My first entry into the industry was in 1977. Up until then I had been a career civil servant at the Department of Employment, but was seconded to industrial relations at British Shipbuilders. I jumped at the chance to gain some industrial experience. Presently, my job was really the Director of Industrial Relations in charge of industrial relations policy with responsibility for negotiations, pay, conditions and later, redundancy policy. I was still technically on the books of the Department of Employment, but my salary was paid by British Shipbuilders.

From my end of it we were dealing in a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth way with the implications of the Incomes Policy of the Government. What we saw in the industry was this extraordinary set of 168 negotiating groups. Overlaid on top of this was Stage Three of the Incomes Policy, which set a ten percent limit on pay rises which could be got around through productivity schemes. I found myself dealing with the chief executives and industrial relations directors of the yards who were trying to explain to us the legitimacy of some pretty bogus productivity schemes to get round the incomes policy. We had to take all these deals to the Department of Trade and Industry. It was my first direct dealings of industrial relations, and I was astonished and horrified at the distance, running through the industry, between the management and unions. We counted some twenty-four unions in the Confederation that we had to deal with. Many of them were pretty politically motivated.

What we were trying to do was to devise a strategy, which gave us the best chance of settling the industry down, of getting more peace than strife, of trying to establish a framework of order on the industrial relations scene which would give us a better chance of improving productivity, and therefore of keeping our market share. We recognised that we were going to be driven to reducing manning, whether for efficiency reason or because the work just was not there, and so we had to devise a redundancy package that would enable us to slim the industry down without outright warfare. I think, in some ways, we were extraordinary successful in that this whole process could have gone badly wrong. We had a centralised wage negotiating structure within eighteen months.