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By 8:30, John Owen has left Four Ashes, a 16-acre estate near the pleasant village of Knowle, 25 miles from Darlaston. The rambling, rose-covered "cottage," which Owen bought three years ago for $73,000, has a main section that dates from the 16th century. It is surrounded by spacious lawns, well-tended flower beds, a small pond and a paddock for Granby, the family pony. Later in the day the Owens' two oldest children−Rebecca, 8, and Sarah, 6−will receive riding lessons from their handsome blonde mother Elizabeth, 33, John's stepcousin as well as wife, the adopted daughter of his Uncle Ernest Owen. Now Owen, who has the tall (6 ft. 4 in.) athletic frame of a man once celebrated for playing rugby for England, packs the girls into his red Jaguar convertible with their younger brother Simon, 4, for the ride to their private day schools. After dropping them off, he continues driving through countryside that remains green with grazing pastures right up to the area bordering Darlaston. Like many towns in the Midlands, Darlaston resembles the fictional Coketown of Charles Dickens' Hard Times: "It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black ..."
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The difference between the fiction of Coketown and the reality of Darlaston is that "you saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful." At Rubery Owen, an average workday seems more like a raucous political convention−or a cinema verite version of the 1959 Peter Sellers movie, I'm All Right, Jack. Shop stewards and managers alike frequently spend half of their day on labor disputes, but because the men do not actually leave the plant, these countless lost hours are not even logged among the 70,000 man-days the company now loses a year. "It's like a holiday camp here," says Michael Peach, 29, a press setter operator and Doug Peach's second son.
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In the steel-storage department, a dispute over what to pay the driver of a side-loader truck has bogged down at the worker, foreman and department-supervisor levels. Doug Peach enters the negotiations at the fourth stage of a ritualized dispute procedure that calls for as many as seven steps leading up to John Owen's office. The difference in question is $5 a week. At a parley in the manager's office, Peach is told that another Rubery Owen plant pays the lower rate ($87.55 a week).
"That has nothing to do with us," says Peach. "More bloody fools them." "We have two men who are prepared to drive it," says the manager. "That's fine," says Peach, "as long as we get the pay right. In the meantime, that machine will stay in that corner."
The meeting ends formally with one more failure to agree passed up to the next higher level. "We have hundreds of little incidents every week," says another manager. Only three of the