Having narrowly avoided a strike over pay, BL found itself back in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. It all came to a head on 21 November 1980 and the root cause was Metro seat production.
Discontent, which had been rumbling among the 130 seat assemblers on the day shift for weeks, ended in a strike on the preceding Thursday. The management had been pressing unsuccessfully for output to keep pace with the big demand for the new car and claimed that a few seat assemblers were refusing to work properly so that the day shift was achieving only 80 per cent of its target output compared with the night shift’s 98 per cent. It said the disparity between shifts with identical manning made nonsense of the day shift’s claim that it required more workers. As a result the Metro production line was stopped.
Angry groups of Metro workers stormed through the Longbridge plant, smashing windows and doors in protest at the management’s stopping production of the new car. The plant was soon at a standstill. The trouble occurred when 500 assembly workers were laid off for the second time in a week because of the shortage of car seats.
Their colleagues had refused to unload seats from an outside contractor brought in as a result of the dispute involving Longbridge seat assemblers. Within minutes of the track being stopped, workmen began to storm through the plant, hurling car components through windows; knocking over racks of parts and terrifying female staff in adjoining offices.
it seemed normal to have something break almost weekly. A steering rack retaining bracket shearing off in a Motorway contraflow was the final straw.
