Like Beachboy's comment on the hourly paid staff at the Commer and Bedford factories in Boscombe Rd., I was told the same by a collegue of mine - now working at the Vauxhall warehouse on Toddington Road. They would literally go to the factory that paid the best rate on the day, that being Rootes or Vauxhall..
And as for workforce, build quality, unions, strikes, I'm pretty sure the practice of hourly paid staff has to take a large part of the blame for all that. Fair enough, you get big orders in and need to "up" the tempo on the production line to manufacture the vehicles in greater numbers, but the way I have understood it this hinged to a large degree on staff which was hired in on the day, more or less. If you keep your salaried workforce at a minimum headcount and a larger part of the forkforce is "casual" staff, surely this could be a recipe for disaster.
I know that the car manufacturing industry still uses this practice (definitely at several GM plants, if not to a large degree at plants in Europe - to my knowledge at least).
And the big question "Where did it all go wrong?" I suppose has as many answers as you'd like it to have. But I have heard countless stories from my GM collegues here in Norway who have been with the company for a good few years, and they tell me of (export) Vauxhalls being received with disc brakes fitted to one side of the vehicle while the other side was fitted with drum brakes, packed lunches welded in between outer and inner wing (smelt so rotten that they couldn't understand what it was, and vehicle ended up as a buy-back, and the packed lunch was found when they decided to dismantle the vehicle 100%), fields parked full of Vivas with no front end - as the engine plant was on strike.. I could go on, but being at the receiving end of all this mess, no wonder the exports dried up after a while.
All of which is a shame, because Vauxhall - as good an example as any - enjoyed great success as they were better value than Opel cars over here, due to higher equipment levels and more aggressive pricing policies, and were even outselling their German counterpart in periods in what was a very established "Opel country". But all of that helps very little when the brand is left to bleed for years, that being industrial actions, low morale amongst the workforces, lack of investment in the product (Bedford trucks being a prime example of that..) which eventually lead to costomer at the other end simply walking away.
As for BL and Rootes/Chrysler, they really didn't fare any better at all, for all the same reasons. But where Vauxhall had (has) a big owner who could take a beating and eventually got things right (although at a high price for both the company and for Britain), the others did not. Hence a Linwood plant being derelict for years, an old Dunstable plant eventually being "redeveloped", as well as countless others.
That said, I too love the staircase on that link
http://http://www.urbexforums.co.uk/showthread.php/3015-Linwood-Car-Plant-Scotland-2008
