"John Cartmell" wrote in message
...
In article
ws.net,
:::Jerry:::: wrote:
Do you really think that paying ten people to do one mans work
was
efficient, that was British industry BEFORE the '80's!

That's what you were told. You obviously believed it. It was a lie.

So one man operating a CNC lathe or CAM manufacturing (and it's
predecessors) plant is not more economic than having ten people doing
the same work? You might not like the fact that countries like the
Japan were using such methods in the late '70's and thus selling
their products cheaper but you can't change the fact that they were.


I'm not talking about her vindictive approach to some unions but
her
realisation that UK industry was un economic.

Because it was very badly managed. It was changed to be extremely
badly
managed.

....and who were trying to tell the management how to manage?...


Re reading the Labour Manifesto of '79 I suspect that Callaghan
had come to
the same conclusion and would have used oil revenue to re
structure the
countries industry, if only he had gone to the country in '78 -
before the
'Winter of Discontent'...

Absolutely. But the 'Winter of Discontent' was almost 100% tabloid
fiction.

By that I take it that you are no more than about 30 years old (and
thus have no memory of that winter), or are you saying that all the
film that exists of locked grave-yards, rubbish in the streets and
various other 'problems' were just film sets used by the right wing
media (funny that, the media is always the opposite to what the
Government is at the time...)?!

The mainly successful attempts by the Labour (with Liberal)
government to
reduce the 'through the roof' inflation of the previous Tory
government had
hit especially hard on the lower paid. Letting go after a period of
restraint
is always particularly difficult but the government were (mainly)
managing it.
The Liberals bailed out of the coalition in order to reduce the
political cost
at the next election of being in government and the tabloids
scented blood.
Thatcher solved the very tricky and delicate problem of possible
re-inflation
by destroying industry and letting unemployment rip to way over 4
million
after being elected on a 'reduce unemployment' ticket.

That is your take on the facts, but if the UK was in such a good
state (economically) why did Callaghan lose? I'm not defending most
of what Thatcher did, in retrospect much was bad if not vindictive
[1] but I do think that the reconstruction of the British
manufacturing base (yes I do mean the cutting out of out-dated and
uneconomic work practises) was necessary and beneficial to 'UK
industry Ltd'.

[1] a lot of the current ills of 'society' can, IMO, be directly
linked back to many of Thatcher's values - was it not her who once
said that "their is no such thing as society", well there certainly
doesn't deem to be one today... :~(

The fact that many other countries are only now waking up to the
realities of (far eastern) 'competition' and that they will have to
re structure or die is surely proof that the UK has been one or two
steps ahead for the past twenty odd years.


Getting back to something close to uk.d.i.y. I worked at finding
jobs for
people in the building industry during the 70s and managed a
close-on 100%
success rate to get joiners, brickies, plasterers, H&V Engineers,
&c in work
at the end of a six-moth training course. Employment prospects
never got back
to that in the 80s and 90s - and house prices didn't go down
because that
'over-employment' had disappeared.


'Finding jobs', were they real jobs or were they created to keep
people off the dole?