The Scottish Development Agency yesterday held a press conference to announce the results of a survey of the 140 US manufacturing plants in Scotland. The attitudinal survey, rather pompously called US Corporate Excellence in Scotland was conducted for the Scottish agency by the economic and planning consultants, PIEDA, and looked exclusively at US plants, for an exclusively US readership – it is in effect a marketing tool to attract further US manufacturers to establish or expand plants in Scotland. The survey questioned senior managers on productivity and profitability performance, the main drivers of change affecting manufacturing in Scotland and how companies are adapting, the importance of 1992, and so on, and so on… It is the fifth such survey in the last 10 years and the Scottish Development Agency claims that the results will surprise many experts, particularly in the light of the Confederation of British Industry’s recent thoughts on the state of the UK economy. Indeed, the Scottish Development Agency spent a large proportion of the conference re-iterating how spectacular the results of the survey were – the only thing missing seemed to be the actual results themselves. The survey report contains umpteen bar charts which all look very pretty but contain little information of real use – percentages have been clumped together, so that it is impossible to establish the yearly rate at which US manufacturing is increasing in Scotland, or the relative increases in expansion of already esablished US plants against the set up of companies’ first Scottish plants. According to the survey, 98% of US plant managers in Scotland say they plan to expand or retain their level of investment there, nine out of 10 managers say Scottish operations are profitable or very profitable – though no breakdown of how many used the very prefix – and seven out of 10 US plants in Scotland report rising profitability over the period 1986-1990 though again, no year by year breakdown. And just in case any American firm is still hesitant about setting up in Scotland after browsing the report’s impressive figures, it would like to offer the reassurance that trade unions no longer pose a serious threat in this country and that the British striking disease is no longer a problem – unless you happen to be an automaker like Ford and want to establish a vehicle electronics plant in the UK: then you’re up against the luddite motor industry unions unable to agree among themselves so that the plant ends up being established in Spain. Otherwise, hardly any of the Scottish electronic plants are unionised.
