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Ford
Closure: End of the Road for a Generation
By
Subroto Mukherjee
GlobalomNet
Media Service
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Ford
Dagenham construction 1931
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1,000,000th Cortina
airlifted from Dagenham
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The blow fell three years ago soon after revelations that Indian workers
at the plant were being racially abused by supervisors, and even assaulted.
The end of the assembly line
recently was the end of the road for a generation of Indian workers at the
Ford plant at Dagenham near London.
The last car rolled off the assembly line to loud cheers of defiance from
about a thousand workers still at the plant. The last car is expected to
go to a Ford museum; the three before that will go to charity.
The closure of car manufacturing at the plant marks the end of a chapter
for thousands of Indian immigrants. More than 10,000 workers were employed
at the plant and in supporting industry when it was in full production. At
peak as many as 40 per cent of the work force was Indian.
The blow fell three years ago soon after revelations that Indian workers
at the plant were being racially abused by supervisors, and even assaulted.
Ford managers flew in from the plant’s head office in Detroit. Within
weeks they announced closure of car production at the Dagenham plant.
“This is where we all came from Punjab in the sixties,” says Gurbux Singh,
who took voluntary retirement last year as redundancy loomed.
“So many people had worked in the transport business in Jalandhar
and Hoshiarpur before coming here,” he said. “Everybody knew even in
Punjab they will try for a job with Ford.”
Thousands found employment. They brought their families, told other
immigrants of jobs at the plant, they joined a string of ancillary
industries. It was an American plant that became a part of Indian life in
Britain.
Most of the thousand or so workers still remaining cheered loudly when the
last Ford Fiesta rolled off the line shortly before lunch hour. It was the
end of an era, not just for Indian migrants but for the car industry at
Dagenham.
The little town has been a nucleus for car production. The town, and tens
of thousands of car workers in nearby London had lived off the plant. The
plant at Dagenham built some of Ford’s most famous models, including the
Prefect, Popular, Consul, Cortina and Sierra.
The factory opened 71 years ago. It saw off generations of cars, about 11
million in all. It will now become a centre for production of diesel
engines. But production of diesel engines could not employ all the workers
there were. Only a fraction managed to switch jobs to the new production.
Workers have been leaving the plant over the past three years. Now another
1,100 jobs will go with the end of car production.
“It is just very very sad,” said Paramjit Dhindsa, who had worked at the
plant for 20 years. “We were making good cars, they were selling well, and
we were doing it cost effective”, he said. “They just handled personnel
problems by closing down the car plant itself.”
Union convenor Keith Gould, 58, said after the last car rolled off that
the feelings among workers ranged from “disappointment to disbelief, to
anger and panic.”
Ford chairman Ian McAllister said in a statement: “It is sad that car
production is ending after 71 years. But it also marks a new era in that
Dagenham is now set to become
Ford’s global centre of excellence for diesel engine manufacture.”
He said: “Together with our plant at Bridgend, Ford in Britain will be
producing one in four Ford engines used globally.”
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