When you're looking for a job, you're looking for a job.
You don't make choices.
Some people do. Some very principled people
make a decision not to work in the arms industry.
But you go to a company
because you're going to get paid
and you're going to feed your wife and kids.
But then when you get settled, then you get more confident.
You say: Why am I doing this?
This is a story about when these workers livelihoods were threatened
and they came up with an alternative plan.
They expressed their great anxiety about the future of their company
and the prospects for employment.
And I said to them: Look, why don't you go do a corporate strategy
of your company
based on your own knowledge of the company,
of the equipment, of the skills, of the market available.
And they did.
And it's one of the most remarkable exercises
that's ever occurred in British industrial history.
We took the view that it was no good, just waiting until the problems were on us
and then whining to the government or to the TUC or whoever
that we want the right to work.
We thought that we have a very highly skilled, very competent
workforce, and we have the intelligence among ourselves
to devise or endeavor to solve the problems for ourselves.
Because it's a very small step to go from power generators on aircraft
to wind turbines.
A plan that's even more pertinent today.
And you'll see things in there,
cheap, efficient heating systems,
propulsion units, such as hybrid engines for motor vehicles
that uses the best characteristics of both the petrol and electric engines.
Power generating equipment.
Lucas Aerospace core Business almost was power generation
gas turbines to provide the electricity for aircraft.
So in the plan, there is a proposal for wind turbines.
An example of a product that came from ... actually wasn't one of our members.
It wasn't a union member in our office.
He said, I'm against more or less everything that you do,
but I really support this.
He'd worked on heat pumps and that kind of technology for a long time.
We actually developed a prototype heat pump powered by natural gas.
Well, the problem today, you make socially useful products.
And when we look at cutting back on defense, what could you do
with the skills that you've got with the capital that you've got?
What could you make if you weren't making that?
If that had been spent on mass transit, heating system, solar power,
wind generation, all of those sectors would provide more jobs.
And it all happened
40 years ago.
150 alternative products developed from the shop floor
for a more sustainable world.
These are ideas that were right, and it's just a question
of bringing them together to develop them into something that will really work.
We had four or five of the more technically minded people
actually sorting out, will this work, will it not?
People who actually design parts for aircraft that keeps aircraft in the air.
So they weren't airy fairy.
I mean, they knew what they were doing.
What is it that is tapped into the workforce.
And if you got people who had ideas, they wanted
their ideas to be doing as well!
And that was when the whole notion of the political climate we were in
was larger, because the government were the main customer of Lucas Aerospace.
But somehow there was a political definition of profit at work
that it was profitable to make arms paid for by taxpayers money,
but not profitable to make life saving equipment paid for by taxpayers money.
So there's a pure political definition of profit taking place there.
I think what I saw,
along with my colleagues around me was the world around us was not right.
The technology was not being used in the interests of ordinary working people,
the control of technology and where the money is put into scientific research.
It's okay to pour tens of millions of pounds,
if not billions, into researching
and developing and improving, say, a fighter's maneuverability by 2%.
That's okay.
And that always used to be done on a cost plus contract so the company could charge
what they want.
But oh, it's not profitable to keep an extra 3000 people a year alive
for want of kidney machines.
3000 people were dying each year for want of a kidney dialysis machine.
And Lucas already made this particular product,
but they were reducing the numbers they were making.
And at the same time, there was more of a need.
You're a worker as well as being part of the community.
I mean, that's the two things you can't just see yourself as a worker.
You go in there to serve a living,
but also you take into account you live in a wider society.
Your neighbors probably got a problem with the kidneys or whatever.
So, you know, there's a connection there.
And you see the various things that are going on.
You see about the environment, about the fact
that, you know, we're running out of oil, we're running out of oil.
And it was we had to look at other forms of motivating cars.
So, you know, you're not
you just haven't got this sort of set mind of a worker.
But you also once you get to a position where you're saying,
well, we haven't got enough.
They say we haven't got enough work doing this.
They wasn't getting the aerospace work then.
I think ultimately, if you're going to talk about
all the products, you're going to talk about something useful
because you're a person, you're a human,
you're affected by it all!
And whilst we were looking at the corporate plan in terms
of preserving our jobs, we were looking at society in a broader sense.
We wanted to broaden it out, and in many respects it broadened itself out.
He took his own path.
Energy.
The main area in energy was conservation of energy
and the storage of energy, particularly in housing.
So we developed designs
in building houses that were energy efficient.
Run in conjunction with the ideas that we have about developing systems
with local authorities to support people, with design input
in building their own houses and building in these energy conservation systems.
