One of India’s most successful and respected businessmen has made a blistering attack on the complacency of British managers as one of his companies announced plans to dismiss up to 1,500 people in the North East of England.
In an interview with The Times, Ratan Tata, an Indian tycoon who runs Tata Group, the biggest manufacturing employer in Britain, and who is also an adviser to David Cameron, compared Britain’s work ethic unfavourably with that of India.
He suggested that British managers did not “go the extra mile”, while those in India were working in “a war-like situation”.
The Mumbai-born businessman, 73, who was educated at Harvard, recounted his astonishment at the attitude of managers at the two flagship British companies, Corus, the steelmaker, and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), the car manufacturer, which he bought in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Yesterday Corus said that it was cutting 1,500 jobs in what unions described as a “devastating blow” to industry in the North East.
“It’s a work ethic issue,” Mr Tata said. “In my experience, in both Corus and JLR, nobody is willing to go the extra mile, nobody. I feel if you have come from Bombay to have a meeting and the meeting goes till 6pm, I would expect that you won’t, at 5 o’clock, say, ‘Sorry, I have my train to catch. I have to go home.’ Friday, from 3.30pm, you can’t find anybody in their office.”
In India, he added: “If you are in a crisis, if it means working to midnight, you would do it. The worker in JLR seems to be willing to do that; the management is not.”
At JLR “the entire engineering group would be empty on Friday evening, and you have got delays in product introduction. That’s the thing that doesn’t happen in China or in Indonesia or in Thailand or in Singapore.”
He was at pains to point out that things had changed. “The new management team has put an end to that. They call meetings at 5 o’clock; they have made it very clear that’s not on.”
However, he added that there was a “certain comfort level that comes from a country that has had good times”, suggesting that Britain and the US could expect to suffer a further dwindling of manufacturing bases unless their approach changed.
Yesterday the Tata group said that it was proposing to close or mothball part of its steelmaking plant in Scunthorpe, putting 1,200 jobs at risk, as well as shedding 300 jobs at sites on Teesside. The union said that the cuts amounted to 8 per cent of its British workforce.
Mr Tata is a member of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group, co-chairman of the UK-India CEO Forum, which meets at Downing Street, and one of the closest senior industrialists to Mr Cameron.
In the interview he lamented a lack of dynamism in industry, saying that Britain “needs a real push. It needs nationalism. The sort of spirit that comes during a war. It needs people really to want to see the UK sitting again, maybe not as a colonial power, but as an economic power.”
The comments immediately caused alarm in Westminster. “It is very disappointing given the commitment Tata has made in other areas of the economy,” Adrian Bailey, the Labour chairman of the Business Select Committee, said.
“As for working practices, I find it very surprising and disappointing because that has not been the case with workers at Jaguar Land Rover.”
Ian Murray, Labour MP and colleague on the committee, said: “I think the Government needs to reconsider whether he is a valuable person to have on the business council.”
David Frost, director-general of the British Chamber of Commerce, said: “That is not a world I recognise. I look at our members in the past three years and business owners and senior managers have been working all hours to get the job done. Nine-to-five is not the British culture.”
Keith Hazelwood, a GMB national secretary for manufacturing, said: “Surely it’s up to Mr Tata to make sure he employs the proper people, to make managers come up to the standards of the workers.”
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