If you walk round the perimeter of the Ford factory at Dagenham, past the miles of pale blue fencing and men in blue boiler suits and doorways hissing and clanking, you may notice something about the windows. Not just the smart, smoked glass of the company offices, which perfectly frames the suits and busy smiles and mid- morning coffees, or the view into the engine plant, which proudly reveals a gym for employees - but a series of smashed panes, unrepaired and recent-looking, along the side of one of the more minor buildings.
These holes are quite a few feet up, and small and jagged, as if objects have been thrown. It may be nothing - Dagenham is a rough and ready town, with the odd bad lad and vandal - except there is a jarring detail. The knocked-out glass splinters are on the ground outside the car factory. The window-breaker was on the inside.
At Dagenham, this sort of thing is not supposed to happen any more. In the 70s, Ford's biggest British factory may have been famously unruly, with walkouts and wildcat strikes and pay disputes that jolted govern ments, yet until very recently, at least officially, it was close to becoming a model. There are productivity improvements and `partnership contracts' between management and unions. There are team meetings and picnic tables for the workers. There is new investment: £300m, announced this summer, to increase annual production and help `regenerate' the town as a whole. There is a redesigned Fiesta being built, to be launched at the London Motor Show in a fortnight. There are plans to set up a University for Industry at the plant, in collaboration with the government. Last week, Ford gave £7,500 to plant trees in Dagenham's school playgrounds.
It all seems perfectly New Labour: a well-intentioned corporation, a cooperative workforce, a source of jobs and profits on the poorer side of London. Except that yesterday morning, straight after their 10.30am tea break, for the first time in 10 years and without any signal from their unions, the entire assembly line day-shift walked out. `The whole plant is just sickened at the management,' said one of the shopfloor organisers. He did not think everyone would be returning to work today.
Last week was almost as turbulent. Just as Tony Blair was telling his party conference that `the class war is over', production stoppages were rippling through Dagenham, several a day, sometimes a few minutes long, sometimes lasting hours. Shopfloor meetings were being held, up to a hundred strong. Cars were rolling off the assembly line unfinished. Supervisors were being `heatedly' confronted. Ultimatums were being issued. A strike ballot was being voted for.
Out of Ford's towering blue sheds, allegations are pouring: of assaults and bullying by foremen, acrimony over hours and pay, racial taunts and tensions, smashed windscreens and sit-downs, even a `mini riot' among the new-model Fiestas.
Last Wednesday, an Asian shop steward, Jaswir Teja, was reportedly `forcibly pushed' by a supervisor while talking to a fellow Asian worker about insults they had received. The Thursday before that, an industrial tribunal heard details of the Dagenham treatment endured by another Asian employee, Sukhjit Parma: `Paki' scrawled on his pay packet, protective clothing refused while he was oil-spraying, confinement in a `punishment cell', and graffiti snarling from a factory wall - left undisturbed for two weeks - that he would be murdered like `nigger Lawrence'. Such barbarities, says Bill Morris, the general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU), one of the main unions at Dagenham, are `the very tip of the iceberg'. Ford maintains that racism is not a `major problem'.
Recent history would seem to support him. Three years ago, Ford was forced to offer compensation to four black Dagenham workers, after recolouring their faces white in advertising photographs. Two years ago, Ford paid £70,000 to seven more of the plant's non-white employees, who had accused the company of denying them better-paid jobs as Dagenham truck drivers. As a press officer at the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) puts it: `We have had traffic with Ford over the last few years.' This week, the Dagenham unions will tell the factory's managers that they have asked the CRE to investigate racism at the plant again.
Yet the precise causes and scale of all this have remained unclear. Ford will only admit that `a number of employees' have been involved in `incidents' that are `work-related'. Dagenham has 9,000 workers. It occupies several square miles. Some of its buildings are car journeys apart; some can barely be glimpsed from the outside world. Since the current trouble began, the compound has been off-limits to journalists. `We don't allow visits while pay talks are going on,' says a Ford spokeswoman, `so that our employees don't have any reason to complain about distracting visitors.' She pauses. `We don't want any niggles. We like to keep things quiet . . . We tend to keep things between us and the people involved. This is the way we have always handled things.'
There have not been weeks of pickets or placards at the factory gates. There is no such focus for a protest: just endless entrances and car parks, watched by security guards, where the car workers - mostly men in their 30s and 40s, with lined faces and, it seems, friends of many races - walk quickly in and out. Questions are not generally encouraged.
