back to the quality of British management and their ability to manage. Having worked in Britain, France, Germany, Holland and Belgium, I have first hand experience and British workers are treated the worst out of all of them, British industrial management having a more confrontational style than all the others. This brings us back to Thatcher saying managers must be allowed to manage. They fucking can't because largely they are incompetent and not because of anything to do with the work force.
Scargill never tried to bring down the Thatcher government, he said Thatcher was lying about not wanting to close down the coal industry and wanted to stop that. As it turned out cabinet papers have shown Thatcher was lying and this was her intention from the beginning. This puts Scargill in the clear as he was told by the government there was nothing to negotiate about because the Tories weren't going to close down the industry.
< Message edited by meatcleaver -- 8/16/2007 10:40:56 AM >
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