Interesting write up on some turbulent times at Austin Rover…....
"On Monday 28 March 1983, 5000 car workers at the Cowley assembly plant voted to strike over the ‘washing-up’ time issue.
The men voted to walk out on after management tried to do away with ‘clocking off time’, whereby workers were allowed a total of six minutes on the day shift and nine minutes on the night shift to wash." http://www.aronline.co.uk/blogs/facts-a ... washed-up/
Aahh memories... I worked in a large engineering facility around that time. As a naive young manager, a worker (covered in grot from a particularly filthy job) would ask to go a few minutes early to "clean up". If you agreed this would happen a few more times ... a week of so later the troops would start knocking off early.
When you objected, the shop steward would bring out the "Custom and Practice" book. This book would list in detail all the instances when "clean up" time was allowed (but perhaps a little fuzzy on exactly why clean up was required). Once a practice had been recorded in the C&P book a few times it became an unalienable right of the worker which management would dispute at its peril...
Hence the reason many appropriate and reasonable requests were met not with NO - but HELL NO.
Luckily I had an ancient scheduler and an equally experienced job supervisor to guide me and protect me from the more egregious practices.