Then ordinary people who were unemployed
could be put to work building their own house,
and they would be designed in such a way as to be energy efficient, both in terms
of conserving the energy in the house and maintaining and collecting energy.
That would be for their use and their communities use.
Once they find out.
Let me know when you get a report.
You beat them all up.
You're trying to keep them on fire.
Roger
keep shootin',
keep shootin'.
We're in a period where oil prices had quadrupled.
It was just after yet another conflict in the Middle East.
So again, the political backdrop to the construction of the plan.
You couldn't actually do anything
without thinking of the energy consequences of it.
So the conservation of energy in the production process
and then the whole notion of built-in obsolescence,
which was a wastage of energy.
And Lucas Motors were pass musters of that
because they were designing motorcar components
for obsolescence.
Design meeting at Great King Street that Mike Taylor used to talk about
that the secondary market for spare windscreen wipers motors
was flagging, because they were lasting too long.
So they reduce the bearing area by 30% so the windscreen wiper motors
would wear out quicker. So then sell more on the spares market.
And the cost to the planet
in raw materials of the built-in obsolescence type manufacture,
which is still is, that things don't last
so they end up on the tape.
So you have to mine more scarce materials.
You have to fight and wage war over who controls the raw materials.
And there was a proposal to try and stop design for built-in obsolescence
and that things should be made in a fashion where they could be repaired
and the skills for repairing cars, washing machines, dishwashers
could be taught to perhaps younger people as a means of giving them a skill set.
The awareness of energy and repair,
rather than design from built-in obsolescence.
Young people searching for spare parts on this waste dump
wasn't exactly what Phil had in mind.
All this no doubt a profitable way to meet EU recycling targets.
One of the largest poisonous waste dumps
for throwaway Western goods.
Small change to what can be made on
the grander world of dumping grounds.
In the division where I worked,
the Engine Management Division,
they wanted just to concentrate on aerospace products
and didn't really get involved in industrial applications
of gas turbines.
And some of these gas turbines,
I think the G 2-20 was particularly suitable
for combined heat and power systems within communities
so that you could have the system, you know, again, under the heading
of energy, of energy conservation, using a gas turbine generator,
would provide heat and power for a local community.
If the town is in the city,
I realize that
you determine the community, then you look at the size of the power plant
that you need to do that the gas turbine develop the gas turbines.
It will give you power, electricity, it will give you your heating.
It will be all in one system.
And all you need is the switching in each house
to control the input into the house from that source
and then you can feed it off to the grid, what's left of it.
But it's a community thing.
The community have to be involved. They have to discuss it.
They have to know what's going on, the right to work to control it.
I mean, you've got to remember that all the systems of sewage, etc., etc.,
it all goes back to local authority.
I mean, not big business staff, the local authorities,
times like Birmingham in the 19th century.
So we're going back to that in the sense that
I used the phrase back-to-the-future sort of thing, that people control
in their own environments, controlling their own energy inputs and outputs and
paying for it, which they do,
whether it's big business running it or they're running it for their own use.
But the profits, if there are any for the community,
they're not for
whoever some French magnate that owns the power supply system!
It's democratizing power supply if you want.
I mean, I don't think it's just a question
of de-privatizing the companies.
I think they've got to go
one step further than that, not just back to the old electricity boards,
but to do something back in the communities where it all started from
in the first place.
I mean, if you think about the involvement of the community
setting up the old systems,
which diminishes the influence of the multinational power companies,
and it makes them
independent of them.
So they all have to be involved in the decisions.
They all have to be involved in how the system works.
They're creating jobs in their own particular economy.
And as a consequence of that, this is only one example of how
a civil society is being used for its own ends.
In the end of the day,
I suppose for its own profit, if you want to use that term.
So it's not just the power supply itself, it's the effect
it has on society.
I mean, you're taking on the big builders and all the rest of it.
You come up with an idea where a million unemployed people
can start building houses which are energy efficient and save on the costs.
The builders are not going to look up with great...
well you know, they're not going to have the enthusiasm for it!
You need thegovernment support,
finance, local authority, support finance.
But the big builders get that anywhere.
They get government supplies, they get local authority support
and the housing prices go through the roof,
and working people can't afford them!
We the same society and develop society in a fair and equitable way.
I mean, the system that's to say that that's you
that's then the thing to do with one another.
But we are a society and if we're going to look at work
and we ought to look at energy efficiency,
then we have to look at society as a whole.
And that's what we're about.
That's what Lucas Aerospace was about,
not Lucas Aerospace, but Lucas Aerospace, Joint Shop Stewards.
What about
after we'd
presented it to Lucas Aerospace Directors, they refused to meet us ever again,
rejecting the whole thing lock, stock and barrel,
including hybrid power technology for cars, including wind turbines.
