From Socialist Worker, No. 108, 8 February 1969, pp. 2–3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
THE SHIPPING correspondents of the national press have paid for their free cruise from Las Palmas on the new Queen Elizabeth II by saying unanimously that the cruise liner ‘will be a great [word missing]’.
Now it is the turn of the labour correspondents to blame the delays on the QE2 on the workers.
One by one, the stories of ‘mass theft’ and ‘inexcusable delay’ are finding their way into print.
From Clydeside workers comes a rather different story. They do not deny that a certain amount was taken from the ship, or that, wherever possible, jobs were ‘made to last’.
Working-class Clydeside has grim memories of unemployment, and a healthy contempt for the frivolous waste of the luxury liner.
The difference between the glitter of the liner and the squalor in which the men who build it are forced to live is one of the crudest contradictions in capitalism and the workers do not hold back from snaffling whatever they can.
The story of delay and incompetence which surrounds the QE2, however, has little to do with the workers. Three points in particular emerged from a long conversation with joiners who worked on the ship, none of which are likely to be brought to our attention by the national press.
To start with, this was the first ship built on the Clyde which was ‘all maronite’.
Ever since two Greek hulks caught fire in New York harbour some years ago, the American government has insisted that all new ships should be lined with fire-proof maronite. Their insistence on this brittle material is not entirely unrelated to the huge American investment in Cape Asbestos, who produce it.
The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders therefore decided that the QE2 should be lined throughout with maronite. They had not reckoned on the fact that soon after work started, asbestosis, a fatal cancer caused by dust from asbestos materials like maronite was classified as an industrial disease.
The TUC doctor at once insisted that maronite should not be cut unless by a covered saw or with a vacuum cleaner to remove the dust.
The employers were forced to abide by this ruling, but neither they nor their subcontractors were prepared to pay for more than a very few cleaners and saws.
John Browns (one of the firms in UCS) had two saws, which, because of their own needs, they banned from the contractors.
Tom Goldie, a joiners’ steward explained what this situation meant:
‘About five times a day, we’d have to cut maronite, and this meant carrying a big slab of the stuff about four decks up to the saw.
‘There was always a long queue waiting to use it, and invariably while you were standing there a gaffer would say "Get lost and come back in half an hour".
‘Often, you’d come back to find exactly the same situation all day. You could waste about three hours a day just waiting to cut a bit of maronite.’
Vacuum cleaners, too, were in constant demand, and there were no more than 30 for the use of 550 joiners on the ship. Hundreds of hours were wasted in queues for cleaners.
A second big delaying factor was the need constantly to have things ‘looking smart’ for the ‘walk-rounds’ of the ship by the UCS bosses, or, worse still, for the directors of Cunard. Lord Mancroft, who has been complaining about the ship’s delay recently, was a regular visitor, with his wife and family, of course.
Before such visits, the foremen all over the ship would blurt out orders to put up panels with only two screws and clear passages by any stop-gap method that came to hand.
Invariably, after such walk-rounds, the piecemeal work would have to be dismantled and the work done all over again, with the loss of countless hours.
One of the most sinister, and unexplained, reasons for the chaos in the management’s labour planning towards the end of the QE2 building was an agreement signed with the finishing trade unions on September 2, 1968.
This agreement stated that any worker employed for a continuous period of nine months by UCS would be entitled to a minimum of two years’ redundancy pay.
Many of the finishing trade workers started on the boat last March and April and would have been entitled to substantial redundancy pay if they were still working by last December.
Accordingly, from November 19 a series of panic sackings took place – noticeably of 500 joiners.
About 100 of the joiners were re-employed a week later, and more still before the ship left Greenock. Some of the men were working on the ship all the way to Las Palmas and back, and are still on her now at Southampton.
Had these men been allowed to work uninterrupted, without the sackings, the finishing work would have been completed weeks ago.
As it is, however, the management were able to save about £[figure missing] ½m in redundancy pay, then turn round and and blame the workers for the delay!
Last updated on 26 October 2020