According to Ford's latest Equal Opportunities Report, almost 41% of Dagenham's `hourly personnel', or shopfloor workers, are from ethnic minority groups. `Individuals are treated equitably and consistently,' reads the company's most recent annual report, `regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs and nationality.' Ford says it exercises `zero tolerance' towards racism.
Not everyone at Dagenham accepts this. At the local branch of the TGWU, which is painted in the company colours but has tight, frustrated doodles on the blotting pads in its conference room, the phrase `equal opportunities' tends to be accompanied by a frown. `The company's not doing enough,' says Steve Riley, a convenor in the assembly plant. `When it comes to race issues here, Ford has let them go to an industrial tribunal, taken the bad publicity, and then played it all down.' He has been requesting a meeting on the local implications of the Macpherson report on Stephen Lawrence for over six months.
Inside the Dagenham compound, there is one building in particular that could have lessons to learn from it. The engine plant is deep down a private road, right at the heart of the complex, a hugely-extended shed with roofs like the teeth of a saw. Along one wall, a big bright banner hangs, reading: `Dagenham Engines For The World.' Almost 98% of its supervisory and senior staff are white. According to Riley and others, racism has been stewing there for decades. During the 50s and 60s, it was the Irish workers who suffered `banter' and the worst assignments. In the early 80s, when large numbers of black employees had been hired, there were professional bigots at work: two foremen who handed out racist literature and recruited white workers into far-right parties.
Ford drew up an equal opportunities policy to combat racism but it did not control some elements on the shopfloor. It certainly did not do much at the engine plant for Sukhjit Parma. `It's not like a civil society in there,' he says. `It's like street gangsters, like you see in films.' When he threatened to complain, he was told by a fellow worker: `Ford can't protect you in the car park.' When another minority employee was assaulted, 30 people saw the fingermarks on his neck afterwards. Only one witness came forward.
Parma says these attacks are `still happening'. Not all of this can be blamed on Ford: the racists, union officials concede, control parts of the union structure in the engine plant. Parma's own shop stewards refused him any support.
The workers in the engine plant are powerful. They control the truck fleet that delivers parts to all other parts of the factory. They, more than any other group, can bring it to a halt in an instant.
Ford will not comment on allega tions about specific parts of the complex. But, across its factory as a whole, it does seem that profitability and `partnership' may not be completely compatible. For a host of reasons beyond racism, Dagenham is getting harsher. There are far too many European car plants; the future, it is agreed by unions and bosses across the continent, will mean fewer workers, working harder.
More immediately, British demand for cars is slackening, weakened by the row over high prices and a less car-friendly government. Dagenham is currently on `short-time working': building vehicles only four days a week. `There's a hell of a lot of uncertainty,' says a shopfloor source. `People don't believe the assurances they hear. Everything is taken as a potential slight.'
Even Ford's press releases sound fretful. They announce `continued cost efficiencies', and `agreed performance milestones', and `more flexible and lean operating practices'. It is not that far from here to the term the unions increasingly use: `bullying'. As the company's demands bear down on the factory, so the foremen, it is widely said, are growing more aggressive towards their subordinates of all races. `They're in your face all the time,' says one worker. `Putting pressure on you to increase your output, threatening that you'll be off-pay. There are a lot of people on a short fuse.'
And then there are the tricky new cars to build. Fresh models always give car factories teething troubles; at the start of last month, before the current unrest became public, problems fitting the new Fiesta bumpers jammed the assembly line for a day. Dagenham may be less patient with such setbacks than Ford's continental factories: the company's British workers have the longest hours. They are currently arguing for their first reduction since the early 80s, and an above-inflation pay rise.
Perhaps Dagenham is doomed. It has made Fords since 1931, and old factories are almost impossible to modernise completely. The plant's labour relations may be the same. This decade, thanks to a daily conveyor belt of meetings between unions and management, big stoppages had been reduced to almost zero. But now they're back, it seems, because one aspect of shopfloor conditions has been beyond modification. As Riley puts it: `Ford are good at partnership as long as it's to do with pure business.'
Tony Blair could take note. Then again, he could just point at Ford's Dagenham neighbours. To the north, there are miles of semi-detached houses, gardens clipped and proud, estate cars most likely paid for by wages at Ford. To the west, there is a wasteland of wrecking yards, defeated buildings, and smashed and gutted cars. A `model' factory is probably better than none.