The term that management
used to discredit that particular proposal for wind turbines was
it's in the realm of the brown bread and Sandals Brigade, where aerospace.
In the electronics department, every time we met the management,
they made it clear that they weren't interested in
any alternatives that were just operating the electronics on the aircraft side.
And they saw that as a future.
And I didn't want to know about anything out.
After the management reject of the corporate plan,
the combine felt it was necessary to demonstrate
that two or three of the products that we could afford to build
from our meager combined and support resources could actually be translated
into products, socially useful products that would have technical feasibility.
So with the assistance of the north east London Polytechnic
funding was obtained from, I think it was Rowntree's
which helped develop a hybrid power pack for a Hillman Imp motorcar.
And so they basically transplanted an electric drive system onto a Hillman Imp
and a control system to demonstrate the viability
of a hybrid drive.
Then I heard that Cadbury Trust
could make £60,000 available if we could set up a center
in the Midlands area.
I had that discussion with the University of Warwick.
They went to the Senate to discuss the idea of a a unit there,
the business school there.
But they got very clear links with Lucas and obviously they were
they were frightened of £60,000 worth of money.
It was, you know,
it's a fund something for three years.
In those days, it was a good thing there were people there who wanted
to respond to those sorts of initiatives and welcomed it.
But the bureaucracy or the management were very hesitant.
It was interesting to see what you were dealing with
and how they resisted it.
And in the end we got this agreement with the Polytechnic in Coventry
and that sets up the unit for development of alternative products.
And quite early on in the project and it was electric car
that was running around.
Well Electric Vehicle was a small truck actually.
It was running around in Coventry, you know, in the early seventies.
And then the open university
along with ourselves had a chart and we got a project going.
We actually developed a prototype gas powered heat pump powered by natural gas,
hitherto had been powered by electricity, which wasn't the most
thermal efficient way of doing it.
I actually built they actually built a gas powered heat pump
and Sheffield City Council became very interested in gas powered heat pumps.
And that interaction partly led to the inclusion of the concept
of socially use production in the Labor Group's manifesto.
The latest government report suggests
that this is one of the major means of conserving energy.
The company is still saying that that is not a viable product.
But we have intercepted one of the company's own market surveys,
which shows that the market for these
in the domestic sector by 1985 will be 255 million.
So nobody can seriously suggest that that's not viable.
Kind of multinational.
So the problem of where we go in with the environment,
they don't even ask the question.
They don't say, where is our product in our systems, take in the environment.
It's just will this make a profit?
If it will make a profit, then it's made.
We can't get the toxic emissions down like the lives of I do.
And I don't think Volkswagen, they're on their own there.
I mean, this is part of the pressure that comes on to management.
It happens in both industry.
But you look at what's happening in the Third World, I mean, it's really around is
the only way it's going to happen is by new ways of approach of society
and the way involving society in the way things happen.
As we've said in
the products that we've mentioned.
Here, was a group of shop stewards really advancing the argument
for sustainable agility in the seventies, a management dismissing it
and the cost to the planet shows the lack of responsibility.
The management displayed.
I think.
I think those fit in nature
like they couldn't solve the problem even if they wanted to.
Even if they decided, you know, tomorrow I want to make the world a better place,
because I would find that
they would lose their competitive edge
against other companies and other countries.
And and therefore, it is you know, they are trapped almost in
in having to do what share shareholders, if you like, are demanding of them
because
they are as vulnerable as everybody else in the capitalist system.
So so it wasn't about individuals.
It was about the system which operates in a particular way
in the brave new world.
Now, if we don't move now
and move very, very quickly,
both large and small companies like I think we would run a major risk
of losing competitiveness.
We still have time now to stay in this race.
If we run very hard now.
It was a philosophical view of the world
and the mentality of there's only one way.
And all we were doing at Lucas Aerospace was saying there are
alternatives to what you've been told, all you've got to do in your eyes.
And look at them
down can't be legislated for Google.
I think legislation can only be put in place.
It supports society where at the moment legislation supports
big business, supports the city, support banks.
The fact is they spend billions and billions and billions
to state governments,
which they pour into private companies.
That's okay.
All right.
We've got to put a few hundred thousand or a few million
into sort of mutual product.
No, that's the market.
I think we were
very challenging to system workers telling them what they should be making.
And if you think you can do that
with the entrenched power structures you're up against,
we are not naive.
What we want to do, they say, well, we'll go us money,
but right down to the shop floor and then it'll go up.
Obviously, you know, you turn the world on its head,
it's absolutely turning the world on its head.