Re: There's an interesting point about those industries being crap
"They were crap because they were crap"
Absolutely. And they were crap because of protectionist policies and piss-poor management which refused to listen to the unions and workers, resulting in them being alienated and surly (who can blame them).
Bug thumbs-up for pointing out the obvious about crap companies., This happens wherever there is a lack of real competition and they don't feel a need to keep their customers happy.
Where I grew up, "Made in Britain" was a general indicator of "badly made unreliable crap that's expensive to maintain and fix" - which is why when the market was opened up to Japanese cars in 1972, British cars went from 45% to 3% of market sales in less than 3 years.
The kind of mentality which went into 1960-70s-era british cars is alive and well in a number of areas thanks to management attitudes not changing as the people involved ended up in other industry sectors. Most notable is housing and railways - there's no real option to buy german or japanese made houses and whilst you can run german/french/japanese trains, the infrastructure is still operated and controlled by those old mentalities.
Bolshie unions happen when management is equally as bad, but there's never a call to abolish London Underground management and replace them with competent people(*), as one example. There are hundreds of unions in the UK and most of them work with companies for the benefit of all parties. I've seen union mediators tell particular staff that their claim doesn't have a leg to stand on and the company was right to fire them. This it happens more often than you might realise.
(*) LU is a particular example where management should have stood up and told Boris that night tubes are not possible, thanks to safety issues derived from maintenance requirements instead of forcing the unions to strike because of the same issues.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
