{"id":60607,"date":"2021-11-23T06:41:23","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T11:41:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60607"},"modified":"2021-11-23T06:41:23","modified_gmt":"2021-11-23T11:41:23","slug":"hogwash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60607","title":{"rendered":"Hogwash"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hogwash<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In the early 1980s, to Margaret Thatcher\u2019s annoyance, union reps and managers at the steelworks in Port Talbot agreed a strategy to save the plant.\u00a0 As a result, Port Talbot was spared the post-industrial blight visited upon most of Britain\u2019s ex-industrial towns.\u00a0 Now in private hands, and despite periodic crises, the steelworks employs some 4,000 people \u2013 a big drop from the 20,000 workers during the plant\u2019s heyday in the 1960s.\u00a0 Nevertheless, those 4,000 jobs are supplemented by hundreds more sub-contractors, and together these provide the demand for local small and medium businesses.<\/p>\n

What saved the Port Talbot plant was an agreement to implement neoliberal efficiency savings.\u00a0 Key among these was the sub-contracting of what we might think of as efficiency buffers \u2013 redundant capacity to cope with emergencies.\u00a0 For example, prior to the agreement, the steelworks employed a small army of fitters, electricians, welders and other skilled workers whose skills were only required when something went wrong.\u00a0 Instead of being paid a full wage \u2013 often for sitting around playing cards and drinking tea \u2013 they would be paid a retainer together with a set fee every time they were called out.<\/p>\n

Similar arrangements were in place in the railway industry in those days too.\u00a0 And I personally spent shifts playing cards and drinking tea as part of the spare train crews kept on standby for sickness cover and unforeseen emergencies.<\/p>\n

Whatever else neoliberalism was about, cutting out these \u201cinefficiencies\u201d lay at its heart.\u00a0 Companies were losing money paying people like me to sometimes sit around all day.\u00a0 And so, the redundancy process was enlisted to cut the workforce down to its bare minimum…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hogwash In the early 1980s, to Margaret Thatcher\u2019s annoyance, union reps and managers at the steelworks in Port Talbot agreed a strategy to save the plant.\u00a0 As a result, Port Talbot was spared the post-industrial blight visited upon most of Britain\u2019s ex-industrial towns.\u00a0 Now in private hands, and despite periodic crises, the steelworks employs some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[335,6996,4252,30926,30640,31360],"class_list":["post-60607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-free-markets","tag-neoliberalism","tag-oversupply","tag-supply-vs-demand","tag-the-consciousness-of-sheep","tag-tim-watkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60608,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60607\/revisions\/60608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}