8 March 1975 Ailing British manufacturer is taken over by a workers’ cooperative
Warren Beatty in Shampoo (1975).
Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.com
The home-made banners on the wall outside the Meriden motorcycle factory continued to shout their message yesterday. “Triumph,” they said, “stays at Meriden, where the legend was born.” The difference is that, instead of the cold defiance which the words have represented for the past 18 months, they now state the facts of the situation.
Triumph is staying at Meriden — at least for the time being — following the success of the workers’ cooperative in being allowed to buy the plant from the former owners, Norton-Villiers-Triumph. After the signing ceremony in London on Thursday, when the business passed legally into the hands of its workers, the cooperative yesterday began to face up to the cold reality of running a factory for an industry which is also fighting for its life against Japanese competition.
There were boilers to be stoked, machines to be prepared, and the 300 workers who have stayed to fight for the survival of the plant, had to be fully briefed on their new role as active participants in a business that almost died in September, 1973. Since then, all have taken their share of the continuous picketing through which the Meriden workers have kept a firm grip on the factory and maintained their occupation.
It has meant two long winters at the gates and some bitterly cold nights when shelter and warmth came from a home-made hut and a brazier that burned continuously. A tradition grew up around the brazier; the Meriden workers swore that it would never be allowed to go out until the factory became theirs. Yesterday they awoke to the fact that now the factory is theirs: it will in any case, need a permanent security guard. The brazier burns on.
The legend of Triumph and Meriden is based on the sincerely-held conviction among the workers that, no matter how badly dented the British motorcycle industry may be as a result of Japanese market penetration, they still make the finest motorcycles in the world. Many Triumph owners share the belief; more than a few have made the trek to Meriden during the workers’ occupation to have their machines repaired (usually free of charge) or simply to pledge their support.
But after 18 months of picketing, unemployment pay, and little else but hope, there are no rich pickings at the end of the line for the Meriden workers. The £4.95 millions which Mr Tony Benn has agreed to put into the project is a loan which the cooperative must begin repaying in 1979. Meanwhile, it will be asked to find only the interest, although interest in this case means regular instalments of £42,000, the first one of which falls due in about a year.
This means that the prospects of the cooperative being able to share profits among its “beneficiaries” (as the workers are legally termed) are remote, even if the business does well.
A common flat-rate wage will be fixed by the elected leaders of the cooperative but this is likely to have a ceiling of about £50 a week, modest enough by the standards of the Midlands engineering industry.
What then was the battle of Meriden about? Certainly not money, for there is little enough, in spite of what appears to be handsome Government aid. “It was about the right to work and to draw attention to the injustice of a situation in which a viable factory such as this can be chopped down for reasons which are nothing to do with its workers,” said a spokesman of the cooperative yesterday.
The viability of the factory was always a hotly-contested point between the cooperative and Mr Dennis Poore, the chairman of NVT who claimed it was losing £4 millions a year. The workers blamed the management for this. They now have the chance to show whether they can do better.
Their method will be to create a two-tier management structure with a “supervisory board” to make policy decisions. This will include eight elected shop-floor representatives (one from each union in the plant), a Government nominee, and two other external members — one representing business interests outside the plant, the other to represent trades union interests.
Day-to-day running of the plant will be in the hands of a “management board” made up of departmental heads, probably elected by the workers themselves. Meriden’s immediate task is to get its plant rolling again as quickly as possible. Assembly lines and machinery have been carefully maintained in readiness for the day when the workers could launch their own business but it will take a weekend of last-minute preparations to ensure that the plant can produce, next week, the first “cooperative motor-cycle” in the industry’s history.