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List of contents
Part One: Introduction 1.Introduction: Studying Closures (David Bailey and Gill Bentley) 2. Dealing with Shocks (Jonathan Cook) Part Two: The Automotive Industry 3. Restructuring of the European Automotive Industry (David Bailey, Gill Bentley and Stuart MacNeill) 4. The Canadian Auto Industry (Jim Stanford) 5. Restructuring in the US Auto Industry (Tom Klier and James Rubinstein) 6. Australia: Closure of Mitsubishi (Andrew Beer) Part Three: MG Rover Closure 7. The decline of the West Midlands Auto Cluster (Jason Begley and Tom Donnelly) 8. A History of Longbridge (Dan Coffey and Carole Thornley) 9. Rover under BMW Rule (David Bailey and Alex de Ruyter) 10. Who killed MG Rover? (Matthias Holweg and Nick Oliver) Part Four: The Impact of Closure 11. Impact on Workers (Caroline Chapain; David Bailey and Michelle Mahdon) 12. Trading Places: A Changing Labour Market and the Precariousness of Work (Alex De Ruyter and David Bailey) 13. Different Landscapes, Different Lives: the voice of MG Rover Workers (David Bailey, Gill Bentley, Alex de Ruyter, Stephen Hall and Caroline Chapain) Part Five: The Policy Response 14. Role of the Task Force (Gill Bentley, David Bailey and Alex De Ruyter) 15. The Local Impact and Response (Stephen Hall) 16. Reordering the Supply Chain (David Bailey and Gill Bentley) 17. Support for ex-workers (Gill Bentley, David Bailey and Alex de Ruyter) Part Six: Reflections 18. Reflections: Policy Lessons for dealing with Closures (David Bailey, Gill Bentley, and Alex De Ruyter)
About the author
David Bailey is Professor of Industrial Strategy at Aston Business School, Birmingham United Kingdom
Gill Bentley is in the Department of Management at the University of Birmingham, UK
Summary
In May 2005, MG Rover’s car manufacturing plant in the UK’s second largest city, Birmingham went into administration with the loss of 6,300 jobs and with far reaching effects across the supply chain. This was the largest mass scale redundancy in the country since British Steel, twenty years before.
The impact on the community was far reaching and the UK Government sought to determine a response at the national, regional and local level while a Task Force was set up to look into ways of helping workers and their families deal with and come to terms with the effects of the closure.
This book analyses the impact of the closure of the Longbridge plant at all stages, drawing comparisons with similar events in the Canadian, Australian and American auto-industries while analysing the policy response and effort of retraining undertaken at the local and national levels.
