In 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell, I visited a frozen food factory in Grimsby, on the north-east coast of England. It was run by Birds Eye Wall’s, then owned by Unilever, and it had just won an award for industrial harmony.
The workers had agreed to job cuts and to work in teams, retraining and raising productivity in return for higher wages. Employees of Birds Eye in Kirkby, Merseyside, had rejected the same challenge and their factory was being shut.
Grimsby’s escape did not last. Unilever finally declared the factory too small and inefficient and closed it in 2005; the abandoned building later caught fire.
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