Hsir 18 (29-3)

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HSIR  ( AUTUMN ) ‒
Apprentice Strikes in the

Twentieth-Century UK Engineering
and Shipbuilding Industries
Paul Ryan
‘Was it serious? I don’t know. It certainly had serious consequences.’1
The lead story in the Manchester Evening News on 29 April 1960, under
the headline ‘Apprentices Storm Works: Singing 700 Hold Up Traffic’,
reported that 300 yelling apprentices had just scaled the walls of the
Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) factory in Trafford Park and
brought out 200 younger colleagues from the firm’s apprentice school.
The factory’s gates had been locked after a decision at a lunchtime
meeting to join a strike that had started in Scotland nine days before.
An apprentice delegate from Glasgow, one of two who had travelled by
motor-cycle to gather support, denied that the march was ‘communist
inspired’. He claimed that ‘the only time the apprentices get a rise is
when they strike’. A 700-strong group, accounting for half the factory’s
complement of apprentices, then marched off to raise support from
nearby factories, sending two strikers on bicycles to do the same at the
more distant Mather and Platt works.
Several attributes of these events are worthy of note. First, work-
places with so many apprentices could still be found then. Second, the
carnival-like atmosphere evoked the historical apprentice traditions of
larking about and rioting in public. Third, the political attributes of the
strike were controversial. For example, a Scottish cleric claimed that it
had been organized by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP) and
supported by a ‘Trotskyist’ body.2 Fourth, the 1960 movement was
classed, in terms of working days lost, as the largest industrial dispute
of the year. Finally, the strike precipitated a substantial pay rise for all
young males in the engineering and shipbuilding industries.
1. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (Vintage Books: 2000), p. 69.

2. Rev. W. MacIntyre, organizer of industrial chaplaincies for the Church of
Scotland, (Aberdeen) Evening Express, 20 April 1960.
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2 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS 
The 1960 dispute was far from unique. Nine strike movements were
launched by engineering and shipbuilding apprentices between 1910
and 1970. They typically started in engineering, in either Glasgow or
Manchester, and then spread to shipbuilding and to the other city, sub-
sequently to other northern metalworking centres, and occasionally to
the Midlands and the South as well. They lasted on average around a
month, drawing in many thousands of young people for an average of
nearly two weeks apiece.
This apparently prominent feature of the industrial relations
landscape has remained obscure. Although the movements form part
of the official strike record, and particular ones have been discussed in
detail, primarily by social historians,3 the attention paid to them in the
literatures on industrial conflict and vocational training has remained
marginal.4 This paper has three objectives: to view the movements as a
3. N. Branson and M. Heinemann, Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (Weiden-

feld and Nicolson: 1971), pp. 114–15; R. Croucher, Engineers at War
(Merlin: 1982), pp. 45–57, 123–31, 230–9; J. E. Cronin, Labour and Society
in Britain, 1918–79 (Batsford Academic and Educational: 1984), pp.
108–9; W. Knox, ‘“Down with Lloyd George”: The Apprentices’ Strike of
1912’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal (SLHSJ) 19 (1984), pp.
22–36; A. McKinlay, ‘The 1937 Apprentices’ Strike: Challenge “from an
Unexpected Quarter”’, SLHSJ 20 (1985), pp. 14–32, and ‘From Industrial
Serf to Wage-Labourer: The 1937 Apprentice Revolt in Britain’, Interna-
tional Review of Social History (IRSH) 32:1 (1986), pp. 1–18; D. Fowler,
The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar
Britain (Woburn Press: 1995), pp. 55–63; N. Fishman, The British
Communist Party and the Trade Unions, 1933–45 (Scolar Press, Aldershot:
1995), pp. 96–8, 231–2; see also J. Gollan, Youth in British Industry
(Gollancz: 1937), pp. 311–17, and E. and R. Frow, Manchester’s Big
House in Trafford Park: Class Conflict and Collaboration at Metro-Vicks
(Working Class Movement Library, Manchester: 1983), pp. 31–8.
4. Studies of industrial conflict during the period that do not mention
apprentice disputes are: K. G. J. C. Knowles, Strikes: A Study in Industrial
Conflict, with Special Reference to British Experience between 1911 and
1947 (Basil Blackwell, Oxford: 1952); C. T. B. Smith, R. Clifton, P.
Makeham, S. W. Creigh and R. V. Burn, Strikes in Britain, Manpower
Paper 15, Department of Employment (HMSO: 1978); J. E. Cronin, Indus-
trial Conflict in Modern Britain (Croom Helm: 1979); E. L. Wigham,
Strikes and the Government, 1893–1981 (Macmillan: 1982); J. W. Durcan,
W. E. J. McCarthy and G. P. Redman, Strikes in Post-War Britain: A Study
of Stoppages of Work due to Industrial Disputes, 1946–73 (Allen and
Unwin: 1983); A. Charlesworth, A. D. Gilbert, A. Randall, H. Southall
and C. Wrigley (eds), An Atlas of Industrial Protest in Britain, 1750–1990
(Macmillan: 1996); and N. Fishman, ‘“A Vital Element in British Indus-
trial Relations”: A Reassessment of Order 1305, 1940–51’, Historical
Studies in Industrial Relations (HSIR) 8 (Autumn 1999), pp. 43–86.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 3
RYAN: APPRENTICE STRIKES IN UK ENGINEERING & SHIPBUILDING 3

whole, aiming at a more comprehensive and quantitative account than
has been available in a literature confined largely to the qualitative
attributes of individual disputes; to interpret them, in terms of the
relative importance of social, political, economic and industrial
relations factors; and to suggest reasons for their neglect in the litera-
ture.
The principal objective is the interpretative one. Two broad
accounts, which have to date been distinguished only partially, are
developed here. The first approach combines political, social and
cultural factors. Political goals are seen as central to mobilization and
militancy among young people and their adult supporters in an epoch
of intense ideological conflict. From a sociological standpoint, the
apprentice strikes represent outbursts of youth exuberance and indisci-
pline, part of the precarious socialization of young people, and a con-
tinuation of historical traditions of apprentice disorder. An
interpretation that unites these two attributes might hold that a strike
by apprentices should be viewed as akin more to one by students in
full-time education than to one by regular employees. Apprentice
strikes may therefore not even belong in the history of industrial
conflict proper. The second, ‘economics–industrial relations (IR)’
approach views apprentice strikes in terms of collective organization
and economic conflict. The movements are taken to have involved
organized discontent, economic damage for both strikers and
employers, and serious implications for economic outcomes. In this
view it is entirely appropriate to treat them as part of mainstream
industrial conflict.
The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Both prove
relevant to an understanding, in that particular attributes of the strikes
point to a distinct role for each of four factors – political, socio-
Studies of vocational training showing the same omission are G. Williams,

Recruitment to the Skilled Trades (Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1957) and
K. Liepmann, Apprenticeship: An Enquiry into Its Adequacy under Modern
Conditions (Routledge: 1960). By contrast, apprentice strikes are discussed
in some of the more general histories: H. M. D. Parker, Manpower: A
Study of War-Time Policy and Administration (HMSO and Longmans:
1957), pp. 459–66; H. A. Clegg, A History of British Trade Unions since
1889, Vol. 3: 1934–51 (Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1994), pp. 242–3, 249–51;
C. Wrigley, ‘The Second World War and State Intervention in Industrial
Relations, 1939–45’, in idem (ed.), A History of British Industrial Relations,
1939–1979 (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham: 1996), pp. 32–4, all three of whom
discuss the wartime movements (1941 and 1944); and, notably, A. Tuckett,
The Blacksmiths’ History (Lawrence and Wishart: 1974), pp. 213, 252–3,
265 and 354–7, which covers the movements of 1921, 1937, 1939 and 1960.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 4
cultural, economic and IR. Although the evidence compiled to date

does not determine clearly the relative importance of these factors,
qualified priority is given here to the economics–IR interpretation.
The neglect of apprentice strikes in the literature also warrants dis-
cussion. Why would so salient a phenomenon have been so rarely and
so narrowly considered by social scientists,5 despite Richard Croucher’s
appeal for the consideration of the movements as a whole?6 One possi-
bility is that only one set of factors really mattered. Thus, were political
aspects the primary consideration, the volume and orientation of the
existing literature might be considered appropriate. Alternatively, were
social and cultural considerations predominant, apprentice strikes
would matter only for the sociology of youth – though that literature
too has paid surprisingly little attention to them.7 Both answers are
undermined by evidence that political, social, industrial relations and
economic factors all mattered. The key source of intellectual neglect is
taken instead to have been the complexity of both apprenticeship and
apprentice strikes: phenomena so multi-faceted are not readily assimi-
lated and interpreted, requiring an interdisciplinary approach, which is
hardly favoured in contemporary social science.
5. ‘Narrowness’ is represented by consideration of typically only one or two

movements, in isolation from the others, and one-dimensional interpreta-
tions. Thus Fowler’s account of the second phase of the 1937 movement,
in Manchester, does not mention the important procedural outcomes of
the year’s movement as a whole: The First Teenagers, pp. 55–63. Croucher,
Engineers at War, remains the broadest treatment to date, but even that
account, confined to 1937–45, omits the 1939 movement.
6. ‘A history of the apprentices’ movement would be immensely valuable for
the light it would throw on the historical situation of young workers
generally’: Croucher, Engineers at War, p. 131.
7. Notably F. Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order (Routledge and Kegan
Paul: 1964), pp. 48–50, who does not refer to the movements, despite
writing soon after one of the largest and delving into riots at public
schools in the eighteenth century. Sociological studies of the school-to-
work transition have also ignored apprentice strikes, despite widespread
interest in youth resistance, group as well as individual, to established
authority in working-class schools – e.g. P. Rudd, ‘From Socialisation to
Postmodernity: A Review of Theoretical Perspectives on the School-to-
Work Transition’, Journal of Education and Work 10 (1997), pp. 257–79.
See also T. Ferguson and J. Cunnison, The Young Wage-Earner (Oxford
University Press: 1951); T. Vaness, School Leavers (Methuen: 1962); M.
Carter, Into Work (Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1966); J. Maizels, Adoles-
cent Needs and the Transition from School to Work (University of London
Press: 1970).
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Evidence is derived here from published strike statistics, the archives
of employers’ associations and trade unions, and newspaper reports.
The next section presents the statistical attributes of the strikes, making
comparisons to strike patterns for other employees. An outline of the
qualitative attributes of the movements follows, including their organi-
zation, procedural status, the demands put forward, and their course
and outcomes. The evidence is then brought to bear on the two lines of
interpretation, followed by the conclusions.
Quantitative attributes
Between 1910 and 1970 the engineering and shipbuilding industries –

henceforth ‘metalworking’8 – saw nine apprentice strike movements: i.e.
an event classed in official statistics as a ‘principal dispute’,9 in which
the primary or sole class of employee involved was ‘apprentices’ or
‘apprentices, boys and youths’, and which involved a sufficient number
of employers and districts to be termed here a strike movement.10 They
occurred in 1912, 1921, 1937, 1939, 1941, 1944, 1952, 1960 and 1964.11
Table 1 shows that the average movement lasted more than five weeks,
involved 18,000 young workers and caused the loss of 190,000 working
8. The sector is taken to include all metalworking manufacture, including

vehicles, but to exclude metal manufacture. Employees and apprentices in
occupations associated with engineering and shipbuilding (e.g. fitters,
boilermakers) but employed in other sectors, including railway workshops
and construction, are also excluded.
9. A ‘principal dispute’ came to be defined as one in which at least 5,000
working days were lost. Official statistics did not report days lost in indi-
vidual disputes until 1925, but the number of strikers and the duration of
the dispute almost certainly put the movements of 1912 and 1921 above
the threshold.
10. A strike was excluded from the official statistics if it lasted for less than
one working day or involved less than ten workers, unless it led to the loss
of at least 100 working days: Durcan et al., Strikes in Post-War Britain, pp.
3–7. As political strikes were in principle excluded, the 1944 movement,
which attacked conscription into coalmining, is measured here using
archival evidence. The reliability of official strike statistics is limited by the
intrinsic difficulty of counting participants and days lost, intensified by
the interest of both employers and strikers in estimating numbers so as to
suit their own interests: R. Hyman, Strikes (2nd edn; Fontana: 1977), pp.
17–19.
11. Although the 1921, 1937 and 1941 disputes all had two distinct phases,
each involving separate districts, there was sufficient continuity of issues
for each to be treated as a single movement.
6
HSIR 18(29/3)
Table 1: Attributes of apprentice strike movements, UK, 1910–70

Year Period Districts involveda Duration Number Working days lostc
of strikersc
Outbreak Participation Daysb Total p.c.d Ranke
30/3/05
1912 6 August– 5 October Dundee Central Scot., 70 14,600 n.a. n.a. n.a.
NE Coast,
Manchester
5:59 pm
1921 21 June–20 July; Manchester; Manchester, 33 6,500 n.a. n.a. n.a.

10 August–13 October Blackburn Lincoln, Clyde
1937 18 March–5 June; Clyde; Scotland, 94 32,500 406,000 12 3

6 September–30 October Manchester N.Ire.,
Page 6
N&NE.Eng.,
Coventry, London
1939 18 May–5 June Clyde Clyde 16 2,200 19,000 9 7
1941 5 February–5 April Edinburgh Central Scot., 62 25,100 220,000 9 1

N.Ire., S.Lancs
1944 28 March–12 April NE.Eng. Clyde, 16 17,000 150,000 9 4

Huddersfield,
S.Wales
1952 7 February;f Clyde Scotland, 24 16,400 194,000 12 1

HISTORICAL STUDIES IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
10 March–2 April N.Eng., N.Ire.


1960 24 February;f Aberdeen Scotland 27 36,900 347,000 9 1

20 April;f N.Eng., N.Ire.
25 April–16 May Coventry, London
1964 7 September;f Manchester N.Eng., 23 6,000 26,000 4 9

2–25 November Central Scot.,
London
Averageg 38 17,500 187,000 10

HSIR 18(29/3)
Table 1 (continued)
Source: Ministry of Labour Gazette, various issues (summaries of principal disputes); Knox, ‘“Down with Lloyd George”’, pp. 22–36; Croucher, Engineers at War; EEF,
30/3/05
1921 Circular Letter 194 and A(7)164, 275, 330, Z64/69 (52), MRC; SEF, SNRA/4946, NMM. Where sources differ, archive evidence is preferred.
Notes: n.a.: not available. The sympathy strike by adults on Clydeside on 16 April 1937 is excluded.
a. Clyde: Glasgow region. Central Scot.: same, plus Edinburgh and Dundee; Scotland: same, plus Aberdeen; N.Eng(land): industrial districts of Lancs and Yorks;
NE.Eng.: Tyne, Wear and Tees; N.Ire.: Northern Ireland.
5:59 pm
b. Calendar days (from column 2).

c. Includes indirectly involved employees (put out of work by the dispute at same workplace as strikers).
d. Per capita (i.e., per striker: ‘Working days lost’ divided by ‘Number of strikers’).
e. In all disputes that year.
Page 7
f. Token strike(s).
g. Unweighted arithmetic mean (days lost: 1937–64 only).
RYAN: APPRENTICE STRIKES IN UK ENGINEERING
& SHIPBUILDING
7
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 8
days. The average striker stayed out for ten – not necessarily continu-
ous – working days.
The movements varied in size. Four accounted for at least one-third
of total working days lost in ‘principal disputes’ in the two sectors in
the relevant year (Figure 1). Those of 1941, 1952 and 1960 constituted
the year’s largest dispute, in terms of days lost, in the country as a
whole; the other four for which data are available ranked within the ten
largest disputes of the year (Table 1, last column). In the biggest
movements, those of 1937 and 1960, more than 30,000 apprentices par-
ticipated and districts ranging geographically from Aberdeen to
London became involved. In 1937, 406,000 working days were lost
during a two-stage movement that spanned seven months and lasted
thirteen weeks in all. By contrast, in 1939 and 1964, events were
dominated by a single region (Glasgow and Manchester respectively)
and were shorter-lived (two to three weeks) and smaller (a few
thousand participants and the loss of less than 30,000 working days).
The movements centred on two sub-periods: rearmament and the
Second World War, and the 1960s. All involved both engineering and
shipbuilding, but little else.12 The centre of gravity was typically the
industrial districts of Scotland and the North of England, with either
Glasgow or Manchester normally taking the lead, and with occasional
spillage into the Midlands and the South of England. Most of the
larger ones proceeded in wave-like fashion, with new groups of appren-
tices, as defined variously by occupation, employer and district, joining
the dispute while earlier ones returned to work.
As the class of employee involved, e.g. ‘apprentices in engineering
and shipbuilding’, was indicated in official statistics only for ‘principal
disputes’, this analysis is confined largely to that category. Within it,
apprentice militancy involved, in addition to the nine movements, a
further three, all at single establishments in the 1960s. The largest
occurred at the Vickers shipyard in Barrow in 1968, when apprentices
went in and out of work over a six-month period.13 Various smaller
apprentice disputes also occurred at works level, including fifteen
12. Metal manufacture participated marginally in 1937 and 1952, and electri-
cal contracting in 1941: LAB 10/76 and 10/509, Public Record Office,
London (PRO).
13. Details are provided in the Appendix.
HSIR 18(29/3)
90
30/3/05
80
70
5:59 pm
60
Number of strikes
Number of strikers
50
Working days lost
Page 9
% share
40
30
20
10
1919
1921
1923
1925
1927
1929
1931
1933
1935
1937
1939
1941
1943
1945
1947
1949
1951
& SHIPBUILDING
1953
1955
1957
1959
1961
1963
1965
1967
1969
Figure 1: Young manual male share of ‘principal disputes’ in engineering and shipbuilding, UK 1919–69 (%)
Source: Ministry of Labour Gazette, monthly reports (1919–24) and annual summaries (1925–69).
9
Note: ‘Number of strikers’ and ‘Working days lost’ include the relevant part of disputes in progress that had started in the previous year; ‘Number of strikes’ is confined
to strikes that started in the current year. Woking days lost not avaiable for 1921.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 10
‘youth only’ strikes in federated engineering establishments between

1920 and 1951.14 Apprentices also participated at times in adult-related
and general disputes.15
Youth–adult comparisons
The quantitative importance of apprentice strikes can be gauged from

comparisons to disputes by other employees, both in metalworking and
in the economy as a whole. Two strike series are potentially appropri-
ate: ‘principal disputes’ and ‘all disputes’. The former compares like
with like, using the same category of dispute for apprentices and other
employees. It potentially overstates relative apprentice activism, as
‘principal disputes’ probably constituted a larger share of strike activity
for apprentices than for adults, given that safety was even more likely
to lie in numbers for apprentices than for adults. A comparison is also
made to ‘all disputes’, in order to view the militancy of apprentices in
relation to industrial conflict as a whole.
Between 1919 and 1969, the period for which adequate official sta-
tistics are available, young manual males – the category that has to be
used here as a proxy for apprentices16 – accounted for only a small
14. Engineering Employers’ Federation (EEF), Strike Record from 1920

(undated typescript, formerly held at EEF headquarters) records, for the
period 1920 to 1951, 57 strikes at individual firms over youth-related
issues. Young workers acted alone in 15 and together with adults in 16,
while adults acted alone in 26.
15. In the 1922 lockout, 17% of the apprentices employed by federated engi-
neering employers – and more than 50% in some towns in the north of
England – were on strike in the sixth week of the dispute: file M19, Appen-
dices 17, 25, EEF Archive, Modern Records Centre, University of
Warwick (MRC). Similarly, in the 1950s shipbuilding employers com-
plained to union officials that apprentices frequently joined adult walk-
outs: file SNRA/4946, Shipbuilding Employers’ Federation (SEF)
Archive, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (NMM).
16. As employment data are not available for apprentices alone, manual male
youth employment has to be used as the denominator in indicators of
apprentice strike intensity. The measure includes non-apprenticed manual
male youth and excludes non-manual, female and over-age apprentices.
The former distortion greatly exceeded the latter, particularly before the
Second World War. In 1925–26, the number of ‘drawing office, over-21
and female’ apprentices amounted to only 0.9% of that of manual male
apprentices aged less than 21 in metalworking industry: Ministry of
Labour, Report of an Inquiry into Apprenticeship and Training, 1925–6
(HMSO: 1928), Vol. 6, pp. 11–12, 22, 37, 56, 60 and Vol. 7, p. 155. By
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 11

share of the annual count of ‘principal disputes’ in metalworking
(Figure 1).17 At the same time, the extent of industrial action among
young manual males, as indicated by working days lost per thousand
employees, stood comparison with its adult counterparts. Figure 2
shows that in 1937 and 1960 militancy among young manual males
attained peaks exceeded after 1926 among other employees in metal-
working only in 1957. The youth series exceeded its ‘other employee’
counterparts in five years: 1937, 1941, 1944, 1952 and 1960. In 1937
and 1941, young manual males accounted for the great majority of
working days lost in ‘principal disputes’ in metalworking (Figure 1).
If the ability of apprentices to mount major strikes was comparable
to that of adults, the timing of their actions differed. None of the
apprentice movements occurred in the same year as an all-employee,
sector-wide ‘principal dispute’. Nor did any occur during the wider
upsurge of industrial conflict in the late 1960s. Statistical correlations
between the time-series indicators for youth and adult disputes are
insignificant, in contrast to the significant associations typically found
between strike-activity indicators across other categories of employee
(e.g. by sector).18 Indeed, apprentices sometimes took action when
adults were reluctant to do so. The 1937 movement helped to break the
contrast, the number of non-apprenticed junior male employees in

federated engineering firms was 87.4% of the number of apprentices in
1934: EEF, A(7)111, MRC. As apprentices are shown below to have been
more prone to join the disputes than were other youths, Figure 2 under-
states industrial action among apprentices proper. Similarly, the low
incidence of apprenticeship in light engineering reduces the index of youth
strike-propensity relative to what it would be for shipbuilding and heavy
engineering alone.
17. All youths, including apprentices, were treated in official strike statistics as
employees, despite the residual legal differentiation of the contract of
apprenticeship from that of employment (‘service’): B. A. Hepple and P.
O’Higgins, Employment Law (2nd edn; Sweet and Maxwell: 1981), pp.
169–70.
18. Cronin, Industrial Conflict, pp. 82–8. Pearson correlations between the six
permutations of dispute categories and strike indicators for junior manual
males and other employees are all negative and less than 0.09 (absolute
magnitude). The divergence in timing between youth and adult disputes
does not rule out all potential links between them. In 1921, the strikes
against wage cuts paralleled adult actions. In 1960 and 1964, apprentice
activism may have been fostered, albeit with a lag, by that of adults, as
expressed in unofficial disputes over the implementation of recent national
agreements.
HSIR 18(29/3)
1400 Manual Male

1957: 1772
1695
Youth, E&S,
Principal Disputes
12
1200 Other Employees,
E&S, Principal
30/3/05
Disputes
1000 Other Employees,
E&S, Other
Disputes
5:59 pm
800
600
Page 12
WDL per 1000 employees

400
200
1927
1931
1935
1939
1943
1947
1951
1955
1959
1963
1967

Figure 2: Working days lost by category of employee and dispute, UK, engineering and shipbuilding, 1927–69
Sources: Figure 1. Employment series (Manual Male Youth and Other Employees) are constructed from: Department of Employment and Productivity, British Labour Statis-
tics: Historical Abstract 1886–1968 (HMSO: 1971), Tables 114, 132; Central Statistical Office, Statistical Digest of the War (HMSO: 1951), Tables 19–21; Department of Employ-
ment Gazette, various issues, 1968–71; E. Wigham, The Power to Manage (Macmillan: 1973), Appendix J. Employment by age series are constructed on the assumption that the
ratio of two series based on different definitions of the same variable (by sector, age, etc.) in the years of overlap remained constant across time. Data available from author.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 13

protracted post-1926 quiescence.19 The 1941 dispute was the first major
challenge to the Coalition government’s wartime ban on industrial action
under Order 1305. The 1944 strike caused the government such concern
that it extended the ban to cover incitement to strike.
Apprentice strikes also differed in extent and duration from the
wider dispute pattern in their sectors. The typical post-war strike in
engineering and shipbuilding affected only a single establishment and
was resolved within a matter of hours or days. Industry-wide, all-grades
disputes occurred rarely and were mostly short-lived. Apprentice
strikes tended by contrast to be multi-employer and multi-district
(though not strictly industry-wide) and protracted rather than brief.
Apprentice participation
Large factories and shipyards featured prominently in the strike

movements. Not only were they large works, they took on apprentices
in numbers that lack modern equivalents. Leading cases included:
Metropolitan-Vickers/AEI in Manchester, which employed around
2,000 apprentices in the late 1930s, 250 of whom struck in 1937, 700 in
1941, 800 in 1952, 700 in 1960 and 570 in 1964; John Brown & Co.,
Clydebank, a shipyard with 2,000 apprentices and boys in the late
1930s, and 812 apprentices in 1941, of whom 432 went on strike;
Vickers-Armstrong in Barrow, the great majority of whose 2,000
apprentices struck in 1941; the two members of the Belfast Marine
Engineering Employers’ Association (EEA), which in 1941 employed
1,200 apprentices in engineering trades alone, almost all of whom
stopped work; and Siemens, which saw 1,000 of the apprentices at its
London plant strike in 1937.20
Despite the prominent part played by large workplaces, only in 1937
and 1960 did more than 10% of young manual males employed in
metalworking go on strike and was there an average of at least one
working day lost per potential striker. The average was pulled down not
only by a lower tendency to strike among non-apprenticed young
19. The 1937 movement was ‘a watershed between the dark years of the
Depression and the growing strength and confidence evident in the
months immediately preceding the war’: Croucher, Engineers at War, p.
47.
20. Manchester Guardian, 17 September 1937, 27 March 1952; LAB 10/140,
LAB 482/1952, PRO; (Glasgow) Evening Citizen, 19 May 1939; Manches-
ter Evening News, 29 April 1960; March 1941 strike report, file TD
241/12/242, Clyde Shipbuilders’ Association (CSA) Archive, Mitchell
Library Glasgow (MLG); EEF, Z64/69(52), MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 14
employees, but also by limited participation of apprentices, particularly

in the Midlands and the South. The involvement of Coventry and
London apprentices was limited largely to the biggest movements, in
1937 and 1960, and then to short-lived episodes at a handful of firms.
Apprentices from Birmingham, who in 1934 constituted the fifth
largest district grouping in the Engineering Employers’ Federation
(EEF), never took part.21 Overall participation was also reduced by the
tendency of particular apprentice groups – as defined variously by
occupation, works or employer – to divide internally over whether to
strike or not.
The highest participation rates appear to have been attained in
central Scotland, where that for apprentices reached 62% in federated
engineering in 1952 (Table 2) and was estimated by the employers’ asso-
ciation at around 90% in 1960.22 In Clyde shipyards, 57% of apprentices
participated in 1941, but only 31% in 1964. Participation also varied
greatly over time at works level. At John Brown in 1939, only 10%
of the yard’s 2,000 apprentices were involved one week after the start
of the strike, compared to 53% in 1941.23 In Manchester in 1952, 73% of
Metropolitan-Vickers/AEI apprentices went on strike, compared to
only 15% in 1937.24
Participation patterns were closely associated with payment systems.
21. Federation records indicate 1,100 engineering apprentices in Birmingham

in 1934, similar to Coventry’s 1,300 and many fewer than the more than
3,000 in each of the North West (Glasgow), Manchester and North East
Coast Associations, but many more than in such regular strike centres as
Aberdeen, Dundee, and East Scotland (Edinburgh), which recorded less
than 300 each: EEF, 1934 Survey of Apprentices (file formerly available at
EEF headquarters). Birmingham apprentices made a rare appearance in
1952, when a group of them requested the Manchester strike committee to
send a delegate to explain the issues: Manchester Guardian, 26 March
1952.
22. In 1952, junior male participation rates of 50% were reported for
Aberdeen and 45% for Dundee, but only 27% for Manchester and 7% for
Sheffield. In the same year, the 21% of central Scottish engineering
employers affected by the initial token strike became 52% during the indef-
inite stoppage: EEF, A(7)275, MRC.
23. In 1939, a sequence of lunchtime factory gate meetings persuaded various
apprentice groups in the outfitting trades, including plumbing, joinery and
engineering, to go out but did not induce any of the more numerous ship-
building trades to join in: Glasgow Evening News and Evening Times, 26
May 1939; EEF, A(7)164, MRC; CSA, TD 241/12/242, MLG.
24. R. A. Leeson, Strike: A Live History 1887–1971 (Allen and Unwin: 1973),
p. 159; Frow and Frow, Manchester’s Big House, pp. 21–37.
HSIR 18(29/3)
Table 2: Apprentice participation in apprentice strikes in federated firms by industry and district
Year Industry Districts Date Days No. Apprentices Participation

30/3/05
into disputea of employers employed rate

replying
1941 Shipbuilding Clydeside 10–12 March 11–13 23 2,828 57.2%

5:59 pm
1952 Engineering Central Scotland 7 February;b (1) 174 8,138 32.5%

Central Scotland 14 March 4 198 8,642 61.6%
Sheffield 17 March 7 9 644 43.8%
Page 15
1964 Shipbuilding Clydeside 24 November 22 22 1,781 31.0%
Source: CSA, TD 241/12/242, TD 241/12/359, MLG; EEF, A(7)275, MRC; LAB 482/1952, PRO.
Notes: Questionnaires were distributed to all members of the Association; data exclude non-apprentice strikers, where separately identified (1952).
a. Calendar days since start of indefinite strike movement in first district involved.
b. Initial token strike.

& SHIPBUILDING
15
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 16
Table 3 shows that nearly three-quarters of time-rated apprentices in

shipbuilding joined the 1941 movement on the Clyde, whereas less than
one-quarter of their piece-working counterparts did so. The earnings of
apprentices who received incentive bonus payments were in the post-
war years between one-eighth and one-quarter higher than those of
their time-rated counterparts, according to sector and year, and the gap
is unlikely to have been much different in 1941 (Table 4). Apprentice
earning-power may therefore have influenced willingness to take
action, though its association with mode of payment may also reflect
selection effects.25 By contrast, occupational differences, notably those
between the shipyard trades proper and the outfitting and engineering
trades, were marginal in three of the hardest-hit Clyde yards in 1941
(Table 5).
Participation in the movements was often volatile, with individual
strikers and groups of strikers going out and returning to work, and
in some cases going out again, as the wider dispute unfolded.
According to an official of the Manchester EEA in 1952, ‘everything
is very fluid and no sooner do you get a number of lads back in one
factory than another set of lads go on strike somewhere else’.26 Such
conditions appear to have been the norm: the average individual par-
ticipant remained on strike for only one-third of the duration of the
Table 3: Apprentice employment and strikers by method of payment,

federated Clyde shipyards, March 1941
Payment Employment Strikers

method
Number Share Number Share Participation
of strikers rate
Time-work 1,886 66.7% 1,398 86.3% 74.1%

Piece-work 942 33.3% 221 13.7% 23.5%
All 2,828 100.0% 1,619 100.0% 57.2%
Source: CSA, TD 241/12/242, MLG.
Notes: Aggregated data for 23 shipyards affiliated to the CSA, c. 13–20 March. Three incomplete
responses are excluded, as are 26 strikers who had already returned to work.
25. Apprentices may have been selected, by their own or by employers’

decisions, into payment mode according to personal traits associated with
the propensity to collective action, such as individualism.
26. EEF, A(7)275, MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 17
Table 4: Employment share and relative earnings of apprentices

receiving incentive bonuses, by sector and strike movement
Age Number of Bonus Relative pay of

category apprentices recipients as apprentices
share of receiving
apprentice bonusesb
employmenta
Engineering 1948 16–20 n.a. n.a. 118.6%

1950 16–20 n.a. n.a. 121.6%
1959 19 15,161 43.2% 112.1%
1960 19 11,829 46.7% 115.0%
1968 19 10,016 28.3% 112.9%
Shipbuilding 1952 16–20 11,503 57.8% 125.7%

1960 16–20 n.a. 75.6% n.a.
Source: EEF, A(7)270, A(7)330, Z67(590), MRC; SEF, SNRA/4831, SNRA/3912/1, NMM.
Notes: Apprentices employed by federated firms only.

a. Apprentices paid under payment by results (engineering) or piece-work, payment by results or
lieu rates (shipbuilding), as opposed to by plain time rates, as percentage of all apprentices.
b. Weekly (1968: hourly) earnings of apprentices receiving incentive bonuses as percentage of those
of time-paid apprentices.
Table 5: Apprentice employment and strikers by trade in three Clyde

shipyards, 10 March 1941
Trade Employment Strikers

group
Number Share Number Share of Participation
all strikers rate
Shipyarda 271 45.0% 237 47.3% 87.5%
Otherb 331 55.0% 264 52.7% 80.0%
All 602 100.0% 501 100.0% 82.3%
Source: CSA, TD 241/12/242, MLG.
Notes: Aggregated data for Barclay Curle (Elderslie), Alex Stephen & Sons and Connell
(Scotstoun); apprentices who had already returned to work are not counted as strikers.
a. Platers, sheet iron workers, shipwrights, caulkers.
b. Engineers, welders, electricians, carpenters, joiners, painters, plumbers.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 18
episode (Table 1). The major exception was the Clyde in 1937, when
few apprentices returned to work, despite mounting hardship, until a
mass meeting on 4 May decided to do so. The Ministry of Labour’s
local official was impressed by their ‘rather astonishing … solidar-
ity’.27
Strike constituency
‘Apprentice strikes’ were, as the term presumes, largely the preserve of

apprentices.28 Non-apprenticed young manual males, including
learners, trainees, operatives and labourers, were less numerous than
apprentices, though their numbers remained substantial until the
Second World War.29 Many of them did join the movements but their
quantitative contribution to the strikes, like that of non-manual
apprentices, who worked mostly in drawing offices, was low. The lists of
strikers circulated among federated engineering employers on the
Clyde in the early phase of the 1937 strike comprised overwhelmingly
apprentices.30 Table 6 reports a rare instance for which comprehensive
data are available, for federated engineering on the Clyde in 1952. Trade
(manual craft) apprentices accounted for fully 97% of youth strikers.
Only one in eight non-apprenticed manual male youths, and only one
in fifty drawing-office apprentices, took part – in contrast to two-thirds
of manual apprentices. Non-apprenticed young males did play a greater
part on other occasions,31 and apprentice militancy sometimes
triggered separate activism among non-apprenticed youth.32 Neverthe-
27. Minute sheet, entry for 16 April 1937, LAB 10/76, PRO.
28. An ‘apprentice’ is taken here to be a young worker who could expect to be
considered eligible by employers and unions to enter craft employment at
age 21 as a result of having served his or her time.
29. Data on the share of apprentices in youth employment are fragmentary. In
1939, 43% of 156,000 junior males employed by EEF members were
apprentices, rising to 73% in 1949 and 78% in 1956, following the decline
in non-apprenticed youth employment during the war: EEF, A(7)275,
MRC.
30. The only significant exception was the 46 ‘boys’ on strike at Mechams’
works: North West Engineering Trades Employers’ Association
(NWETEA) Circular Letters, March–April 1937, MLG.
31. In 1939, 15% of youth strikers in the engineering departments of Clyde
shipyards were non-apprenticed, as were 29% (of 656) at James Mackie &
Sons in Belfast in 1937: EEF, A(7)164, A(7)137, MRC.
32. Thus rivet heaters at John Brown’s, Clydebank, struck in 1944 in sympathy
with the apprentices and in support of their own claim for minimum daily
earnings: CSA minute book, 30 March 1944, MLG.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 19

Table 6: Participation in 1952 strike movement in federated engineering
firms in Glasgow district by category of youth
Strikers All Participation Share of

employees rate all strikers
Apprentices: manual 5,311 7,895 67.3% 97.1%

Apprentices: drawing-office 12 747 1.6% 0.2%
Non-apprentices: manuala 147 1,222 12.0% 2.7%
All 5,470 9,864 55.5% 100.0%
Source: SEEA letter to EEF, 14 March 1952, EEF A(7)275, MRC.
Note: a. ‘Boys and youth’.
less, ‘apprentice strike’ appears to be a valid characterization of these

disputes.
Young females were not considered relevant when such statistics
were compiled. Only a handful of the two sectors’ apprentices were
female: primarily French polishers and drawing-office tracers in ship-
building.33 Although female apprentices participated at least once,34
they were too few to have made much difference. Moreover, male
strikers were not necessarily prepared to accept female help: in 1937
two offers of assistance made by young females were turned down by
the Glasgow strike committee.35
In sum, apprentices in the metalworking industry constituted during
the period what might be termed a strike-prone employee category.
Their distinctiveness is underlined by the near total absence of appren-
33. Ministry of Labour, Report of an Inquiry, Vol. 7, p. 155; NWETEA,

Circular Letter 116, 22 March 1941, MLG.
34. Ten female French polisher apprentices joined the 1941 strike at Denny
and Bros, Dumbarton (NWETEA, ibid.).
35. The sympathy action was taken by young female employees at Barr and
Stroud in Glasgow, the financial support (in the shape of a postal order)
by their counterparts in a Bristol factory. The local Ministry official
reported concerning the former that the young women ‘were rather hurt
when informed that they would be more of a hindrance than an aid, in
view of the fact that they were not apprentices but only learners’ – an
excuse that Croucher (Engineers at War, p. 51) plausibly discounts. The
young women responded by joining the distributive workers’ union: report
of 7 April 1937, LAB 10/76, PRO; Evening Citizen, 24 April 1937.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 20
tice strikes from the other sectors that employed substantial propor-
tions of apprentices, notably building and printing.36
Qualitative attributes
This section discusses the organization and conduct of the movements,

their relationship to trade-unionism, the demands made on employers,
and their outcomes.
Apprentice organization
The conduct of apprentice strikes depended primarily on district-level

ad hoc committees set up by apprentice activists to run and extend the
strike (Table 7, column 1). The strike committee typically used mass
meetings, marches, leafleting and picketing, and sometimes a strike
bulletin, to increase participation locally. Travelling emissaries were
often used to spread the strike to other areas and inter-district com-
mittees were formed, particularly in Scotland. When the strike waned,
the committee sought to rally support or, when that looked unpromis-
ing, to organize a co-ordinated return to work.
The similarity of the titles of successive committees, particularly
variants of the Clyde Apprentices’ Committee (CAC), suggests organi-
zational continuity, but the evidence is fragmentary and suggestive
more of ephemerality. The principal exception was 1937–42, when
apprentice committees appear to have functioned fairly continuously at
works and district levels in the Glasgow and Manchester areas and
more intermittently at industry level. A national official of the Amal-
gamated Engineering Union (AEU) subsequently recalled having
helped, as an apprentice, to form a Manchester apprentices’ committee
in 1938, having been appointed treasurer of a ‘national’ apprentices’
committee in 1939, and having attended two conferences organized by
the latter.37 James Hunter, ex-secretary of the CAC, told the Court of
36. The only ‘principal dispute’ recorded for apprentices (as opposed to other
youth) in a different sector during the period was that by 750 plumbing
apprentices in Scotland in October 1941. Its timing suggests an influence
for the 1941 movement in metalworking: Ministry of Labour Gazette,
November 1941, p. 224.
37. Interview with Bob Wright, assistant general secretary, Amalgamated
Union of Engineering Workers/Amalgamated Engineering Union
(AUEW/AEU), May 1985; LAB 10/509, PRO; EEF, A(7)111, A(7)186,
MRC; I. Johnston, Ships for a Nation (Mitchell Public Library, Glasgow:
2000), p. 219.
Table 7: Apprentice strike movements: organizations, demands and outcomes
HSIR 18(29/3)
Unofficial strike organizationsa Strike demands Outcomes: immediate (subsequent)
1912 Edinburgh & Leith Apprentice Engineers’ Exemption from national insurance contri- Conditions before strike; tightening of
Union butions; pay increase; abolition of ‘black indenture clauses; ‘certain advances’ in a
time’c minority of works
30/3/05
1921 n.a. Withdrawal of impending apprentice pay Conditions before strike

cuts (withdrawal of War Bonuses)
1937 Clyde and Manchester strike committeesb Apprentices’ Charter: pay rise, district (May) Increased pay scales in some districts
North East Campaign Committee age–wage scales, day release rights, limits to (October) Return to work pending official
5:59 pm
apprentice numbers, union representation negotiations; (national age–wage scales for

pay advances; youth procedure agreement)
1939 Clyde Advisory Committee of Apprentices Military service to count for apprenticeship; Six months’ credit towards apprenticeship
Youth Charter (pay rise, day release, paid service for military training; otherwise as
holidays); end of improverships before strike
Page 21
1941 Edinburgh, Clyde, Barrow and Scottish Pay increase: AEU national youth pay claim; Court of Inquiry; prosecution of strike
Apprentices’ Committees; Engineering and day release; all-round factory training; leaders; (national age–wage scale for junior
Allied Trades National Youth Movement revisions to agreement of 26 March 1941 males; revised youth procedure agreement)
1944 Tyneside Apprentices’ Guild; Apprentice exemption from conscription Conditions before strike; prosecution of
Clydeside Apprentices’ Committee into coalmining external supporters associated with Revolu-
tionary Communist Party
1952 Clyde Apprentice and Youth Committee; CSEU national claim for £1 increase in pay Return to work pending renewal of official
for young males negotiations; (age-graded pay increases for
Aberdeen Apprentices’ Committee; Man-

chester Apprentices’ Strike Committee young males)
1960 Clyde Apprentices’ Committee; CSEU national claim for pay increases for Return to work pending renewal of official
Scottish Apprentices’ Committee young males negotiations; (age-graded pay increases for
young males)
1964 Manchester Engineering Apprentices’ Direct Apprentice Youth Charter: increased appren- Conditions before strike; (increase in
Action Committee; National Apprentices’ tice pay; 35-hour week; 4 weeks’ paid age–wage scales; national procedure
& SHIPBUILDING
Wages and Conditions Campaign holiday; full sick pay agreement for all young males)
Committee; Clydeside Apprentices’
Committee
Source: As Table 1, plus The Apprentice Strikers’ Bulletin, no. 3, April/May 1937; Croucher, Engineers at War, pp. 47–57, 123–31, 230–9; Knox, ‘“Down with Lloyd
21
George”’, pp. 22–36; McKinlay, ‘The 1937 Apprentices’ Strike’, SLHSJ, pp. 14–32, and ‘From Industrial Serf to Wage-Labourer’, SLHSJ, pp. 1–18; Fowler, The First
Teenagers, pp. 55–63.
Notes: Most details apply to both engineering and shipbuilding; in cases of divergence, details refer to engineering only.
a. Leading ones only.
b. These committees appear not to have adopted formal titles.
c. The requirement that apprentices make up at the end of their contract all time lost during it.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 22
Inquiry into the 1941 movement in Scotland that the committee had
continued in skeleton form after the 1939 strike and had organized a
Scotland-wide conference in November 1940. Following the 1941
strike, the CAC continued to function and even tried to organize
apprentices in Lancashire, but signs of life soon disappeared.38
The strike committees chalked up major achievements in organizing
the strike movements. When union premises were not available,
meetings of strikers were organized variously at factory gates, on
bombsites and in public parks, with Glasgow Green featuring fre-
quently. Strike headquarters were established in the premises of trade
unions (notably when district officials sympathized with the strikers, as
in the AEU in Glasgow in 1941), trades councils (particularly when
district officials did not, as in Manchester in 1937), the Labour Party,
and even (in Manchester in 1960) in a coffee bar. Mass picketing of
factory gates and the verbal abuse of non-strikers were widely
practised.39
The strikes were typically spread by apprentices themselves, travel-
ling within districts on foot, typically as columns of demonstrators, and
by bicycle, and between districts by motor-cycle, by car (1960) and
finally by aeroplane (from Manchester to Glasgow in 1964).40 The 1944
Tyneside strikers sent two deputations to London by train to lobby
38. In May 1941, more than a month after the end of the strike, the Clyde
Apprentices’ Committee (CAC) arranged a victory ball, published a
newsletter (The Apprentice Mag), and organized a conference of Scottish
apprentices, which in turn founded an ‘Engineering and Allied Trades
National Apprentices and Youth Movement’ and called its first national
conference for 5 October in Manchester. In August, EEF officials warned
the Manchester Association’s officers that ‘the … [CAC] are busy again
and they are busy in Lancashire, particularly in the Bolton and Bury
districts, for the purposes of prevailing upon boys to attend a mass
meeting of apprentices to be held in Glasgow on 9 August’. Reports of
such activities then dried up – possibly in association with low attendance
at CAC meetings, about which a correspondent had complained in the
May newsletter: EEF, A(7)186, MRC.
39. Manchester Evening News, 29 April 1960; Verbatim Report of Proceedings
of Court of Inquiry, 15–16 March 1941, pp. 162–4, LAB 10/509, PRO;
Fowler, The First Teenagers, p. 60. The role of mass meetings is illustrated
by the reversal by the Edinburgh strikers in 1952, after a ‘harangue’ from
a Glasgow apprentice at a ‘stormy meeting’, of their previous decision to
return to work: Daily Mail, 24 March 1952.
40. During apprentice strikes at three factories in 1960, the Coventy Engi-
neering Employers’ Association (EEA) reported that ‘the start of this was,
of course, a visit of some lads from Clydeside’: EEF, A(7)330, MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 23

politicians.41 Attempts to co-ordinate activity across districts
sometimes proved decisive. The concessions by employers that finally
defused the protracted 1937 dispute were made soon after a national
conference of apprentices on 10 October had called for a national strike
on 18 October.42
Apprentice self-organization attracted some admiration. In the
fourth week of the first phase of the 1937 movement, a Ministry of
Labour official observed that
it is quite clear that the apprentices must have a very perfect organi-
zation. They have a cycle corps of no less than 500 members and
they have arranged a telephone system which enables their head-
quarters to keep in touch with practically every town in Scotland.
Trade Union organisers admit that the perfection of the arrange-
ments puts them to shame.43
During the 1960 dispute, the reborn CAC set up finance, propaganda
and demonstration sub-committees, staffed entirely by apprentices and
taking multifarious initiatives.44
Apprentice organization tended to precede the strike itself. The 1937
strike followed ‘a widespread movement amongst apprentices for an
advance of 2s. [10p] per week in wages’ across Scotland in 1936. The 1941
dispute began only after two mass meetings of apprentices in Edinburgh
had expressed discontent about low pay.45 The Tyne Apprentices’ Guild
started up in 1942, well before it launched the 1944 strike.46 The
movements of 1952, 1960 and 1964 all began with a token strike whose
intention was probably, and whose effect – fuelled by the punishment of
participants by some employers – was clearly, to precipitate an indefinite
strike. Such tactics indicated prior organization by apprentices.47
41. LAB 10/451, PRO.

42. Croucher, Engineers at War, p. 56. The dispute continued until the end of
the month in Coventry and London.
43. Chief Conciliation Officer (CCO), Scotland Area, memo of 9 April 1937,
LAB 10/76, PRO.
44. Tuckett, The Blacksmiths’ History, p. 199.
45. CCO memos of 3 September 1936 and 4 February 1941, LAB 10/76 and
10/422, PRO.
46. The Times, 3 April 1944.
47. The CAC was reconstituted early in February 1960, two months before the
token strike, to pursue demands for increased apprentice pay: CSA minute
book, 27 April 1960, MLG.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 24
Apprentice self-organization did not always run smoothly. Continu-

ity was hampered by the annual round of ‘coming out of their time’
among older apprentices, on whom strike committees largely relied.
Some employers reported receiving unstable or incoherent demands
from, and facing rapid membership turnover in, deputations of striking
apprentices.48 The 1941 Court of Inquiry heard how the activities of the
CAC had been handicapped by limited record-keeping, itself promoted
by turnover among its ‘officers’.49 The use of air travel to spread the
strike from Manchester to Glasgow in 1964 was not accompanied by
comparable organization on the ground, where the strike involved mis-
located, leaderless and chaotic mass meetings – though the prior
collapse of the strike in Manchester amid political in-fighting probably
promoted disorganization on the Clyde.50
Procedural status
All apprentice strike movements were both unofficial and unconstitu-

tional, in that they were launched with neither official union approval
nor prior recourse to the two industries’ national disputes procedures.51
48. For example, at Blackburn Aircraft, Glasgow, in 1939: EEF, A(7)164,

MRC.
49. ‘I believe there is a minute book somewhere’, said James Hunter, adding
that there had been ‘about six minute secretaries within a period of three
months … [A]fter a while we stopped taking minutes for some reason or
other. The apprentices are not so good at the official procedure’: Verbatim
Report of Proceedings, p. 151, LAB 10/509, PRO.
50. The mother of Barry Foxhall, the Manchester Dry Dock apprentice who
toured factory gates on the Clyde in 1964 to little effect, told the press that
‘Barry is the only one on strike now. All the others went back to work after
Barry left for Glasgow’: Daily Record, 20 November 1964; CSA, TD
241/12/359, MLG.
51. The post-1918 engineering and shipbuilding industries both featured
industry-wide (‘national’) regulation of employment issues, involving an
employers’ federation (EEF and SEF respectively) and national trade
unions, notably the AEU and a union federation – from 1936, the Confed-
eration of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions (CSEU). Both industries’
disputes procedures in principle channelled locally contested issues through
a sequence of joint ‘conferences’ at works, district and national levels. Only
in the event of failure to agree at all levels in succession did either side
become free to take industrial action. These procedures represented
‘employer conciliation’: the presentation by unions of their case to a quasi-
court of employer representatives: I. G. Sharp, Industrial Conciliation and
Arbitration in Great Britain (Allen and Unwin: 1950), ch. 4; A. Marsh,
Industrial Relations in Engineering (Pergamon, Oxford: 1965), pp. 112ff.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 25

Moreover, the apprentice strike committees were never formally recog-
nized by either employers or unions, and most movements continued,
in their later stages at least, in defiance of official instructions by unions
to apprentice members to return to work.
Although unofficial and unconstitutional strikes became common
in engineering from the late 1930s onwards,52 in the case of the appren-
tice movements those attributes reflected also factors specific to
apprenticeship. Their unofficial status was promoted by weak links
between trade unions and apprentices, few of whom were union
members when the movements started. Until the Second World War,
few apprentices were members of unions, not least because most unions
made little effort to recruit them and some unions did not accept them
at all.53 The AEU estimated that only 20% of engineering apprentices
participating in the 1937 dispute in Manchester were union members.
Despite recruitment efforts by various unions, membership rates
among apprentices appear to have been as low as 10% on Tyneside in
1944 and in Scotland in 1952.54
The unconstitutional nature of apprentice strikes was promoted by
the exclusion, from the two industries’ (post-1937) procedure agree-
ments for young males, of the standard adult option of recourse to
shop stewards for handling individual grievances. Apprentices were
required instead to approach either management or a district official in
order to retain procedural legitimacy, which in turn encouraged them
to ignore procedure.
The unofficial and unconstitutional attributes of apprentice strikes
were both ambiguous. Some unions made the apprentice movements
official, either as they went along, as did the engineering, pattern-
making and foundry workers’ unions on the Clyde in 1937, or after
they were over, by granting strike benefit to prior members who had
gone on strike, as did the AEU in 1952 and 1960. Some unions even
encouraged strikers to join up during the dispute by waiving the
normal qualifying period for benefit eligibility, as did the woodworkers’
union on the Clyde in 1937. These decisions indicated the wish of
52. Croucher, Engineers at War, pp. 363ff.; Royal Commission on Trade

Unions and Employers’ Associations (Donovan), Report, Cmnd 3623
(1968), ch. 7.
53. Apprentice membership in the AEU had long been restricted to those
aged 18 and above: J. B. Jefferys, The Story of the Engineers 1800–1945
(Lawrence and Wishart: 1945), p. 137.
54. Manchester Guardian, 16 September 1937; CCO memo, 27 March 1944,
and Industrial Relations Officer (IRO) phone call, 18 March 1952, LAB
10/451 and 482/1952, PRO.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 26
officials to use the strikes to increase membership,55 but that was not
necessarily an overriding consideration: the AEU refused to grant
strike benefit, even retrospectively, in 1939, 1941 and 1964.56
In terms of their constitutionality, apprentice strikes could strictly
speaking be termed unconstitutional only after 1937–38, when the first
procedure agreements for junior male employees were signed in the two
industries. Even then, indentured apprentices, who, though in the
minority, were still numerous,57 were excluded from disputes procedure
agreements until 1965. In every strike movement, therefore, some strikers
did not act unconstitutionally, in that they did not violate any procedure
agreement – as opposed to their indentures – in going on strike.
Not surprisingly, union officials – particularly at national level – for
the most part objected to unofficial organizations and unconstitutional
disputes. In the AEU, national officials of various political hues moved
at some point to stop all of the movements from 1937 onwards. The
same sometimes applied at district level. In Barrow in 1952, and Wigan
and Halifax in 1960, district officials quickly instructed their appren-
tice members to return to work immediately.58
Opposition to apprentices’ tactics was far from universal or unam-
biguous among union officials. District officials and district commit-
tees often favoured the strikers. In the AEU, the traditional autonomy
of district committees permitted them to give effective support to the
strikers, particularly in the crucial early phase of a movement. The
most notable example was the Clyde in 1937, when the Confederation
of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions (CSEU) district committee
not only asked the national executives of member unions to make the
strike official and to pay strike benefit, but also organized a one-day
strike and an indefinite overtime embargo in support of the apprentices
and persisted with sympathy action despite the opposition of national
officials. In both Manchester and Oldham in 1964, AEU district officials
55. Fowler, The First Teenagers, p. 60, concludes from the second, Manches-
ter-based, phase of the 1937 movement that union officials were ‘preoccu-
pied’ with the recruitment issue.
56. The unions cited are the AEU, United Patternmakers’ Association,
National Union of Foundry Workers, and Amalgamated Society of
Woodworkers; AEU Executive Committee minutes, 20 April, 20
September 1937, 27 June 1939, 23 April 1941, 22 April 1952, 25 April
1960, 8 December 1964, MSS 259/1/2/1–97, AEU Archive, MRC; CCO
memo, 24 April 1937, LAB 10/76, PRO.
57. In 1925, only 28.4% of apprentices in the two industries (23.3% and 50.5%,
in engineering and shipbuilding respectively) served under an indenture or
other written agreement: Ministry of Labour, Report of an Inquiry, Vol. 6,
pp. 12, 56.
58. EEF, A(7)275, A(7)330, MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 27

actively encouraged apprentices to strike. AEU officials in Glasgow also
proved sympathetic, albeit less overtly, in 1939 and 1952. The support of
trades councils, with their greater independence from national union
officials, could be especially valuable, particularly with facilities for
running the strike, as in Manchester in 1937 and Glasgow in 1939.59
Further down the hierarchy, among shop stewards and journeymen,
and even among the public at large, support for apprentice strikers was
often widespread. In 1952 and 1960 shop stewards undermined the
efforts of union officials to secure a return to work on the Clyde.60
Adult craft-workers got the credit in 1964: the Glasgow, Halifax and
Sheffield associations reported that attempts by local officials to
promote a return to work had been undermined by widespread
sympathy for the strikers among adult workers.61
The reactions of union officials to apprentice strikes showed a fun-
damental ambiguity. National officials might formally oppose the
strikes as unofficial and unconstitutional but they also sought two
benefits from them. The first was increased recruitment. Apprentice
strikes saw many young people become members. In 1952, Jimmy Reid,
then a nineteen-year-old strike leader, claimed that a thousand young
workers had joined a union during the strike.62 The second was an
increase in union influence over youth employment and training. In
most of the national negotiations occasioned by apprentice strikes,
union officials urged on employers the potential benefits to both parties
were the employers’ association (until 1937) to recognize, or (after 1937)
to universalize, the right of unions to represent apprentices, thereby
allowing them to guide youth discontent into less damaging channels.63
59. LAB 10/76, PRO; EEF, A(7)164, A(7)275, A(7)330, Z64/69(52), MRC.
60. In 1952, a Ministry regional official reported that ‘naturally some
elements are making the most of the dispute, and it is understood that
militant shop stewards are attending the meetings of the Strike Committee
on the pretence that they are encouraging them to return to work, while,
in point of fact, their influence is being used in the opposite direction’:
memo, 13 March 1952, LAB 482/1952, PRO. In 1960, the information
given by CSEU officials to shop stewards was said by one employer ‘to
have acted more as an incentive than as a deterrent’ to helping the strikers:
Rolls-Royce letter, 29 April 1960, Scottish Engineering Employers’ Asso-
ciation (SEEA) Archive, 60/81, MLG.
61. EEF, Z64/69(52), MRC.
62. Daily Worker, 21 March 1952.
63. ‘Some of the trade-union officials are very anxious to make use of this par-
ticular strike to overthrow the traditional attitude of the employers in
refusing the trade-unions to represent apprentices’: CCO Scotland, memo
of 7 April 1937, LAB 10/76, PRO.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 28
The strikes also prompted the largest union to improve its official
links to apprentices. In the early 1940s the AEU set up official channels
of representation for its young members, comprising district-level
Junior Workers’ Committees (JWCs) and an annual national Youth
Conference, intended as an alternative to unofficial bodies for the
expression of youth grievances.64 The union’s efforts intensified during
the 1944 strike on the Tyne, when it successfully pressed the nineteen-
year-old secretary of the unofficial Tyne Apprentices’ Guild, J. W.
Davy, to abandon that body in favour of its own district JWC.65 Yet the
creation of official youth institutions in the AEU did not prevent the
re-emergence of unofficial activism after the war. Indeed, by arranging
for district-wide meetings of young workers while offering only limited
scope for their activities,66 the JWCs may actually have encouraged
unofficial organization and militancy. The relationship between official
and unofficial youth organizations could be fraught: the minutes of the
1961 AEU Youth Conference did not mention the recent strike
movement, for example.67
Strike demands
Apprentice disputes resembled their adult counterparts in the primacy

of pay-related claims.68 They differed in the extent to which pay
dominated. In eight of the nine strike movements higher pay for appren-
tices and other youth led the list. Only in the 1944 anti-conscription
dispute did it fail to feature (Table 7, column 2). The other demands
advanced by apprentice strikers included improved training, as in the
demand for day release for all apprentices contained in both the
64. Jefferys, Story of the Engineers, p. 263; J. V. C. Wray, ‘Trade Unions and
Young Workers in Great Britain’, International Labour Review 75 (1957),
pp. 304–18.
65. An EEF officer stated on 27 March 1944 that ‘the AEU are doing every-
thing possible to form a Youth Committee movement, and have told
Davey [sic] that he must join one or the other’: LAB 10/451, PRO.
66. The functions formally allocated to the Junior Workers’ Committees
(JWCs) were limited to increasing the union’s youth membership and co-
operating with the district committee to promote social, educational and
recreational activities for young members: memo by J. C. L., Ministry of
Labour, 22 March 1944, LAB 10/451, PRO.
67. AEU, Minutes of the 18th Annual Youth Conference held at the Royal
Pavilion, Brighton (1961).
68. Pay was the central issue in more than half (57%) of the ‘principal
disputes’ in the UK during 1946–73: Durcan et al., Strikes in Post-War
Britain, p. 203, Table 6.17.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 29

Apprentice Charter of 1937 and the Youth Charter of 1939. Formulated
by the Clyde strike committee, the 1937 Charter called for higher pay,
district-wide minimum age–wage scales, a right to part-time technical
education during the working week, a ‘reasonable’ proportion of
apprentices to journeymen, and the right to union representation.69
Demands that employers recognize union rights to represent
apprentices featured only before their attainment in 1937 (for all but
indentured apprentices). Thereafter unofficial apprentice committees
did not join the national unions in giving priority to full representation
rights for all young workers. Other apprentice demands – concerning
conscription and the transition to journeyman status – proved
ephemeral and marginal respectively.70
The dominance of pay within apprentice-strike demands increased
over time. The last three movements advanced exclusively pay-related
claims, whereas their 1937, 1939 and 1941 predecessors had also
included training-related ones. Although some apprentice groups
showed interest in training issues after 1945, training-related issues
featured regularly only in the motions submitted to annual AEU Youth
Conferences – where they were typically blocked by unwillingness to
see the use of piece-work restricted in order to improve training.71
The priority given by national unions to pay over training in their
69. The formulation of these Charters may have been inspired by the
Engineers’ Charter, adopted by the AEU in 1929: Jefferys, Story of the
Engineers, pp. 238–9. The demands for higher pay and day release origi-
nated from the strike leaders themselves. Those concerning apprentice
numbers and representation rights emerged after discussions with sympa-
thetic adult unionists: Croucher, Engineers at War, p. 51; McKinlay, ‘The
1937 Apprentices’ Strike’, SLHSJ, pp. 14–32. Although the appeal of
apprentice charters dwindled after 1941, a National Conference of
Apprentices (NCA) in Glasgow in 1952 adopted one with a more organi-
zational orientation, including demands for apprentice closed shops,
apprentice committees in all factories, a reduction in military service to
one year and full recognition inside the CSEU: Clyde Apprentice and
Youth Committee (CAYC), ‘Youth in overalls unite!’, undated leaflet.
70. Demands involving conscription were not surprisingly confined to war
conditions, incipient or actual, in 1939 and 1944. Claims concerning the
transition to journeyman status featured twice: to abolish the require-
ments that time lost during an apprenticeship (‘black time’) be made up (in
1912) and that apprentices coming out of their time serve up to two more
years below the adult craft rate as ‘improvers’ (in 1939). Both claims
implicitly involved pay, given that both practices delayed the attainment
by apprentices of the adult craft rate.
71. The decline of training-related demands characterized the official negoti-
ating agenda at sector level too. The only claim related to training quality
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 30
30 RYAN: APPRENTICE STRIKES IN UK ENGINEERING & SHIPBUILDING
apprenticeship-related demands can be attributed to the difficulty of

enforcing training clauses in collective agreements, given the informa-
tional obstacles to the monitoring of work-based training by trade
unions.72 The adoption of the same priority by the apprentice strikers
may, however, have a simpler explanation. A leader of the 1941 strike
testified to the Court of Inquiry that apprentices took a short-term
view, preferring an immediate pay gain to more training and the asso-
ciated benefit for their career prospects.73 They were encouraged to do
so by increasing task specialization, which jeopardized those career
prospects.74
Dispute outcomes
The movements at one level appear to have failed: most ended in a

return to work on conditions prevailing prior to the dispute. Such
results might suggest that the apprentices gained nothing from their
efforts (Table 7, column 3). In 1912, 1921, 1939 and 1944 that was
essentially the case. The other five movements – 1937, 1941, 1952, 1960
advanced nationally by engineering unions after 1940 was that in 1963 for
compulsory day release on average earnings for apprentices aged less than
18: P. Ryan, ‘The Embedding of Apprenticeship in Industrial Relations:
British Engineering, 1925–65’, in P. Ainley and H. Rainbird (eds), Appren-
ticeship: Towards a New Paradigm of Learning (Kogan Page: 1999), pp. 48,
54.
72. Union efforts in the 1940s to improve apprentice training through joint
regulation, in the form of sectoral Recruitment and Training of Juveniles
agreements rather than through collective bargaining, are consistent with
such an interpretation: P. Ryan, ‘Training Quality and Trainee Exploita-
tion’, in R. Layard, K. Mayhew and G. Owen (eds), Britain’s Training
Deficit (Avebury, Aldershot: 1994), pp. 92–124; Ryan, ‘The Embedding of
Apprenticeship’, pp. 41–60.
73. Asked if receiving more training would have compensated the apprentice
strikers for low pay, James Hunter, former CAC secretary, stated, ‘we just
looked at the amount of work we were doing and found to our astonish-
ment that we weren’t being paid for the work we were doing … The
question of training was – not absolutely washed out, but when the
committee came to the conclusion that the primary demand of the appren-
tices was a question of a wage increase, we concentrated on that’: LAB
10/509, p. 175, PRO.
74. The priority that apprentices gave to higher pay, particularly in low-paid
districts like Glasgow, had also been visible in 1939: the strike’s flagging
impetus revived when the apprentice committee shifted its demands from
conscription issues to the Youth Charter, with featured higher pay as the
leading objective: The Bulletin, 23 May 1939.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 31

and 1964 – were called off on the understanding, as conveyed from the
employers’ associations by the trade unions, that industry-wide negoti-
ations on the apprentices’ claims, which had been in progress before the
strike, would be rapidly resumed after a return to work – and that con-
cessions to the strikers’ demands were to be anticipated. In all five
cases, substantial concessions soon materialized.75
Apprentice pay was governed, in federated firms in both engineering
and shipbuilding, by age–wage scales that specified time-rated appren-
tice pay as a percentage of the adult craft rate in the same occupation.
Those scales, initially imposed locally by employers’ associations as
maximum rates, were converted in the aftermath of the strikes of 1937
and 1941 into collectively negotiated, nationally uniform minimum
rates. After 1937, union officials pursued claims for higher scale rates
at national level, convoking the special conferences with the sectoral
employers’ association at which they were entitled to raise issues of
industry-wide import.
Those negotiations led between 1937 and 1970 to an episodic
sequence of increases that broadly doubled apprentice scale rates in
engineering (Figure 3). The timing of the pay increases aligns moder-
ately closely with that of the disputes. The 1939 movement was not
followed by a pay rise, nor did the scale increases of 1943 and 1969
follow a strike. But five pay increases – those of 1937, 1941, 1952, 1960
and 1964 – did come after an apprentice movement (Figure 4).76 Within
a month (on average) of these movements ending, a national agreement
that increased pay scales for junior males, and in 1937 and 1941 also
extended the trade unions’ representation rights vis-à-vis apprentices
(Table 8).
The importance of apprentice strikes in precipitating those wage
rises is underlined by the average of four years and four national
conferences that had elapsed (in engineering) between the start of
national negotiations on the unions’ claim for increased youth pay
and the start of the movement (Table 8). In all five cases an appren-
tice strike released a log-jam in national negotiations. More
generally, while the interests of apprentices and trade unions over-
lapped,77 the overlap was not great enough to permit the apprentices
75. In 1937, the first, Scottish, phase of the strike had led to increases in
apprentice pay scales at works and then district levels before the end of the
stoppage: CCO memo, 18 May 1937, LAB 10/76, PRO.
76. As the pay data refer to April, pay increases that occurred later in the year
do not show up in Figures 3 and 4 until the year after.
77. Trade unions are not generally expected to support a demand by a small
minority of the membership (apprentices) for an increase in its pay relative
HSIR 18(29/3)
32
100
90
30/3/05
80 20 yrs
19 yrs
70
18 yrs
17 yrs
60
5:59 pm
16yrs
50
40
Page 32
30
% Craft fitter’s wage rate

20
10
0
1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970
Figure 3: Apprentice age–wage scale rates, federated engineering firms, UK, 1935–71
Source: Ministry of Labour and National Service, Time Rates of Wages and Hours of Labour, annual. EEF file, ‘Wages of Apprentices, Boys and Youths’, undated, c. 1948,

MRC.
Note: Basic weekly time rates of pay of time-rated apprentice fitters in EEF member firms as percentage of district basic weekly minimum consolidated time rates of craft
fitters (except foundry). Craft rates for 1951–67 are the unweighted average of minimum rates for the five largest districts by employment; for 1968–70, minimum national
rate for fitters. Apprentice scale rates for 1935–41 are the locally recommended apprentice rates in five large EEF Associations (NE Coast, North West, Manchester, Birm-
ingham and London); for 1941–50, apprentice scale rates in the 1941 and 1943 EEF/AEU national wage agreements; for 1951–70, age–wage scales for mechanical engineer-
ing. For 1952–64, the flat-rate component of apprentice pay is factored in pro rata.
HSIR 18(29/3)
16 1600
14 1400
30/3/05
12 1200
10
5:59 pm
1000
8 800
Page 33
6 600
4 400
Change in age–wage scale rates % points

Working days lost in ‘principal disputes’
2 200
0 0
-2 -200
1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970
Change in age–wage scale Working days lost (per ‘000 young manual male employees)
& SHIPBUILDING
Figure 4: Changes in age–wage scale rates (federated engineering) and working days lost by young manual males in
‘principal disputes’ (engineering and shipbuilding), UK, 1935–70
33
Source: Figures 2, 3.
Note: ‘Change in age–wage scale’ is unweighted mean of percentage point changes across the five age groups in Figure 3.
HSIR 18(29/3)
Table 8: Apprentice pay-related strikes, official negotiations and national agreements in federated engineering, 1937–64
Dates of preceding Start of Time between Time between End of Subsequent Time between
34
conferences on apprentice apprentice first conference last conference apprentice strike national pay end of strike
pay claims strike and start of and start of agreement and national
advanced by trade unions indefinite strike indefinite strike agreement
30/3/05
(months) (months) (months)
1937 5 May 1936a 27 March 1937 n.a. 10.7 30 October 1937 23 December 1937 1.7
1939 26 May 1938; 18 May 1939 11.7 3.1 3 June 1939 none n.a.
15 February 1939
1941 25 July, 5 October 1939; 28 February 1941 18.2 0.0 5 April 1941 21 March 41 -0.5b
5:59 pm
26 January 1940;
1952 24 September 1941; 7 February 1952 126.5 0.8 2 April 1952 17 April 1952 0.5
27 January, 14 May token;
1942; 23 November 10 March 1952
1944; 14 June, indefinite
Page 34
4 October 1945;
14 August 1946;
17 December 1947;
26 July 1949;
14 February 1952
1960 22 January, 18 June 24 February and 87.1 0.0 16 May 1960 20 July 1960 2.1
1953; 20 May, 20 April 1960
21 October 1954; token;
4 April 1956; 25 April 1960
20 February 1958; indefinite
20 April 1960
1964 31 October 1963 7 September 1964 12.1 12.1 25 November 1964 22 December 1964 0.9
token;
2 November 1964
indefinite
Average 51.1c 5.3 0.9d


Source: EEF, Minutes of Central and Special Conferences and A(12)20, MRC.
Notes: Claims lodged at Central Conference with EEF by engineering unions (variously AEU, National Engineering Joint Trades Movement and CSEU) concerning the
pay of apprentices (excluding general pay claims that also covered apprentices); n.a.: not applicable.
a. Claim for trade-union right to represent junior males, as required for pay claims to be negotiated on their behalf.
b. Strike continued after the national agreement was signed, owing to discontent in the Manchester area over its content.
c. Excluding 1937. d. Excluding 1939.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 35

to rely on union officials alone to promote their claims. The lack of
results from national negotiations for higher age–wage scales in the
years before the 1952 and 1960 strikes was widely attributed among
apprentices to a low priority attached to that goal in official circles.
Other factors may also have contributed to the five pay
increases.78 Although in all cases the EEF and the Shipbuilding
Employers’ Federation (SEF) sought to avoid making concessions, in
some years a number of their members favoured a pay increase. Such
inclinations were particularly widespread in 1952, when the demand for
youth labour was still strong and the youth population cohort was
small. An EEF survey of local associations, conducted between the
token strike and the indefinite strike, found that 33 out of 43 respon-
dents favoured a pay increase whereas only 7 opposed it.79 Even on that
occasion, it took a strike movement to break the resistance of the
employers’ federation. The pattern in engineering was repeated in ship-
building, whose national agreements on apprenticeship generally
followed engineering ones closely in both timing and content.80
These increases in apprentice wage rates did not necessarily translate
directly into higher relative earnings and payroll costs. Increases in
to that of other members (journeymen). A convergence of interests was

encouraged in the case of metalworking apprentices by, inter alia, the
threat posed by their low paid, unregulated status to the interests of adult
members: P. Ryan, ‘Trade Unionism and the Pay of Young Workers’, in P.
N. Junankar (ed.), From School to Unemployment? The Labour Market for
Young People (Macmillan: 1987), pp. 119–42.
78. Williams, Recruitment to the Skilled Trades, pp. 155–6, attributed early
post-war increases in apprentice relative pay to tight youth-labour
markets, without mentioning apprentice strikes. Her interpretation cannot
account for further scale increases in the 1960s, when labour markets
slackened as the supply of youth labour increased.
79. Report, ‘Association Views on Pay Increases for Apprentices, Boys and
Youth’, March 1952, following the survey distributed with Circular Letter
47, 5 March 1952, EEF, A(7)275, MRC. Employer support for a wage rise
had probably been increased by the time of the survey by the return of
apprentice militancy, in the shape of the token strike of 7 February and the
increasing prospect of an indefinite stoppage.
80. The exceptions included 1941, when the SEF had recently signed with the
CSEU a national agreement on apprentice pay that had to be reopened as a
result of the apprentices’ strike, and 1969, when, for once ‘the tail wagged the
dog’ (as an EEF committee had put it in 1960), in that the SEF’s acceptance
of a reduction of the duration of apprenticeship from five to four years and
of payment of the adult rate at age 20 forced the EEF to follow suit: EEF,
Management Board Report, 27 November 1969, Z67/590(5); Meeting of
Negotiating and Policy Committees, 20 July 1960, A(7)330, MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 36
‘wage drift’ – i.e. the gap between negotiated wage rates and actual
earnings, including incentive bonuses81 – benefited apprentices as well
as adults, given that through the 1960s a substantial minority of
apprentices in engineering, and a majority in shipbuilding, received
output-related bonuses (Table 4).82 In engineering, adults gained more
from the growth of bonus earnings than did apprentices. Relative
apprentice earnings actually declined, albeit only marginally, between
1959 and 1968, notwithstanding the 1960 and 1964 scale increases. It
took the large scale rises of 1969 and the abandonment of piece-work
by many employers around that time to move apprentice earnings
strongly towards those of adults and for the efforts of the post-war
apprentice strikers finally to bear fruit.83
In sum, the apprentice striker and the union negotiator, the unoffi-
cial and the official, generated together a cumulatively large change in
the training-related wage structure of the metalworking sector between
1937 and 1970.
The interpretation of apprentice strikes
How should a strike movement among apprentices be understood?

This section discusses four sets of factors – political, sociological,
economic and industrial relations – in relation to the relevant attributes
of the movements, informed by the economics of work-based training
and bargaining. These factors are then grouped, partly for heuristic
purposes, into two broad interpretations: socio-political and
economic–IR.
81. E. H. Phelps Brown, ‘Wage Drift’, Economica 29 (1962), pp. 339–56.

82. The gap between rates and earnings was reduced in the case of apprentices
by the legal restrictions imposed by the Factory Acts on night shift and
overtime work by young workers.
83. The EEF’s surveys of its members put average apprentice hourly earnings
(all ages) at 39.1% of those of journeymen in 1959 and 37.5% in 1968:
sources as in Table 4. Unpublished data from the New Earnings Survey
(NES) indicate a figure of 51.6% for 1974 (including non-federated
employers, in mechanical and electrical engineering and shipbuilding only,
and relative to all adult manual employees). The comparability of the EEF
and NES estimates is limited, not least as a result of the removal of
twenty-year-olds from the apprenticeship category in 1970; but, as that
should have reduced the measured increase relative to the true one, the
large increase between 1968 and 1974 is unlikely to have resulted from
different definitions and coverage in the two surveys.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 37

Politics
The first set of factors is associated with the period’s politics, both
industrial and national. The issue is the extent to which the strikers and
in particular their leaders were motivated by left-wing political goals,
usually involving social and political revolution – and to which those
who did not share those goals were manipulated by those who did. The
potential manipulators, in the accounts offered at the time by many
employers, union officials, politicians and journalists, and by some
apprentice leaders too, included the CP and various Trotskyist
groups.84
Evidence of political influence is both fragmentary and poten-
tially distorted by the tendency of contemporary commentators to mis-
represent the situation to their own advantage, assigning either
overwhelming or negligible importance to ‘agitators’ as the source of
conflict.85 The most readily available evidence is also the least reliable:
statements made by the individuals involved, particularly their public
utterances. Less readily accessible, but potentially more informative,
are the political affiliations, policies and actions of strike leaders and
supporters.
Allegations of the manipulation of young workers by far-left groups
were widely levelled in public by employers in particular. In 1960 the
manager of a Manchester factory, trying to keep his drawing-office
apprentices at work, told them ominously that the Glasgow apprentice
representatives had travelled down, not on a motor-cycle, but ‘in a big
black saloon driven by a man over 21’, adding ingenuously, ‘I am not
suggesting that this is the work of the Communist Party, but this all
seems very well organised.’86
The internal communications of employers offer potentially more
reliable evidence. In 1937 the local engineering employers’ association
described the North East Campaign Committee, one of whose leaflets
it forwarded to the EEF, as ‘one of those communistic bodies of
mushroom growth’.87 A less conspiratorial view was offered in private
84. A new twist was provided by the suggestion by Belfast engineering

employers in 1964 that the dispute had been spread to the city by two
Young Socialist students from Liverpool University: letter, Northern
Ireland EEA to EEF, 26 May 1965, Z64/69(52), MRC.
85. R. Darlington, ‘The Agitator Theory of Strikes’, British Universities
Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA) conference paper, Nottingham,
July 2004.
86. Manchester Evening News, 29 April 1960.
87. Letter, North East Coast Employers’ Association to EEF, 8 May 1937,
A(7)330, MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 38
in 1941 by a leading Clyde shipbuilder: ‘practically all the agitation

seems to be by the younger employees and although this element is
commonly spoken of as “communistic”, I am confident that it only
means that natural agitators are taking advantage of this busy time for
agitating for increases and improvements’.88
Union officials also made similar allegations, sometimes with unin-
tended effects. At a mass meeting of strikers in Edinburgh in 1941 that
had been expected to decide to return to work, a district official made
a very pointed attack on the Chairman of the Apprentices’

Committee and criticised those ‘who were stupid enough’ to be led
away by the advice of the communists. The result was of course
retaliation from the apprentices. Finally, peace was, more or less,
restored, but a vote, on resumption pending negotiations, resulted in
132 for and 154 against.89
Apprentice strike committees sometimes went out of their way to deny

political motives and connections – as when the Clyde delegates who
sought to rally support in Manchester in 1960 claimed that ‘this is def-
initely not communist inspired … we just want a fair increase’.90
Among the less plausible denials was the decision in 1944 by the Tyne
Apprentices’ Guild (TAG) to add the qualifier ‘non-political’ to its
title, along with the claim by its leaders that it had turned down offers
of help from the Militant Workers’ Movement (MWM), a Trotskyist
umbrella group.91 The latter statement was contradicted by evidence
given at the trials of four non-apprentice leaders of the Revolutionary
Communist Party (RCP), an MWM affiliate, on charges of aiding and
abetting an illegal strike by the TAG. The appeal judge noted that all
four defendants had effectively conceded having incited one – with
which, ironically, they had not been charged. Two ex-leaders of the
88. Letter from Sir Stephen Piggott, John Brown & Co., to Admiral Fraser, 5
March 1941, LAB 10/138, PRO.
89. Conciliation Officer (CO) memo, 7 April 1941, LAB 10/422, PRO. Ernest
Bevin, Minister of Labour, famously denounced the Tyneside strike of
1944 as purely political: ‘this is not an industrial dispute. It has been
fomented by a few irresponsible mischief-makers and is flatly contrary to
the advice of the trade unions. It is in short an attempt to use the strike
weapon to coerce the Government at a critical moment of the war’:
statement, 29 March 1944, LAB 10/451, PRO.
90. Glasgow Evening Times, 31 May 1939; Manchester Evening News, 29 April
1960.
91. CO memo, 14 February 1944, LAB 10/451, PRO; Daily Herald, 3 April
1944.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 39

TAG stated that the four had provided advice, facilities and funds for
the organization of the strike, and then tried to redirect the movement
towards the RCP’s campaign for the nationalization of the coal
industry.92
The limits to political motivation in apprentice strikes are suggested
by the evasive actions taken on occasion by strike committees. The
1939 apprentice leadership on the Clyde decided not to go ahead with
a proposal for demonstrations at Labour Exchanges, as it wanted ‘not
to be confused with the political demonstrations taking place at the
same time’.93
Secretive behaviour by apprentice leaders or adult supporters was
often seen as evidence of far-left involvement. In Manchester in 1964,
the press was excluded from a ‘national’ apprentice conference called
by one of two rival strike committees, the Trotskyist-oriented Man-
chester Engineering Apprentices’ Direct Action Committee
(MEADAC). At the ensuing press conference, Mike Hughes,
MEADAC’s nineteen-year-old organizing secretary, appearing
nervous, was assisted by an older man, aged around thirty, who refused
to give his name and fielded the ‘sticky’ questions.94 The other strike
committee, the Communist-oriented National Apprentices’ Wages and
Conditions Campaign Committee (NAWACCC) behaved similarly. At
a previous delegate meeting, its leader had refused to tell the press his
name, but suggested that communications be addressed to a J. F.
O’Shea at an address in Islington, London – which proved to be the
details of a CP candidate in a recent local council election.95 These
evasions could have reflected simply fear of misrepresentation in the
press, but on that occasion they aligned with other evidence of left-
wing political influence.
Further evidence is provided by the political affiliations of, and the
statements made by, apprentice leaders. The leader of the 1937 Clyde
strike committee, eight out of nine members of its 1941 successor
92. LAB 10/451, PRO; Law Report, The Times, 26 September 1944; Newcastle
Journal & North Mail, 1 April, 15 June 1944.
93. Evening Times, 31 May 1939. In 1937 the Manchester strike committee
had refused to seat any member of a ‘political organisation’: Fowler, The
First Teenagers, p. 61.
94. Confidential Manchester EEA report on Manchester Engineering
Apprentices’ Direct Action Committee (MEADAC) national conference
of 31 October 1964: EEF, Z64/69(52), MRC; Financial Times, 2 November
1964.
95. The Week, 8 October 1964.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 40
(CAC), the secretary of the TAG in 1944, and the secretary of the CAC
in 1952 were members of the Young Communist League (YCL).96 In
the first phase of the 1937 movement, YCL members encouraged the
rejection by the Scottish strikers of calls by trade-union officials for an
unconditional return to work; in the second phase, they promoted the
unofficial national conference whose threat of a national apprentice
strike precipitated victory.97 Strike leaflets put out by the 1939 Clyde
and 1944 Tyne strike committees included wider political demands, for
‘peace’ (by which was meant the overthrow of the ‘pro-Fascist’ UK
government and the adoption of a national alliance with the USSR) in
1939 and coal nationalization in 1944, that the CP and the RCP respec-
tively were promoting at the time.98
Similar attributes and actions were sometimes visible among adult
supporters. The spread of the 1944 strike within England to Hudders-
field alone was associated with the presence of an Independent Labour
Party majority on the AEU district committee and a reputedly Trot-
skyist district secretary.99 The strongest instance of the often-alleged
political manipulation of youth by adults was the Tyneside strike of
1944, when the strikers faced opposition from the CP, given Britain’s
wartime alliance with the USSR,100 but gained support from Trotsky-
ists, who opposed the war. The secret services, the police and a Ministry
96. Croucher, Engineers at War, pp. 50, 130; Fishman, The British Communist
Party, pp. 201ff. The Economic League reported to the EEF in 1952 that
Eric Park, Jimmy Reid’s successor as secretary of the CAC, was an appren-
tice engineering draughtsman, the son of a long-time Communist Party of
Great Britain (CP) mother, a ‘wearer of very powerful lensed glasses, indi-
cating bad sight’ and a Young Communist League (YCL) member: memo,
12 March 1952, EEF, A(7)275, MRC.
97. McKinlay, ‘The 1937 Apprentices’ Strike’, SLHSJ, pp. 14–32.
98. Glasgow Evening News, 18 May 1939; NWETEA letter to EEF, 22 May
1939, EEF, A(7)164), MRC; Croucher, Engineers at War, pp. 235ff.
99. EEF memo to Ministry of Labour, 5 April 1944, LAB 10/451, PRO;
Croucher, Engineers at War, pp. 235ff.
100. The CP’s North East District Committee called for a rapid return to work
and denounced the Militant Workers’ Federation (MWF) for exploiting
‘genuine fears about the mines ballot schemes for other ends than those
sought by the apprentices themselves’: Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 1
April 1944.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 41

of Labour investigator all concluded that the London-based leaders of
the RCP had increased apprentice discontent on the Tyne by misrepre-
senting the ballot that was to allocate conscripts between the armed
forces and the coalmines.101
Political factors undoubtedly accounted also for the proliferation of
youth and apprentice committees during the four movements in which
the role of left-wing politics was particularly prominent: those of 1939,
1941, 1944 and 1964. The first of these saw, on the Clyde alone, activity
by, inter alia, the Glasgow Youth Campaign Committee, the National
Youth Campaign, the Youth Peace Council and the West Scotland
Youth Pilgrimage for Peace and Freedom, in addition to the strike
committee itself.102 The aftermath of the 1941 strike saw the creation in
East Lancashire of several secretive local apprentice committees, asso-
ciated, according to an engineering employers’ official, with a ‘Left
Wing element … very active in attacking our economic system and in
supporting the Russians and Communists’.103 The 1964 strike saw the
Communist-oriented NAWACCC and the Trotskyist-oriented
MEADAC fight it out for control of the movement. The NAWACCC,
formed as a breakaway from MEADAC, launched the indefinite strike
on 2 November 1964. The MEADAC faction opposed the move, pre-
dicting a flop and advocating a postponement to March 1965 in order
to increase support.104
These rivalries and manoeuvres brought to the surface the mostly
submerged attempts of left-wing organizations to promote and steer
apprentice discontent. They also show the limitations of those efforts,
which, as far as the effectiveness of the movements were concerned,
rebounded at least partially on all four of the movements that showed
the clearest political component. The most vivid case was the 1964 one,
when overt conflict between the two strike committees reduced support
101. LAB 10/451, PRO.

102. EEF, A(7)164, MRC.
103. Letter from EEF to Manchester EEA, 25 August 1941, A(7)186, MRC.
104. MEADAC subsequently came up with only a poorly attended ‘national
conference’ at which plans to strike were postponed to May 1965, before
subsequently being abandoned. MEADAC was described privately by
local employer representatives as ‘a purely political organisation’
composed of ‘Trotskyists’; the National Apprentices Wages and Condi-
tions Campaign Committee (NAWACCC) was termed by AEU officials
‘communist inspired’: EEF, Z65/68(52), MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 42
in both Manchester and Scotland.105 At least one employer anticipated

benefits from in-fighting on the left: the deputy director of the Man-
chester EEA asked the EEF, ‘do you think we can rely on support from
union officials with communist leanings when we come to the Trotsky-
ists’ effort next March?’106 The extent of left-wing political motivation
and factionalism may even have been inversely associated with the
scale and success. Of the four with the most salient political attributes
– 1939, 1941, 1944 and 1964 – the first and last were the smallest, and
the first and third among the least successful, of the nine movements
(Tables 1, 7).
The geography of apprentice strikes suggests that the political stance
of district union organization – a central attribute in the AEU in par-
ticular107 – also influenced strike activity by apprentices. At one pole
stood Glasgow, whose presence in all nine movements, and whose lead-
ership of most of them, aligned with its long-established left-wing
politics, both industrial and municipal.108 At the other pole stood Birm-
ingham, another large engineering centre, with its centre-right labour
politics, whose apprentices never featured in a strike movement. The
105. In Manchester, Mike Hughes, MEADAC chairman, denounced the

NAWACCC’s strike call for 2 November 1964, claiming that the call was
‘made by a bogus committee set up by disgruntled apprentices, and others,
who were removed from our committee two weeks ago … [T]hese
elements, members of the Communist Party and supporters of the Pabloite
group [sic], refused to accept democratic decisions’: The Apprentice, 7
September 1964. In Glasgow, Alex Ferry, secretary of an AEU district
whose officials had hitherto invariably shown sympathy for the apprentice
cause, attacked the apprentice who had flown from Manchester to bring
out Glasgow apprentices as ‘an agitator from England’: Daily Record, 20
November 1964.
106. Letter, 16 November 1964, EEF, Z64/69(52), MRC. The extreme demands
for apprentice pay and conditions that MEADAC advanced, together with
the weakening of the strike by political in-fighting, paralleled the tactics
and effects of the left-wing organizations, notably the Militant Tendency,
Socialist Workers’ Party and Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), that
sought to harness youth discontent on the Youth Training Scheme in the
1980s: P. Ryan, ‘Trade Union Policies towards the Youth Training Scheme:
Patterns and Causes’, British Journal of Industrial Relations (BJIR) 33:1
(1995), pp. 1–33.
107. J. D. Edelstein and M. Warner, Comparative Union Democracy (Allen and
Unwin: 1975), pp. 291–4; R. Undy, ‘The Electoral Influence of the Oppo-
sition Party in the AUEW Engineering Section’, BJIR 17:1 (1979), pp.
19–33.
108. D. Gilbert, ‘Little Moscow and Radical Localities’, in A. Charlesworth, D.
Gilbert, A. Randall, H. Southall and C. Wrigley, An Atlas of Industrial
Protest in Britain (Macmillan: 1996), pp. 151–7.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 43

prominence in the annals of apprentice militancy of Manchester before
the 1950s and the low profile of London throughout are, however, less
readily explained in terms of local industrial politics.109
Finally, a significant role for political factors might be suggested by
the ‘spontaneity’ of apprentice strikes. As unofficial actions by largely
unorganized workers, the apprentice movements can be seen as purely
spontaneous outbreaks, the manner and timing of whose occurrence
was difficult to predict in advance and remains difficult to explain in
retrospect. The ‘spontaneity’ attribute was emphasized by some strike
leaders. John Moore, secretary of the CAC, asked by the Court of
Inquiry to identify when the 1941 strike had started, replied, ‘it is hard
just to place when it actually happened … [The apprentices] just
seemed to be coming out here and there spontaneously.’ The trivial
events that precipitated some movements, such as the dismissal of an
Edinburgh apprentice for stealing a bicycle in 1941, were indeed con-
sistent with such an interpretation.110
Moore’s insistence on spontaneity is rendered unreliable by his
position – that is, facing an official inquiry into an illegal strike that he
admitted leading – and by the evidence of prior organization by ad hoc
apprentice groups. The 1941 movement had been preceded in late 1940
in Edinburgh by two apprentice meetings called to discuss lack of
progress in national official negotiations on junior male pay. Moore
himself stated that the CAC had been in existence since 1937 and even
claimed that it had restrained a district apprentice meeting from
striking in January 1941, two months before the movement got under
way.111 An important role must therefore be attributed to leadership,
109. The traditional conservatism of the Manchester AEU hampered the local
apprentice strikers until the advent of Hugh Scanlon and Eddie Frow as
district officials in the 1950s and 1960s: interview with Bob Wright, May
1985; Frow and Frow, Manchester’s Big House, pp. 33, 35. The marginal-
to-zero role played by London apprentices throughout is perhaps surpris-
ing, given the growth of shop steward militancy in West London
engineering factories from the mid-1930s: Fishman, The British
Communist Party, pp. 129ff.
110. Verbatim Proceedings, Court of Inquiry, 15 March 1941, p. 26, LAB
10/509; CCO memo, 5 February 1941, LAB 10/422, PRO.
111. James Bachelor, an Edinburgh strike leader, said that apprentice represen-
tatives from Glasgow and Edinburgh had communicated over whether the
pay demand should be 3d. or 4d. (1.25 or 1.67p) per hour: Verbatim Pro-
ceedings, Court of Inquiry, 15–16 March 1941, pp. 43, 109, LAB 10/509,
PRO. Evidence of apprentice organization in the months before the strikes
is also visible for 1937, 1944, 1952, 1960 and 1964. The token strikes that
preceded the last three of these movements also suggest prior organization.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 44
and to the politically committed individuals who took that on, even in
strike movements as apparently ‘spontaneous’ as those by appren-
tices.112 At the same time, the limits to the role of political factors in
apprentice strikes can be seen in the predominance of the economic
over the political in strike demands, and in the disappearance of the
movements after 1964, despite the wider upsurge of left-wing politics
and the continuing organizational strength of the CP in engineering.113
Social and cultural factors
An additional source of apprentice activism may be located in the

socializing functions of apprenticeship. Ideally, apprenticeship inserts
young people into the adult world gradually rather than abruptly, while
respecting their developmental needs.114 This function is less pro-
nounced nowadays than it was during the period when apprenticeships
typically began between fourteen and sixteen years of age, lasted five or
more years, and ended on the apprentice’s twenty-first birthday with
the attainment of the legal age of majority.115
The normative content of apprenticeship, as expressed traditionally
in indentures, involved the exchange of obedience and loyalty by the
apprentice for protection and training by the employer. Acting in loco
parentis, employers resisted the intervention of third parties – notably
112. J. Kelly, Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilization, Collectivism and

Long Waves (Routledge: 1998), pp. 34ff.; Darlington, ‘The Agitator
Theory’.
113. J. McIlroy, ‘“Every Factory our Fortress”: Communist Party Workplace
Branches in a Time of Militancy, 1956–79, Part 1: History, Politics, Topog-
raphy’, HSIR 10 (Autumn 2000), pp. 99–139.
114. Apprenticeship may be contrasted both to full-time post-compulsory
schooling, which segregates youth from the adult world, and to regular
youth employment, which tends to ignore the developmental needs of
youth. Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order, who prized the early assimi-
lation of youth into adult life, might therefore have been expected to favour
apprenticeship, but he viewed it instead as quasi-slavery and advocated early
and unregulated youth employment instead. By contrast, P. Garonna and P.
Ryan, ‘The Regulation and Deregulation of Youth Economic Activity’, in P.
Ryan, P. Garonna and R. C. Edwards (eds), The Problem of Youth: The Reg-
ulation of Youth Employment and Training in Advanced Economies
(Macmillan: 1991), pp. 25–81, see apprenticeship as a potential vehicle for
the ‘regulated inclusion’ of youth in the labour market.
115. In contemporary Britain, what is left of apprenticeship rarely lasts more
than three years and no direct link remains between completion and attain-
ment of the age of majority, which was reduced from 21 to 18 years in 1970.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 45

trade unions – in their ‘privileged’ relationship with their apprentices.116
A corollary was the paternalism and even affection that some
employers showed towards their apprentices, as well as the hostility
that the apprentice strike, with its explicit disobedience, evoked in many
employers, especially when the strikers were indentured.
The socialization of the apprentice involved a further authority
figure: the craft-worker, as organized by trade-unionism. The relevant
norms – involving craft skill, collective organization and solidarity –
diverged from those prized by employers. The journeymen alongside
whom the apprentices worked, and on whom their learning typically
depended, drew them into the community of adult craft-workers, using
rituals that expressed the subordination of the apprentice to, and even
the apprentice’s humiliation by, the adult craft-worker.117 From this
perspective, apprentice strikes appear as a form of self-socialization by
youth, influenced by the values and practices of the labour movement.
The executive committees, delegate conferences and mass meetings
used by the apprentices resembled their counterparts in adult trade-
unionism.118
Effective apprentice self-socialization is suggested by the subsequent
careers of several of the leaders of the movements.119 For all that, the
process was far from smooth. In adult disputes, notably the 1922 engi-
neering lockout, apprentices often faced competing claims on their
loyalty from employers and trade unions.120 The apprentice strikes
116. ‘There should be no interference between the employer and the apprentice
or boy which would detract from the sense of responsibility on the one
hand and the sense of service and discipline on the other hand’: note of a
Special General Meeting, 28 October 1937, NWETEA minute book,
MLG.
117. A third influence on the socialization of the apprentice was parental
authority. Many apprentices were the sons of metalworking journeymen,
often employed at the same works. The vast majority of apprentices lived
in the parental household. Many contributed their earnings to the
household purse in return for pocket money. There is little evidence on
either the attitude of parents to apprentice strikes, including their response
to the competing claims of the employer, the trade union and the strike
committee on their sons, or their influence on their sons’ actions.
118. The CAC may have been inspired by the unofficial Clyde Workers’
Committee of the First World War: J. Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’
Movement (Allen and Unwin: 1973), pp. 68, 80, passim.
119. The apprentice leaders who went on to prominence as adults, mostly as
trade-union officials and left-wing political leaders, included Jimmy Reid
and, reputedly, Alex Ferguson in Glasgow, and Eddie Frow, Bob Wright
and Dick Nettleton in Manchester.
120. EEF, M(19), MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 46
themselves involved explicit disobedience towards adult authority, in

the shape of the employer, and sometimes of the trade-union official
and the parent too, when refusing instructions to return to work.
More specifically, the strikes evoke misbehaviour by pre-industrial
apprentices, including absence from work, skylarking and rioting on
the Shrove Tuesday apprentice ‘holiday’.121 The Shrove Tuesday
tradition appears to have carried over to industrial apprenticeship in
some districts, primarily in Lancashire. The efforts of employers to
suppress it had had limited success.122 Dick Nettleton, a leader of the
1941 strike, recalled that ‘in Manchester there was a habit among
apprentices of leaving the factory on Shrove Tuesday each year to go
home. It was regarded more or less as a lark. The management tried to
stop it but not seriously, though, and the older workers egged us on.’123
One of his peers linked apprentice horseplay in Manchester to the uni-
versity students’ Rag Day: ‘there was the Shrove Tuesday tradition of
walking out ... the craftsmen would hammer us [the apprentices] out …
we’d go and march against the students, taking oily rags with us ... it
wasn’t “dear brothers” … if they [the students] didn’t come out, we’d
go and get them’.124 Such practices were not confined to Manchester.
In 1950, apprentices at a vehicle factory in Leyland, Lancashire, left
121. ‘The day was usually kept as a holiday; games of football were common,
together with throwing at cocks, and all sorts of horseplay took place in
schools, universities and among apprentices’: Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1970 edn), Vol. 20, p. 458. Absence from work on Shrove Tuesday had
implicitly been licensed, to the extent that employers acquiesced in appren-
tices’ absence from work.
122. In 1905 the Manchester EEA printed for members’ use a notice, headed
‘Shrove Tuesday Holiday: Apprentices’, stating that ‘it has been decided
… that for the future the above holiday will not be allowed and that any
apprentices or boys absenting themselves from these works on that day
will render themselves liable to summary punishment’ (original emphasis):
EEF, A(7)32, MRC.
123. Leeson, Strike, p. 159. The 1941 strike was termed a ‘holiday’ by the
strikers in Manchester, probably to reduce the manifest threat of legal pro-
ceedings, but possibly also in cognisance of regional apprentice traditions.
124. Interview with Bob Wright, May 1985. Manchester University students
have held their Rag Day on Shrove Tuesday since at least the 1940s, which
in conjunction with the apprentice ‘holiday’ meant an annual ‘afternoon
of fun’ in the city: Mike Morris, e-mail of 7 February 2003, ‘Eng-
Manchester-L Archives’ pages, RootsWeb.com website.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 47

work at 10 a.m. on Shrove Tuesday, accompanied by ritual teasing and
‘blacking’ by adult workers.125
The continuation of Shrove Tuesday customs into post-war indus-
trial Lancashire suggests that the ‘stripping away’ of the social
functions of apprenticeship, in train for over two hundred years,
continued into the modern period.126 The extent of these practices
during the period, even in Lancashire, remains unclear.127 No sign of
them is visible for the Clyde, where the combination of Presbyterianism
and left-wing politics may have left little space for pre-Lenten revelling,
but they may well have contributed to apprentice militancy in Man-
chester. Nettleton recalled ‘a general tradition of frivolity about
apprentice strikes’, which he linked directly to Shrove Tuesday antics.128
The seasonality of apprentice strikes, which tended to start in late
winter or spring, also suggests a link to Shrove Tuesday customs, but as
none of the movements started on the day itself and as the number of
125. The situation was revealed by an apprentice’s appeal against denial of

National Insurance (NI) benefit for a finger injury. The NI Commissioner
noted that ‘it is a custom long established, though in abeyance during the
war years, for apprentices to run out from work at 10 o’clock in the
morning on Shrove Tuesday and remain away for the rest of the day. It is
a part of the custom that, before the apprentices run out, the older men
tease them, and apparently “blacking” is included in the ritual. It seems
that it is part of the custom for the apprentices to try to evade being
blacked, and it was while endeavouring to escape this ordeal at about 9.50
am that the claimant fell and injured his finger … He was skylarking, or
at any rate he was the victim of skylarking by others.’ The Commissioner
allowed the apprentice’s appeal, holding that his injury had indeed
occurred while he was performing the job of an apprentice: PIN 62/348,
PRO.
126. The social functions of apprenticeship had previously included the
curbing of youth marriage and fertility, and entitlement to poor relief: K.
D. M. Snell, ‘The Apprenticeship System in British History: The Frag-
mentation of a Cultural Institution’, History of Education 25 (1996), pp.
303–21.
127. An ex-apprentice who had participated in the 1964 strike at Metropolitan-
Vickers (by then Associated Electrical Industries (AEI)) in Manchester
recalled no such activities on Shrove Tuesday: interview with Brian Peat, 3
July 2004. Nor do such traditions feature in a study of craft engineering in
Rochdale: R. Penn, Skilled Workers in the Class Structure (Cambridge
University Press: 1984).
128. Leeson, Strike, p. 159.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 48
movements was not large, no link can be inferred statistically.129 The

seasonal pattern may have reflected simply the release of hibernally
suppressed youth energies.
A further attribute of the strike movements that suggests a role for
social and cultural factors was the exuberance shown by participants,
both within factories and in public. One leader in the Manchester area
recalled the events of 1937–41: ‘talk about flying pickets … [It was] “dep-
utations”. We went by bicycle. I remember walking into the factory …
“we are the apprentices” … we’d bring the lads out’.130 Similarly, a par-
ticipant in the 1964 strike at Metropolitan-Vickers/AEI described the
strikers as jumping across desks in the apprentice school and running
through the factory, cheered on by adult workers as they called out other
apprentices.131 Marches and rallies featured prominently, as in the events
outside the same factory in 1960 that were described in the introduction.
At the start of the 1937 movement on the Clyde, the press reported that
‘the youths spent the time today in playing football and parading the
streets’.132 In Sheffield in 1952, apprentices marched through the city
centre chanting ‘it’s not a question of greed, £1 is what we need’, while
their Glasgow counterparts paraded to the anthem ‘one, two, three, four,
we want one pound more’.133
The public displays that characterized apprentice strikes resembled
those during ‘strikes’ by schoolchildren in 1911 and university students
in the 1960s and 1970s.134 There may be a further, deeper resemblance
129. Five of the nine movements – those of 1937 and 1941–60 – started in late
winter or spring, less than six weeks after Shrove Tuesday. The preliminary
token strikes of 1952 and 1960 occurred two weeks and one week respec-
tively before Shrove Tuesday. Three of the four movements that started at
other times of the year were prompted by an exogenous shock: the intro-
duction of NI contributions, post-war wage cuts, and the introduction of
military conscription, in 1912, 1921 and 1939 respectively. Principal
disputes involving adult employees showed by contrast little seasonality
during 1946–73, beyond slight biases to both spring and autumn: Durcan
et al., Strikes in Post-War Britain, p. 201.
130. Interview with Bob Wright, May 1985.
131. Interview with Brian Peat, July 2004. The actions of the adult workers
resembled those in the Shrove Tuesday practices in the Leyland factory
(see n. 125 above).
132. Evening Citizen, 31 March 1937.
133. Daily Worker, 11 March 1952. Ministry of Labour memo, 17 March 1952,
LAB 482/1952, PRO.
134. D. Marson, Children’s Strikes in 1911 (History Workshop, Oxford: 1973);
D. Jacks, Student Politics and Higher Education (Lawrence and Wishart:
1975), pp. 86–96; D. L. Westby, The Clouded Vision: The Student
Movement in the United States in the 1960s (Associated University Presses,
Cranbury, NJ: 1976), pp. 136–53.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 49

between the two types of ‘strike’: a lack of economic substance, in the
sense of involving no credible threat of economic damage to one’s
opponent. When employers invest in the skills of their apprentices, the
value of the apprentices’ output during training (net of training costs)
is by definition less than the payroll cost of their services to the
employer. Any withdrawal of the apprentices’ services would then
impose no immediate economic damage on the employer: profits would
actually increase, in the short term at least. For the apprentices, a strike
would mean not only an immediate loss of pay but also reduced
learning of skills.135 Under such conditions, a strike threat by appren-
tices would not be economically credible. It would resemble one under-
taken by full-time students against an educational institution in that,
while it might cause disruption and undesirable publicity, it would
impose no serious economic damage.136 If so, the strike movements
might be viewed as simply youth rampages, lacking significance from
an industrial relations or an economics standpoint.
An interpretation of apprentice strikes in terms of ‘no economic
damage’ is consistent under particular conditions with the economics
of work-based training. In imperfectly competitive occupational labour
markets for skilled workers, employers who possess market power as
buyers of labour are predicted to finance, albeit only in part, as well as
to provide, apprenticeship training.137 Bargaining theory predicts that
135. The only damage that would face the employer would be a reduction in its
skill supplies in the long term, and then only to the extent that the strikers
learn less or leave the firm as a result of the dispute.
136. A. Muthoo, Bargaining Theory (Cambridge University Press: 1999), pp.
9–40. Student groups that seek to influence university policy have usually
gone beyond simply boycotting lectures and classes, and used sit-ins, occu-
pations and even violence in order to exert serious pressure on university
administrators: Jacks, Student Politics and Westby, The Clouded Vision.
137. M. Stevens, ‘A Theoretical Model of On-the-Job Training with Imperfect
Competition’, Oxford Economic Papers 46 (1994), pp. 537–62; D.
Acemoglu and J.-S. Pischke, ‘Beyond Becker: Training in Imperfect
Labour Markets’, Economic Journal 109 (1999), pp. F112–42. These
models of monopsony power implicitly (but not necessarily plausibly)
assume that labour markets for trainees and unskilled workers are more
competitive than those for skilled workers. Models of perfectly competi-
tive markets also predict that employers will provide apprenticeship
training, but that they will refuse to finance it, even in part: G. S. Becker,
Human Capital (University of Chicago Press, New York: 1964), ch. 2. As
apprentice pay is then lower, an apprentice strike costs the apprentice less,
in terms of foregone pay, and reduces the employer’s payroll costs by less,
than in the presence of monopsony power, but it still imposes no signifi-
cant damage on the employer.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 50
the employer will then remain unmoved, on economic grounds at least,

by any threatened suspension of the ‘services’ of its apprentices, as an
apprentice strike would hurt the apprentice but not the employer, in the
short term at least.138 In such circumstances apprentice strikes would be
primarily non-economic phenomena. The resistance of employers to
apprentice strikes might then result not from any anticipation of
serious economic damage but rather from objecting to youth disloyalty
and disobedience.
The evidence does indeed suggest that in particular respects and cir-
cumstances apprentice strikes did little or no damage to employers. In
some cases the lack of damage to production was intrinsic: e.g. when
the time lost would have been entirely spent off the job, in a company
training school or a technical college – as in the case of the youngest
apprentice strikers at Metropolitan-Vickers in 1964, who spent their
first year in the firm’s apprentice school. Nor was the loss of the on-the-
job services of younger apprentices, with their limited skills, likely to
have affected output significantly. The brevity of participation by many
apprentices also limited the effect on production. Even in the face of
prolonged participation by older and more productive apprentices,
employers might limit the damage by requiring adult journeymen to do
the work that the apprentice strikers would otherwise have done.
Apprentice strikes might well be expected not to have caused serious
damage. A press report on the one at the Fairfields shipyard on the
Clyde in 1966 stated that ‘neither the number of boys nor the sum of
money is substantial. In most companies or industries a strike of 130
apprentices would provide more amusement than concern. It would be
excused as a youthful gesture and the company or industry would
easily survive the young men’s cat-calls and placard protests’.139
138. The Nash solution to the standard bargaining problem, in which two
agents negotiate the division of a joint surplus, defined in relation to their
outcomes if they fail to agree (launch a dispute), sees each party’s share
rise with how well off it would be in the event of failure to agree. Were an
apprentice strike to impose no damage on an employer, the employer
would then appropriate the entire surplus and the strike threat would be
non-credible: Muthoo, Bargaining Theory. An apprentice strike might also
involve little economic loss for apprentices themselves, to the extent that
low pay and access to parental support cushions the effect on their
incomes, but that would remain a secondary consideration were the
economic effect on the employer negligible.
139. Glasgow Herald, 18 November 1966. Ironically, the reporter went on to
claim that in the company’s precarious financial condition even an appren-
tice strike could cause serious damage.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 51

The key issue is the effect of the strikes on production. Evidence on
that is unfortunately confined largely to qualitative observations,
whose veracity is often undermined by the interested status of the
observer.140 A potential exception is the nuanced account provided by
the Manchester AEU district secretary ten days into the 1952 strike: ‘it
is difficult to assess the effect of the strike on production … In many
firms the full effect would not be felt for some time … Some of the
strikers, who normally make small components, will not be seriously
missed until existing stocks of the components are used up’.141 The age
profile of the apprentice strikers was potentially important for the
effect on production, as the damage done to the employer could be
expected to rise with the apprentice’s length of service. The evidence on
this is particularly thin. Some reports claimed that it was the younger,
and less productive, apprentices who were the more prone to take part,
but those reports may also have been filtered through the economic
interests of the employers affected.142
Limited economic damage is also suggested, paradoxically, by the
long duration of the disputes. When serious damage is involved, the
parties have an incentive to settle quickly. The fact that the average
apprentice movement went on for more than five weeks (Table 1,
above) suggests that the economic pressure to settle was less than
intense for both parties to the dispute. Most disputes involving adults
proved shorter-lived.143
Finally, there is the indulgence with which some employers
responded to the strikes. Managers frequently referred paternally to the
strikers as ‘lads’ and ‘boys’.144 Some of their actions evinced the same
140. Thus the Clyde shipbuilders’ responses to the 1941 strike simultaneously
emphasized and played down the gravity of the situation. One of its press
statements announced that ‘the majority of those apprentices involved are
junior boys, not eligible for military service’, while also declaring that
‘their stoppage very seriously impairs important war production’.
Members were encouraged to telegraph the Admiralty with the claim that
the strikes were holding up war production: CSA Circular Letter 98, 8
March 1941; minute book, 13 March 1941, MLG.
141. Manchester Guardian, 20 March 1952.
142. When more than 200 apprentices walked out at a Teesside yard in April 1944,
those who stayed at work were said by the firm to be ‘the older, more respon-
sible type of apprentice’: Newcastle Journal & North Mail, 1 April 1944.
143. More than three-quarters of principal disputes in the economy as a whole
ended within the thirty-eight calendar-day average duration of an appren-
tice movement: Durcan et al., Strikes in Post-War Britain, p. 208.
144. Thus a Greenock shipbuilder reported during the 1921 movement that,
‘with the exception of a few lads’, all of its strikers had returned to work:
NWETEA Circular Letter 21-408, 11 October 1921, MLG.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 52
spirit. At Metropolitan-Vickers in 1937, after a parade inside the

factory by 1,200 apprentices, reluctant to go out for fear of breaking
their indentures, the factory manager led them to an impromptu event
in the canteen, comprising refreshments and a ‘sing song’, ‘preferring
not to send the boys back into the workshops in their excited frame of
mind’.145 Even the decision in 1952 by the management of Rollo and
Grayson, a Birkenhead ship-repairer, to turn its fire hoses onto a
column of apprentice strikers from other firms can be viewed in such
terms.146 These responses suggest that an apprentice strike could fail to
provoke managerial concern, on economic grounds at least.
These attributes indicate the importance of social and cultural
factors in the generation of apprentice activism. Together with its
political attributes, they suggest a socio-political interpretation, with
the movements viewed, akin to student strikes, as outbursts of political
activism and youthful exuberance – put crudely, as politics and fun.
The implication would then be that the apprentice movements, instead
of being treated as part of the history of industrial conflict, should be
excluded from it, as student strikes have – entirely reasonably – been.
Collective organization and economic damage
The second interpretation unites industrial relations and economic

aspects. The movements are viewed in terms of collective organization,
industrial conflict and divergent economic interests. The evidence in
favour of such an interpretation starts with the qualitative attributes of
the strikes – their organization, procedural status, and outcomes – as
outlined in the previous section.
A key issue is the potential emptiness of an apprentice strike from
the economic standpoint, which was cited above as consistent with a
purely socio-political interpretation. That property, however, is not
universal. It does not apply when the role of the apprentice is closer to
production worker than to full-time student and, in particular, when
employers exploit apprentices, paying them at the margin less than the
value of their net output (marginal value product).147 Sufficient condi-
tions for that outcome are, first, that employers possess market
(monopsony) power over apprentices and, second, that they possess
145. Manchester Guardian, 17 September 1937; Leeson, Strike, p. 159.

147. Exploitation is defined here in neoclassical rather than in Marxist terms.
As Marxist analysis sees all wage labour as exploited, it offers no insight
into the specific position of apprentices.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 53

more market power over apprentices than over skilled employees.148
Employers then have an incentive to substitute production work for
learning during the apprenticeship – e.g. by limiting apprentices to par-
ticular production tasks rather than giving them an all-round training.
As unit labour costs (payroll costs per unit of output) are then lower for
apprentices than for other employees, including skilled adults, appren-
tices appeal to employers as ‘cheap labour’. The apprentice strike threat
becomes economically credible, as a prospective source of economic
damage to employers.149
Such an interpretation was advanced by the leaders of the 1937
movement, who claimed that
in many cases the workshops are run by the employment of a greater

number of apprentices than journeymen ... [W]e frequently find
ourselves unable to get secure or permanent employment on com-
pletion of our apprenticeship. When we finish our apprenticeship
and qualify for a higher rate of pay we are too often dismissed and
replaced by juniors. The employers use this method to obtain cheap
labour … this is exploitation of boy labour.150
148. The potential sources of monopsony power over apprentices include invol-
untary unemployment, employer collusion, asymmetric information
about training content, and low collective organization and bargaining
coverage: Ryan, ‘Training Quality and Trainee Exploitation’; J. M.
Malcomson, J. W. Maw and B. McCormick, ‘General Training by Firms,
Apprentice Contracts and Public Policy’, European Economic Review 47
(2003), pp. 197–227. Although recent models mostly assume that buyer
power applies only to skilled workers, it was probably greater for trainees
in the sector and period discussed here.
149. The ‘exploitation’ of apprentice labour may be seen as applying not to the
apprenticeship contract as a whole but only to its later stages, i.e. to senior
apprentices, whose pay can be held below their marginal value product in
order for the apprentice to repay within the contract period the employer’s
investment in training during its early stages: M. Stevens, ‘The Economic
Analysis of Apprenticeship’, paper to Colloquium on Skills and Training,
Centre for History and Economics, King’s College Cambridge, July 1994;
R. A. Hart, ‘General Human Capital and Employment Adjustment in the
Great Depression: Apprentices and Journeymen in UK Engineering’:
Oxford Economic Papers, forthcoming. The difference between the two
interpretations is not important for this analysis. Both view senior appren-
tices as being paid less than their marginal value product, and strikes that
involve them primarily as having economic leverage.
150. The Clyde Apprentice, no. 1, undated, 1937, EEF, A(7)111, MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 54
Several attributes of apprenticeship training and apprentice strikes

suggest the relevance of such an interpretation to inter-war metalwork-
ing apprenticeship: the prevalence of informal contracts, of training
programmes limited to informal on-the-job instruction in practical
skills, of high apprentice–journeyman ratios,151 and of piece-work
bonus systems that paid apprentices less than journeymen for given
output (not just less pay for less output). Some metalworking
employers did provide high-quality training, investing in rather than
exploiting their apprentices, but they were in the minority. In 1925, only
11% of metalworking firms both employed apprentices and gave them
paid time off for technical education, and only 2% had a works training
centre or offered technical courses to apprentices at the workplace.152
Most employers opted to deskill craft work and cheapen labour where
possible, with apprenticeship as a convenient vehicle.153 The substance
of the ‘cheap labour’ charge was even conceded privately by some
employers.154
Labour-market conditions between the wars were consistent with
widespread power for buyers of apprentice labour. Until 1937 appren-
tice wage rates were determined locally and unilaterally by employers.
In both sectors, local employers’ associations recommended maximum
apprentice age–wage scales. The scale rates were not only low; many
firms paid their apprentices less – notably on Clydeside, despite its
151. MacFarlane Engineering Co., Cathcart, which refused to take back 30 of

its 60 striking apprentices after the 1937 strike, had previously employed
102 apprentices for only 25 journeymen. The trade unions’ concern to
ensure the reinstatement of the apprentice strikers proved correspondingly
muted in this instance: CO and CCO memos, 6, 11 and 19 May 1937, LAB
10/76, PRO.
152. Ministry of Labour, Report of an Inquiry, Vol. 6, pp. 9, 56; Vol. 7, pp. 108,
110. As such practices were more common in large than in small firms, the
share of apprentices covered by them was undoubtedly higher than the
share of employers offering them.
153. J. Zeitlin, ‘The Labour Strategies of British Engineering Employers,
1890–1922’, in H. Gospel and C. Littler (eds), Management Strategies and
Industrial Relations (Heinemann: 1983), pp. 25–54; J. Zeitlin, ‘The
Triumph of Adversarial Bargaining: Industrial Relations in British Engi-
neering, 1880–1939’, Politics and Society 18 (1990), pp. 405–26.
154. According to the manager of a Birkenhead marine engineering firm,
‘many employers are using apprentices as a form of cheap labour at the
present time, evading all responsibility in respect of the boys’ training’:
Subcommittee on Apprentices and Young Persons, verbatim report of
meeting of 7 December 1933, p. 4, EEF, A(12)1, MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 55

potentially competitive youth labour market.155 Local associations
reduced competition for apprentice labour still further by discouraging
members from recruiting each other’s apprentices.156
In the war and post-war years, the scope for the exploitation of
apprentice labour fell, with the arrival of full employment, collectively
bargained floors to apprentice pay and the extension of day-release for
technical education.157 Nevertheless, piece-work payment remained
widespread, particularly for senior apprentices (Table 4, above). Trade
unions attacked the continuing incentive to exploit apprentice labour,158
155. The CSA adopted in March 1921 maximum apprentice time-rates ‘beyond
which firms were not to go but firms were free to arrange lower rates if
they so desired’. Its 1924 survey found that ‘a large majority of firms were
paying below the maximum rates recommended’; its 1933 survey showed
little change. In March 1937, just before the start of the strike movement,
the average rate paid to third-year apprentice shipwrights by nine CSA
members was 5s. 9d. (28.75p), only 28.6% of the maximum rate of £1 0s.
0¾d. (£1.003p) per week: CSA, TD 241/12/231, MLG.
156. Just before the start of the 1937 movement, the NWETEA, following
normal practice, circulated the names of two apprentice welders who ‘have
left the employment of the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering
Company without completing their apprenticeship’, asking members:
‘kindly keep the names prominently before you in the event of any of the
apprentices applying to you for employment’: NWETEA Circular Letter
44, 10 March 1937, MLG. The practice was initially applied to all the
apprentices who walked out, but soon discontinued in view of the large
numbers involved.
157. Under the 1947 Recruitment and Training of Juveniles for the Engineer-
ing Industry agreement, the EEF recommended that member firms give
paid release for one day of technical education a week to all apprentices
aged less than 18. By 1953–54, 46.2% of male apprentices and employees
aged less than 18 in metalworking and metal manufacture received day
release or block release: Technical Education, Cmnd 9703 (1956), pp. 18,
29.
158. Shipbuilding unions complained regularly to the SEF in the 1950s that
piece-working apprentices were paid lower piece-prices than were adults –
i.e. that apprentices earned less than adults not just because they produced
less, but also because they earned less even when producing the same
output – which encouraged employers to favour apprentice over adult
labour on tasks that both could perform. The national negotiations asso-
ciated with the 1960 movement saw union officials attack the deductions
from standard piece-work prices that were applied to apprentices as ‘very
largely reimburs[ing] employers for the whole cost of training those
apprentices’. They threatened to press for their abolition unless the SEF
gave a pay increase to piece-working as well as time-rated apprentices:
SEF, Circular Letter 112/60, 17 June 1960, SNRA/4831(a6), NMM.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 56
which retained its appeal to many employers until the Industrial

Training Boards (ITBs) improved training standards after 1964.159
Turning to the strikes themselves, the evidence suggests that they did
impose economic damage on employers, albeit only in certain respects
and under particular conditions. Although no firm appears to have
been shut down on account of a strike by apprentices alone, there is
evidence of damage to output and profits, especially when senior
apprentices were extensively involved and when the strikers enjoyed
active support from adult craft-workers. The Manchester AEU district
secretary cited above went on to note the ways in which he expected the
1952 strike to hurt employers:
one immediate result … was that adult engineers in many cases

would have to be paid a man’s wage for doing an apprentice’s work
… The absence of older apprentices, whose work is often vital to
production, will be felt more acutely ... Some strikers claim that the
men at their works are refusing to do apprentices’ tasks as an
indirect way of supporting the strike.160
Adverse effects on output appear to have been particularly marked in

the 1941 and 1944 disputes, two large-scale events that held up urgent
war production and galvanized government intervention – in 1941 with
a Court of Inquiry, whose institution, in the face of employer opposi-
tion, the government justified with the claim that ‘essential government
work was delayed by these stoppages’.161 Less dramatic but still sub-
stantial effects were reported for some of the peacetime movements. In
1937, Babcock and Wilcox, Dumbarton, stated to its local association,
without obvious reason to exaggerate, that ‘the output from their West
Factory had suffered materially on account of the absence of the
apprentices on strike and had now become entirely unbalanced; that it
was useless to continue working the men on overtime and piling up
components while no corresponding components were being produced
by the apprentices’ and that the firm had stopped all overtime working
159. P. Senker, Training in a Cold Climate (Science Policy Research Unit, Uni-
versity of Sussex: 1991); D. W. Marsden and P. Ryan, ‘Initial Training,
Labour Market Structure and Public Policy: Intermediate Skills in British
and German industry’, in P. Ryan (ed.), International Comparisons of
Vocational Education and Training for Intermediate Skills (Falmer Press:
1991), pp. 251–85.
160. Manchester Guardian, 20 March 1952.
161. Ministry of Labour Gazette, June 1941, p. 117.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 57

‘until the apprentices changed their attitude or production became
balanced’.162
In some cases, the effect of the strike on production was reported to
have grown as it progressed. On the sixteenth and last day of the 1939
strike the Manchester press reported that ‘the absence of apprentice
labour was beginning to have its effect on the output of various estab-
lishments’; on the tenth day of the 1952 strike, that ‘the effect of the
strike is now gradually being felt in north-west arms and export
factories, where processes, often highly skilled, which are done by
apprentices, are being neglected’.163 By contrast, Clyde employers
reported declining effects on production during the 1937 strike, as work
was progressively reorganized and sympathetic blacking by adults
waned.164
The participation of older apprentices, whose unit labour cost may
be taken to be the lowest (i.e. output highest relative to pay) among
apprentices, was particularly damaging to employers. The AEU district
secretary’s assertion (above) of the particular importance of the older
apprentices in Manchester in 1952 had probably applied in 1941 as
well, when the strongest sense of grievance was reported for the older
apprentices, many of whom were required at the time to supervise and
train dilutees who were not only being paid more than them but were
also mostly female.165
As the AEU official suggested, the damage done to employers by an
apprentice strike appears to have depended on the reactions of adult
employees, whose services employers often sought to use to offset the
strike’s effects on production. The outstanding case of adult support
was the district-wide one-day sympathy strike on the Clyde on 16 April
1937, and the indefinite overtime ban that accompanied it. The
sympathy strike was supported by only half the district’s adult metal-
working workforce, but even that tally indicated considerable support
for the apprentices’ cause.166 Sympathy action by adults raised the pos-
162. NWETEA minute book, 7 May 1937, MLG.

163. Manchester Evening News, 3 June 1939, 20 March 1952.
164. McKinlay, ‘From Industrial Serf to Wage-Labourer’, IRSH.
165. According to Sir Stephen Piggott of John Brown & Co., Clydebank, ‘the
discontent among the apprentices appears to arise through women, after
a few weeks’ training, receiving the full tradesman’s rates, whereas the
most advanced apprentices, such as the fifth year, receive approximately
half the tradesman’s rate’: letter to Admiral Fraser, 5 March 1941, LAB
10/138, PRO.
166. The sympathy strikers accounted for 58% of adult employment in the
district in engineering and 47% in shipbuilding: EEF, A(7)138, MRC;
CSA minute book, 22 April 1937, MLG.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 58
sibility of shutting down a factory, thereby increasing the leverage

exerted on the employer. In Glasgow in both 1952 and 1960, the disci-
plining of apprentices who had joined the initial token strike induced
some adults to strike in sympathy. In 1952 one firm shut down as a
result.167
Adult employees who stayed at work might refuse to do ‘apprentice
work’, which they often blacked at works level, with the encouragement
of shop stewards and even district officials. Such actions directly
increased the cost to the employer and threatened to widen the dispute
should the employer punish those involved.168 Following the call in
1937 by the Clyde district committee of the CSEU for the blacking of
apprentice work, ‘several firms … reported that their journeymen
engineers had refused to undertake work which normally would have
been done by apprentices and that the shop stewards had intimated
that if any man was dismissed in consequence of a refusal to do such
work, all the men in the shop would be taken out’.169 Further adult
options included pressing blackleg apprentices to join the strike,170 and
imposing levies on union members or holding collections in aid of the
apprentice strike fund, as in Manchester in 1952.171
The economic effects of an apprentice strike depended also on the
employers’ responses. Strong reactions might have been expected, given
the historical willingness of the EEF to organize lockouts of entire cat-
egories of employee and the affront posed by apprentice indiscipline. In
practice, although individual employers often reacted dismissively to
167. In 1952, adults walked out in sympathy at two firms; in 1960, at six
shipyards and the Singer works: Evening Citizen, 8 February 1952;
Tuckett, The Blacksmiths’ History, p. 354.
168. For example, apprentice work was blacked in at least one firm in Aberdeen
in 1952 and 1960, Glasgow in 1952 and Manchester in 1964; non-striking
apprentices were blacked in Oldham in 1952 and Aberdeen and Sheffield
in 1960: EEF, A(7)275, A(7)330, Z64/69(52), MRC. Three works-level
strikes by adult employees in response to instructions by their employers
to do the work of striking apprentices were reported in Clydeside engi-
neering in 1952: Daily Worker, 22 March 1952.
169. NWETEA minute book, 21 April 1937, MLG.
170. In 1960, Hall Russell & Co., Aberdeen, 83% of whose 206 apprentices were
on strike, reported that an attempt by an apprentice caulker to restart
work had been defeated by journeymen boilermakers, who had variously
blacked his work and gone on strike themselves until he went out again.
Pressed by a shop steward, the apprentice did not return after lunch: EEF
A(7)330, MRC. Adults also struck against non-striking apprentices at a
Scottish firm in 1952: Daily Worker, 17 March 1952.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 59

apprentice-strike threats, employers’ associations proceeded cautiously
once an apprentice movement got underway, fearful of extending it
and, in particular, of provoking sympathy action by adults. They
typically advised members to write to the apprentices’ parents, making
ominous but imprecise threats, primarily to refuse to pay the strikers
for time spent at technical college during the dispute, and to extend
periods of service to make up time lost on strike – but to go no further.
In particular, members were urged not to dismiss any strikers.172 The
few employers who took a hard line, e.g. suspending or firing strikers,
tended to prolong the dispute and increase the damage to other
employers.173
Another attribute that suggests that taken as a whole the movements
caused economic damage to employers was the willingness of the EEF
on the biggest occasions (1937 and 1960) to allow members to claim
compensation along standard lines from its Indemnity Fund for
damages caused by the strike.174 Finally, the outcomes of apprentice
strikes suggest significant economic content. As noted above, five of
the eight movements that set out to increase apprentice pay achieved
substantial successes. Serious results need not indicate serious inten-
tions and activities, but they do tend to be associated with them. In
172. In 1960 the EEF suggested that members write to apprentices and their
parents to remind them that ‘participation in the strike is a breach of the
Apprenticeship Agreement, rendering the Agreement liable to termination
… [but] in relation to the present dispute … no obstacles should be placed
in the way of a return to work and that, upon return, there should not be
any retaliatory action, e.g. suspension of apprentices or termination of
Apprenticeship Agreements by the employers. Time lost on account of the
stoppage, however, may be required to be made up.’ The Scottish EEA
gave yet more cautious advice, urging member firms not to allocate
‘apprentice work’ to adult employees during the dispute nor even to disci-
pline apprentices when they returned to work: EEF Circular Letter 119, 9
May 1960, A(7)330, MRC.
173. The 1952 dispute was prolonged in Manchester by the sacking and
replacement by R. Broadbent & Son of the seven of its eight apprentices
who had gone on strike. The city strike committee refused to recommend
a return to work until the firm had reinstated all of the strikers. One week
later, after discussions with union officials, the company allowed the
dismissed strikers to apply individually for reinstatement, stating that their
cases would ‘be considered favourably’. The strikers voted the following
day to return: Manchester Evening News, 19, 20, 27 and 28 March 1952;
IRO memo, 27 March 1952, LAB 482/1952, PRO. Allegations of victim-
ization also delayed the return to work on the Clyde in 1937 and 1944:
LAB 10/76, 10/451, PRO.
174. EEF, Circular Letters 265, 18 December 1937, and 179, 21 July 1960,
MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 60
sum, an economics–IR interpretation of the strike movements receives

support both from the economics of training, given the conditions and
practices prevailing during the period, and from evidence that under
particular conditions (notably wartime) and in particular respects (par-
ticipation by senior apprentices and sympathy action by adults) they
reduced output and imposed serious costs on firms.
Conclusions
The nine strike movements that apprentices in engineering and ship-

building launched between 1912 and 1964 are a neglected feature of the
history of industrial relations. Although the movements spanned an era
of major change in both markets and national politics, they show suf-
ficient continuity of purpose and method to be taken as a whole. Com-
parable in scale to their adult counterparts, they blended spontaneity
with organization and on occasion gave the lead to wider industrial
militancy.
The apprentices’ movements are of interest from the standpoint
of politics, sociology, industrial relations and economics alike. Left-
wing politics influenced their genesis and course throughout. The
strikers continued historical traditions of apprentice exuberance and
misbehaviour. They demonstrated an impressive capacity for collective
action in complicated situations. Although under some conditions and
in some respects the strikes involved little economic damage, they did
exert sufficient economic leverage, in conjunction with sympathy action
by adults and national negotiations by trade unions, to elicit substan-
tial concessions from employers.
The bounds to the incidence of apprentice strikes across time and
place are potentially informative. In metalworking itself, the apprentice
strike disappeared in the late 1960s, which suggests that it became the
victim of its own success.175 In conjunction with the raising of training
standards by the ITBs, the cumulative increase in apprentices’ relative
pay, to which the strikes contributed directly, raised training costs to
employers and ended the exploitation of apprentice labour. Employers
who recruited apprentices were by the 1970s obliged to invest signifi-
cantly in them. The apprentice strike had lost its economic leverage.
175. The AEU/AUEW president, Hugh Scanlon, threatened the EEF with an
apprentice strike in 1969, but the threat appears to have had little effect
and no strike materialized; Policy Committee report, 18 November 1969,
EEF, Z67/590(5), MRC.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 61

The near total absence of apprentice strikes from other apprentice-
intensive sectors, notably construction and printing, but also from the
other industries that employed engineering craft-workers, notably
public utilities and railway workshops, is also potentially informative.
It is unlikely to have meant the absence of low pay and exploitation for
apprentices, particularly in printing. What was distinctive about metal-
working was the protracted deskilling of craft work, to the detriment of
the career prospects that might have induced apprentices to accept low
pay. On the rare occasion when the apprentices’ unofficial representa-
tives spoke on the record, at the 1941 Court of Inquiry, they expressed
dissatisfaction on that score.176
The evidence does not determine definitively the relative importance
of two lines of interpretation: economics–IR and socio-political. Each
approach is relevant to some aspects of the movements. To some extent
the interpretations are complementary.177 The economic leverage of the
movements could increase when political, social and cultural factors
lent direction and momentum, though too prominent a part for left-
wing politics tended to weaken support.
Pride of place is given here to the economics–IR interpretation.
The movements involved collective organization and action, conflict-
ing economic interests and serious economic consequences. They
transferred the regulation of apprenticeship from employers’ unilat-
eral control to collective bargaining. Their disappearance after 1964
is more readily explained in economic than in social or political
terms. The movements compressed training-related wage differentials.
They increased the payroll cost of training, which contributed to the
trend reduction of apprentice intakes that set in at the end of the
period, and they closed off any option for a ‘low pay, high volume,
high quality’ apprenticeship system, such as developed in post-war
Germany.178
The limited attention that has been paid to apprentice strikes in
histories of industrial relations, vocational training and youth in
society is therefore not appropriate, even if their neglect can be under-
176. LAB 10/509, PRO.

177. The point is reflected in a participant’s recollection of the 1960 movement:
‘it is doubtful if Clydeside has ever seen anything as amusingly funny, yet
at times so grimly determined, as some of the demonstrations organised
before and during the strike’: Tuckett, The Blacksmiths’ History, p. 199.
178. Marsden and Ryan, ‘Initial Training’; H. Gospel, ‘The Decline of Appren-
ticeship Training in Britain’, Industrial Relations Journal 26:1 (1995), pp.
32–44; P. Ryan and L. Unwin, ‘Apprenticeship in the British “Training
Market”’, National Institute Economic Review 178 (2001), pp. 99–114.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 62
stood in terms of their heterogeneity and complexity. Some attributes

suggest that they be viewed as akin to student strikes, and even that
they be excluded from the history of industrial conflict. The impor-
tance of productive labour, wage earning and exploitation in appren-
ticeship warrants their continued inclusion in the history of industrial
relations, while recognizing their idiosyncrasies as instances of indus-
trial conflict.
The importance of apprentice activism was recognized, as its heyday
drew to a close, by a right-wing trade-union leader who otherwise
showed it little sympathy. Sir William Carron, AEU president,
remarked in 1963, during renewed national negotiations with the EEF
for higher pay scales for apprentices, that ‘it might be a coincidence, or
it might not be a coincidence, but on each and every occasion, so far as
we can recall, when apprentices have felt themselves impelled to take
this course, something has been done about the problem which was not
done prior to this kind of thing happening’.179 His guarded choice of
words suggests discomfort over apprentice activism on both sides of the
table, but his assessment rang true.
Management Centre, King’s College London

150 Stamford Street, London SE1 9NH
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the International Conference

on the European History of Vocational Education and Training, University of
Florence, the Economic and Social Research Council Seminar on Historical
Developments, Aims and Values of VET, University of Westminster, and the
annual conference of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association.
I would like to thank: Alan McKinlay and David Lyddon for their generous
assistance, and Lucy Delap, Alan MacFarlane, Brian Peat, David Raffe,
Alastair Reid and Keith Snell for comments and suggestions; the Engineering
Employers’ Federation and the Department for Education and Skills for access
to unpublished information; the staff of the Modern Records Centre, Univer-
sity of Warwick, the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, the Caird Library, Greenwich,
and the Public Record Office, Kew, for assistance with archive materials; and
the Nuffield Foundation and King’s College, Cambridge, for financial support.
179. EEF, Minutes of Central and Special Conferences, 31 October 1963,

HSIR 18(29/3)
Appendix: Large single-employer apprentice strikes in engineering and shipbuilding, 1919–69
Year Perioda District and sector Number of Working days ‘Principal Issue Outcome
30/3/05
strikers lost dispute’?

1922 27 July–15 August Southport vehicles 208 n.a. No Proposed pay cut Pay cut imposed
1942 18–19 June; Northern Ireland 1,000 n.a. No Apprentice Unconditional return
22–23 June engineering pay rise to work
5:59 pm
1942 2–21 November Dundee shipyard 480 n.a. No Earnings guarantee Return to work
for piece-working pending negotiations
apprentices
Page 63
1962 31 May–15 June Belfast 880 6,500 Yes Suspension of Work resumed
textile engineering apprentice who without change
forgot check-in disc
1963 11–25 September Glasgow shipyard 195 6,000b Yes Claim to bonus Return to work
payments for pending
specific tasks negotiations
1966 6 June–17 November Glasgow shipyard n.a. 2,700 No Inclusion in Inclusion on
(Fairfields) productivity bargaining terms less
agreement favourable than

demanded
1968 5 June–3 December Barrow shipyard 420 39,800 Yes Revised pay Change accepted
structure with pending arbitration
reduced earnings
Source: Ministry of Labour Gazette, passim; K. Alexander and C. Jenkins, Fairfields: A Study of Industrial Change (Allen Lane: 1970), pp. 149–51.
& SHIPBUILDING
Notes: a. In cases of repeated walk-outs, the entire period containing them.

b. Includes adult strikers.
63
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 64
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HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 65
HSIR  ( AUTUMN ) ‒ 65
Worker Mobilization in the 1970s:

Revisiting Work-ins, Co-operatives
and Alternative Corporate Plans
Michael Gold
The 1970s in the UK have been characterized as a decade dominated

by crisis in industrial relations. Over its course, governments – Conser-
vative and Labour – concentrated on addressing the UK’s poor record
in productivity and competitiveness by attempting to reform the indus-
trial relations system, which was widely blamed for many economic ills.
Contemporary commentators observed that governments used two
broad approaches.1 The first was to impose state authority and restrict
union powers, while the second was to develop partnership policies
with the unions, whose membership peaked in 1979. Though the dis-
tinction is by no means rigid, the Conservative Party generally favoured
the former approach and the Labour Party the latter. The Conserva-
tives were the party of the Industrial Relations Act 1971 and laissez-
faire (or ‘lame duck’) industrial policies, though these were later
abandoned when the government decided to support Upper Clyde
Shipbuilders (UCS). Labour rejected the regulatory approach
enshrined in its 1969 White Paper, In Place of Strife, after its electoral
defeat in 1970, and later became the party of the Social Contract, a
partnership model of macro-economic policy, which has been dubbed
a form of ‘weak corporatism’.2 The Social Contract integrated incomes
1. D. Barnes and E. Reid, Governments and Trade Unions: The British Expe-
rience, 1964–79 (Heinemann: 1982). For further contemporary analyses of
the ways in which successive governments had attempted to reform indus-
trial relations over this period, see D. E. Macdonald, The State and the
Trade Unions (Macmillan: 1976), ch. 11; G. A. Dorfman, Government
versus Trade Unionism in British Politics since 1968 (Macmillan: 1979).
2. B. Casey and M. Gold, Social Partnership and Economic Performance: The
Case of Europe (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham: 2000), p. 14.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 66
and tax policy, industrial relations reform, nationalization of key

industries and proposals for planning agreements in the private sector,
among a variety of measures agreed between the government and the
Trades Union Congress (TUC). It eventually collapsed principally
because of the insistence of the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, on
imposing an unrealistic pay policy.3
None of these attempts to resolve economic crisis produced – or
appeared to produce – any long-lasting results. Unemployment in
Great Britain, for example, increased from the election of the Conserv-
ative government of Edward Heath, in June 1970, to 927,000 in January
1972 before falling to a low of 484,000 in December 1973. It then rose
again steadily until it topped one million in August 1975. From then
on, it never dropped below that mark for the rest of the decade, and
stood at 1,238,000 by May 1979.4 Furthermore, the level of industrial
stoppages and wage and price inflation also reached record post-1945
levels.5 Overall, as Henry Phelps Brown observed, ‘stagflation became
manifest as the dominant problem of the 1970s’.6 Eventually, the
failure to ‘solve’ industrial relations problems contributed to the defeat
of the Callaghan government, just as it had contributed to Harold
Wilson’s defeat in 1970 and Heath’s in February 1974.
The conventional wisdom now regards the 1970s as a disaster. The
former economics editor of the Guardian, Will Hutton, for example,
described the decade as ‘despairing’,7 while New Labour Prime
Minister, Tony Blair, in his introduction to the 1998 White Paper,
Fairness at Work, stated: ‘There will be no going back. The days of
strikes without ballots, mass picketing, closed shops and secondary
action are over’.8 The 1970s – the immediate, pre-Thatcher era – have
accordingly become a shorthand reference for industrial chaos and
economic gloom by contrast to the 1980s, when industrial order was
3. R. Taylor, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Social Contract’, in A. Seldon and K.
Hickson (eds), New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Gov-
ernments, 1974–79 (Routledge: 2004), pp. 70–104.
4. Annual Abstract of Statistics, no. 118 (HMSO: 1982), ‘Unemployed in
Great Britain’ (table 6.9), p. 164.
5. Number of stoppages peaked in 1970, working days lost in 1979 and
workers involved also in 1979. See Annual Abstract of Statistics, no. 118,
‘Industrial Stoppages’ (table 6.15), p. 168. For wage rates and retail prices,
see ibid., ‘Basic Wage Rates of Manual Workers’ (table 6.18), p. 171, and
‘Index of Retail Prices’ (table 18.1), p. 457.
6. E. H. Phelps Brown, The Origins of Trade Union Power (Oxford Univer-
sity Press: 1986), p. 8.
7. W. Hutton, The State We’re In (Vintage: 1996), p. 10.
8. Department of Trade and Industry, Fairness at Work, Cmnd 3968 (1998),
p. 3.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 67
GOLD: WORKER MOBILIZATION IN THE S 67

allegedly restored and significant improvements in output and produc-
tivity took place.
Yet the conventional wisdom about the 1980s has been challenged on
the grounds that the alleged improvements were not based on structural
or sustainable changes in production but at least partly on the fear of
unemployment. Though labour productivity in the UK did improve, it
still lagged behind other European countries because a ‘cheap, disposable
and malleable labour force inhibited the emergence of high wage, high
productivity growth strategies’.9 It is, arguably, now also time to reassess
the 1970s, as the failures of that decade contributed to the increasing
prevalence of the low-wage, low-productivity economy of the 1980s,
whose legacy remains today.10 The story of policy shifts and uncomfort-
able compromises is only part of what happened in the 1970s. A refocus-
ing and re-emphasis allow the consideration of a parallel perspective
based on the widespread grass-roots struggle to develop an imaginative
and flexible alternative vision of how industry might be run more in line
with workers’ interests. This vision embraced work-ins, the use of social
audits, the formation of ‘new’ co-operatives and the role of alternative
corporate plans in widening industrial stakeholding to include not just
shareholders but also workers and their communities. These initiatives
were rapidly and brutally snuffed out in the Thatcher era.
A series of analyses have now traced the course of industrial
relations over the 1970s from the point of view of shop-floor workers
and their shop stewards. Some of these have focused on factory-level
case studies.11 Others have examined developments in individual
sectors, such as the docks, cars, road haulage and engineering.12 Yet
9. P. Nolan, ‘Industrial Relations and Performance since 1945’, in I. J.

Beardwell (ed.), Contemporary Industrial Relations: A Critical Analysis
(Oxford University Press: 1996), p. 100.
10. There are signs that such a reassessment is beginning. See K. O. Morgan,
‘Was Britain Dying?’, in Seldon and Hickson (eds), New Labour, Old
Labour, pp. 303–7; J. Tomlinson, ‘Economic Policy’, ibid., pp. 55–69.
11. Examples include T. Nichols and P. Armstrong, Workers Divided: A Study
in Shop-floor Politics (Fontana/Collins, Glasgow: 1976); T. Nichols and H.
Beynon, Living with Capitalism: Class Relations and the Modern Factory
(Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1977).
12. See three chapters in C. J. Wrigley (ed.), A History of British Industrial
Relations, 1939–79 (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham: 1996): J. Phillips, ‘Decasu-
alization and Disruption: Industrial Relations in the Docks, 1945–79’, pp.
165–85; D. Lyddon, ‘The Car Industry, 1945–79: Shop Stewards and
Workplace Unionism’, pp. 186–211; P. Smith, ‘The Road Haulage Industry,
1945–79: From Statutory Regulation to Contested Terrain’, pp. 212–34.
See also M. Terry and P. K. Edwards (eds), Shop-floor Politics and Job
Controls: The Post-War Engineering Industry (Blackwell, Oxford: 1988).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 68
others have assessed the role of shop-floor workers and shop stewards
in the key events of the decade, notably the struggle against the Indus-
trial Relations Act 1971, the ‘glorious summer’ of 1972 and the ‘winter
of discontent’ of 1978–79.13
This article takes a different direction, and aims to bring together a
number of otherwise disparate trends in collective action over the
decade, trends that Richard Hyman has referred to as ‘qualitative as
well as quantitative advances in struggle’. He includes here the UCS
work-in, ideas about workers’ control and guidelines for an alternative
economic strategy – the combination of Keynesianism with shop-
steward and trade-union participation in planning agreements – which
he sees as the ‘left’, ‘progressive’ and ‘solidaristic’ face of trade-
unionism in the 1970s.14
The broad context for these ‘advances in struggle’ was the 1974–79
Labour government’s industrial strategy. The Trade Union and Labour
Relations Act 1974 (amended in 1976) repealed the Industrial Relations
Act and restored legal immunities to unions. The Employment Protec-
tion Act 1975 encouraged the extension of collective bargaining by,
among other means, establishing a statutory obligation on employers to
disclose information to recognized trade unions and conferring new
rights, such as maternity leave and time off for trade-union duties, which
opened up new areas for negotiations with employers. New rights for
union safety representatives were similarly covered by the Health and
Safety at Work Act 1974. These measures were supplemented by the
Industry Act 1975, which aimed to increase union influence over the
national formulation of economic and industrial strategy. This Act set
13. See, for example, F. Lindop, ‘The Dockers and the 1971 Industrial
Relations Act, Part 1: Shop Stewards and Containerization’, Historical
Studies in Industrial Relations (HSIR) 5 (Spring 1998), pp. 33–72; F.
Lindop, ‘The Dockers and the 1971 Industrial Relations Act, Part 2: The
Arrest and Release of the “Pentonville Five”’, HSIR 6 (Autumn 1998), pp.
65–100; D. Lyddon, ‘“Glorious Summer”, 1972: The High Tide of Rank
and File Militancy’, in J. McIlroy, N. Fishman and A. Campbell (eds),
British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, Vol. 2: The High Tide of Trade
Unionism, 1964–79 (Ashgate, Aldershot: 1999), pp. 326–52; P. Smith, ‘The
“Winter of Discontent”: The Hire and Reward Road Haulage Dispute,
1979’, HSIR 7 (Spring 1999), pp. 27–54. See also R. Darlington and D.
Lyddon, Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain, 1972 (Bookmarks:
2001).
14. R. Hyman, ‘Afterword: What Went Wrong?’, in McIlroy et al. (eds),
British Trade Unions, Vol. 2, pp. 353–64. For the thought behind the alter-
native economic strategy, see S. Holland, The Socialist Challenge (Quartet
Books: 1975).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 69

up the National Enterprise Board, a state-holding company designed
to take a controlling stake in leading companies, as well as a system of
planning agreements and tripartite sector working parties.15 Along with
the 1977 Bullock proposals on worker participation on company
boards,16 these measures formed the backbone of the Social Contract
with the TUC, through which voluntary pay restraint was to be secured
in exchange for greater union involvement across broad areas of
economic and industrial policy.17 As we know, this strategy soon ran
into difficulties, which included employer hostility and union opposi-
tion to the pay norms imposed by the government, particularly in the
1978–79 bargaining round.18
Against this background of ostensible union influence, ‘new’ forms
of collective action emerged at shop-floor level that had not been used
on a wide scale since before the Second World War, if at all. These
included work-ins, the use of social audits, the formation of co-
operatives and alternative corporate plans; all these were generally
responses to factory closures, redundancy or its threat, but then
developed a more enduring life of their own as medium- or longer-term
means of establishing job security.
This article examines two specific questions relating to these ‘quali-
tative advances in struggle’. The first analyses what these had in
common, despite appearing so diverse and emerging under such
different circumstances. Each form of action was a means to maintain
or protect jobs that went beyond strikes, working-to-rules or go-slows,
which are short-term responses and do not challenge management’s
right to manage. Over the period 1966–76, the three most common
causes of strikes were pay-related issues (56%), ‘manning’ and work
allocation (12%) and dismissal and other disciplinary measures (11%).
15. M. Sawyer, ‘Industrial Policy’, in M. Artis and D. Cobham (eds), Labour’s

Economic Policies 1974–79 (Manchester University Press: 1991), pp.
158–75. For a more general overview, see M. Hatfield, The House the Left
Built: Inside Labour Policy-Making 1970–75 (Victor Gollancz: 1978).
16. Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy (Bullock), Report, Cmnd
6706 (January 1977).
17. K. Mayhew, ‘The Institutional Context of Incomes Policy’, in R. E. J.
Chater, A. Dean and R. F. Elliott (eds), Incomes Policy (Clarendon Press,
Oxford: 1981), pp. 32–7.
18. For contemporary accounts, see R. Taylor, Labour and the Social
Contract, Fabian Tract no. 458 (Fabian Society: September 1978), pp.
5–13; T. Forester, ‘Neutralizing the Industrial Strategy’, in K. Coates (ed.),
What Went Wrong? (Spokesman, Nottingham: 1979), pp. 74–94.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 70
Only 4% resulted from redundancy questions.19 In all cases, the

intention of the stoppage was to bring pressure on the employer to
remove its cause, whereupon the workers were to return to work as
before within the same employment relationship.20
By contrast to such ‘negative’ methods of industrial action, the use
of sit-ins and occupations as a tactic contains elements of a ‘positive
challenge to the employer, involving the assertion of a different rela-
tionship of control’ and so are ‘very much out of the ordinary’.21 The
nature of these ‘different relationships of control’, and the extent to
which they can be sustained, are discussed below. These ‘positive chal-
lenges’ to the employer reveal attempts to harness creatively the moti-
vation and commitment of shop-floor workers to defend their jobs in
times of threat. They all took into account the specific circumstances of
the workers involved, such as their labour-market conditions, the size
and structure of the industry concerned, the nature of its product
markets, skill profile and links into the wider community. They also
promoted forms of decentralization of decision-making driven from
below, with workers taking responsibility for the business strategy of
often failing companies. In the 1980s and 1990s, by contrast, processes
of decentralization were driven from above by management in attempts
to promote greater workforce flexibility in the face of intensifying com-
petitive and technological pressures.22 The ‘new’ forms of collective
action in the 1970s all potentially challenged the foundation of man-
agement’s right to manage and, in some cases, represented longer-term
solutions to industrial relations problems. The formation of co-
operatives and alternative corporate plans, for example, was an attempt
to institutionalize workers’ input into business strategy and developing
and sustaining product markets, both old and new. Though in appear-
ance very different, they reflected pragmatic responses by workers
attempting to save their jobs in small and large companies respectively.
19. C. T. B. Smith, R. Clifton, P. Makeham, S. W. Creigh and R. V. Burn,

Strikes in Britain: A Research Study of Industrial Stoppages in the United
Kingdom, Department of Employment Manpower Paper no. 15 (HMSO:
1978), table O, p. 44.
20. For a case study of the dynamics of redundancy at a manufacturing plant
in the late 1960s, see R. Martin and R. H. Fryer, Redundancy and Pater-
nalist Capitalism: A Study in the Sociology of Work (Allen and Unwin:
1973).
21. R. Hyman, Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction (Macmillan:
1975), p. 101.
22. B. Towers, ‘Collective Bargaining Levels’, in idem (ed.), A Handbook of
Industrial Relations Practice (Kogan Page: 1993), pp. 167–84.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 71

The second question is why these forms of collective action became
so popular during the 1970s. The twentieth century had witnessed
several waves of factory occupations, including Russia (1917), Italy
(1920), Spain (Civil War), the USA (mid-1930s) and France (1936 and
1968).23 Until 1971, experience of factory occupations in the UK had
been sparse. In 1916, women in large munitions factories in Newcastle
had staged a ‘stay-in’ in pursuit of a pay rise, as strikes had been
forbidden during wartime.24 In 1935, miners in South Wales had
organized ‘stay-down strikes’ – that is, occupations of their pits – to
prevent the use of non-union labour, with strong support from their
local communities.25 In the 1960s, there had been similar attempts to
occupy coalmines to combat pit closures, though these had not caught
on.26 It was not until the early 1970s that the most significant wave of
occupations – and indeed other forms of innovative collective action –
surged ahead as part of ‘the most intense period of class struggle in
Britain’ since the General Strike in 1926.27 Mobilization theory, as
developed by John Kelly,28 can be used to explain why shop-floor
workers and their shop stewards were prepared in the 1970s to engage
in such action in their struggle against rising levels of unemployment
and, in particular, how they came to try to consolidate the gains they
had made on a lasting basis.
Political and social conditions within the UK in the early 1970s
often gave these new forms of collective action a wide public, which
then itself began to question the role of employers in treating labour as
a commodity to be manipulated and discarded under pressures for
profitability. Indeed, the February 1974 general election, held against
23. For a brief outline of these waves, see A. G. Tuckman, ‘Industrial Action
and Hegemony: Workplace Occupations in Britain 1971 to 1981’ (Ph.D.,
University of Hull: 1985), pp. 1–13. There were also occupations in
Portugal following the 1974 revolution and an occupation of the Gdansk
shipyards in Poland, 1980–81.
24. Tuckman, ‘Industrial Action and Hegemony’, p. 2.
25. H. Francis and D. Smith, The Fed: A History of the South Wales Miners in
the Twentieth Century (Lawrence and Wishart: 1980), pp. 279–98. ‘Stay-
down strikes’ were also known as ‘stay-ins’.
26. K. Coates, ‘Converting the Unions to Socialism’, in M. Barratt Brown and
K. Coates (eds), Trade Union Register 3 (Spokesman, Nottingham: 1973),
p. 19.
27. Darlington and Lyddon, Glorious Summer, p. 2.
Long Waves (Routledge: 1998). See also idem, ‘The Future of Trade
Unionism: Injustice, Identity and Attribution’, Employee Relations 19:5
(1997), pp. 400–14.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 72
the backdrop of a national miners’ strike, ‘was fought on the issue

“Who Governs Britain?” On that basis it seemed impossible for the
Government to lose – but lose it did’.29 This process was checked by the
result of the referendum in June 1975 when the political left was deci-
sively defeated in its campaign to leave the European Economic
Community (EEC). Yet such explicit questioning about the relation-
ship between capital and labour, and a robust defence of workers’
interests, remained influential items on the agenda of the left until the
end of the decade.30
Management and the right to dispose of property
The new forms of collective action emerged against this background of

instability and apprehension. To understand their significance, and to
appreciate the gravity with which employers viewed them, it is
necessary to analyse the nature of management prerogative and its
foundation in property rights that they were putting under pressure.
Under the 1948 Companies Act, shareholders are guaranteed the
exclusive right – even if it is actually exercised only by a tiny minority
of their number – to appoint and remove directors after submission of
appropriate resolutions at its annual general meeting. No mention is
made anywhere of workers’ rights.31 Such property rights constitute the
29. As noted by Denis Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1974–79. See D.
Healey, The Time of My Life (Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1989), p. 370.
30. During the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–79, ‘[e]ach night the television
screens carried film of bearded men in duffle coats huddled around
braziers. Nervous viewers thought the Revolution had already begun’:
ibid., p. 463. Indeed, such images contributed to what J. Coe, The Rotters’
Club (Viking: 2001), p. 176, has dubbed the ‘ungodly strangeness’ of the
1970s. By this he means the tense and uneasy political atmosphere.
Domestically, it was also marked by continuing violence in Northern
Ireland, the rise of the National Front, persistent talk of private armies,
and minority government. Popular culture was to become suffused by the
iconoclasm of punk rock. Internationally, the period was dominated by
intensification of the Cold War, bracketed by the triumph of North
Vietnam at the start of the decade and the invasion of Afghanistan by
Soviet forces towards the end. Popular literature penned by authors on the
political right projected a bleak totalitarian future for the UK: C. Leys,
Politics in Britain: An Introduction (Heinemann: 1983), pp. 313–24. A
more light-hearted and balanced assessment of everyday life in the 1970s
can be found in A. Pressley, The Seventies: Good Times, Bad Taste
(Michael O’Mara Books: 2002).
31. Sections 183–4 and 130–46 of the Act. See M. Finer, The Companies Act,
1948 (Eyre and Spottiswoode: 1948).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 73

foundation of industrial power in capitalist societies. This is because
the value of private property does not consist in the mere ownership of
title deeds or share certificates but in the rights to control certain
scarce resources. Jack Winkler lists four of these: ‘the right to use the
goods owned, the right to direct their use if one does not wish to use
them oneself, the right to appropriate the fruits of their use, and the
right to transfer the property to another owner.’ The ‘enforceability of
these rights rests ultimately on the state’s monopoly of legitimate
coercion’.32
There are two limiting conditions on these rights. First, the state
protects certain interests of those directly affected by the disposal of
property. Up to 1979, employees’ rights at work had been generally
extended, thereby restricting the unlimited power of owners to impose
conditions on them (though the labour movement has long recognized
the limitations of the law as an instrument to protect workers’
interests).33
Second, the state may simply not be called on, in certain circum-
stances, to use its ‘monopoly of legitimate coercion’. For reasons of
expedience, some companies during the 1970s did not contest the
organized opposition of workers to the disposal of assets leading to
redundancies, even though such opposition included the seizure of
company assets through sit-ins or work-ins. Recognizing companies’
rights to legal protection, the TUC passed a resolution in 1975 that
called for work-ins and occupations ‘to be treated as accepted forms of
industrial action with immunity from legal proceedings’.34 The govern-
ment’s response was reported two years later. The Secretary of State
was not prepared to extend trade-union immunities because of concern
over possible abuse by dissidents, the difficulties of drafting appropri-
ate legislation and the precarious Parliamentary situation (the govern-
ment had lost its majority in April 1976).35 So, throughout this period,
work-ins and sit-ins remained unlawful.
The Institute of Personnel Management (IPM) warned against hasty
action in instances of occupation, because ‘the underlying problem is
an industrial relations problem ... and while the civil authorities will
intervene at the request of the company, they can thereafter handle the
32. J. T. Winkler, ‘Corporatism’, European Journal of Sociology 18 (1976), p.

112.
33. P. O’Higgins, Workers’ Rights (Arrow Books: 1976), chs 8–10; J.
McMullen, Rights at Work: A Worker’s Guide to Employment Law (Pluto
Press: 1979), ch. 1.
34. Trades Union Congress (TUC), Annual Report, 1975, p. 403.
35. TUC, Annual Report, 1977, p. 45.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 74
situation as they see fit, having regard to their law enforcement role
rather than to the company’s industrial relations policies’.36 The IPM
noted only three cases where legal proceedings had been taken against
‘unauthorized occupiers’, two of factories and the other by students of
a foreign power’s High Commission.37 If a company went into receiver-
ship, the Labour government, during the earlier stages of its 1974–79
administration, occasionally even assisted occupying workers to raise
cash to form a producers’ co-operative. The transfer of assets to the
workers was then consolidated.
These strategies were all brought to prominence in the 1970s by the
labour movement’s struggle against high levels of unemployment. They
challenged management’s right to dispose of property on the basis of
private profitability alone, and they frequently generated mass support
within the labour movement and among the general public in the
earlier part of the decade, though this waned later on. In short, these
strategies brought the role of property rights and management prerog-
ative into the mainstream of political debate, though their success
varied. The UCS work-in, for example, galvanized in the short term
virtually the entire population of the west of Scotland in its defence,
though subsequent attempts to consolidate work-ins through the estab-
lishment of co-operatives generally failed. Indeed, the first attempt to
change tactics in the struggle against redundancies, by organizing a sit-
in at the General Electric Company (GEC) in 1969, also failed. The
reasons are significant.
In August 1969, GEC – with 250,000 workers, the largest private-
sector employer in the UK – announced almost 5,000 redundancies in
addition to 12,000 already implemented over the previous year.38 Three
factories on Merseyside were affected; at a mass meeting striking
workers mandated their action committee to take any further steps
necessary in response, ‘including sit-ins and other measures’.39 This ini-
tiative had been inspired by a series of recent events: a television play
by Jim Allen, entitled ‘The Big Flame’, which had depicted a fictitious
workers’ take-over of Liverpool docks; the example of Catholic
workers in Belfast who had taken control of their communities in the
36. Institute of Personnel Management (IPM), Sit-Ins and Work-Ins (IPM:

1976), pp. 15–16.
37. Ibid., pp. 35–9.
38. This account is based on G. Chadwick, ‘“The Big Flame” – Events at the
Liverpool Factories of GEC–EE’, in K. Coates, T. Topham and M.
Barratt Brown (eds), Trade Union Register (Merlin Press: 1970), pp.
178–97.
39. Ibid., p. 183.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 75

course of their struggle for civil rights; and the wave of factory occu-
pations that had surged across France in May and June 1968.40 The sit-
in at GEC, scheduled for 19 September 1969, collapsed for several
reasons: variations in organization and motivation between the three
sites involved; concerted attacks on the action by employers, local and
national press and Labour MPs; concerns among the workforce itself
about the legitimacy of a sit-in and fears of retribution (a strike would
have been more familiar); and splits among the shop stewards, with a
persuasive bloc set against the action. Ken Coates adds that the
workers, unlike those at UCS who found themselves in possession of
£90 million worth of shipping under construction, did not possess a
major capital asset that they could seize as a bargaining weapon.41 So
while a clear opportunity for a sit-in had presented itself, a coherent
understanding among the workforce of its interests, good organization
and a united leadership were missing. Nevertheless, Graham
Chadwick, writing in 1970, concluded with some prescience that
despite the failure of the sit-in at GEC, it was only a ‘matter of months’
before another group of workers would try again, and that ‘many more
[would] follow’.42
Mobilization theory and the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in
One of the most remarkable developments during the early 1970s was
the spread of the employees’ work-in and sit-in. By 1974, the TUC
already distinguished four types of occupation: work-ins; sit-ins over
major management decisions (e.g. closures); collective bargaining sit-
ins; and tactical sit-ins (e.g. as part of a wider strategy).43 Since such
occupations challenged locally the ‘unlimited property rights’ of
employers to close factories and carry out policies ‘that would blight
the lives of workers (and often the prospects of whole areas and
towns)’, the TUC concluded that their use was ‘an appropriate trade-
union tactic in certain circumstances’.44
40. For an analysis of these occupations, see A. Hoyles, Imagination in Power:

The Occupation of Factories in France 1968 (Spokesman, Nottingham:
1973).
41. Coates, ‘Converting the Unions’, p. 23.
42. Chadwick, ‘“The Big Flame”’, p. 192.
43. TUC, Industrial Democracy (TUC: 1974), para. 12.
44. Ibid., para. 71. As noted above, the IPM produced a booklet for its
members confronted by occupations with tips on preventive, protective
and legal countermeasures. Its introduction remarked that: ‘Sit-ins and
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 76
A stream of academic studies analysed the causes and effects of

occupations.45 Despite the important differences in emphasis between
these studies, they had one critical element in common:46 the view that
the UCS work-in in 1971–72 was the major precursor of the movement
whose example ‘transformed the nature of the struggle against unem-
ployment and redundancies in Britain’.47 Indeed, as one observer put it:
‘if there had not been UCS, there would not have been Plessey at
Alexandria nor the River Don works at Sheffield, nor Fisher-Bendix at
Liverpool, nor the wave of Manchester sit-ins’.48 Another commenta-
tor noted that since many occupations had begun before the successful
outcome of UCS, it was the latter’s example rather than its success that
had caught the imagination.49
The story of UCS has been told many times, by Conservatives, Com-
munists and Trotskyists as well as by academics, journalists and the
participants themselves.50 Even so, none explicitly links the UCS work-
in to the development of subsequent ‘new’ forms of collective action.
The deepest analysis, by John Foster and Charles Woolfson,51 examines
work-ins, while no longer automatically attracting headlines in the

national press, are becoming a feature of life for many companies since
they are increasingly being used as an alternative to more traditional
forms of industrial action’: Sit-Ins and Work-Ins, p. 1.
45. See, for example, A. J. Eccles, ‘Sit-ins, Worker Co-operatives and Some
Implications for Organization’, Personnel Review 6 (1977); J. Greenwood,
Worker Sit-ins and Job Protection (Gower Press, Farnborough: 1977).
46. IPM, Sit-Ins and Work-Ins, p. 2; TUC, Industrial Democracy, para. 12;
Eccles, ‘Sit-ins, Worker Co-operatives and Some Implications’, p. 39;
Greenwood, Worker Sit-ins and Job Protection, p. 29.
48. J. Gretton, ‘To Sit or Not to Sit’, New Society, 15 June 1972, p. 564.
49. A. J. Mills, ‘Factory Work-ins’, New Society, 22 August 1974, p. 489.
50. Conservatives: F. Broadway, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders: A Study of Gov-
ernment Intervention in Industry, preface by Sir Keith Joseph (Centre for
Policy Studies: 1976); Communists: Alex Murray, UCS – The Fight for the
Right to Work (Communist Party: 1971); Trotskyists: S. Johns, Reformism
on the Clyde: The Story of UCS (New Park Publications: 1973);
academics: Robin Murray, UCS: The Anatomy of a Bankruptcy
(Spokesman, Nottingham: 1972); J. Foster and C. Woolfson, The Politics
of the UCS Work-In: Class Alliances and the Right to Work (Lawrence and
Wishart: 1986); journalists: A. Buchan, The Right to Work: The Story of
the Upper Clyde Confrontation, introduction by Harold Wilson (Calder
and Boyars: 1972); and participants: J. Reid, ‘The UCS Campaign: Three
Speeches’, in idem, Reflections of a Clyde-built Man (Condor Books:
1976), pp. 84–98.
51. Foster and Woolfson, Politics of the UCS Work-In.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 77

the political economy of the work-in and how it influenced other sit-ins
and work-ins, but not its lasting impact on the social audit, the new co-
operatives or alternative corporate plans. Mobilization theory seeks to
account for levels and intensities of collective action by reference to five
principal factors: interests, recourse to appropriate forms of action,
opportunity, organization and mobilization.
Interests
Shipbuilding in the UK, since 1945, had suffered from declining shares
in global markets, falling profits and declining capacity.52 Following an
influential report on shipbuilding in 1966,53 the then Labour govern-
ment had set up a Shipbuilding Industry Board (SIB) designed to ratio-
nalize production. It recommended that all five yards on the upper
Clyde should merge into one consortium, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders.54
UCS began trading in February 1968 with a loan of £5.5 million from
the SIB. Problems soon arose: the plant had been under-invested, man-
agement remained autocratic and the order book was full of loss-
making contracts. Even a Conservative commentator observed: ‘One of
the few absolutely incontrovertible conclusions to be drawn about UCS
is that it was acutely short of working capital throughout its brief
history’.55 Though the financial position of UCS had temporarily
improved by 1971, the Conservative government – then operating its
laissez-faire or ‘lame duck’ policy56 – announced on 14 June 1971 that
it would withhold a further £6 million loan, a decision that would have
led to many thousands of redundancies. This event was critical in trig-
52. A. Burton, The Rise and Fall of British Shipbuilding (Constable: 1994); B.
Stråth, The Politics of De-industrialization: The Contraction of the West
European Shipbuilding Industry (Croom Helm: 1987).
53. Shipbuilding Inquiry Committee, 1965–1966 (Geddes), Report, Cmnd
2937 (1966).
54. For the ownership structure of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS), see W.
Thompson and F. Hart, The UCS Work-In (Lawrence and Wishart: 1972),
p. 38.
55. Broadway, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, p. 30.
56. ‘Lame duck’ was a term used by John Davies himself when he was the
Conservative Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. It referred to the
policy, adopted at the Selsdon Park conference of the Conservative Party
before the 1970 election, to encourage businesses to accept responsibility
for their own decisions and not to expect state support. See R. Taylor, ‘The
Heath Government, Industrial Policy and the “New Capitalism”’, in S.
Ball and A. Seldon (eds), The Heath Government 1970–1974: A Reap-
praisal (Longman: 1996), ch. 6, pp. 139–59.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 78
gering the subsequent work-in. ‘The sine qua non for collective action’,
argues Kelly, ‘is a sense of injustice, the conviction that an event, action
or situation is “wrong” or “illegitimate”.’57
Indeed, just ten days later, on 24 June, the first of two mass protest
demonstrations took place in Glasgow, a clear indication of the sense
of injustice pervading the entire community.58 The Times estimated that
the UCS reorganization could cost 6,000 jobs and that ‘a further 6,000
employed by firms supplying materials to UCS could be jeopardized’.59
Tony Benn – then Labour spokesman on trade and industry – put the
number of jobs at risk in ancillary trades at 15,000.60 Furthermore, the
Conservative Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, John Davies,
had handled the issue poorly in Parliament.61
Responsibility for the crisis was immediately and unequivocally laid
at the door of Davies and Heath, as the speeches of Jimmy Reid,
chairman of the UCS shop steward conveners and a Clydebank
Communist councillor, make plain.62 In their attribution of blame, the
shop steward leaders of the work-in were supported by a wide cross-
section of the local population.63 Some 80,000 people joined the second
demonstration through Glasgow on 18 August and a further 200,000
downed tools in sympathy.64 In this case, ‘us’ embraced in a populist
fashion all but owners of large-scale capital and the Conservatives, who
were seen as their agents.65 As opposition to the closure spread, so too
did support for the UCS work-in throughout the country. Norman
Buchan MP observed succinctly: the Tory government had ‘made the
class struggle respectable’.66
57. Kelly, Rethinking Industrial Relations, p. 27.

58. J. Reid, ‘An Introduction to the UCS Crisis’, in idem, Reflections, p. 79.
59. ‘Workers Seize Control of Shipyard on the Clyde’, The Times, 31 July
1971.
60. Buchan, Right to Work, p. 73.
61. The Times correspondent, reporting the debate, wrote: ‘Mr. Davies’s
somewhat cold and precise statement [on the need to rationalize] and his
dismissal in a single short paragraph of the redundancies issue … con-
tributed to the furious reaction’: ‘Commons in Uproar as Labour MPs
Attack “Butchery” of Clyde Yards’, The Times, 30 July 1971.
62. J. Reid, ‘The UCS Campaign: Three Speeches’, in idem, Reflections, pp.
84–98.
63. For details of organized support, see Morning Star: housewives, 2 and 18
August 1971; churchmen, 2 August 1971; Glasgow City Council, 3 August
1971; artists and musicians, 12 August 1971; Scottish Trades Union
Congress special conference, 17 August 1971.
64. Morning Star, 19 August 1971.
65. Foster and Woolfson, Politics of the UCS Work-In, p. 17.
66. Ibid., p.191.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 79

The workers whose jobs were under discussion had had one of the
most radical histories of any in the United Kingdom.67 Pauline Hunt,
in her empirical study of workers’ consciousness during the work-in,
acknowledges that alternative models to capitalist society are most
likely to evolve in ‘solidary’ working-class communities. She argues
that their background of class conflict gave many UCS workers ‘an his-
torically evolved form of consciousness’68 that was lacking in other
industrial disputes. A sense of injustice, an attribution of responsibility
and a high degree of group and community cohesion therefore charac-
terized the UCS dispute from the outset. In such circumstances, the
nature of leadership is to articulate interests, maintain cohesion and
defend collective action. At UCS, leadership went much further in
urging a unique form of collective action, a work-in.
Collective action
Shop stewards from the five affected yards were concerned to find an
effective initiative with which to answer the announcement of liquida-
tion. Sammy Barr, the convener of stewards at Connells (one of the
yards), proposed a work-in, which was at first received sceptically
because of the failure at GEC two years previously. The proposal was
then accepted on 13 June 1971 as the method most likely to publicize
‘the men’s determination in the most dramatic fashion possible’ to
oppose closure.69 However, this hardly passes as an analysis of the
social pressures that made the work-in possible as a form of collective
action. Why not, after all, a strike?
67. W. Gallacher, Revolt on the Clyde: An Autobiography (Lawrence and

Wishart: 1942); H. McShane, ‘The Early Twentieth Century – Red
Clydeside’, WEA day conference on ‘Aspects of Scottish Working Class
History’, Falkirk, 4 December 1977, author’s notes.
68. P. Hunt, ‘The Development of Class Consciousness in Situations of Indus-
trial Conflict’ (M. Phil., University of Edinburgh: 1975), p. 65. See also D.
Lockwood, ‘Sources of Variation in Working Class Images of Society’,
Sociological Review 14 (1966), pp. 250–1. It should be noted that
Lockwood’s ideal type of ‘proletarian traditionalism’ has been criticized
on the grounds that it fails to take into account sectional interests in
industry and the dynamics of workers’ own perceptions of their class
position. See respectively: R. K. Brown and P. Brannen, ‘Social Relations
and Social Perspectives among Shipbuilding Workers – a Preliminary
Statement, Part Two’, Sociology 4 (1970), p. 207; and J. H. Goldthorpe, D.
Lockwood, F. Bechhofer and J. Platt, The Affluent Worker: Industrial
Attitudes and Behaviour (Cambridge University Press: 1968).
69. Thompson and Hart, UCS Work-In, p. 48.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 80
A contrast can be drawn with another factory – Fisher-Bendix, later

to become the Kirkby Manufacturing and Engineering (KME) co-
operative – which was also in difficulties early in 1971. Thorn Electri-
cal Group had taken over the factory in April and it became apparent
that the new management intended to improve productivity through
halving the workforce. On 25 June, the workers went on strike. ‘This
was not a powerful tactic since it increased the chance of total closure
of the plant’, noted one commentator.70 Only sympathy strikes
elsewhere saved the jobs in August, but under the threat that the whole
factory might close the year after.71
The divergence between UCS and Thorn can be attributed to the
nature of the leadership. Partly owing to the community factors that had
led to a ‘traditional proletarian’ outlook, and partly owing to the sheer
size and scale of UCS that required considerable organizational skills, the
leaders at UCS were more confident and politically aware than their
counterparts at KME. The role of the Communist Party of Great Britain
(CP) was significant, as it contributed a network of key activists to the
UCS work-in. Jimmy Airlie, Barr and Reid, who each played a ‘vital
part’72 in the work-in, were all members of the CP’s shipbuilding branch
in Scotland, which had a sizeable membership, peaking at 110 in the
aftermath of the work-in.73 Their leadership – and the leadership of the
CP itself – was solid and hegemonic from the start, in a way that leader-
ship in the later struggles reviewed in this article was rarely to prove. They
personified the role of the Communist factory branch that was, according
to a CP guide, ‘to give all-round leadership on all the current political
issues and in the Battle of Ideas between capitalism and socialism’.74
70. A. J. Eccles, ‘Kirkby Manufacturing and Engineering’, in K. Coates (ed.),

The New Worker Co-operatives (Spokesman, Nottingham: 1976), p. 144.
71. For background on Kirkby Manufacturing and Engineering (KME), see
T. Clarke, Sit-In at Fisher-Bendix, IWC pamphlet 42 (Institute for
Workers’ Control, Nottingham: n.d.); Eccles, ‘Kirkby Manufacturing and
Engineering’; D. Monnies, ‘KME: Study of a Workers’ Co-operative’
(Labour Studies Diploma, Ruskin College, Oxford: 1979).
72. J. McIlroy, ‘Notes on the Communist Party and Industrial Politics’, in
McIlroy et al. (eds), British Trade Unions, Vol. 2, p. 238.
73. J. McIlroy, ‘“Every factory our fortress”: Communist Party Workplace
Branches in a Time of Militancy, 1956–79, Part 1: History, Politics, Topog-
raphy’, HSIR 10 (Autumn 2000), p. 136.
74. Communist Party of Great Britain (CP), Build the Factory and Pit
Branches (CP: June 1958), pp. 3–4. This extract is quoted by J. McIlroy,
‘“Every factory our fortress”: Communist Party Workplace Branches in a
Time of Militancy, 1956–79, Part 2: Testimonies and Judgements’, HSIR
12 (Autumn 2001), p. 58.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 81

Such a broader political perspective was embedded in the approach
of the members of the shop stewards’ co-ordinating committee as a
whole, who soon became used to addressing mass meetings and
appearing on radio and television.75 Indeed, Foster and Woolfson
attribute a large measure of the success of the work-in to the leading
shop stewards’ skilful use of language – ‘the construction of contexts
and the deployment of emotions’76 – as well as to the workers’ own
class understanding and the government’s insistence on organizational
rationalization. These points are echoed by Kelly, who notes the way in
which the shop stewards carefully widened the context of the UCS
struggle ‘to construct a broad alliance of class forces against the
employer’.77 In such ways the shop stewards managed to ‘embrace but
transcend’ trade-unionism to great effect.78
The discussion prior to the work-in had already demonstrated an
advanced understanding of strategy. It had embraced objections to
strike action (‘it would enable the liquidator to put up the padlocks all
the quicker’) and to a sit-in strike (‘that would be almost impossible to
maintain for the exceptionally long drawn-out battle that was in
prospect, especially in view of the geographical spread and scatter of
the workforce’).79 A work-in would be unexpected, attract wider
support for its originality, avoid the problems of the other types of
action and, by controlling the gates, challenge the right of owners to
dispose of their property in a socially arbitrary manner.
Such a debate was in stark contrast to the eventual occupation of the
Thorn plant in 1972. Shop stewards and senior management were
having talks to try to avert closure when a group of workers decided
they should call a demonstration of support, which in fact grew into
the occupation:
the workers felt they were taking a step into the unknown – and were
understandably nervous – [T]hey had always believed that manage-
ment and their enclave were forbidden territory … ‘when we did get
to the boardroom there was this invisible barrier, it’s got to be said,
75. Jimmy Reid came third in BBC Radio 4’s ‘World at One Personality of the
Year’ competition in 1971 – after Edward Heath and Enoch Powell. See
Morning Star, 28 December 1971.
76. J. Foster and C. Woolfson, ‘How Workers on the Clyde Gained the
Capacity for Class Struggle: The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ Work-In,
1971–2’, in McIlroy et al. (eds), British Trade Unions, Vol. 2, p. 311.
78. J. McIlroy, ‘“Every factory our fortress”’, Part 2, HSIR, p. 58.
79. Thompson and Hart, UCS Work-In, p. 48.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 82
it was a barrier ... You got this feeling ... and Tom, one of our senior
stewards, was jockeyed into the office, he wouldn’t go at first’.80
Although this sit-in was temporarily successful (the co-operative was

set up later), it is clear that its leadership, at least initially, was less expe-
rienced and less confident than the UCS stewards.
At UCS, a campaign against the government’s decision to refuse the
£6 million loan was launched and, on 27 July, Reid, the shop stewards’
spokesman, announced plans for a work-in:
[an unfavourable government decision would spark off] the most

militant struggle ever seen in the history of Clydeside ... When we
speak of occupying the yards we do not merely mean a sit-in. We
intend to continue producing ships. After all, UCS has an order
book worth £90 million. We will have a work-in, which is unique in
trade union history. People have been out on the street before now,
and others have been on strike. But no one has ever had a work-in
before now.81
On 29 July the government confirmed that the yards at Clydebank and

Scotstoun would be closed, with an immediate loss of 6,000 jobs. The
following day, the Clydebank yard was occupied.82 The role of leader-
ship in inspiring the work-in had proved decisive.
Opportunity
The political context of the decision to occupy the UCS consortium

was also critical in creating a historic opportunity for the shop
stewards. The Labour Party’s furious criticisms of Trade and Industry
Secretary, Davies, were based on the social considerations of liquida-
tion – criteria for evaluating the purpose of an industrial enterprise (its
capacity to provide stable employment) quite different from those used
naturally by the Conservatives (commercial viability and ‘success’). It
is unusual for this to be debated openly and systematically by the
Labour Party since it questions the role of property in legitimizing
management’s authority to dispose of assets.83
80. Clarke, Sit-In at Fisher-Bendix, pp. 4–5.

81. ‘Clyde Yards Ready for Work-in’, Morning Star, 28 July 1971.
82. ‘It’s Clyde Workers Unlimited Now’, Morning Star, 31 July 1971.
83. However, these alternative criteria arguably reflected a key objective of the
Labour Party as then specified in Clause IV (4) of its constitution: ‘To
secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 83

This process of parliamentary legitimization helped to shift the
focus of national debate. The traditional rights of owners to dispose of
their capital had been subverted by workers’ insistence on the same
property rights in their job: they ‘owned’ their job as they had
‘invested’ their working lives in it and chose to keep it.84 After Davies’s
announcement of the liquidation, the thrust of Labour’s arguments was
to question the arbitrary disposal of property and, in the case of Tony
Benn in particular, to urge workers to occupy the yards. The Times cor-
respondent noted that he ‘has probably spent more time in Clydebank
than in his own constituency since the crisis began. Workers’ control
seems assured at least until Mr Wilson’s visit, and probably beyond’.85
The actions of the stewards’ leadership were naturally strengthened
by this support and by Wilson’s, the Leader of the Opposition. ‘We
should not condemn’, he stated, ‘any action they [the UCS stewards]
take, within the law, to maintain their right to work.’86 Wilson had, by
all accounts, been initially angry with Benn for spending so much time
at UCS.87 Yet he soon understood the political implications of the
work-in and, during a visit to UCS on 4 August, had placed his
authority behind the campaign for jobs. Later, he wrote that the work-
in ‘was a natural reaction to an obsolete ideology. What the men of
Clydeside proclaimed, and what I went to Clydeside to assert, was the
“right to work”’.88 Such support for action that was technically illegal
was critical: ‘the militant stewards of Upper Clyde – many of them
Communists – were now leading and acting as the spokesmen for the
whole labour movement’.89
… that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the
means of production, distribution and exchange …’ This wording last
appeared on membership cards in 1995.
84. H. A. Turner, G. Clack and G. Roberts, Labour Relations in the Motor
Industry (Allen and Unwin: 1967), pp. 336–7, argue that ‘property rights
in a job’ had been given a certain ‘legal embodiment’ for workers generally
through the Contracts of Employment Act 1963 and the Redundancy
Payments Act 1965, with their initial recognition of ‘job ownership’ and
partial provision for employer-financed compensation for job loss.
85. The Times, 31 July 1971.
86. Morning Star, 5 August 1971.
87. Robert Jenkins, Tony Benn: A Political Biography (Writers’ and Readers’
Publishing Co-operative: 1980), p. 156.
88. Wilson’s introduction to Buchan, Right to Work, pp. 9–10.
89. Buchan, Right to Work, p. 90.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 84
Organization and mobilization
The UCS workers strongly identified with the work-in, which itself
derived support from the local community and developments in Par-
liament. The work-in also ensured a high level of interaction between
the shop stewards and the workers, and their habit of working. Absen-
teeism halved, time-keeping improved and morale soared. ‘It could be
argued’, observe Foster and Woolfson, ‘that UCS provided a fleeting
glimpse of that kind of voluntary self-discipline that workers impose on
themselves when they feel themselves to have a real stake in determin-
ing their own lives’.90
The clear definition of interests, firm and committed leadership,
appropriate opportunity and a high degree of organization together
created the conditions for the declaration of the work-in and for its
maintenance and conclusion.91 The work-in had succeeded in creating
a measure of public tolerance for direct action. One of its most
enduring results was undoubtedly the development and popularization
of the ‘social audit’, a campaign instrument that widened the struggle
against unemployment by explicitly highlighting the social costs
involved.
Towards institutionalization
The social audit
Full employment and the election of Labour governments in 1964 and

1966 had kindled an interest in workers’ control among trade-
unionists, political activists and academics keen to build on these
apparent shifts in the balance of power towards organized labour. The
Institute for Workers’ Control (IWC), which had been launched in 1968
after a series of conferences initiated in 1964, acted as a forum through-
90. Foster and Woolfson, Politics of the UCS Work-In, p. 203. These observa-
tions closely reflect those made about the sit-down strike at General
Motors in 1936–37, where the workers had created ‘a palace out of what
had been their prison’: S. Fine, Sit-down: The General Motors Strike of
1936–1937 (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI: 1969), p. 171.
91. The conclusion, which included the restoration of subsidies to UCS,
formed part of the Conservative government’s lurch back towards inter-
ventionist policies in industry – ‘the famous U-turn, which Heath was
never allowed to forget’: H. Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret
Thatcher (Macmillan: 1989), p. 75.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 85

out the late 1960s and 1970s for debates and campaigns on ways to
promote industrial and social accountability. It published a regular
bulletin among a stream of other publications, and many influential
politicians and trade-union leaders became associated with its activi-
ties.92
In particular, the IWC pioneered the use of social audits, which were
designed to reflect the wider economic and social costs of decisions
otherwise taken within the narrow confines of organizational budgets.93
As part of the campaign against mass redundancies at GEC on
Merseyside in 1969, shop stewards had commissioned the IWC to carry
out an early version of a social audit on their behalf: a survey of third-
world embassies and relief agencies revealed buoyant demand for the
products that the company proposed to stop manufacturing at the
threatened sites, thereby demonstrating their economic viability.94
Michael Barratt Brown, in the first full-scale social audit, assessed
the external economies of keeping the UCS yards open, transformed
perhaps into a multi-purpose port with ore and oil terminals. He
evaluated: the external costs of allowing the yards to run down in terms
of wastage of assets and the deterioration of housing, schools, roads
and hospitals; the additional costs of moving, re-employing, housing,
educating and providing for an infrastructure of transport and social
services for an entire, displaced community; and the costs of unem-
ployment and social security benefits, as well as the grants and loans
(about £21 million) awarded by governments to the consortium
between 1968 and 1971.95
A further social audit on UCS was prepared as evidence on behalf
of the IWC to the Committee of Enquiry into the Proposed Rundown
of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, which was set up by the Scottish Trades
Union Congress.96 Murray observes:
92. For an overview of the role of the IWC in promoting workers’ control at
this time, see K. Coates, Workers’ Control: Another World is Possible
(Spokesman, Nottingham: 2003). Relevant publications are listed in
‘Select Bibliography of Writings by the late Tony Topham’, HSIR 17
(Spring 2004), pp. 139–46. By the late 1980s, the IWC was ‘no longer a
living thing’: Coates, Workers’ Control, p. 177.
93. K. Coates, Work-ins, Sit-ins and Industrial Democracy (Spokesman, Not-
tingham: 1981).
94. Chadwick, ‘“The Big Flame”’, pp. 194–5.
95. Coates, Work-ins, Sit-ins and Industrial Democracy, pp. 87–99.
96. This committee’s report appears in Barratt Brown and Coates (eds), Trade
Union Register 3, pp. 253–9.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 86
Far from promising increased social efficiency, bankruptcy promises

merely to restore the rate of profit on private capital by transfers
from other parts of society … [T]he restriction of discussion to the
terms dictated by the market can no longer be accepted … [T]he
question … is not how to adjust ourselves to maintain this particu-
lar economic system, but how to organize the system to meet our
needs.97
The social audit approach was also used with success at the second
work-in undertaken, in autumn 1971, at the River Don steel works in
Sheffield. The British Steel Corporation (BSC) had announced plans to
close the plant by hiving off some orders to private competitors and
shutting down its heavy forge. The unions and middle-management
together approached customers for heavy forgings to ask whether they
knew of the plans. Closure would have meant that heavy forgings could
be obtained only from abroad; following customers’ protests, BSC
withdrew the decision.98
The approach was used elsewhere, for example at Imperial Type-
writers,99 and refined to develop the notion of local participatory
democracy. Stan Bodington set out a model of democracy based on the
social audit: the community is to relate social needs to the resources
available to satisfy them as a way to avoid the inefficiencies of both the
‘automatic market system’ and centralization.100 Yet the social audit’s
more immediate, if indirect, impact was on the institutionalization of
new co-operatives and on workers’ alternative corporate plans
(ACPs).101 Both these developments were based on a concept of
industry’s social responsibilities in providing secure, useful employ-
ment. The formation of co-operatives during the 1970s came to be seen
increasingly as a way to socialize small companies, and the propagation
of ACPs as a way to socialize large companies. Both methods were
intended to steer a course between the free market and the bureaucratic
centralization of traditional nationalization. Both ‘went beyond’ the
97. Murray, UCS, p. 80.

99. Why Imperial Typewriters MUST NOT Close, a preliminary social audit
by the Union Action Committee, IWC pamphlet 46 (Institute for Workers’
Control, Nottingham: n.d.).
100. S. Bodington, ‘The Political Economies of Social Auditing’, Workers’
Control (1978) no. 2, pp. 8–9.
101. For a summary of the relationships between these strategies, see M. Gold,
‘When Workers Take over the Works’, Tribune, 24 July 1981.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 87

sit-in and work-in by attempting to institutionalize and formalize
workers’ control on a long-term, stable basis from below.
This process of institutionalization presents a series of challenges
that goes well beyond the use of work-ins as a reactive form of collec-
tive action. Most analyses of mobilization centre on strikes,102 but it can
account too for work-ins and even social audits. Yet what of attempts
to build on such temporary foundations to create enduring solutions to
closures or redundancies, such as co-operatives? Or what of efforts to
extend collective bargaining into new areas that have major implica-
tions for managers’ right to manage and shareholder value, such as
ACPs?
The ‘new co-operatives’
The ‘new co-operatives’, which emerged in 1974–75, can be regarded as

ambitious forms of collective resistance to closure and redundancy,
involving often high densities of worker mobilization. Their origins can
be analysed by reference to the factors used already in this article –
including interests, sense of injustice, leadership, opportunities
and organization. The difference lies in the barriers that the new co-
operatives encountered as they evolved from ‘collective action’,
through ‘habitual action’ to ‘viable institution’. A work-in, as a form of
collective action, requires the continuation of the habit of attending
work, which could even lead to improved rates of attendance and
morale, as in the case of UCS. This form of habitual activity remained
controversial as it was not sanctioned by the employer and had been
organized as a direct challenge to the employer’s interests. UCS
succeeded as the work-in eventually wore down the government, which
was concerned at the political implications of soaring unemployment
and the apparent risk of civil disorder.103
The formation of a co-operative demands a crucial further step:
institutionalization, which ‘occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typifi-
cation of habitualized actions by types of actors. Put differently, any
such typification is an institution.’104 The key phrase is ‘reciprocal typ-
ification’. Clearly, an institution will not pass beyond the stage of
‘habitual activity’ and emerge as an institution unless the typical
actions that it defines and structures are accepted and shared by all
parties to them as legitimate and enduring. It follows that the failure to

103. J. Campbell, Edward Heath: A Biography (Jonathan Cape: 1993), p. 443.
104. P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality
(Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1973), p. 72.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 88
institutionalize a habitual activity requires careful examination of the

barriers that have prevented its ‘reciprocal typification’ by the actors
involved. If the barriers that hampered the consolidation of the new co-
operatives can be identified and evaluated, then it is possible to explain
why it proved so difficult for even well-organized and reflective shop-
floor interests to make lasting progress in creating the foundations of
alternative forms of industrial production, even when – as in the 1970s
– the circumstances appeared most propitious.
The co-operatives contrasted with UCS in a variety of ways. The
work-in was never intended to be permanent, but the co-operatives
were: workers had to assume managerial roles in the co-operatives and
bear responsibility for implementing wage cuts and redundancies.
While workers elsewhere had no reason to oppose the UCS work-in,
the co-operatives often evoked hostility from those whose jobs were
threatened as a consequence. UCS had a massive backlog of work, but
the co-operatives were generally desperately seeking markets. The
UCS work-in was a means to an end – securing state aid – but the co-
operatives were ends in themselves.105
In his study of factory occupations, A. J. Mills distinguishes three
‘waves’ of occupations that followed the UCS example between July
1971 and March 1974.106 At first, engineering workers were the vast
majority of occupiers (91.5%), and it was they who ‘had a pioneering
role in initiating and establishing occupation strategy’. The second
wave ‘brought in other unions, notably the Transport and General
Workers’, while the final wave, beginning in February 1972, marked ‘a
deeper acceptance of the strategy … when 28 print workers occupied
their work premises to protest a pay claim rather than redundancy.
Another 25 occupations (all involving the Amalgamated Union of
Engineering Workers) over pay disputes followed this move’.
According to the union leader Alan Sapper, in 1977, there had been
some 200 factory occupations since 1971, involving over 200,000
workers.107 Alan Tuckman listed 264 occupations over the period
1971–81, of which 69 had involved responses to closures or redundan-
cies, and the remainder issues such as pay and conditions.108
105. For an overview of the co-operative movement in the UK, with particular
reference to the development of larger co-operatives, see ICOM, No Single
Model: Participation, Organization and Democracy in Larger Co-ops
(Industrial Common Ownership Movement, Leeds: 1987).
106. A. J. Mills, ‘Factory Work-ins’, New Society, 22 August 1974, p. 489. See
also G. Chadwick, ‘The Manchester Engineering Sit-ins’, in Barratt
Brown and Coates (eds), Trade Union Register 3, pp. 113–24.
108. Tuckman, ‘Industrial Action and Hegemony’, appendix two, pp. 558–63.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 89

In February 1972, at the start of the ‘final wave’, an occupation led
to the formation of the first producers’ co-operative by a small group of
women workers in Fakenham, Norfolk. Though opposed by the
executive committee of their union – the National Union of Footwear,
Leather and Allied Trades (NUFLAT) – they resisted the closure of
their leather factory during a seventeen-week work-in.109 They
continued making dresses and bags and eventually obtained financial
backing from the Scott-Bader Commonwealth. The reasons for the
eventual failure (in 1977) of Fakenham Enterprises – the name of the co-
operative as it became – are instructive. The demand for shoes,
in which it had specialized, slumped; the co-operative was under-
capitalized; there was no help from the labour movement; and there was
little genuine interest in self-management in any case.110 The workers
were prepared to negotiate virtually any deal to secure their jobs.
The Fakenham example raises two major questions. First, under
what circumstances did a sit-in or work-in develop into a producer’s co-
operative? And, second, what chances were there during the 1970s for
the emergence in the UK of genuinely democratic forms of work orga-
nization, especially in larger enterprises, which were not necessarily
based on common ownership (a question we examine below in the
section on ACPs)?
The relationship between sit-ins, work-ins and co-operatives
The term ‘new co-operatives’ is applied to those co-operatives aided by

Benn during his term as Secretary of State for Industry from March 1974
until June 1975 (the three most significant were KME, Meriden and
Scottish Daily News). Benn was then demoted following the defeat of the
referendum campaign to withdraw the UK from membership of the
EEC.111 The emergence of the ‘new co-operatives’ is best seen as the last
resort by workers trying to avoid unemployment, provided that finance
were available. They did not generally have a special regard for the quality
of their jobs. Among the new co-operatives of the 1970s, only at Meriden
was reference ever made to the enthusiasm of the workforce for their
product (motor-cycles) as a factor in eventual success.112
109. K. Coates, ‘Some Questions and Some Arguments’, in idem (ed.), New
Worker Co-operatives, pp. 11–13.
110. J. Wajcman, ‘The Caring, Sharing Co-op?’, New Society, 2 July 1981, pp.
12–14.
111. T. Benn, Against the Tide: Diaries 1973–76 (Arrow Books: 1990), p. 388.
112. See, for example, G. Whiteley, ‘Triumph at Meriden after One Year’,
Guardian, 5 March 1976; M. Leighton, ‘The Workers’ Triumph’, Sunday
Times Magazine, 4 June 1978.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 90
There has historically never been a coherent strategy in Britain

to advance workers’ control through co-operatives, with the result that
there was no political leadership available to give systematic assistance
in developing co-operatives from work-ins. For example, in a report
submitted to the CP’s executive committee in 1975, Bert Ramelson, its
industrial organizer, stated that since a co-operative was suited chiefly
to either distribution or small-scale production, ‘we would be creating
illusions if we were to foster the idea that it is a major solution or an
alternative form to nationalization in a highly sophisticated large-scale
and interdependent industry such as Britain’s’.113
Another commentator argued that:
the problem of the market has not been seriously answered by the
leaders of the struggle for a co-operative [at Meriden] ... The way in
which the workers are maintaining production means that they have
also taken upon themselves the penalties which capital demands in a
crisis situation (i.e. wage reductions and redundancies).114 (original
emphasis)
There is considerable validity in these arguments. At Meriden, the

unions lost their traditional influence on the shop floor.115 As a result,
many new co-operatives in their formative stages received help over
organizational and similar issues from individuals rather than from
unions or political groups: Ray Loveridge (Aston University) at
Fakenham;116 Ken Fleet (secretary of the IWC) at Grantham
Fashions;117 Tony Eccles (Glasgow University) at KME;118 and
Geoffrey Robinson (Labour MP for Coventry North-West) at
Meriden.119
A further obstacle to be surmounted in forming a new co-operative
was the hostility of those workers elsewhere who feared that their own
jobs would be undermined by a successful venture.120 Meriden was such
113. B. Ramelson, ‘Public Ownership and Industrial Democracy’, Comment,

22 March 1975, p. 86.
114. S. Parker, ‘Meriden and Workers’ Control’, Revolutionary Communist 1
(January 1975), pp. 28–9.
115. Whiteley, ‘Triumph at Meriden’, Guardian.
116. Private correspondence from Ray Loveridge, 5 July 1977.
117. H. Frayman, ‘Grantham’s Workers’ Co-operative’, Workers’ Control
(1978) no. 2, p. 13.
118. Private correspondence from A. J. Eccles, 13 June 1977.
119. ‘Save Meriden!’, Tribune, 14 June 1977.
120. E. Mandel, ‘Self-Management – Dangers and Possibilities’, International
2 (Winter/Spring 1975), p. 5.
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an example: Norton Villiers Triumph (NVT) had been formed in July
1973 with £4.8 million of public money and Dennis Poore as chairman.
That autumn, the Meriden plant was closed to concentrate production
on the company’s other plants at Small Heath (in Birmingham) and
Wolverhampton. After an eighteen-month sit-in, Meriden workers set
up their own co-operative (March 1975), though NVT continued to
market Meriden’s products until 1977.121 Poore warned Benn that
motor-cycle demand could not sustain all three factories, a view shared
by the Small Heath workers who had angrily told Benn that they feared
that the Meriden co-operative threatened their jobs. Though Benn
emphasized his commitment to revitalizing the industry through the
National Enterprise Board (NEB), both the Wolverhampton and the
Small Heath plants eventually closed. This led to another sit-in at
Wolverhampton, not supported by Eric Varley, Benn’s successor at the
Department of Industry.122 The Times, in a leading article, declared that
NVT had been expected to rationalize under the programme attracting
state aid in 1973 but that Benn’s support for Meriden had ‘wrecked’ the
plan.123
A similar situation arose during the formation of the Scottish Daily
News (SDN) as a co-operative.124 Beaverbrook Newspapers Ltd
decided to close its Glasgow office in May 1974 and cease printing its
three Scottish papers. The rationale was that the Glasgow printing
operations had to stop to allow those in London and Manchester to
continue. The national print unions backed Beaverbrook and so the
workers’ action committee, formed on being notified of the closure,
decided that other means would be necessary to keep the site open.
Faced with having to raise money rapidly, the action committee soon
discovered that most union executive committees were hostile or indif-
ferent.125 In the event, the SDN co-operative closed in December
1975.126
121. J. McLoughlin, ‘The Meriden Baby That Fights for Survival’, Guardian, 23
May 1978.
122. ‘Policy of State Aid for Ailing Companies Suffers Sharp Reversal’, The
Times, 8 August 1975.
123. ‘A Forlorn Attempt to Keep Going’, The Times, 12 August 1975.
124. The full account of the Scottish Daily News (SDN) can be found in R.
McKay and B. Barr, The Story of the ‘Scottish Daily News’ (Canongate,
Edinburgh: 1976).
125. A. Mackie, ‘The Scottish Daily News’, in Coates (ed.), New Worker Co-
operatives, p. 120.
126. ‘Final Chapter Ends for “Scottish Daily News”’, The Times, 17 December
1975.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 92
Such opposition to co-operatives – as demonstrated by mass

meetings of shop-floor workers at Small Heath and official lack of
interest by unions over SDN at Glasgow – reveals the difficulty in
forming one without outside support. In at least one case, at the Briant
Colour Printing work-in in south London, appeals to establish a co-
operative were voted down on the recommendation of the leadership
inside the plant.127
Weak product markets also presented problems. In the case of the
new co-operatives, a slump – leading to liquidation or its threat – had
been behind the crisis in the plants in the first place. The reorganization
of a company from private to co-operative ownership could not in itself
regain lost sales and arrest a declining market share. Indeed, the moti-
vation to establish a co-operative during the first half of the 1970s was
generally in reaction to the threat of redundancy, just as recourse to
self-help has been a traditional reaction to economic crisis throughout
British labour history.128 The prospect of saving jobs was seen as the
single most important motivation in setting up KME, SDN and
Meriden.129 One essential condition, then, for a sit-in or work-in to
develop into a co-operative was the readiness of the shop floor to
support a leadership committed to resist redundancies. Benn stressed
that the new co-operatives were assisted only because they were self-
selected – he was unable to set one up when Aston Martin, for example,
went bankrupt, because the workers did not want it.130
There was a further, crucial condition for success: access to finance.
British co-operatives, unlike their French or Italian counterparts or the
Mondragón organization in Spain, had no substantial sources of
finance or credit especially geared to their needs.131 As a result, a
vicious circle ensued: lack of credit meant that cash reserves disap-
peared, so the co-operative was forced to lower its prices to establish a
market, which further squeezed the finance available for expansion and
put the co-operative at risk. This eroded confidence, and justified with-
127. Coates, ‘Some Questions’, p. 13.

128. R. Fletcher, ‘Worker Co-ops and the Co-operative Movement’, in Coates
(ed.), New Worker Co-operatives, p. 179.
129. Eccles, ‘Kirkby Manufacturing and Engineering’, p. 155; Mackie,
‘Scottish Daily News’, p. 109; Parker, ‘Meriden and Workers’ Control’, p.
29.
130. T. Benn, Arguments for Socialism, ed. C. Mullin (Penguin, Har-
mondsworth: 1980), p. 68.
131. J. Thornley, Workers’ Co-operatives: Jobs and Dreams (Heinemann: 1981),
ch. 7, p. 93.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 93

holding credit.132 This kind of structural weakness has prevented the
co-operative movement in the UK from challenging traditional forms
of private ownership in industry.
Because the plants in question had been on the point of closure
before becoming co-operatives, management had not normally provided
funds to continue, although Beaverbrook did supply both unsecured
and secured loans to SDN. In addition, it was no longer adequate, given
the scale of operations in the examples in question, to build up a fund
principally of members’ savings. The remaining three methods of
finance – support from an individual benefactor, grants from central
government and assistance from specialist agencies – often proved
unsatisfactory as well. The result was that the new co-
operatives’ failure reflected (unfairly) on co-operative organization as
such, rather than on credit starvation or poor methods of capitalization.
The most notorious example of reliance on an individual benefactor
involved Robert Maxwell’s association with SDN. Maxwell, already
with a record of dubious business dealings,133 effectively bought himself
the co-chairmanship of the works council. Later, following quarrels
over format, pricing and editorial line, he gained full control of the
business.134 It was eventually liquidated, and the occupiers evicted in
autumn 1976.
A second source of finance was grants from central government,
associated with the period Benn spent as Secretary of State for
Industry. These grants – notably to KME, SDN and Meriden –
attracted considerable criticism, particularly from the Industrial Devel-
opment Advisory Board.135 From June 1975, when Varley replaced
Benn against a background of mounting economic crisis, the govern-
ment took a harder line over such grants. Varley allowed the reposses-
sion of the Imperial Typewriters factory in Hull, which workers had
occupied in the face of closure and drawn up a social audit.136 He
132. J. Pearce, Sources of Finance for Small Co-operatives, ICOM pamphlet no.
7 (Industrial Common Ownership Movement: 1979), p. 4.
133. I. Jack, P. Knightley and J. Fox, ‘How Maxwell Sabotaged the Workers’
Dream’, Sunday Times, 21 September 1975.
134. Mackie, ‘Scottish Daily News’, p. 136.
135. ‘A Dead Duck’, The Times, 23 December 1974.
136. Other factors were also involved in the failure of the campaign to convert
Imperial Typewriters into a co-operative. The Hull plant was merely leased
to the parent company, which therefore could not sell its assets to the
workforce to its advantage. Furthermore, the parent company was deter-
mined to retain the brand name and the marketing, so the workforce
would have had to start the business again from scratch: Tuckman, ‘Indus-
trial Action and Hegemony’, pp. 265–6.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 94
refused to aid the NVT Wolverhampton sit-in137 and eventually allowed

KME to slip into liquidation in March 1979 after take-over attempts
by Worcester Engineering had failed to satisfy creditors.138
Finally, other co-operatives and especially co-operative agencies
helped to finance new ventures. Scott-Bader, the common-ownership
enterprise operating in the plastics and chemicals industry,139 aided
Rowen Engineering (Glasgow), Rowen Onllwyn and Fakenham Enter-
prises. The Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM),
founded in 1958 with inspiration from Scott-Bader, provided financial
assistance through Industrial Common Ownership Finance Ltd
(ICOF). This latter body, founded in 1973, was a non-profit-making
loan fund deriving finance from individual contributions and the pro-
visions of the Industrial Common Ownership Act l976.140 Under this
Act, £250,000 was made available over five years from the Department
of Industry for loans to common-ownership enterprises. The projects
that ICOM and ICOF could support were, therefore, very small.141
Funds available from other agencies – such as the Co-operative Devel-
opment Agency (CDA), established by the government in 1978 – were
likewise limited.142
By the end of the decade, it was believed that, in the longer term, the
co-operative sector was most likely to flourish through ICOM and the
CDA.143 Indeed, the number of co-operatives in Britain supported
through these agencies rose from 75 in 1977 to 140 in 1978 and 162 in
1979.144 These co-operatives remained very small and constituted only
a tiny proportion of industrial output.145
Key factors, then, in explaining the formation of the new co-
operatives include the firm cohesion of the workers involved and the
137. J. Elliott, ‘The Workers’ Co-operatives: A Political Own Goal’, Financial

Times, 21 November 1978.
138. ‘Assets Bid Too Late To Save Kirkby Co-operative’, Financial Times, 28
March 1979.
139. E. Bader, ‘From Profit Sharing to Common Ownership’, in J. Vanek (ed.),
Self Management (Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1975), pp. 227–37.
140. D. Watkins, Industrial Common Ownership, Fabian Tract 455 (Fabian
Society: 1978), pp. 2–4.
141. ‘Rebirth Co-operative Style’, ICOM Newsletter (Industrial Common
Ownership Movement: January/February 1980), p. 1.
142. Thornley, Workers’ Co-operatives, pp. 54–61.
143. ‘Co-operatively, To Collapse’, Guardian, 29 March 1979.
144. D. Owen, ‘Exponential Growth in Industrial Co-ops’, ICOM Newsletter
(Industrial Common Ownership Movement: March/April 1980), p. 1.
145. C. Logan, ‘Do-it-yourself Socialism’, New Statesman, 16 April 1982, pp.
6–7.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 95

role of leaders in arguing the case and exploiting opportunities for
sources of finance. Other factors emerged to constrain their success.
First, the new co-operatives relied on workers’ concern for their jobs
and on public funds, whose supply turned out to be erratic. Indeed,
their intention – to save jobs – sometimes led to an organizational
structure not always regarded as genuinely co-operative. Jo Grimond,
the Liberal Party leader, dubbed them ‘government funded syndicalist
enterprises’.146 Second, they sometimes provoked the hostility of
workers elsewhere who felt that the co-operatives threatened their own
jobs. Third, they were not supported by a coherent government
strategy. Indeed, when workers at Meriden, KME and SDN shifted
their interest from a ‘mere’ defence of their jobs towards an alternative
industrial structure, there was no unambiguous strategy of support
from the Labour Party as there had been for UCS:
To give the movement real shape and direction, a committed

approach would be necessary from the Labour Party itself. This
would not mean simply handing round the hat to individual co-
operatives, but would involve an acceptance of this form of enter-
prise as part of a political programme and strategy.147
Yet no such committed approach was forthcoming. Indeed, the co-

operatives aided through ICOM and the CDA tended to be small and
isolated, and could not in any sense be presented as an alternative
model to the private sector.
Alternative corporate plans
Co-operatives have a tendency to be small not only because smallness

favours direct democratic accountability, but also because the process
of capital accumulation is more restricted: co-operatives must finance
expansion purely from within and cannot rely on raising funds on the
stock market. By contrast, the second major development in the insti-
tutionalization of ‘new’ forms of collective action during the 1970s –
the emergence of workers’ alternative corporate plans (ACPs) –
146. Elliott, ‘The Workers’ Co-operatives’, p. 18. Grimond is referring here to

‘syndicalism’, a social movement, peaking between the 1890s and 1920s,
that sought to overthrow capitalism through ‘the revolutionary potential
of working class economic organization, notably the trade union or indus-
trial union’: B. Holton, British Syndicalism 1900–1914 (Pluto Press: 1976),
p. 17.
147. Thornley, Workers’ Co-operatives, pp. 177–8.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 96
involved large, multi-plant manufacturing companies. The factors that

led to the diffusion of ACPs in a number of industries can, again, be
explained by mobilization theory. These include the attribution of
blame for redundancies to poor management, a sense of injustice, a
strong sense of solidarity fostered through the action of the shop
stewards’ combine committee, creative leadership, efficient organiza-
tion and appropriate opportunities.
The Industry Act 1975 had already introduced voluntary planning
agreements that were designed to strengthen the relationship between
corporate strategy and the attainment of certain government objec-
tives, such as reducing unemployment and import penetration. Agree-
ments were to provide government with current information from each
company covered on matters such as investment, pricing, product
development and marketing.148 They were to form an intrinsic part of
the government’s industrial strategy, and the original intention was to
cover around one hundred manufacturing companies by 1978, a target
strongly endorsed by the TUC.149 Only two were ever signed: the
National Coal Board and Chrysler.150 Such lack of progress created
much disappointment in union circles, though it was acknowledged at
the time that the government was too weak to force through legislation
to make the system compulsory.151
Alongside these formal, top-down structures there emerged a series
of alternative corporate plans drawn up by shop stewards’ combine
committees in close collaboration with the workers involved. These
ACPs built on the discourse of planning and on the expanded scope of
collective bargaining, such as disclosure of company information,152 to
break free of government agendas and to challenge management’s right
to manage at the level of business and investment strategy. While
planning agreements were officially recognized but failed to capture the
148. The Contents of a Planning Agreement: A Discussion Document, preface by

Eric Varley, Secretary of State for Industry (Department of Industry:
1975).
150. Sawyer, ‘Industrial Policy’, pp. 168–9.
151. N. Vann, ‘Negotiating Planning Agreements’, Studies for Trade Unionists
3:9 (Workers’ Educational Association: March 1977), pp. 5–7.
152. Sections 17–21 of the Employment Protection Act 1975 granted unions
certain rights to information for the purposes of collective bargaining. If a
company resisted disclosure, the union could request the Central Arbitra-
tion Committee (CAC) to intervene. By the end of April 1979, eighty-four
complaints had been referred to the CAC: M. Gold, H. Levie and R.
Moore, The Shop Stewards’ Guide to the Use of Company Information
(Spokesman, Nottingham: 1979), pp. 113–15.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 97

popular imagination, ACPs – in a kind of parallel universe – did the
reverse. They captured the popular imagination but were never offi-
cially recognized.
Arguably, had the terms of Industrial Democracy, Labour’s White
Paper,153 ever been implemented, then these are the very issues that
worker directors could have raised at company boards. By contrast,
ACPs used the principle of the social audit to counter the threat of
redundancies by presenting management with possible alternative
investment strategies. These were designed to achieve several related
objectives: to save jobs; to produce ‘socially useful’ products; and to
achieve these aims by adapting the existing technology and equipment
in the company, thereby avoiding capital expenditure on a new plant.
Above all, ACPs were designed to involve actively all workers in the
plant by tapping their own ideas for new products in a highly effective
operation of ‘bottom-up’ direct democracy. Even so, the implementa-
tion of ACPs was hindered by management prevarication, technologi-
cal constraints and fears in some union quarters of incorporation into
management interests. Union leadership was consequently often frag-
mented both politically and organizationally.
These points are best illustrated by examining the first and best-
known ACP, that at Lucas Aerospace.154 A division of Lucas Industries
Ltd, Lucas Aerospace had begun to rationalize its operations and lay
workers off towards the end of the 1960s, when it employed around
18,000. In 1974, the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards’
Committee (LACSSC) – then representing 14,000 members in 13
unions across 17 sites – began to develop a proactive strategy to oppose
mass redundancies.155 It circulated a questionnaire throughout the
workforce for ideas on products designed to achieve the objectives
noted above. On the basis of returned questionnaires, the LACSSC
drew up in 1976 a list of 150 such products, grouped under six
headings. These covered oceanic equipment, robots, transport systems,
braking systems, alternative energy sources and medical equipment.156
The LACSSC subsequently campaigned for recognition of its Alter-
native Corporate Plan with Lucas management, the national unions
involved, the Labour Party, the TUC and the Department of
153. Industrial Democracy, Cmnd 7231 (May 1978).

154. H. Wainwright and D. Elliott, The Lucas Plan: A New Trade Unionism in
the Making? (Allison and Busby: 1982).
155. Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards’ Committee (LACSSC), ‘The
Lucas Plan’, in K. Coates (ed.), The Right to Useful Work (Spokesman,
Nottingham: 1978), pp. 212–16.
156. Ibid., pp. 228–31.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 98
Industry.157 In January 1978, along with North East London Polytech-

nic (NELP), it established the Centre for Alternative Industrial and
Technological Systems (CAITS) with a grant from the Joseph
Rowntree Charitable Trust.158 Its aims were to act as a ‘clearing house’
for the Lucas Aerospace ACP, to promote the notion of socially useful
production in union negotiations, and to provide research and experi-
ence for shop stewards wishing to set up joint combine committees and
ACPs of their own.159 Then, in March 1978, Lucas Aerospace
announced further redundancies. At this point, the LACSSC decided
to involve the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions
(CSEU), the body that negotiated at national level in shipbuilding and
engineering, as it was the official channel to represent the Combine’s
ideas and proposals.160 Under its auspices, the Lucas Aerospace Trade
Union Committee produced a 400-page report on possible investment
initiatives at Lucas, which also included a social audit of Lucas
Aerospace’s closure plans.161 Lucas Aerospace agreed to consider the
report and not to carry out compulsory redundancies; in the event,
only a relatively small number of jobs were lost.162
The originality of the LACSSC ACP, as Coates has argued,
consisted in its attempt to present a solution to four interwoven aspects
of the underlying industrial crisis: unemployment, lack of democracy,
unmet social needs and environmental concerns.163 For these reasons,
no doubt, it attracted both favourable (the LACSSC was nominated for
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979) and unfavourable attention.164
157. LACSSC, Democracy versus the Circumlocution Office, IWC pamphlet 65

(Institute for Workers’ Control, Nottingham: 1979), p. 3.
158. J. Proctor, ‘Alternative Technology Centre Founded’, Workers’ Control
(1978) no. 3, p. 7. In September 1982, the Centre for Alternative Industrial
and Technological Systems (CAITS) moved to North London Polytech-
nic.
159. CAITS Broadsheet no. 135 (North East London Polytechnic (NELP):
November 1979), n. p.
160. The CSEU – Friend or Foe? (LACSSC: n.d.), p. 1.
161. Lucas Aerospace Confederation Trade Union Committee, Lucas
Aerospace: Turning Industrial Decline into Expansion – a Trade Union Ini-
tiative (interim report) (CAITS: February 1979); M. George, ‘New Lucas
Workers’ Plan To Save Jobs’, Workers’ Control (1979) no. 2, p. 12.
162. CAITS Quarterly (September 1980), p. 1.
163. K. Coates, ‘Planning by the People’, in idem (ed.), Right to Useful Work,
p. 11.
164. M. George, ‘Behind the Scenes: How ATV Handled the Lucas Aerospace
Affair’, Workers’ Control (1979) no. 3, p. 18.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 99

Most importantly, the Lucas ACP, aided by CAITS, stimulated
much debate among shop stewards’ combine committees facing redun-
dancies in other multinational companies. Some combine committees
established their own ACPs, for example at Vickers.165 Others acknowl-
edged the importance of ACPs and drew up ‘rational strategies’ for
their industry though in less detail, for example at C. A. Parsons.166 Still
others discussed possible transfers of work to the plant under threat –
though not in the same systematic manner associated with an ACP, for
example at British Leyland in Liverpool.167 A one-day conference,
organized in November 1979 by CAITS, discussed the opportunities
and challenges presented by ACPs in different sectors: aerospace, heavy
engineering, motors, power engineering, and telecommunications and
postal engineering. The conference agreed to create and maintain links
between shop stewards’ combine committees through regular meetings,
a decision which was interpreted in some quarters as a step towards an
effective way to deal with the emergence of multi-union, multi-plant,
multinational companies.168 Indeed, by 1982, CAITS listed initiatives
across six industries, with case studies drawn from companies including
Dunlop, ICL, Metal Box and Thorn, where joint shop stewards’ com-
mittees were at different stages of drawing up alternative plans.169 A
survey by Labour Research in 1983 revealed a further expansion of ini-
tiatives, with examples of alternative plans and strategies drawn from
thirty-one sectors. These included plans and reports prepared not only
by shop stewards for their companies but also by trades councils, pro-
gressive local authorities and enterprise boards, and resource centres
based in Leeds, London and Newcastle. However, the survey concluded
that with the re-election of the Conservatives in June 1983, ‘the grand
vision of the alternative economic strategy faded away’.170
165. H. Beynon and H. Wainwright, The Workers’ Report on Vickers (Pluto Press:
1979); Vickers’ National Combine Committee of Shop Stewards, ‘Building a
Chieftain Tank and the Alternative’, in Coates (ed.), Right to Useful Work, pp.
233–61.
166. Corporate union (CU) committee of C. A. Parsons, The Turbine-Generator
Industry – Options and Possibilities, leaflet (CU committee, Heaton Works,
Newcastle: October 1979).
167. F. Banton, The Closure of British Leyland’s No. 2 Factory at Speke, Liverpool,
leaflet (n.d.).
168. J. Murray, ‘The Shop Steward’s Who’s Who – Or How To Recognize a Combine
Committee’, in Workers’ Plans: Cutting Edge or Slippery Slope?, report of
CAITS one-day conference, 17 November (CAITS, NELP: 1979), p. 79.
169. A Brief Review of Workers’ Plans (CAITS, Polytechnic of North London: 1982).
170. ‘Alternative Plans and Strategies’, Labour Research, January 1984, p. 8. See also
the second part of this survey in ‘Popular Planning’, Labour Research,
September 1984, pp. 222–4.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 100
Barriers to institutionalization
The development of ACPs in the 1970s raises important issues. To

begin with, they presumed the existence of a united shop stewards’
combine committee. Such committees bring together stewards from
different sites across a multi-plant company. They are ‘seldom recog-
nized by unions or management’ and ‘thus occupy an anomalous and
necessarily unofficial position’ within companies.171 Indeed, it is not
even certain how many existed in Britain in the 1970s, still less what
different types there were (division, company or industry-wide), or how
united, effective and independent they were, or how they derived their
income.172 Gaining recognition for ACPs from such an insecure foun-
dation was always going to prove a struggle.
Not every industry was amenable to the development of an ACP,
even where there were robust combine committees. For example, at C.
A. Parsons, Newcastle, the corporate union committee stated:
The most important difference in our approach is that we cannot

apply the same formula as at Lucas Aerospace where socially useful
products are posed as an alternative to military production. We see
the production of turbine generators for electrical power transmis-
sion as socially useful work in itself, essential for production and
essential to maintain living standards of workers generally.173
The committee added that the company’s technology was suitable only
for the production of turbine generators, yet only a few were manufac-
tured each year. ‘Many of the workers are highly specialized; much of
the plant would be only of limited use for other heavy engineering
products and useless for small-scale production.’174 Faced by govern-
ment pressures to rationalize turbine production, the committee
attempted to build a campaign to prevent private mergers. It also drew
up a ‘rational strategy’ for the company to develop turbine generators
using wind/wave/tidal energy, intermediate turbine generator technol-
ogy, and combined heat and power generators. The objection that
factories are often purpose-built, and so not amenable to ACPs, has
171 J. F. B. Goodman and T. G. Whittingham, Shop Stewards (Pan Books:

1973), pp. 142–3.
172. M. Terry, ‘Combine Committees: Developments of the 1970s’, British
Journal of Industrial Relations 23:2 (1985), pp. 359–78.
173. CU committee, The Turbine-Generator Industry, p. 1.
174. Ibid.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 101

been made elsewhere as well.175 CAITS acknowledged the diversity of
ACPs, and produced guidelines on ‘what needs to be done’ if a combine
committee decided to develop one.176
A further objection to ACPs was that they might lead to some form
of incorporation: ‘The Corporate Plan has been criticized as a fuzzy
reformist demand which removes workers from a position of direct
opposition to management.’177 Senior shop stewards allegedly ran the
risk of co-option into top-level consultations with management, which
could have undermined their independence. Meetings and discussions
could be used as delaying tactics while redundancies went ahead. Shop
steward ‘corporate planners’ could become distanced from their con-
stituents. ACPs could also become enmeshed in bureaucratic proce-
dures of tripartite planning or else degenerate into glorified suggestion
boxes for management. Yet it could be argued that because ACPs were
so complex – involving the defence of jobs, use of technology and social
need – they allowed workers to advance along a series of ‘fronts’ at the
same time and therefore helped to strengthen bargaining positions.
This might have encouraged the independence of shop stewards because
attention would be drawn to the fact that other interests in industry –
the company itself, government, and union leaderships – could not be
relied on to save jobs.178
These divergent perspectives resulted in fragmented support among
the unions. At the political level, some union leaders, such as Arthur
Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers, argued that ‘workers’
control means in effect the castration of the trade union movement’
and ‘total collaboration as far as the working class is involved’.179 By
contrast, Mike Cooley, a founder member of the LACSSC, maintained
that workers’ control – in lending workers an opportunity to sense their
own power – represented a significant challenge to ‘the naked power of
the multinationals in this country’.180 Such a stark polarity of view was
hardly conducive to building union solidarity around the creation of
ACPs.
175. Comments made by F. Banton, discussion group leader for motor

industry, CAITS conference, 17 November 1979, author’s notes.
176. M. George, ‘Combine News: Workers’ Plans and Reports’, Workers’
Control (1978) no. 5, pp. 7–8.
177. M. George, ‘The Pros and Cons of Workers’ Alternative Corporate Plans’,
Workers’ Control (1979) no. 4, p. 17.
178. Ibid., p.18.
179. A Debate on Workers’ Control, IWC pamphlet 64 (Institute for Workers’
Control: November 1978), p. 4.
180. Ibid., p. 3.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 102
At an organizational level, too, the TUC was clearly uneasy with the
nature of the shop-floor activity that lay behind the ACPs. Combine
committees enjoyed an uncertain status in the union movement, and
the issues raised by ACPs were seen as ‘matters for political parties, and
beyond the legitimate brief of local and plant unions as far as the
bureaucracy was concerned’.181 Indeed, there is evidence that Lucas
management and the CSEU even collaborated in attempting to destroy
the Lucas Aerospace Combine.182 Lacking unified union support, and
facing a hostile economic and political climate after 1979, ACPs never
secured their breakthrough into management recognition.183
Nevertheless, at the time, ACPs extended and decentralized collec-
tive bargaining in a radical way: ‘Workers’ plans and reports are not
objects, rather they are processes of expropriation over managerial pre-
rogatives.’184 This extension of collective bargaining into new areas –
information disclosure, investment and product planning, marketing
strategies, factory location and take-overs – formed a major incursion
into the traditionally defined areas of management’s ‘right to manage’.
From the point of view of the shop stewards, the merit of this approach
was that it did not compromise their independence. Not only did their
members readily understand it, but it also significantly extended their
members’ involvement in bargaining strategy as their own ideas and
views formed its foundation. As Audrey Wise put it: ‘The greatest con-
tribution of the Workers’ Plan is that it depends on workers thinking
constructively about their own work and people’s needs’ (original
emphasis).185 The formation of CAITS, the forging of links with the
relevant unions and the spread of ACPs into broader areas of industry
all demonstrate the extent to which such an approach had gained
acceptance across significant – though clearly not all – sectors of the
labour movement in the 1970s.
181. Private correspondence from Mike Cooley, 13 June 2004.

182. George, ‘Pros and Cons’, p. 17.
183. The ideas embodied in ACPs – notably the nature of the interaction
between people and technology, and socially useful production – still
command attention: M. Cooley, Architect or Bee? The Human Price of
Technology (Hogarth Press: 1991).
184. George, ‘Combine News’, pp. 7–8.
185. A. Wise, ‘Useful Production: The Key to a Worthwhile Industrial
Democracy’, Workers’ Control (1979) no. 6, p. 9.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 103

Conclusions
This article has traced the development of ‘new’ forms of collective

action in the 1970s from their inspirational origins in the UCS work-in,
through the social audit to their peak and eventual demise. The analyt-
ical framework – mobilization theory – has helped to highlight the con-
ditions common to all these forms of collective action, which include
redundancy or threat of redundancy, a sense of injustice, creative lead-
ership, good organization and appropriate opportunities, as well as fre-
quently support from broader social and political communities.
The common features of these ‘new’ forms of action are summarized
in Table 1. The left-hand column lists the problems faced by the
workers involved in the new forms of collective action, whereas the
right-hand column links the objectives or solutions that they corre-
spondingly evoked.
The forms of mobilization are diverse, but they reflect the pragma-
tism of the workers involved in devising schemes that were appropriate
and workable. They are linked by the creativity and optimism of
workers reacting, under very different circumstances, to common,
underlying threats – namely redundancy or its prospect. In each case,
the workers involved believed that their action undertaken collectively
could make a difference to their lives and help secure stable employ-
ment.
Table 1 also reveals that, at certain moments in the 1970s, there was
a match between shop-floor aspiration for job security and popular
support for the creative means to achieve it, even when these means
challenged management prerogative and property rights. On occasion,
as at UCS, this popular support was articulated at national level
through the Labour opposition in Parliament. Though the limitations
of the unions to transform society are widely documented and under-
stood,186 it seemed at such moments, fleeting though they were, that
they were indeed pushing the boundaries of capitalism. The example of
UCS – an attempt to demonstrate the priority of workers’ interests over
those of capital – continued to emblazon the decade that followed.
Indeed, the promotion of ACPs and strategies based on popular
planning techniques lasted until 1983, when hope for further advances
was finally extinguished by the second successive election victory of the
Conservatives.
186. See, for example, T. Lane, The Union Makes Us Strong (Arrow Books:
1974).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 104
Table 1: Common features of ‘new’ forms of collective action
Problem Solution
(Threat of) redundancy Job security
Closure, bankruptcy New forms of institution

(e.g. co-operatives) or
consolidation (e.g. ACPs)
Failure of management Workers’ control
Top-down decisions from Bottom-up mobilization

management by workers
Workers regarded as Workers as creative and

passive and submissive resilient
Management prerogative Management prerogative

and property rights to be and property rights to be
accepted challenged
Traditional forms of col- ‘New’ forms of collective

lective action not neces- action based on
sarily appropriate in the pragmatic adaptation to
circumstances the circumstances
Narrow definition of Broad definition of

stakeholders (company, stakeholders (community
shareholders) and society, through
social audit)
Lack of private finance Co-operation, state

subsidy, alternative
sources
Declining demand for New products, marketing

products
Short-term reaction Long-term

institutionalization
Pessimism Optimism
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 105

The key point is that the development of co-operatives and ACPs
represented attempts to institutionalize alternative forms of industrial
organization that placed the interests of labour above those of capital.
A co-operative is designed to ensure that production, finance and man-
agement are controlled by the workforce through a directly elected
workers’ board. ACPs acknowledged that the interrelationships
between sites in a multi-plant company were so complex that the
struggle to prevent redundancies had to take account of the company’s
operations as a whole. Indeed, among the new co-operatives, two –
SDN and Meriden – were individual plants owned and controlled by
multi-plant companies (Beaverbrook and NVT respectively). As co-
operatives, the first failed, opposed by plants in Manchester fearing
their own job losses, while the second temporarily succeeded, though at
the expense of the plants at Small Heath and Wolverhampton, both of
which subsequently closed. In neither case had the unions involved
formed a company-level structure – that is, a joint shop stewards’
combine committee – to consider redundancies at company level.
Instead, the unions fought at plant level, which was inappropriate in the
broader perspective.
Co-operative organization is therefore best suited to single-plant
enterprises, though its effectiveness in combating redundancies has
proved to be strictly limited. It is not surprising that the ‘second wave’
of (successful) producer co-operatives in the 1970s, aided by the CDA,
ICOM and other agencies, were small enterprises based on one unit of
production, organized and financed from the start as co-operatives.
The ACP of the LACSSC, by contrast, was a major organizational
advance in union negotiating strategy in a multi-plant, multinational
company. It consolidated and extended the principles of collective bar-
gaining on which industrial democracy in Britain has traditionally been
founded.
The development of co-operatives and ACPs in the 1970s demon-
strates how managerial prerogative, based on discretionary control
through the property rights of shareholders, may be challenged in the
right economic, political and social circumstances. In the co-operative
structures, management was reduced to a technical function, directly
accountable to the workforce, and therefore shorn of the need to legit-
imize itself through property rights. ACPs left traditional management
structures intact but opened up new areas of collective bargaining over
planning decisions and business strategy. Analysis of the ways in which
both initiatives formed and unfolded bears out the principal contention
of mobilization theory, that ‘it is the perception of, and response to,
injustice’ that should play the central role in the industrial relations
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 106
agenda.187 From this sense of injustice there sprang the workers’ deter-
mination – underpinned by leadership, organization and creativity – to
confront the assumption that they were powerless in the face of market
forces. Such determination reveals that, for these workers at least,
‘another world was possible’.188
School of Management
Royal Holloway University of London
Egham TW20 0EX
I should like to thank the following for their encouraging comments on earlier
drafts of this article: Donna Brown, Ken Coates, Mike Cooley, Nina Fishman,
Richard Hyman, Chris Smith and the late Tony Topham. Ron Mendel con-
tributed sources on factory occupations in the USA in the 1930s. I am particu-
larly grateful to the editors, Dave Lyddon and Paul Smith, for their detailed
suggestions on ways to clarify the text. I remain responsible for the final
version, which is based on my Ph.D. thesis, ‘Industrial Democracy, Incorpora-
tion and Control: Britain, 1945–80’ (University of Edinburgh: 1982), chapters
10 and 11.

188. Adapted from subtitle of Coates, Workers’ Control: Another World is
Possible.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 107
HSIR  ( AUTUMN ) ‒ 107
Free Trade-Unionism in Latin America:

‘Bread-and-Butter’ or Political
Unionism?
Magaly Rodríguez García
The foundation of the International Confederation of Free Trade

Unions (ICFTU) in 19491 formalized the ‘free’ trade-union ideology
within the international labour movement. Unions around the world
had to be convinced of the ‘democratic principles’ of free trade-
unionism. To achieve this goal the ICFTU turned its attention to
Africa, Asia and Latin America, and set out to give them technical,
financial and educational support by means of its regional organiza-
tions. In 1951, the Inter-American Regional Workers’ Organization
(ORIT) was founded as the ICFTU regional organization on the
American continent.
The idea of free trade-unionism appeared on the American
continent long before the formation of the ICFTU – with the creation
of the Pan-American Federation of Labor (PAFL) in 1918. This was
founded through the efforts of Samuel Gompers, leader of the
American Federation of Labor (AFL),2 to propagate his economic
vision of trade-unionism in Latin America. PAFL’s ephemeral
existence was followed by the Inter-American Confederation of
I am indebted to my Ph.D. supervisors G. Vanthemsche and M. van der Linden,

and to B. Coppieters, D. Lyddon and an anonymous reviewer for their useful
comments on this text. See p. 134 for acronyms for Latin American union bodies.
1. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) was

founded after the non-Communist unions within the World Federation of
Trade Unions (WFTU, founded in 1945) disapproved of the WFTU’s
sympathy for the Soviet regime. The ICFTU united non-Communist
trade-union organizations of fifty-one countries and territories. For a
comprehensive history of the ICFTU, see M. van der Linden (ed.), The
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (Peter Lang, Bern: 2000).
2. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) merged with the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1955 to form the AFL–CIO.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 108
Workers (CIT) – also a US creation – founded in 1948 to defend the

‘free’ trade unions in the western hemisphere. Both organizations paved
the way for the ORIT in 1951.
In the formulation of its objectives and tasks, the free trade-union
movement resembled very closely the business unionism practised by
US unions. According to the vision of the predecessors to the ORIT,
trade unions are economic organizations created by workers for the
protection of jobs, the improvement of working conditions, and the
increase of wages through collective bargaining.3 ‘Big business’ was
inevitable, and the emancipation of the working class could, according
to the defenders of business and free trade-unionism, be achieved
within the capitalist system. Organized workers must therefore
abandon every effort to transform society as a whole, and concentrate
on bread-and-butter trade-union issues, in order to create ‘an ever-
increasing sphere of economic security and opportunity’. This is what
the American theorist Selig Perlman called ‘job consciousness’.4
Free trade-unionism is an ambivalent ideological construct. Some
authors and insiders claim that free trade-unionism, as much as US
3. Trade Unions: what they are, what they do, their structure (ICFTU,
Brussels: 1969); G. Meany, Labor Looks at Capitalism (AFL–CIO,
Washington DC: 1966). A. Carew, ‘Ideology and International Trade-
unionism’, in B. De Wilde (ed.), The Past and Future of International
Trade-unionism (Archive and Museum of the Socialist Labour
Movement (AMSAB), Ghent: 2000), p. 236, has observed that the
‘tendency to concentrate on trade union practicalities rather than the
more theoretical questions thrown up by political debate’ was also
present in the European continent and its unions as early as the
beginning of the twentieth century. The author agrees with Carew’s
statement but is of the opinion that the tendency to concentrate on
industrial relations, and to avoid (at least officially) political issues and
formal organizational links with political parties, was emphasized prin-
cipally by the US unions. Many European unions maintained close links
with political parties during the twentieth century and were not always
reluctant to debate on political matters.
4. According to S. Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement (Augustus M.
Kelley, New York: 1970; first published 1928), pp. 252–3, trade-union
militants developed a so-called trade-union mentality, in contrast to the
anti-capitalist mentality of intellectuals. This represented ‘a shift from an
optimistic psychology, reflecting the abundance of opportunity in a partly
settled continent, to the more pessimistic trade union psychology, built
upon the premise that the wage earner, in a complex industrial structure,
is faced by a scarcity of opportunity. The new attitude no longer called for
a restoration of free competition, but for control and administration by
the union of all job opportunities available to the group.’
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 109
RODRÍGUEZ GARCÍA: FREE TRADE-UNIONISM IN LATIN AMERICA 109

business unionism,5 could not be considered an ideology as such.6
Gompers promoted a ‘pure and simple’ trade-unionism, which would
concentrate on economic issues. He refused to accept any dogma,
doctrine or ‘ism’. According to him, dogmas and ideologies endan-
gered the freedom of humankind and limited the economic vision of
workers.7 The ICFTU, in a document on trade-union education, main-
tained that it had avoided laying down ‘an ideological approach’ as it
had committed itself to ‘respect the philosophical views of the [affili-
ated] national organisations’ and that ‘trade-union organisations must
by definition deal much more with practical things than ideological
outlooks’. The post-war world, according to ICFTU members, was far
too complex to follow ‘mechanistic interpretations of the evolution of
society’ such as those formulated by ‘Marx and Engels, according to
which the capitalistic world is bound to collapse and that workers have
to wait and take over.’8 Trade unions needed to go beyond any ideo-
logical approach to find solutions to modern problems.
Indeed, free trade-unionism, as an ideology, is vaguer than, for
example, communism or socialism, in the sense that it does not claim
to make use, to the same extent, of scientific knowledge and that it is
difficult to define concepts such as ‘independence’ or ‘freedom’. But
this does not mean that the free trade-union movement is without
ideology, defined as a system of ideas, beliefs and values which
contains: a particular conception of the (past and future) world; a dis-
tinctive way to understand liberty, democracy, social justice and
authority; and a programme to achieve its objectives in the future.9
5. Carew, ‘Ideology and International Trade-unionism’, p. 236, discusses

trade unions and their tendency ‘to work in the “here and now” while
avoiding politics’, and continues: ‘In making these points I am arguing
that business unionism or Selig Perlman’s “Tom, Dick and Harry” theory
of non-ideological trade-unionism represent a natural order of things.’
6. V. Alba, Politics and the Labor Movement in Latin America (Stanford Uni-
versity Press: 1968), p. 353; Meany, Labor; P. Reiser, L’Organisation
Régionale Interaméricaine des Travailleurs (ORIT) de la Confédération
Internationale des Syndicats Libres (CISL) de 1951 à 1961 (Droz/Minard,
Geneva/Paris: 1962), p. 179.
7. R. Salazar, Samuel Gompers: Presencia de un líder (Inter-American
Regional Workers’ Organization (ORIT), Mexico: 1957).
8. (Untitled document) ‘ICFTU European Conference on Education, 30
October–1 November 1950’, pp. 13, 16, folio 2569c, International Institute
of Social History, archive of the International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions, Amsterdam (hereafter, ICFTU archive).
9. R. Borja, ‘Ideología política’, Enciclopedia de la política (Fondo de
Cultura Económica, Mexico: 1997), p. 508.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 110
The free trade-union ideology, as any other ideology, was neither

universal nor static. It had distinctive meanings in different parts of the
world; it evolved and modified its ideological nature according to
political and socio-economic transformations. For the US unions,
‘freedom’ meant that unions should be entirely independent of political
parties, governments, employers and church, while some European
unions, particularly those which were linked to political parties, chose
a vaguer definition, namely ‘free from external domination’. Since the
Latin American labour movement was historically highly politicized,
the ORIT Latino leaders also favoured the vaguer definition of inde-
pendence. But the ORIT was strongly influenced by the US unions and
their purist notion of free trade-unionism. ORIT members therefore
emphasized independence from political parties, governments,
employers and church, and promoted, at least in theory, ‘apolitical’
trade-unionism.
In practice, especially after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the free
trade-union movement in Latin America played an active political role
in protecting the existing economic order. Until the mid-1970s the free
trade unions of the western hemisphere concentrated on the fight
against Communism (and to a lesser extent against Peronism in the
1950s). Therefore, the word ‘free’ in the trade-union movement of the
American continent meant ‘free of anti-capitalistic ideas’. In the 1970s,
Latin American labour leaders started to question the US ideological
influence within the free trade-union movement. They distanced them-
selves from US unions and sought more contact with their Western
European counterparts, to whom ‘the word “free” had come to be syn-
onymous for Socialist’.10 Since then, the free trade unions in the
American continent have identified themselves with other social forces
fighting against the neo-liberal policy followed by governments and
enterprises. Yet, the ideological nature of the free trade-union
movement remains vague.
The following contribution complements the recent (2000) history
of the ICFTU, edited by Marcel van der Linden. It differs from the
work of authors who claim that the ICFTU and its regional organiza-
tions have been of ‘minor significance’.11 The ICFTU has been rather
‘silent’ in the international arena. It organized only a few worldwide
campaigns: the most well known were the boycott of Chile at the end
of the 1970s and the anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa during
10. W. Buschak, ‘The Meaning of the Word “Free” in Trade Union History’,
in De Wilde (ed.), Past and Future, p. 275.
11. P. Pasture, ‘A Century of International Trade-unionism’, International
Review of Social History 47:2 (2002), pp. 277–89.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 111

the 1980s. But the ICFTU and its regional organizations were
extremely efficient in the fight against Communism. The achievements
of the ICFTU and its regional organization in Latin America were par-
ticularly felt at the political level, which in turn influenced the
economic and social development of the continent.
This paper will focus on the history of international free trade-
unionism, and the formalization of its ideology, el sindicalismo libre, in
Latin America, by the creation of a regional structure. It examines the
pre-war situation with regard to international trade-unionism in Latin
America and the efforts made by the AFL to influence it. It then
analyses the political and socio-economic factors that paved the way
for the creation and consolidation of the ORIT, the methods that free
trade-unionists used to spread its ideas, and the reaction of Latin
American labour leaders. It presents, in this way, a short history of the
ORIT, which has been marked by crucial moments in Latin American
history: the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the Chilean coup of 1973.
These events allow a division of the ORIT’s history into three major
periods: from its foundation in 1951 to 1959, from 1960 until the mid-
1970s, and from 1977 to now. The conclusion discusses the achieve-
ments of the free trade-union movement in the western hemisphere, as
well as some aspects in the debate on labour internationalism and,
more specifically, the (political or economic) role of the free trade-
union movement and its prospects in the post-Cold War era.
Research was conducted in 2001 on the activities of the ORIT in
Bolivia and Ecuador during the 1960s.12 Primary sources include
reports of international trade-union activities, minutes of ICFTU and
ORIT conferences and meetings, ICFTU and ORIT publications
(brochures), correspondence between labour leaders and other author-
ities, and press releases and cuttings kept by the ICFTU. These sources
can be found in the International Institute of Social History
(Amsterdam).
12. M. Rodríguez, ‘De samenwerking tussen de Organización Regional Inter-

americana de Trabajadores (ORIT) van de International Confederation of
Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) en de Andes-landen Bolivia en Ecuador
tijdens de jaren 1960: Een vergelijkende studie’ (Graduate dissertation,
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels: 2001).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 112
Internationalism in Latin America before 1945
The US influence over its southern neighbours began in the late eigh-
teenth century. The Monroe doctrine of 1823 became an operational
part of US policy, serving as cover for American expansionism, espe-
cially between 1890 and the early 1920s. The message ‘leave Latin
America alone’ changed then, with the expansion of US power, into
‘leave Latin America to us’.13 The USA wanted to avoid external ideo-
logical influences on the western hemisphere, as this was considered
dangerous for American development. Economic investments,
combined with diplomatic and military interventions, were considered
the best tools to influence the Latinos and to keep them away from
‘immoral’ influences, such as socialism, fascism, and communism.
During the twentieth century, the US presence was felt in every
sector of the Latin American society. The labour movement was no
exception. The US unions played a decisive political role. They built
impressive networks with the backing of the US State Department, in
order to propagate ‘American’ values and US foreign policy. Capitalist
expansion in the world contributed to create bigger markets for US
products. Investments abroad generated profits, which helped to
maintain high wages and other benefits for US workers. The contact
with friendly foreign labour organizations was also positive for the
import of cheap raw materials and natural resources. All this promoted
employment and economic growth in the USA.14 For the US unions
internationalism was therefore, as Catherine Collomp observes, more
an instrument to protect the economic interests of the USA than the
expression of labour solidarity.15
The attempt to create an international federation of trade unions on
the American continent was in line with the policy of the US govern-
ment. As the US (military, diplomatic and financial) intervention
expanded in Central America and the Caribbean, the need for a pan-
13. J. Slater and J. Knippers Black, ‘United States Policy in Latin America’, in
J. Knippers Black (ed.), Latin America, Its Problems and Its Promise: A
Multidisciplinary Introduction (Westview Press, Oxford: 1991), p. 235.
14. H. A. Spalding, ‘US Labour Intervention in Latin America: The Case of
the American Institute for Free Labour Development’, in R. Southall
(ed.), Trade Unions and the New Industrialisation of the Third World (Zed
Books: 1988), p. 261.
15. C. Collomp, ‘La politique étrangère de l’AFL et de l’AFL–CIO’, in J.
Sagnes (ed.), Histoire du syndicalisme dans le monde: Des origines à nos
jours (Editions Privat, Toulouse: 1994), p. 513.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 113

American labour organization increased as well.16 Gompers, the AFL
leader, wanted to promote bread-and-butter trade-unionism in the
Spanish-speaking countries of the continent and isolate them both
from the socialist influences coming from Europe and from the revolu-
tionary ideas coming from the US’s own Industrial Workers of the
World (founded in 1905). Latin American trade-unionists had to follow
the example of their northern neighbours, concentrate on economic
issues, and distance themselves from political questions.
The AFL, together with the Mexican Confederación Regional
Obrera Mexicana (CROM), founded the PAFL in 1918, with head-
quarters in Washington, and Gompers as president. It was dominated
by the AFL and its ideology. Many Latin American trade-unionists
therefore perceived the PAFL as being more beneficial to US business-
men than to Latin American workers. The PAFL also failed to extend
its influence beyond the USA, Mexico, Central America and the
Caribbean islands, regions where US influence was traditionally very
strong. The biggest South American unions never became members,
and the PAFL did not become a real pan-American labour organiza-
tion. The different ideological views within the federation also caused
many troubles. After Gompers’s death in 1924, the AFL neglected the
federation, and US interference in the Latin American labour
movement decreased. The AFL’s 1941 congress declared that the pan-
American federation had ceased to exist.
‘Free’ unions v. ‘extremist’ unions
During the inter-war period US unions turned their attention to

Europe, where fascism was gaining in importance. International
contacts between US and Latin American labour leaders were
marginal, although the Latin Americans themselves were making plans
to create a confederation of trade-union organizations. In 1938,
Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the Mexican Marxist trade-union leader,
organized a trade-union assembly for the foundation of a Latin
American labour organization, the Confederación de Trabajadores de
América Latina (CTAL). The AFL’s domestic rival, the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO), was also involved in this endeavour. At
first the CTAL followed the line of the Popular Front parties. It strove
16. M. Dreyfus, ‘The Emergence of an International Trade Union Organiza-

tion (1902–1919)’, in van der Linden (ed.), The International Confedera-
tion, pp. 44, 70–1; Collomp, ‘La politique étrangère de l’AFL’, p. 513.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 114
for a coalition of Latin American unions of different leftist trends. But

the CTAL was immediately identified with the international
Communist movement, and especially with the Latin American
Communist parties. It became very successful among Latino workers
before, during and immediately after the war. In only a few years after
its foundation, the CTAL succeeded in uniting Communist and inde-
pendent labour leaders, in order to create new national labour federa-
tions and, at the same time, to convince employers and governments to
accept trade unions as normal organizations of modern society. The
leftist confederation promoted industrial growth and the creation of
new workplaces in Latin America. In 1945 the CTAL, together with the
European (Communist and non-Communist) unions and the CIO,
took a leading role in the foundation of the World Federation of Trade
Unions (WFTU).17
The growth of the leftist labour confederation worried the US
unions. The AFL decided therefore to focus its attention again on its
southern neighbours.18 By sending missions, ‘labour ambassadors’,
secret agents and financial help, the AFL tried to convince the Latinos
of the principles of free trade-unionism. It considered the Latin
American labour movement to be too politicized and tried to promote
a more pro-US ‘business-oriented’ trade-unionism. The US State
Department supported fully the efforts made by Serafino Romualdi,
the ‘roving labour ambassador of the AFL’.19 His Latin and Catholic
background facilitated contact with Latin American trade-unionists.20
17. J. P. Windmuller, International Trade Union Movement (Kluwer, Deventer:

1980), pp. 132–4.
18. For this purpose the AFL worked through the Free Trade Union
Committee (FTUC). This was a semi-independent organ of the AFL,
founded in 1942, and strongly dependent on Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) funding. In exchange for financial support, the FTUC acted, from
1949 to at least 1958, as a cover for CIA activities and as a source of intel-
ligence abroad. For detailed information on this topic, see A. Carew, ‘The
American Labor Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union
Committee and the CIA’, Labor History 39:1 (1998), pp. 25–42.
19. I. Roxborough, ‘The Urban Working Class and Labor Movement in Latin
America since 1930’, in L. Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin
America, Vol. 6:2 (Cambridge University Press: 1994), p. 328.
20. Serafino Romualdi was an Italian immigrant who escaped from
Mussolini’s Italy, because of his socialist ideas. Once in the USA he shifted
to the right and became involved in the International Ladies’ Garment
Workers Union, and afterwards in the AFL’s FTUC: I. W. F. Brandt and
W. G. ‘t Hart, ‘De internationale vrije vakbeweging (IVVV en ORIT) in
Latijns-Amerika van 1950 tot 1960’ (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam:
1979), p. 46; Reiser, L’Organisation Régionale Interaméricaine, p. 179.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 115

Romualdi warned that the AFL should be very careful in its contact
with Latin American labour leaders. US unionists were aware of the
widespread anti-Yankee feeling among large segments of Latin
American society. Thus, if the AFL wanted to co-operate with Latin
American democratic unions, it had to wait until they made the first
move. This was to avoid accusations of dirigisme.
The frequent contacts between US and Latin American non-
Communist trade-unionists facilitated the idea of creating a new inter-
American labour organization. The time was opportune since the
opposition within the CTAL, and especially against its general secretary
Lombardo Toledano, had started to grow from the mid-1940s onwards.
By following the line of the Popular Front parties, the leftist confedera-
tion had managed to unify the labour movement, but at the expense of
its own Marxist ideology. In order to help the Soviet Union in its struggle
against Nazism during the Second World War, the CTAL had urged its
members to co-operate with their national governments, independently
from the ideological orientation of those regimes. By the end of the war,
the Latin American leftist unions were therefore ideologically weak, and
its members disaffected with the Communist parties and the CTAL.
Indeed, they ‘felt profoundly disillusioned and abandoned [their]
political position, to take refuge in a sort of business unionism, only and
exclusively in defence of [their] immediate interests’.21
Conservative forces in the American continent took advantage of
the situation to attack the Communists and to create a new inter-
American labour organization. This resulted in the organization of a
trade-union conference in Lima in January 1948. The invitation to the
conference was sent pro forma by the Peruvian and Chilean national
labour federations,22 but the US support was crucial. During this First
Conference of Free Trade-unionism, the CIT was founded.23 The
21. Alba, Politics and the Labor Movement, p. 352.
22. Respectively, the Confederación de Trabajadores del Perú (CTP) and the
Confederación de Trabajadores de Chile (CTCh).
23. Doce años de lucha por el Sindicalismo Libre en América Latina (notas
polémicas en defensa de la ORIT) (ORIT, Lima: 1960), p. 8; Esta es la
ORIT: Información referente a la ORIT, la mayor entidad sindical interna-
cional del hemisferio (ORIT, Mexico: 1958), pp. 13–14; Discursos, asis-
tentes, mociones, acta, resoluciones, datos e informes del Segundo Congreso
Continental de la CIT, efectuada en el palacio de los trabajadores de la
Habana (sede de la Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba), 7–11
September 1949 (ORIT, Havana: 1949), p. 55; O. Molina García, El
Sindicato Interamericano: 50 Años (1951–2001) de su acción social y
política (ORIT, Caracas: 2001), p. 24; Brandt and ‘t Hart, ‘De interna-
tionale vrije vakbeweging’, p. 48; La ORIT: sus programas y sus realiza-
ciones (ORIT, Mexico: 1962), p. 8.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 116
pillars of the new labour organization were the US (AFL), Chilean,

Peruvian, and Cuban national labour federations. The inter-American
confederation promoted a brand of trade-unionism very similar to
American business unionism, and it opposed heavily the actions of the
Communist-led CTAL and WFTU. It was extremely dependent on US
financial support. Most of the CIT’s key positions went to Latin
Americans, but the AFL was pulling the strings. Therefore, many Latin
American trade-unionists viewed the CIT as an instrument of the US
unions and the US State Department to fight Communism.
The CIT’s brief existence did not allow it to make much of an
impact. Furthermore, the ‘CIT’s activities, planned by the Americans,
were not in concordance with the complex socio-political reality of the
Latin American countries’.24 But the CIT played a crucial role in the
increasing conflict between Communist and non-Communist unions
within the WFTU, which led to the division of the federation and to the
formation of the ICFTU in 1949. Since its foundation, the CIT had
considered Communism to be a major threat to western nations, and
pleaded for the unity of all non-Communist workers of the world.
Thus, as an observer noted, ‘the CIT represented the first step for the
organization of the free trade unions on the international level’.25
At the preparatory conference for the foundation of a new interna-
tional labour confederation (Geneva, 1949), a new concept was intro-
duced in the international trade-union movement – regionalism. US
labour leaders strove for the immediate creation of a decentralized
structure, based on regional organizations. The AFL wanted the CIT
to become the regional organization of the new confederation, but it
had to be sufficiently autonomous. In this way the AFL tried to keep
the Latin American unions away from European (socialist) influences,
and to lead them to a more ‘apolitical’ form of trade-unionism. When
the creation of regional structures was approved, the labour leaders of
the American continent decided to dissolve the CIT, and to create a
regional organization of the ICFTU in the Americas.26
24. Brandt and ‘t Hart, ‘De internationale vrije vakbeweging’, p. 51.

25. Reiser, L’Organisation Régionale Interaméricaine, p. 36.
26. Esta es la ORIT, pp. 15–16; La ORIT, p. 9; International Trade-unionism:
Report of the Preparatory International Trade Union Conference 25–26
June 1949 (ICFTU, Geneva: 1949); A. Carew, ‘Towards a Free Trade
Union Centre: The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
(1949–1972)’, in van der Linden (ed.), The International Confederation, pp.
191–3.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 117

Foundation of the ORIT
Two factors played an important role in developing the plans of North

and Latin American labour leaders to create a new labour organization
in the western hemisphere: the WFTU’s division in 1949, and the
outbreak of the Korean war in 1950. Washington claimed that
Communism was a threat not only for Europe, but for the whole world.
Anti-Communist actions were needed in every region and in every
sector of society. At trade-union level this meant that non-Communist
labour organizations had to be strengthened, for example through a
well-organized international confederation.
The CIT was dissolved in order to create a new inter-American
labour organization including ex-CIT and ex-CTAL members. Once
more, US unions played a crucial role at the foundation of the new
regional structure. Their influence was so strong in the western hemi-
sphere and in Europe,27 that they easily transformed the CIT into the
ICFTU’s regional organization. The CIT’s structure stayed almost
unchanged, as well as the US domination over it.
For the creation of the new inter-American organization, the US
labour leaders were again very careful, so that there would not be com-
plaints about interference. Romualdi ‘suggested’ – in a letter to the
ICFTU general secretary, Jacobus Oldenbroek – the date of the foun-
dation congress, as well as the organizations to be invited. Romualdi
also wrote that the general secretary of the central bureau had to be
present at the foundation congress, in order to clarify the relationship
between the ICFTU and the new regional organization. He recom-
mended Oldenbroek to prepare a document stating the principles of
the free trade-union movement, which the regional organization would
have to respect. As Romualdi wrote, it was very important that ‘the
basic points … be drafted by you [Oldenbroek] or your office, thus
assuring a better reception from the Latin American delegates than
would be the case if the draft constitution were presented by the United
States delegation’.28 He also set out explicitly how the new regional
27. The AFL (and later AFL–CIO) was the biggest organization within the
ICFTU, and one of its most important sources of income.
28. Romualdi to Oldenbroek, 20 April 1950, pp. 2–3, folio 4971, ICFTU
archive.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 118
organization should be managed,29 and emphasized the US wish to

create a regional structure that would keep its autonomy. The head-
quarters were to be placed ‘as close as possible to the United States for
reason of travel convenience and economy’, preferably in Havana,
Cuba.30
The AFL’s ‘suggestions’ were heard by the ICFTU. The latter
organized an international conference, for the foundation of a regional
labour organization in the western hemisphere, in January 1951 in
Mexico City. The pillars of the CIT (the Peruvian, Chilean, Cuban, and
US national centres) were present, together with important organiza-
tions, such as the CIO, the United Mine Workers of America, and the
Mexican Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM), which had
not been CIT members.31
Oldenbroek was also present at the foundation congress, and
presented the ICFTU principles which the new inter-American labour
organization had to follow. These included: to defend and strengthen
the free trade unions of the world; to defend workers’ rights; to
promote international actions in order to achieve political and
economic independence; to strive for full employment and the improve-
ment of the standard of living; to stimulate the economic, social and
cultural progress of all countries; and to defend democracy and the
freedom of nations against totalitarian or imperialist aggression.32
29. Romualdi stipulated that the regional organization should be adminis-

tered by an executive council, consisting of a president, a vice-president,
and the members of the secretariat. The last had to consist of a general
secretary and three or four specialized secretaries. The US unions, CIO
and AFL, would deliver one specialized secretary each. He also specified
that the general secretary had to be fluent in at least two languages and
had to have sufficient experience in international trade-unionism. If such
a person were not available in Latin America, Romualdi proposed one of
the two US secretaries. He also suggested to appoint ‘full-time organizers’
or representatives for regions with special problems, such as the Caribbean
islands, ‘or territories that are very backward in trade union development
such as Central America, Bolivia, Ecuador, etc.’: Romualdi to Olden-
broek, 18 May 1950, p. 3, folio 4971, ICFTU archive.
30. Romualdi to Oldenbroek, 20 April 1950, p. 3.
31. The CIO and the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM) had
been Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (CTAL) members,
but they withdrew in the late 1940s, when the CTAL began to lean to the
Communist camp.
32. La CIOSL: Lo que es, cómo funciona, lo que hace (ICFTU, Brussels: 1961);
Constitution adopted by the Continental Congress of the ORIT (ORIT,
Mexico: 1951).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 119

The new confederation was called the Inter-American Regional
Workers’ Organization or Organización Regional Interamericana de
Trabajadores (ORIT). Its headquarters were in Havana (until 1952),
then in Mexico City (until 1994), and finally in Caracas, Venezuela.
The foundation congress of the ORIT seemed to go well but its hetero-
geneous character led to several conflicts. The Mexican representatives
(from the CTM) were disappointed because the conference organizers
had not accepted their suggestion to invite the CROM, another
Mexican labour organization. The CTM was of the opinion that, as a
host organization, it had to invite every Mexican union, but the US
unions refused, in spite of AFL’s close relation with the CROM after
the First World War.33 The AFL had not appreciated CROM’s refusal
to take part in the foundation of the CIT and then the ORIT. The
CROM’s critical position towards the AFL’s hegemony over the labour
movement of the continent and to the AFL’s support for US foreign
policy was a sore point.
The question of the attendance of the Argentinian Confederación
General de Trabajadores (CGT) at the congress was also a bone of con-
tention between the US and Cuban labour leaders and the other Latin
American unionists. The CGT had not received an invitation from the
ICFTU but the CTM, the host organization, did not want the Argen-
tinian workers to be left out. The US and Cuban representatives were
strongly opposed to the presence of Peronist trade-unionists. Disap-
pointed with this, the Mexican representatives from the CTM ques-
tioned the degree of autonomy of the national labour organizations.
Some other representatives reproached the ICFTU for having invited
reactionary trade unions in order to please Washington. The rhetoric
of an organization ‘entirely independent from states’ seemed question-
able. As a result of these tensions, the Mexicans left the congress and
refused to join the ORIT, though did so a year later.34
33. In 1918, the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM) helped the
AFL in its efforts to create the Pan-American Federation of Labor
(PAFL).
34. Molina García, El Sindicato Interamericano, pp. 33–5, 39; ‘Wrijvingen
tussen Latijns- en Engelssprekende Amerikanen’, Algemeen Handelsblad,
5 May 1951; ‘IVVV-Congres te Mexico geëindigd’, Volksgazet, 16 January
1951; ‘Oprichting van een regionaal secretariaat van het IVVV’, Nieuwe
Rotterdamse Courant, 1 February 1951; Reiser, L’Organisation Régionale
Interaméricaine, p. 48; A. Marvaud, ‘L’action Interaméricaine contre le
Communisme: Une nouvelle centrale syndicale est née à Mexico’, Le
Monde, 16 February 1951.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 120
The CTM’s departure from the congress did not end the tensions.
During preparatory talks on the organization’s constitution, a debate
arose over the relation between the ORIT and the ICFTU. Some
advocated ORIT as a completely independent organization, but others
preferred it to be a direct branch of the ICFTU. A compromise was
reached: the ORIT would have its own executive committee, which was
financially independent, but it had to co-ordinate its activities with the
ICFTU. In this way the US unions succeeded in keeping the Latinos at
arm’s length from the Western European unions.
ORIT’s foundation congress closed with speeches by some
prominent trade-unionists, who emphasized the moral and spiritual
duties of the new organization, as well as the economic conditions for
justice and peace in the world. Jacob Potovsky, from the CIO, noted:
Human dignity is as important as economic independence …

Remember we must be strong to be independent and respected. We
must also be constructive and responsible. The strongest moral and
spiritual force the world over is a militant progressive labor
movement dedicated to democratic ideals and a higher standard of
living … We seek the brotherhood of mankind. We want peace on
earth, and justice for all. Let us join hands to work for these lofty
ideals without friction and politics, with self-sacrifice and humility.
The job is a big one, and I am confident that it will be done.35
In spite of the rhetoric, many observers did not consider this congress
to be a trade-union action, but a political stratagem of the USA to
combat Communism. A few years later this was confirmed by the US
government: ‘ORIT may be regarded as the successor to the inter-
American Confederation of Workers (CIT) formed early in 1948 to
combat a pro-Communist Latin American labor confederation
(CTAL).’36
35. ORIT Address by Jacob S. Potovsky, CIO, quoted in Reiser, L’Organisation

Régionale Interaméricaine, p. 50.
36. United States–Latin America Relations: United States Business and Labor
in Latin America (US Government Printing Office, Washington DC:
1960), p. 87, quoted in Reiser, L’Organisation Régionale Interaméricaine, p.
213.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 121

Promoting the free trade-union ideology
The first years of ORIT’s existence were a period of propaganda and of

moderate anti-Communism. Labour leaders from the ORIT and the
ICFTU tried to meet the Communist challenge by means of strong
organization but this proved difficult to sustain. The ORIT had many
members, but only a few were able to support it financially. It needed
to strengthen its affiliated national centres, and to propagate the free
trade-union ideology to all segments of the labour force in the
American continent. This strategy seemed essential, since the leftist
unions within the CTAL had started a heavy campaign against the
ORIT.
Furthermore, the barrage of criticism did not only come from the
Communist side. The Peronist unions were also harsh in their opposi-
tion. They began to make plans for the foundation of a new Latin
American labour organization. In association with the Mexican
CROM, they organized conferences in 1951 and 1952, from which a
new organization emerged: the Agrupación de Trabajadores Lati-
noamericanos (ATLAS). Its headquarters were situated in Buenos
Aires, and it started immediately with intensive propaganda through-
out Latin America. The ATLAS strove for a society somewhere
between Communism and capitalism (Perón’s justicialismo). Washing-
ton regarded the Peronists as dangerous, since they planned to create a
purely Latin American labour organization that would undermine US
influence in the continent. Therefore, the free trade-union movement
attempted to keep the Latin American unions away from Peronist
influence. When the Peronist regime fell in 1955, the ATLAS was
dissolved, having lost financial support.37
The early 1950s were very important for the ORIT. In 1952, General
Fulgencio Batista rose against the regime of Prío Socarras, president of
Cuba. Batista’s coup d’état put the ORIT in a difficult position, since
its headquarters were in Havana. The new pro-American regime in
Cuba did not disturb the activities of the ORIT’s secretariat, whose
headquarters remained in Havana until December 1952. Oscar Molina
García – author of the ORIT’s 2001 publication on the occasion of its
fiftieth anniversary – claims that the ORIT moved to Mexico City
because it could not function properly: its first general secretary,
Francisco Aguirre, was a member of the Cuban parliament and was
37. Alba, Politics and the Labor Movement, pp. 325–7; Reiser, L’Organisation
Régionale Interaméricaine, pp. 51–3, 89–90; Windmuller, International
Trade Union Movement, p. 135.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 122
therefore not fully concerned with the ORIT. This explanation is

unsubstantiated. The ORIT did not need to move its headquarters in
order to get more attention from its general secretary; an election of a
new one would have been sufficient. A more substantiated explanation
is that it moved in order to avoid (more) political criticism. Latin
American trade-unionists had condemned the ORIT for not having
denounced Batista’s undemocratic and violent regime.
The ORIT did not expel its Cuban affiliate, the Confederación de
Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC), which was a major factor influencing its
future. The Cuban labour leaders did not oppose Batista’s dictatorship
and, in the name of ‘apolitical’ trade-unionism, decided to concentrate
on economic issues. Despite their ‘apolitical’ stance, CTC trade-
unionists actually became Batista’s loyal allies during the last years of
the dictatorship. Even today, the ORIT justifies the CTC’s actions,
claiming that the Cubans had only two choices: ‘to perish or to stay
alive’.38 To stay alive meant to co-operate with a dictator. The alliance
between the CTC leaders and Batista harmed not only the Cuban
trade-union federation, but also the ORIT, as key positions within the
latter’s executive committee were held by CTC leaders. In spite of a
petition of Cuban trade-unionists (opponents of the CTC) to denounce
the CTC, and to expel it from the ORIT, the international free trade-
union movement did not react.
For the first generation of ORIT Latino leaders, Communism was
not the main concern. First, the Communist CTAL had already lost
much of its popularity and, second, the Latin American ORIT leaders
believed that compulsive anti-Communism and exaggerated anti-
Americanism were both negative forces working against the develop-
ment of Latin America. Latin America’s main problem was not
Communism but military dictatorships.39 Thus there was a progressive
group within the ORIT which wished to combat authoritarian regimes.
There were, for example, clearly differing opinions between the ORIT’s
president, Ignacio González Tellechea (Cuba), and its general
secretary, Luis Alberto Monge (Costa Rica), about its policy towards
the Batista regime. In 1957 Monge criticized the dictatorship in Cuba
for the first time, and declared that the ORIT should support the
Cuban opposition led by Fidel Castro. But González Tellechea
declared that the CTC backed Batista and resigned. Eventually, the
38. Molina García, El Sindicato Interamericano, p. 57.

39. L. A. Monge, Mirando a nuestra América (ORIT, Mexico: 1953), p. 9;
Official Report of the Free World Labour Conference and of the First
Congress of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU,
London: 1949).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 123

ORIT executive committee in January 1958 reached a compromise: his
resignation was not accepted, and the executive committee admitted
that Cuba was being ruled by a dictatorial regime – it therefore had to
be overthrown. This does not mean that the ORIT accepted Monge’s
suggestion to support the opposition movement led by Castro.
During the first years of the ORIT’s existence, its progressive leaders
thought that the best way to keep peace in the world was to guarantee
a better standard of living and to improve social conditions of all
people. They pushed for industrial development, agrarian reforms,
increases in wages, fair prices for raw materials, diversification of the
economy, and improvement of the tax system. To achieve these aims,
the Latin American states needed the help of the developed nations, for
public and private investments, and technical help.40
In order to disseminate its ideology, the ORIT represented the
ICFTU in the regional and specialized United Nations (UN) organi-
zations, such as the Economic Commission for Latin America, the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the
Food and Agricultural Organization. The ORIT had a consultative
status in the Organization of American States, the Inter-American
Development Bank, and the Latin American Free Trade Association.
At governmental level, the ORIT strove for good relations with all
‘democratic’ states in the western hemisphere. It also tried to influence
public opinion by means of brochures, communications, and radio and
television programmes. Nevertheless, large segments of the population
– even among trade-unionists – knew nothing about the ORIT’s
existence; those who had heard of it did not necessarily know what it
stood for or what its activities were.41 This was, contradictory as it
might seem, an important factor that contributed to the ORIT’s
numerical growth. The rank and file were not aware of its ideology,
40. Ignacio González Tellechea and Llenin López to the ORIT (n.d.), folio
5005, ICFTU archive; Esta es la ORIT, pp. 25–31; La ORIT, p. 29; Alba,
Politics and the Labor Movement, pp. 328, 333; B. Benassar, ‘Les organi-
sations syndicales régionales en Amérique latine’, in Sagnes (ed.), Histoire
du syndicalisme, p. 525; Carew, ‘Towards a Free Trade Union Centre’, pp.
222–3, 316; C. Hawkins, ‘The ORIT and the American Trade-Unions:
Conflicting Perspectives’, in W. Form and A. A. Blum (eds), Industrial
Relations and Social Change in Latin America (University of Florida Press,
Gainesville: 1965), p. 88.
41. R. J. Alexander, Organized Labor in Latin America (The Free Press, New
York: 1965), p. 257; Carew, ‘Towards a Free Trade Union Centre’, p. 278;
Molina García, El Sindicato Interamericano, pp. 65, 73–4; Reiser, L’Or-
ganisation Régionale Interaméricaine, pp. 128–32, 187–96.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 124
tasks and objectives. This made it easier to persuade them to become

part of the free trade-union movement, as knowledge of the ORIT as
being a pro-US labour organization that concentrated on anti-
Communist actions would not have made it very popular among Latin
American workers.
Cuba’s dictatorship: ‘the most sorrowful of all’42
The period of moderate anti-Communism came to an abrupt end with

the Cuban Revolution. Most ORIT leaders had supported the Cuban
CTC, which, in turn, had given unconditional support to Batista in his
efforts against Castro and the guerrilleros. Many CTC leaders had held
positions in Batista’s cabinet and had had good relations with the US
government. Castro’s victory resulted in a wave of anti-Communism,
led by Washington, throughout Latin America. Within the free trade-
union movement, the successful Cuban Revolution also caused a
shock. During this period the ORIT went through its worst crisis,
which many feared would precipitate its dissolution.
Castro declared that he was not a Communist, and that the revolu-
tion’s purpose was to end Batista’s entreguista-regime. He wished to
build up a state that would be less dependent on the USA, as well as to
implement progressive reforms in Cuba and Latin America in general.
The ICFTU published a communication to congratulate the Cuban
people on their victory against Batista. But it also defended CTC
leaders, as they had ‘always’ been the workers’ protectors against the
dictatorial regime. The ORIT published a communication – much
shorter than the ICFTU’s – claiming that both its executive committee
and the CTC leaders had condemned Batista’s dictatorship.
The Cuban Revolution led to a change in leadership in the CTC.
During the first months of Castro’s regime, the new CTC leaders were
unsure about staying in the ORIT and the ICFTU. At first, they did
not withdraw from the ORIT, thanks to negotiations with some of its
leaders, such as Monge, who was known for his opposition to Batista.
But the more radical Cuban trade-unionists, strong opponents of the
CTC’s old leadership, and therefore of the ORIT, became more influ-
ential within the Cuban labour movement.
The new Cuban labour leaders supported the proposal of the leftist
Latin American labour confederation, CTAL, to create a new ‘neutral’
42. The Philosophy of ORIT: A Statement of Principles of the Free Inter-

American Labor Movement (ORIT, Mexico: n.d.), p. 7.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 125

organization, which would consist of Latin American unions only and
exclude US and Canadian unions. The advocates of a new organization
wanted the ORIT to build the labour unity of Latin Americans, but the
free unions refused, denouncing this petition as a Communist tactic to
control the Latin American labour movement. The ORIT started a
campaign against Communism, in close collaboration with the former
CTC leaders, now in exile, while the new Cuban union leadership
denounced the free trade-union movement for being more concerned
with the former CTC leaders than with the thousands of victims of the
Batista regime.43
Under the circumstances, the new CTC leaders were not willing to
remain members of the ORIT. They withdrew from the ORIT and
ICFTU and organized a foundation congress for a new revolutionary
confederation of Latin American workers. The ORIT’s nightmare
began when Castro’s ideas threatened to spread across the rest of Latin
America. Fidelismo was growing in popularity, and the ORIT feared a
chain reaction. Its difficulties increased when the Christian labour
movement declared that it might be prepared to work with leftist
unions for the foundation of a new Latin American confederation. In
December 1954, the International Federation of Christian Trade
Unions (IFCTU, founded in 1920) had organized a meeting in
Santiago de Chile and created a regional organization: the Confed-
eración Latinoamericana de Sindicalistas Cristianos (CLASC). During
the 1960s, the CLASC became very critical towards the ORIT and, like
the Communists, accused the free trade unions of being a tool for US
interests.
For the ORIT, 1960 was a decisive year. The threat of a new labour
organization, founded by pro-Castro, Communist, and Christian
unions, required a new strategy to keep other Latin American trade
unions within the ORIT. It strengthened its anti-Communist
campaign: the Cuban regime was depicted as totalitarian, undemocra-
tic, repressive and monstrous, serving the interests of the Soviet Union.
The ORIT described the leftist unions as pseudo-labour organizations,
subordinated to Moscow, while the free trade unions were described as
the defenders of the principle of co-operation between Latin and North
American workers, and as being entirely independent of Washington
and US private interests.44
43. L. A. Monge and F. Melgosa Quiroz, Report of Exploratory Mission to
Cuba: Confidential 17 January 1959 (ORIT, Mexico: 1959), p. 9, folio
5005, ICFTU archive; Alexander, Organized Labor, pp. 254–5; Carew,
‘Towards a Free Trade Union Centre’, pp. 257–8; Reiser, L’Organisation
Régionale Interaméricaine, pp. 113, 116, 119–22.
44. La ORIT, p. 19; Molina García, El Sindicato Interamericano, p. 59.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 126
The merger of the CLASC and the CTAL did not happen, and the
foundation of a ‘neutral’ labour organization was not achieved imme-
diately. The leftist unionists dissolved the CTAL, but the foundation of
a new organization was not easy. After all, Washington, the US unions
and the ORIT were leading an impressive anti-Communist campaign
throughout Latin America. Nevertheless, in 1964, the leftist labour
leaders met in a trade-union congress in Brazil. Neither the ORIT nor
the CLASC was present. In fact, not many trade-unionists attended, so
the organizers decided to declare the congress permanent. The doors
remained open for the eventual affiliation of new labour organizations,
which paved the way for the so-called Congreso Permanente de Unidad
Sindical de los Trabajadores de América Latina (CPUSTAL). It
followed the ideological tradition of the CTAL by declaring itself anti-
imperialist. The CPUSTAL was officially independent of any interna-
tional labour organization but maintained close relations with the
Communist WFTU. Although the Christian unions did not agree to a
new labour organization, they often worked together with leftist trade-
unionists in name of the defence of Latin American workers.
The ORIT recovered quickly from its crisis. Arturo Jáuregui, its new
and dynamic general secretary, helped to expand the principles of free
trade-unionism throughout Latin America. He also helped to improve
co-operation with the International Trade Secretariats (ITSs), to
strengthen the relation between ORIT affiliates, and to persuade others
to join the free trade-union movement. Jáuregui, together with other
members of ORIT’s secretariat and US trade-unionists, travelled to
different Latin American countries to meet labour leaders. Relations
with Latin American trade-unionists were also strengthened by the
presence of permanent ORIT representatives in different regions.
From its foundation, the ORIT considered workers’ education as
the most important instrument to spread its ideology. Its educational
activities were impressive, especially from the early 1960s. For these
activities, the ORIT worked together with universities and institutions
such as the American Institute for Free Labor Development
(AIFLD),45 the ILO and UNESCO.
The activities of the free trade-union movement paid off. In spite of
the severe criticism of leftist and Christian unionists, and even of
certain ITSs, the ORIT succeeded in becoming the largest trade-union
45. The American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) was
founded in 1961 by the AFL–CIO, and financially supported by the US
government and US corporations, in order to offer financial and technical
aid to Latin American trade unions: Spalding, ‘US Labour Intervention in
Latin America’, pp. 259–86.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 127

organization in Latin America. It owed its success partly to the financial
support of the US, Canadian and other ICFTU affiliates. This support
was particularly important, as the ORIT consisted of poor and weakly
organized Central and South American unions. Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) infiltration in the ORIT also helped the ‘free’ trade-union
movement to expand its activities during the 1960s.46 The ORIT also
succeeded because of the Latin American trade-unionists themselves.
Many of them were disappointed with the traditional leftist and rightist
parties and trade unions, and sought an alternative. Large segments of
the Latin American society were also still very Catholic and conserva-
tive. Many viewed Communist expansion as a real danger. The ideology
of the ORIT had a popular appeal.
National labour federations and individual unions joined the ORIT.
This went hand in hand with the industrial development of the 1960s
and the expansion of Latin American state machinery. Foreign invest-
ments and state intervention stimulated the growth of the industrial
and service sectors, from which a new, ‘modern’ working class emerged.
This resulted in the foundation of new trade unions that strove for inte-
gration into the capitalist system, focusing on bread-and-butter trade-
union issues, in order to maximize immediate economic benefits. This
‘modern’ trade-union movement was not willing to challenge the capi-
talist system. On the contrary, it wanted to form an alliance between
capital and labour. Collective bargaining was considered to be the best
tool to achieve benefits,47 while strikes were viewed as aggressive
actions used by ‘extremist’ unions, which should only be used as a last
resort.48 But once the interests of the ORIT were in danger (i.e. when
46. Benassar, ‘Les organisations syndicales régionales’, p. 525; Carew,
‘Towards a Free Trade Union Centre’, pp. 315–16; R. Gumbrell-
McCormick, ‘Facing New Challenges: The International Confederation
of Free Trade Unions (1972–1990s)’, in van der Linden (ed.), The Interna-
tional Confederation, p. 450.
47. The conditions for an effective system of collective bargaining were almost
non-existent in most Latin American countries. Many of them lacked the
legal and political system required to guarantee the existence of relatively
independent, strong, and well-organized unions: M. van der Linden,
‘Conclusion: The Past and the Future of International Trade-unionism’,
in idem (ed.), The International Confederation, pp. 531–2. The complexity
of collective bargaining also demands certain technical knowledge that
many Latin American trade-unionists at that time did not have.
48. L. Pita, Informe sobre la misión al Ecuador mayo-julio 1955 (ORIT: 1955), pp.
2–3, folio 5444, ICFTU archive; Trade Unions: What they are, what they do,
their structure (ICFTU, Brussels: 1969), pp. 3, 12; A. Paez Cordero, ‘El
movimiento obrero ecuatoriano en el período (1925–1960)’, in E. Ayala Mora
(ed.), Nueva Historia del Ecuador, Vol. 10 (Corporación Editora Nacional,
Quito: 1990), p. 160; Alba, Politics and the Labor Movement, p. 349.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 128
leftist unions gained in importance), its members changed their

discourse of ‘apolitical’ trade-unionism and used political tools.
Through its educational programmes and its organizational activi-
ties, the ORIT played an active political role in the fight against
Communism. Latin American leftist political and labour leaders were
forced to accept the principles of free trade-unionism. Otherwise they
had to suffer the consequences: isolation, persecution, or exile.49 As a
result of this determined anti-Communism, the ORIT ended up toler-
ating, and on many occasions supporting, repressive regimes, such as
Batista’s in Cuba, Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Castelo Branco in
Brazil, and dictatorships in Bolivia and Ecuador. According to the
ORIT, and especially the AFL–CIO, strong and authoritative govern-
ments were necessary to control ‘totalitarian’ movements, which had
been indoctrinated by the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Beyond Chile’s 11 September
The brutal overthrow of the democratically elected president of Chile,

Salvador Allende, shocked the entire political and labour world and
played a crucial role in the evolution of the ORIT,50 which had been
ambivalent about the Allende administration and made only a modest
comment on the military coup of 11 September 1973. But in the second
half of the 1970s, the Latin American labour unions within the ORIT
demanded a trade boycott against the Chilean regime. The AFL–CIO
tried to thwart this plan – the US unions would support the action, only
if Cuba were included – but it was confronted by progressive Latino free
trade-unionists such as the Venezuelans José Vargas and Juan José del
49. This was, for example, the case of Juan Lechín, the Bolivian labour leader
who refused to join the free trade-union movement: M. Rodríguez, ‘De
Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores in Bolivia in de
jaren ’60’, Brood & Rozen: Tijdschrift voor de Geschiedenis van Sociale
Bewegingen 3 (2002), pp. 7–33.
50. The trade unions were one of the targets of the Chilean military regime.
According to the military, Chilean society, and particularly the leftist
labour movement, was too politicized. In order to achieve political, social
and economic stability, society in general had to be depoliticized. In the
Chilean context depoliticization meant in practice the suppression of all
left-wing individuals and organizations. In November 1973 the leftist
national centre, Central Unica de Trabajadores (CUT), was dissolved and
trade-union activities were systematically repressed: Y. Cieters, Chilenen in
ballingschap: Het migratieproces, de opvang en de integratie van Chileense
ballingen in België (1973–1980) (VUB-Press, Brussels: 2002), pp. 23, 32–3.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 129

Pino, who insisted on boycotting Chile only. Eventually, a week of inter-
national solidarity actions and boycotts of all forms (air and sea
transport, post and telecommunications) took place in September 1979.51
The period of the ORIT’s conservatism, and of extreme anti-
Communism, ended during the mid-1970s. In 1977, the ORIT and the
ICFTU organized a conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on trade-union
freedom and human rights, and elected a new general secretary, the
Venezuelan del Pino. Progressive sectors of the Latin American labour
movement took the initiative to reform the organization. They wanted to
implement the founding principles approved by the ICFTU in 1949, and
to organize activities that would go beyond the anti-Communist actions
that had dominated the organization during its first twenty years. They
distanced themselves from the ‘apolitical’ trade-unionism propagated by
the US unions, which they considered unrealistic. At the same time, they
tried to approach the ICFTU affiliates in Europe, especially the German
Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB) and the Scandinavian unions.
The ORIT became increasingly influenced by the ideology of social
democracy and started to make a serious effort to defend the interests
of workers, democracy and human rights in Latin America. The abuses
of dictatorships in Argentina, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and
Uruguay were condemned. But the US influence did not disappear
completely from the ORIT. Financial support from ‘external’ sources,
such as the AIFLD, was still accepted.52
Luis Anderson, of the Confederación de Trabajadores de la República
de Panamá (CTP), became the ORIT general secretary in 1983,53
playing a crucial role in its reform.54 It finally achieved political and
51. Gumbrell-McCormick, ‘Facing New Challenges’, p. 458.

52. Benassar, ‘Les organisations syndicales régionales’, p. 526; Gumbrell-
McCormick, ‘Facing New Challenges’, pp. 447–51, 454–60; Molina
García, El Sindicato Interamericano, pp. 89–93, 96.
53. After his sudden death in November 2003 Luis Anderson was replaced by
the Paraguayan Víctor Báez Mosqueira.
54. Jorge Chávez, labour leader of the Confederación Ecuatoriana de Organiza-
ciones Sindicales Libres (CEOSL), states that when the US unions decided to
return to the ICFTU in 1982 – after having withdrawn in 1969, because of
their conflict with the Western European unions regarding contacts with
Communist unions – they came to an agreement with the Europeans. The
ICFTU apparently stressed that, under the political circumstances, it seemed
absolutely necessary to support social-democratic ideology in Latin America.
The AFL–CIO was willing to accept this on the condition that the ICFTU’s
secretariat in Brussels accepted an American appointed leader of the ORIT:
Luis Anderson. According to the Ecuadorian trade-unionist, Anderson was a
very competent labour leader, but was very much controlled by the US labour
leaders: interview with J. Chávez, Quito, 19 December 2001.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 130
organizational stability, expanding into the south of the continent, and

millions of workers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay
became affiliated. As a cost-saving measure, in 1994 the executive
moved the headquarters to Caracas, closer to the Latin American
unions.
The ORIT’s activities increased in the 1980s and 1990s. It welcomed
the return of democracy in different Latin American countries and
demanded political and economic democracy throughout the
continent. The rhetoric of ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ remained,
despite the growing dependency of the countries of Latin America on
the USA, the European Union, and international organizations such as
the International Monetary Fund. While human rights are still violated
in different countries of the western hemisphere, and many of its states
live under political and economic instability, at present the ORIT pays
greater attention to these problems than it did previously.55 As with
other international labour organizations, it is presently engaged in
information campaigns countering orthodox neo-liberal policies, on
the importance of rural sectors of the population, and on the specific
problems of (non-organized) workers in the so-called informal sector of
the economy.56
Conclusion
The success of the international free trade-union movement in Latin

America was specifically felt at the political level. Until the mid-1970s
internationalism was driven by an anti-Communist agenda, striving for
harmonious co-operation between labour and employers in order to
maintain industrial peace and hopefully guarantee economic growth.
The ICFTU and its regional organization were (and still are) a confed-
eration of national organizations. They concentrated primarily on the
strengthening of the existent non-Communist national labour federa-
tions, and on the creation of new ones in countries where the trade-
union movement was dominated by Communist, socialist or Christian
labour leaders. For this purpose, free trade-unionists, in close co-
operation with various ITSs and the AIFLD, engaged in impressive
educational and organizational campaigns aimed at opposing
55. Gumbrell-McCormick, ‘Facing New Challenges’, pp. 461–2; Molina

García, El Sindicato Interamericano, pp. 162–3.
56. See the websites, www.ilo.org and www.cioslorit.org; for example, ‘Más
allá de la supervivencia: organizar la economía informal’,
www.ilo.org/public/spanish/dialogue/actrav/publ/informs.pdf
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 131

Communism and promoting the economic expansion of the
continent. They found supporters among Latin American trade-
unionists, who were disappointed by the traditional leftist and rightist
political parties and unions, and who wanted to create a new form of
trade-unionism: on a non-confessional basis, but still appealing to
conservative and Catholic trade-unionists. Free trade-unionism rep-
resented such an alternative to Communist- and Christian-dominated
union movements.
The ORIT Latino leaders were genuinely interested in the improve-
ment of the working and living conditions of the Latin American
workers. They assumed that economic growth would automatically
lead to social reform. Their belief in what is called ‘desarrollismo’ led to
closer co-operation with the USA, as this would stimulate Latin
American economic – and, in turn, social – development. The northern
neighbours had achieved a high standard of living and were viewed as
an example of progress.
As economic expansion was considered to be the only way to
achieve social progress, the democratic forces of every region had to
fight any obstacle that would interrupt this development. The free
trade unions had to oppose ‘disturbing elements’ or ‘extremists’ within
the Latin American labour movement. This meant primarily Commu-
nists or progressive leftist trade-unionists. Therefore, during the 1950s
and 1960s, the ORIT, often in close co-operation with authoritarian
regimes, concentrated on the fight against Communist unions, which
were viewed as the major threat to democracy and freedom in the
western hemisphere. As a result of this extreme anti-Communist
position, the leaders of the free trade unions neglected the main
problems of Latin American workers, such as low wages, unemploy-
ment, restrictions on freedom of association, inefficient social welfare
and discrimination against ethnic minorities. They also neglected large
segments of the Latin American labour force (unskilled industrial
workers and agricultural – mostly indigenous – workers) as they iden-
tified – as much as US business unionism did – primarily with skilled
or semi-skilled workers employed in the export industries and the
service sector.
Despite this, the ORIT consolidated itself in the American continent
during the 1960s and gained more supporters among workers after the
mid-1970s, by paying more attention to the political and socio-
economic problems of the various Latin American countries and by
maintaining an image of pluralism. Indeed, since the 1980s and the
1990s, the free trade-union movement in Latin America consists of
national centres of different political orientations and different degrees
of radicalism. Its internationalism is nowadays ‘driven by an anti-
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 132
neoliberal and anti-corporate agenda, rather than by anti-

communism’.57
Since its foundation (and up to the present) the free trade-union
movement, while maintaining its independence towards political
parties, has played a crucial political role in the western hemisphere.58
Considering the political instability of most Latin American countries
this seemed inevitable. With respect to the (political or economic) role
of the free trade-union movement and its prospects in the post-Cold
War era, three questions need to be answered: can the structure of the
free trade-union movement form an effective answer to the challenges
of globalization; is this needed; and should trade unions advance a
political agenda? In the author’s opinion, the answer to all these
questions is yes. The world labour force has expanded dramatically
since 1970 and will continue to grow, but union membership has
declined during that period.59 Organizing unprotected workers should
not be seen as a purely economic strategy but also as a political one.
Indeed, as Jeffrey Harrod and Robert O’Brien state, ‘such a mass of
people, almost by definition unaffected by rationalizing influence of
formal organization structures, may be producing the core forces for
57. I. Robinson, ‘The International Dimension of Labour Federation

Economic Strategy in Canada and the United States, 1947–2000’, in J.
Harrod and R. O’Brien (eds), Global Unions? Theory and Strategies of
Organized Labour in the Global Political Economy (Routledge: 2002), p.
127. ORIT’s new position became clear when it declared itself against the
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which aims to eliminate the
barriers to trade and investment. ORIT’s general secretary, Báez
Mosqueira, affirms that the regional organization has assumed a position
of ‘No to FTAA’, because this process will only favour the multinational
corporations, to the detriment of the majority of the population of the
western hemisphere: ‘La ORIT frente al ALCA’, 8 June 2004, ORIT
webpage, www.cioslorit.org
58. ORIT supported the actions of the Venezuelan trade-union confederation,
the Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV), against president
Hugo Chávez. ORIT abstained from stating publicly its position towards
Chávez, but its interest in the political situation of Venezuela, and its
attention to the actions of the opposition movement to Chávez becomes
obvious when the reader opens ORIT’s webpage. In the section ‘Fortalacer
la Democracia’ (‘Strengthening Democracy’) the reader can choose
articles by country: as of 19 July 2004, the average number of articles per
country was two, while for Venezuela alone there were sixty-three articles.
59. Trade Union Membership (International Labour Organization (ILO),
Geneva: 2004); M. Van der Linden, Transnational Labour History
(Ashgate, Aldershot: 2003), p. 165.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 133

international conflict’.60 The tradition of unions as a political movement
is not exhausted.61 The enlargement of the labour force with migrant
workers, women and workers in the informal economy requires a political
agenda.
The free trade-union movement can still play an important role. This
can be achieved only on the condition it reorganizes its structure,
employs new strategies to organize workers worldwide, and its affiliated
national centres start to ‘think global’.62 Nationalism and internation-
alism do not have to contradict each other. As one observer has noted,
the ‘main objective – and difficulty – is to provide labour protection
without protectionism’.63 The response of the world labour force to the
challenges of globalization should be threefold: to strengthen formal
labour organizations, such as the international labour confederations,
the ILO, and the ITSs (recently renamed Global Union Federations);
to strengthen the less structured and local organizational forms; and
readiness to co-operate with governmental organizations and other
social movements.
The Fund for Scientific Research
Flanders (Belgium) (FWO – Vlaanderen)
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
60. J. Harrod and R. O’Brien, ‘Organized Labour and the Global Political
Economy’, in idem (eds), Global Unions?, p. 9.
61. Liberal-oriented articles do not support this vision. ‘Trade Unions: Adapt
or Die’, The Economist, 7 June 2003, p. 13, argued that trade unions ought
to use ‘a bit of imagination’ in order to ‘play a useful role in the modern
economy’, and continues: ‘This would require them to think harder, or at
all, about the services their members or could-be members would
nowadays value. Advancing a political agenda is not one. Why should
workers give a hoot what their union leaders think of the war in Iraq, say,
or Europe’s new constitution?’
62. The decisions of the ICFTU Congress in Miyazake, Japan, in December
2004, are a positive start. The Australian Sharan Burrow was elected to the
post of ICFTU president. She is the first woman to hold this position. The
Congress also approved a resolution ‘Globalising Solidarity – Building a
Global Union Movement for the Future’. This ‘gives the ICFTU a
mandate to undertake a series of reforms in its own structures and
working methods, and to move towards unification with the World Con-
federation of Labour’: ‘Historic World Union Congress concludes by
electing first woman president’, 13 December 2004, ICFTU webpage,
www.icftu.org
63. A. Breitenfellner, ‘Global Unionism: A Potential Player’, International
Labour Review 136:4 (1997), p. 542.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 134
Acronyms
ATLAS Agrupación de Trabajadores Latinoamericanos

CGT Confederación General de Trabajadores (Argentina)
CIT Confederación Interamericana de Trabajadores
(Inter-American Confederation of Workers)
CLASC Confederación Latinoamericana de Sindicalistas Cris-
tianos
CPUSTAL Congreso Permanente de Unidad Sindical de los
Trabajadores de América Latina
CROM Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana
CTAL Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina
CTC Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba
CTM Confederación de Trabajadores de México
CUT Central Unica de Trabajadores (Chile)
ORIT Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores
(Inter-American Regional Workers’ Organization)
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 135
HSIR  ( AUTUMN ) ‒ 135
Look Back in Anger: Mining

Communities, the Mining Novel
and the Great Miners’ Strike
John McIlroy
As I write this twenty years after the great strike of 1984–85, the final
nails are being driven into the coffin of the British coalmining industry.
The privatized company UK Coal has announced closure of its mine at
Selby, Yorkshire, the ‘super-pit’ of the 1980s. The National Union of
Mineworkers (NUM), its power broken by the state, its 3,000 members
a pitiful remnant of past splendours, is merging – a grandiloquent term
for absorption – with the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union. Arthur
Scargill, once world famous, the last in a lineage which stretched back
to A. J. Cook and Herbert Smith and beyond to Alexander
MacDonald and Tommy Hepburn, stepped down as NUM president
in 2002 and survives only as a marginal public figure as boss of the tiny
Socialist Labour Party, the fruit of defeat. Yet no matter how distant
the past appears today, for historians it requires remembering, explain-
ing and celebrating. In the case of the miners we are lucky enough to
have a developed historical literature dealing with diverse aspects of
coal capitalism.1 It is still being expanded and there is also a rich vein
of creative literature. In comparison with other groups of workers, the
miners have been well served by their novelists.
1. See, for example, R. Church and Q. Outram, Strikes and Solidarity:

Coalfield Conflict in Britain, 1896–1966 (Cambridge University Press:
1998); A. Campbell, The Scottish Miners, 1874–1939, 2 Vols (Ashgate,
Aldershot: 2000); K. Gildart, North Wales Miners: A Fragile Unity (Uni-
versity of Wales Press, Cardiff: 2001); A. Taylor, The NUM in British
Politics, Vol. 1: 1944–1968 (Ashgate, Aldershot: 2003); J. McIlroy, A.
Campbell and K. Gildart (eds), Industrial Politics and the 1926 Mining
Lockout: The Struggle for Dignity (University of Wales Press, Cardiff:
2004). I use the term ‘miners’ as shorthand. There were, of course,
important differences between them.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 136
Novels are products of the imagination: they do not meet the evi-
dential tests of history or industrial relations. Whether they evoke con-
temporary situations or recuperate the past – ‘historical novels’ –
whatever the direct involvement or detailed research of the author, they
lack authority for all but postmodernists. Nonetheless, creative litera-
ture may provide information and insights to historians and social sci-
entists. Novels may ignite, reinforce or extend our feeling for the past,
suggest what it was like to live in that foreign country and enhance our
understanding of its actors and events. They may capture important
truths and provide imperfect compensation for the absences in
academic analysis.
It is noteworthy that in the four decades after the war, a period of
sustained public interest in coalmining, sociologists produced only a
handful of studies of mining communities.2 The public and students
sometimes depended on fictional accounts for their understanding of
how miners lived.3 It is difficult to think of compelling work on perhaps
our most important industry, or the NUM, or the strikes of 1969, 1972,
1974 and 1984–85, published by industrial relations specialists. Only
one monograph and a handful of articles are cited in John Kelly’s
survey of the discipline. Moreover, his justifiable criticism of much of
this kind of work is that it tells us too little about the processes by
which workers collectively acquire and mobilize power.4 Industrial
relations academics may expand their canvas and their concerns by
reflecting critically on creative literature that gives greater play to
history, to human action, to the generation and exercise of power, to
2. F. Zweig, Men in the Pits (Gollancz: 1948); N. Dennis, F. Henriques and

C. Slaughter, Coal Is Our Life: An Analysis of a Yorkshire Mining
Community (Eyre and Spottiswood: 1956).
3. If my memory serves me well, as students in the 1960s we were typically
referred to Coal Is Our Life and Clancy Sigal’s novel, Weekend in Dinlock
(Secker and Warburg: 1960), to help us understand miners.
Long Waves (Routledge: 1998), pp. 9–13. Kelly cites C. Edwards and E.
Heery, Management Control and Union Power: A Study of Labour
Relations in Coalmining (Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1983); C. Edwards,
‘Measuring Union Power: A Comparison of Two Methods Applied to the
Study of Local Union Power in the Coal Industry’, British Journal of
Industrial Relations 16:1 (1978), pp. 1–15; idem, ‘Power and Decision-
Making in the Workplace: A Study of the Coalmining Industry’, Industrial
Relations Journal 14:1 (1983), pp. 50–67; and P. K. Edwards, ‘A Critique of
the Kerr–Siegel Hypothesis of Strikes and the Isolated Mass: A Study in
the Falsification of Sociological Knowledge’, Sociological Review 25:3
(1977), pp. 551–74.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 137
MCILROY: MINING COMMUNITIES, NOVELS AND THE GREAT MINERS’ STRIKE 137
conflict and to the state, than their own discipline typically does.
Interrogating the fictional, allowance must be made for the values
and preoccupations of the novelist; but of course the same applies to
academic authors. There is, undeniably, some tendency among creative
writers to highlight the fighters, the leaders, the socialists. They are,
after all, writing about power and the struggle for power within the
community and between labour, capital and the state. Many of these
novelists were themselves fighters, leaders and socialists, and write as
such, albeit from a range of perspectives. More broadly, conflict may be
envisaged as more engaging than co-operation. The audacious, the
enduring, the committed, may be perceived as more admirable, more
worthy of remembrance. As with the charge that labour historians have
romanticized mining communities, over-emphasized their militancy,
solidarity and power and neglected the mundane, the element of truth
is exaggerated.
Certainly, socialist optimism sometimes leads to simplification and
colours conclusions. The virtues and potential of the mining
community are sometimes inflated by novelists; but it has also been
depicted as a powerful alternative society by labour historians.5 The
dilemmas of individuals rising from, rather than with, their class, a
recurring motif, have sometimes been over-dramatized: but, in fact as
well as in fiction, such social emigration was a painful process although
mobility does not necessarily entail desertion.6 And yet, mining novels
often depict the tenuous nature of miners’ power, the disequilibrium of
power between capital and labour and the limitations and brittleness of
the mining community as a realized community of interests. What runs
through them are the fissures and fragmentation, the tentativeness of
the ties that bind, the resilience of internal conflict and the necessity to
develop and continually renew understandings of common identity and
belief in collective action. There is a sense of what can be achieved here,
but also a sense of its limited socialist valency. One puts down many of
these novels with a belief in the possibility of solidarity and unity, but
an understanding of the continual necessity for dialogue, negotiation
and the regeneration of resources for struggle between leaders, activists,
5. A criticism levelled at H. Francis and D. Smith, The Fed: A History of the

South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence and Wishart:
1980): see C. Williams, Capitalism, Community and Conflict: The South
Wales Coalfield, 1898–1947 (University of Wales Press, Cardiff: 1998), pp.
4–5.
6. The point for socialists, as Raymond Williams used to emphasize, is not
whether you ‘leave’ the working class – that’s often inevitable and essential
– but whether you ‘go back’ to help the people you have ‘left’.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 138
members, revolutionaries, reformists, conservatives, different men and

different women with different values, beliefs and politics, if mobiliza-
tion is to be achieved and if temporary achievement is to be tran-
scended.
This is nowhere clearer than in the work of the great French novelist,
public intellectual and social reformer, Émile Zola. More than a
century after its publication, Germinal remains the mining masterpiece
and the greatest of all strike novels. Zola was inspired by the
mouvement de grève of miners at Anzin, near Valenciennes in northern
France, exactly a century before the great British miners’ strike of
1984–85. But his novel transcends time and place.7 In its pages we
encounter the working class as it is, almost at its inception, in the shape
of the mining community of Montsou. A microcosm of industrial
society, it includes the reformist leader Rassenau and his competitor,
the anarchist Souvarine. But it also includes the ‘ordinary’ miners, the
calculating Pierrons, the feckless Levaques and the self-interested indi-
vidualist, Caval. Moreover, Zola portrays, if less successfully, the bour-
geoisie, the Hennebeaux and Grégoires, with understanding. The
miners appear powerless and passive; they are almost like the mine
horses, stoic in their suffering. But the novel is about change, birth,
growth and the uneven, conflictual, restricted process by which workers
cease to be objects, begin to make their own history, exercise power and
engage in class formation.8
7. It has been almost continuously in print since the nineteenth century. The
translation by Havelock Ellis published in 1894 was regularly reprinted in
the Everyman Library and the translation by Leonard Tancock, which is
now the most popular, has been almost continuously available for fifty
years: Émile Zola, Germinal (Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1954; first
published 1885). In 1993 Oxford University Press published a new trans-
lation by Peter Collier in its World’s Classics series. Page references here
are to the Penguin edition. Zola attended strike meetings at Anzin, inter-
viewed some of the 12,000 strikers and went down a mine.
8. Germinal, the time of renewal and optimism, was the first month of spring
in the French revolutionary calendar of 1792. On 12 Germinal Year III, April
1795, crowds rioted demanding bread and democracy. See, for example, E.
M. Grant, Zola’s ‘Germinal’: A Critical and Historical Study (Leicester Uni-
versity Press: 1970); C. Smethurst, Emile Zola: Germinal (Edward Arnold:
1974). For shorter essays, see I. Howe, ‘Zola: The Genius of “Germinal”’,
Encounter, April 1970, pp. 53–61; I. Birchall, ‘Zola for the 21st Century’,
International Socialism 96 (Autumn 2002), pp. 105–28. See also the film
Germinal (1993) directed by Claude Berri and starring Gerard Depardieu.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 139
Economics ignites events: reductions in pay crystallize awareness of
exploitation, stimulate rebelliousness and suggest the possibility of
contesting oppression. The strike dominates the novel and Zola’s
portrayal of its movement and rhythms is masterly. The conflict
releases the potential of its protagonists who try to control it.9 Étienne
Lantier, a newcomer, is the catalyst and apparent hero. He has begun
to read and he discovers that he can orate and capture and develop the
mood of the miners. The hopeless Levaque becomes a militant. The
fatalistic Maheu, who saw alternatives as fairy tales, hears himself
addressing the manager as if it were a stranger who was talking. His
wife, la Maheude, becomes the voice of intransigent opposition to the
bourgeoisie, and the women as a whole emerge as an active, sometimes
savage force. At the heart of the story is the mine, Le Voreux, a monster
emblematic of capitalism. Like the system, it devours lives; but it also
establishes the basis for workers’ discipline and engenders proletarian
solidarity. In the process of its making, Étienne is superseded as hero
by a community awakening to collective consciousness.
But solidarity and organization generate their own difficulties. Here,
at the birth of workers’ resistance to capital, Zola unobtrusively intro-
duces a potential barrier to it. With power comes bureaucracy. Zola
uses the image of the ladder to denote mobility between the working
class and the bourgeoisie. Étienne finds that he likes the sound of his
own voice, enjoys his new prestige, appreciates fine clothes. The
delegate of the International, Pluchart, prefigures bureaucracy and the
domination of workers by their own representatives and suggests what
Étienne may become: ‘the workers must manage their own affairs.
Thereupon he found renewed delight in his dream of becoming a
popular leader: Montsou at his feet, Paris in the mists of the future,
who could tell? member of parliament some day’ (p. 22). As the strike
develops and moods shift, collective consciousness fragments, the
limits of leadership and discipline are exposed, the crowd becomes a
mob. The miners oscillate, reject Étienne and then return to the
influence of the more reasonable Rassenau.
The political leaders, in Montsou and beyond, are exemplified by
Rassenau’s moderation and caution; Souvarine, who resists all com-
promise; and Étienne, searching for a new, different and more effective
9. The novel articulates strike strategy as the activists picket nearby pits: ‘It’s
our right, old chap. How can we make the strike general if we don’t force
all the blokes to come out with us?’ (p. 316). It is slightly anachronistic,
however, to talk of ‘flying pickets’. What happens in Germinal is akin to
the ‘processions’ in Britain in which large numbers of strikers would walk
to nearby pits to bring the workers out.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 140
truth. The strike is defeated, Souvarine destroys the mine and Germinal
climaxes in the catastrophe of the flooded pit. But Souvarine’s action
leaves the system, which Le Voreux incarnated, intact but nonetheless
under threat from the germination of a ‘black avenging host’. As
Étienne continues his search for understanding and justice, it is clear
that class formation and class conflict is the face of the future. But its
outcome is uncertain.
Zola’s sympathies are clear and they engage the reader. But he saw
the plight of the miners as much as a warning of the terrible conse-
quences of conservatism as a call for class struggle. Among his achieve-
ments was the fact that Germinal was enduringly read by miners
themselves and that the naturalism in the service of social criticism, the
thick-textured detail and gritty realism which he espoused and the
framework which he laid down with its focus on the local community,
came to dominate the mining novel in Britain.10 Nonetheless, the first
example published at the end of the nineteenth century appears to have
had an indigenous origin. It grew out of the struggle of the infant
Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) in the 1893 lockout,
which created intense public interest. Written by the Liverpool-born
journalist, W. E. Tirebuck, it presented what was, in the context of the
time, a sympathetic picture of miners on strike, their insistence in
justice and their fierce resistance to the coalowners, the military and the
churches.11
The miners also haunt the life and work of a novelist as great as
Zola, D. H. Lawrence, the son of a miner raised in a Nottinghamshire
mining community. Such a community is realized in all its complexities
and conflicts in Sons and Lovers. Paul Morel’s refusal of its values, the
result of a struggle between his father, whose identity is forged in the
collectivism of his work underground, and his mother who represents
individualism and mobility – ‘He is not going in the pit’12 – reflects the
10. See J. McIlroy, ‘Finale: A View from a New Century’, in McIlroy et al.
(eds), Industrial Politics, pp. 299 and 310, n. 1.
11. W. E. Tirebuck, Miss Grace of All Souls (Heinemann: 1895). See G. Klaus,
The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing
(Harvester Press, Brighton: 1985), pp. 86–8. A poor translation of
Germinal was published by Vizetelly and Co., London, in 1886. Strikes of
millworkers figure in earlier English novels, notably in Elizabeth Gaskell,
Mary Barton (Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1996; first published 1848) and
idem, North and South (Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1995; first published
1854).
12. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (Penguin, London: 1948; first published
1913), p. 70. For a detailed account of Lawrence’s background, see A. R.
and C. Griffin, ‘A Social and Economic History of Eastwood and the Not-
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 141
complications and continuing tensions of Lawrence’s own estrange-
ment from his working-class upbringing. In The Rainbow the imagined
mining town of Wiggiston emerges as the negation of community, the
miners ‘not like living people but like spectres’, the mine ‘demon like’,
‘a monster’, as in Zola a destroyer of humanity, the bearer of
Lawrence’s hatred of the industrial system which destroys spontaneous
creative life.13 In Women in Love the mining industry again epitomizes
industrial capitalism. The miners are a dark, alienated mass. They are
seen through the eyes of the coalowners who are entirely absent from
Sons and Lovers. They have surrendered to the will to power and
embrace of ‘the mechanical principle’ of the industrial magnate Gerald
Crich, a power which destroys his and their humanity: ‘They were ugly
and uncouth but they were his instruments. He admired their qualities.
But as men, personalities, they were just accidents, sporadic, little,
unimportant phenomena.’14
In Lawrence’s novelized version of the past the 1893 lockout was a
decisive turning-point. Real events find an echo, although they are
transformed. The challenge which the conflict offered to paternalist
East Midlands coalowners is suggested by the tension between Thomas
Crich, a believer in philanthropy and social harmony, and his son
Gerald, a modernizer and mechanizer in whom the struggle instils the
desire for domination. But the miners’ resistance to innovation and the
introduction of coal-cutting machinery, and the strikes it stimulated
tinghamshire Mining Country’, in K. Sagar (ed.), A D. H. Lawrence

Handbook (Manchester University Press: 1982), pp. 127–63. Lawrence’s
father, Arthur, was a small ‘butty’ (in reality the leader of a gang of col-
lective piece-workers rather than ‘an independent contractor’ in any
grandiose sense) at Barber, Walkers’ Brinsley pit. The continued influence
of his social background can be seen in, for example, ‘Strike Pay’, in D. H.
Lawrence, The Complete Short Stories, Vol. 1 (Heinemann: 1965), a tale of
family hardship inspired by an incident in the 1912 national strike when
Lawrence travelled around with a miner issuing relief tickets; ‘A Sick
Collier’ – more tensions in a mining marriage, presciently located on
Scargill Street – in idem, The Complete Short Stories, Vol. 1; ‘Odour of
Chrysanthemums’, in idem, The Complete Short Stories, Vol. 2 (Heine-
mann: 1965), about a mining disaster at Brinsley; and ‘The Miner at
Home’, in idem, Love Among the Haystacks (Grafton Books: 1988), which
portrays the conflict between husband and wife over a pit strike. See also
The Collier’s Friday Night, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and Touch and
Go, in idem, The Complete Plays (Heinemann: 1965).
13. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1981; first
published 1915), pp. 345, 349–50.
14. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1982; first
published 1920), p. 305.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 142
before 1914, find no place in Women in Love.15 Beyond his imagined

histories, Lawrence perceived a deep change in what he saw as the
battered-down children he had gone to school with: ‘after the war the
colliers went silent … Till 1920 there was a strange power of life in
them, something wild and urgent that one could hear in their voices’.16
His ambivalence, his desire to solidarize with and escape from his class
were contradictory and changing. Returning home in 1926 he observed
the miners moving towards defeat, at times like an outsider. But he also
reflected that the miners ‘are the only people who move me strongly’,
who were ‘in the life sense of the word good’.17 Like Zola he saw class
war coming. But he shied away from its consequences, musing instead
on consensual, organic change: ‘I know that we could, if we would,
establish little by little a true democracy in England: we could nation-
alise the land and industries, and means of transport, and make the
whole thing work infinitely better than at present, if we would. It all
depends on the spirit in which the thing is done.’18
At other times he was more reconciled to class war, even if he failed
to support it: ‘I know the ownership of property is a problem that may
have to be fought out. But beyond the fight must lie a new hope, a new
beginning.’19 As literary critics have pointed out, The First Lady Chat-
terley, written in the aftermath of the 1926 mining lockout, in which
Parkin, the forerunner of the gamekeeper Mellors, is a Communist,
embodies this thinking. It permits the possibility of a radical economic,
social and human transformation quite different from the sexual
mysticism of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In the latter novel Lawrence
returns to his representation of the miners in Women in Love: ‘Men not
15. The ‘real-life’ equivalents of Thomas and Gerald Crich have been seen as
Thomas Charles Barber, who died in 1893, and Thomas Philip Barber,
who succeeded him at the helm of the Barber, Walker Company, for whom
Lawrence’s father worked: G. Holderness, D. H. Lawrence: History,
Ideology and Fiction (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin: 1982), pp. 209–11.
16. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Return to Bestwood’, in W. Roberts and H. Moore (eds),
Phoenix II (Heinemann: 1968), pp. 263–4.
17. Lawrence, ‘Return’, p. 264. See also idem, ‘Nottingham and the Mining
Countryside’, in E. D. McDonald (ed.), Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers
of D. H. Lawrence (Heinemann: 1936): ‘The physical awareness and
intimate togetherness was at its strongest down pit … And if I think of my
childhood, it is always as if there was a lustrous sort of inner darkness, like
the gloss of coal, in which we moved and had our real being’ (p. 135;
original emphasis).
18. Lawrence, ‘Return’, p. 265.
19. Ibid.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 143
men … anima of coal and iron and clay’.20
Lawrence was a critic and opponent of industrial capitalism and its
destructive consequences. In the end he rejected not only ‘the dead mate-
rialism of Marxism’ but any political programme for change beyond the
utopian. His path lay away from the working class, but during the inter-
war years there was no shortage of writers, often from the coalfields,
sometimes inspired by Lawrence, willing to depict the lives and struggles
of miners in the novel. There was, however, a decline in literary merit and
in some cases an attempt to replace complexity with a socialist realism
which demanded that ambivalence be cast aside and the working class be
depicted as moving in the direction of the conquest of power or at least
beginning to comprehend its historical necessity.21
This was far from the approach of James Welsh whose novel, The
Underworld, was a bestseller of Catherine Cookson proportions in the
1920s. A Lanarkshire miners’ official and subsequently a Labour MP,
who went underground in 1892 when he was aged twelve, Welsh’s
books still talk to historians about life in the Scottish pits and pit
villages as well as about trade-unionism and problems of leadership
before 1914 and, unusually, of an attempt by a woman to rise from her
class.22 Like the work of the Derbyshire collier Fred Boden, who
escaped to Exeter University College but whose Miner provides a
valuable account from below of the powerlessness of miners during the
1926 lockout in the Midlands to effect events, Welsh’s books are long
out of print and generally forgotten today.23 A happier fate was
accorded to the Nottinghamshire miner Walter Brierley whose novels,
20. D. H. Lawrence, The First Lady Chatterley (Heinemann: 1972; first

published 1944); idem, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Penguin, Har-
mondsworth: 1960; first published 1928), p. 166. The most successful films
of Lawrence novels are Sons and Lovers (1960), directed by Jack Cardiff,
starring Dean Stockwell, Trevor Howard and Wendy Hiller; and Women
in Love (1969), directed by Ken Russell, starring Glenda Jackson, Jennie
Linden, Alan Bates and Oliver Reed.
21. The transition within Stalinism was from proletkult to socialist realism
after 1934. For socialist realism and its antipathy to modernism in the
novel, see V. Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Clarendon Press,
Oxford: 1988), pp. 299–305.
22. James C. Welsh, The Underworld: The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner
(Herbert Jenkins: 1920); idem, The Morlocks (Herbert Jenkins: 1924), and
idem, Norman Dale, MP (Herbert Jenkins: 1928), reflect Welsh’s move
towards moderation; see G. Klaus, ‘James Welsh, Major Miner Poet’,
Scottish Literary Journal 13:2 (1986), pp. 65–86; T. Rogers, ‘Politics, Popular
Literature and the Scottish Miners: The Poetry and Fiction of James C.
Welsh’, Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society 27 (1992), pp. 23–41.
23. F. C. Boden, Miner (Dent: 1932).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 144
notably Means Test Man, a moving if relatively politically detached

evocation of the impact of unemployment on family, community and
class solidarity, were republished in the 1980s.24
The miners’ struggles of the 1970s and 1980s and socialists’ search
for ‘a useable past’ also revived interest and facilitated republication of
some of the political novels of the 1930s. Last Cage Down, a saga of
industrial conflict written by the left-wing Durham activist, Harold
Heslop, ends with local leader Jim Cameron concluding a prolonged
and bitter learning-process with acknowledgement that the future
belongs not to Labour but to his opponent, the Communist Joe Frost,
and his party with its vision of a workers’ Britain cast in the glittering
mould of the Soviet Union. Labourism is treacherous, managers evil,
women the embodiment of pure militancy and Lenin and Stalin the
architects of the future.25
Like Heslop, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP) activist,
Lewis Jones, used experience, autobiography and documentary realism
to weave across two epic novels a massy, labyrinthine tale of the clash
of ideas and personalities, pit meetings, political arguments, strikes and
lockouts from the 1890s to the 1930s. Like Heslop, Jones has his
strengths and due tribute has been paid to them. But in We Live the
increasing presence of political speeches as well as idealization of the
CP and garrulousness about it mars the text and occasionally descends
into bathos:
‘Oh my dear, our line is wrong’, he moaned.

‘Never mind’, she consoled. ‘Right or wrong, it is the line and we
have to be true to it.’
‘But it means we have to become strike-breakers.’26
24. Walter Brierley, Means Test Man (Spokesman, Nottingham: 1983; first
published 1935); idem, Sandwichman (Merlin: 1990; first published 1937).
These editions have insightful introductions by Andy Croft and Philip
Gorski respectively.
25. Harold Heslop, Last Cage Down (Lawrence and Wishart: 1984, with an
introduction by Andy Croft; first published 1935); see also idem, The Gate
of a Strange Field (Brentanos: 1929), which depicts the suffering, disillu-
sion and sense of betrayal surrounding the battles of 1926 as well as the
factionalism in the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB); and the
autobiography, idem, Out of the Old Earth, ed. A. Croft and G. Rigby
(Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle upon Tyne: 1984).
26. Lewis Jones, Cwmardy (Lawrence and Wishart: 1978; first published
1937); idem, We Live (Lawrence and Wishart: 1978; first published 1939).
The quotes are from We Live, p. 289. These reprints have valuable intro-
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 145
Jones’s message – like Heslop’s – is that the miners can only progress and
attain real power under the leadership of the CP. His characters tend to
become mouthpieces of an imagined march of history rather than compli-
cated flawed human beings, as he chronicles a Rhondda mining
community transformed from the days of syndicalism into a ‘little
Moscow’ by the time of the Spanish Civil War.27 Whatever their literary
merit, these novels provided inspiration for socialists and in their treatment
of strikes and politics in the pit and beyond they contain valuable material
for historians, even if they cannot be taken as reliable guides.
A more independent and more adventurous novel without any kind
of consolation was The Back-to-Backs, written by the London School
of Economics graduate and civil servant J. C. Grant. Influenced by
expressionism and aspects of Zola’s melodrama and ‘sensationalism’, it
portrayed the debauchment of a north-eastern mining community after
1926. