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While changing skill requirements might serve as one explanation for the turnover in the labour force, it is worth asking why management in these firms chose not to retrain their existing workers to take on these new tasks, particularly as the study found that workers were almost universally willing to acquire the necessary skills through retraining and, in the few cases where allowed to do so, performed extremely well. The answer seems to revolve around two political motivations: the desire to reduce the unions’ presence on the shop floor (so as to give firms the freedom to impose flexible job descriptions and to generally use labour more flexibly), and the attempt to gradually purge from the workforce those workers with ‘memory’ of a unionized employment relation, to reduce the risk of future unionization of jobs outside the bargaining unit.