A GROUND-breaking 35-hour working week efficiency deal to save Rover's biggest UK plant at Longbridge, Birmingham will kick-start a renewed campaign to win a similar hours reduction across the engineering industry.
The deal is due to be revealed soon after weeks of negotiations sparked when German owner BMW warned that the Longbridge complex employing 14,000 was at risk because of ''completely unacceptable losses''.
It involves a development programme of #1.5bn, some 2500 redundancies, which will be managed on a voluntary basis, and a staged reduction from a 37-hour working week to 36 and then 35 next year.
Unions are jubilant that Longbridge has been reprieved and that BMW is effectively introducing German levels of investment and working conditions.
Pay parity is not an issue at present, although there will be no earnings reduction for working fewer hours other than that caused by the abolition of overtime payments, which in current depressed market conditions is not an issue.
Like earlier agreements covering Peugeot's UK workforce at Coventry and those employed at Rover's new Hams Hall engine plant near Longbridge, employees will be expected to accommodate peaks and troughs with extra hours ''banked'' and taken off
during quieter periods.
The abolition of overtime pay is expected to herald a completely new culture to that which saw car workers put up with relatively low basic rates in the knowledge that earnings could be boosted by
regular overtime.
However, unions can be expected to press for parity between Rover workers and their German counterparts, who earn in the region of 30% more, once productivity is comparable. Such cross- border comparisons will become easier from next year when 11 EU states, but not the UK, join the common currency.
BMW has been pressing the Government for assurances that the UK will join the single currency at the earliest opportunity and is expected to seek a #200m package of UK and EU aid to help defray the cost of the Longbridge development plan.
In addition to ensuring that Longbridge is tooled up to produce the new Mini, the MG sports car and a new medium-sized saloon, the deal will also put pressure on Ford, Nissan and Toyota to concede reductions in their 39-hour working weeks - the longest in the industry. All other motor manufacturers and the vast majority of engineering companies operate on a 37-hour week basis.
It will also help the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions resurrect its aggressive 35-hour week campaign that broke the 39-hour
barrier in 1990.
Next week, the CSEU ''strategy committee'' will meet for the first time since the 1990 campaign to consider how best to use the #12m ''war-chest'' to further the original aim of a 35-hour week.
Engineers in Germany, France and Italy already enjoy a 35-hour week although that barrier is currently under attack from Europe's largest union IG-Metal which is pressing hard for a 32-hour week.
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