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In 1973, Owen's efforts came to an abrupt and traumatic halt in a bitter, five-week, factory-wide strike from which the company has never fully recovered. "It was pure hell," says Owen. "I couldn't live through anything like it again. For 18 months, issues were coming in at the rate of eight and twelve a day, mostly invented." The issue that finally triggered the strike was a management proposal to equalize the piecework pay system. Under the old system, wages for comparable work could vary by as much as 20% from department to department. "What they were trying to do," as Peach saw it, "was take money out of the higher-paid workers' pockets and give it to the lower-paid workers. In two years' time everybody would be together at the bottom. It became a real battle of undermining the union."
Even more objectionable than the proposed wage reform was the industrial-relations expert who was selected to negotiate it−Fred Straw. Peach describes Straw as "a hatchet man," and even John Owen concedes that he was a rather aloof, overbearing man who gave the unions the false impression that "shock troops of management were coming in to sort things out."
Whether the image of managerial shock troops was fantasy or not, it provoked a strike that cost the company almost $1.5 million. The piecework reform was dropped. Straw was transferred from Darlaston. The effort to centralize management control was abandoned for the more peaceful if ultimately unworkable status quo. Most important, the strike forcibly impressed the Owens with the limits of their power. Says David Owen: "We realized that paternalism was out, that the old gaffer-worker approach had become blurred. The old demarcations of upstairs/downstairs were out the window and well into the past. Coping with that change is still the biggest thing in front of us."
The victory was Doug Peach's, but he also paid a price. In the midst of the strike, he collapsed with an attack of angina pectoris. He was away from the factory for five months. During that time, his 34-year-old marriage to Hilda came near to breaking up. "I wouldn't have liked any of my lads to have followed me into the trade union movement," he says. "It made me for a number of years become a machine."
The personalities and issues involved do not fully account for the impasse reached in 1973. Rubery Owen is at root a closed world, fixed in an intricate pattern of habits, rivalries, loyalties and hatreds. One effect of this has been to make the factory all but immune to change from the outside. Another effect has been to accentuate the profound divisions within the factory. "Inside these walls is our Berlin," says Peach. And within these walls, Hilda Peach refers to the Owens simply and without emotion as "the other side."
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As a child, John Owen regularly visited the plant with his father on gala days. "At company Christmas parties, my father always played Santa Claus. Otherwise he always referred to it as 'the works,' and he must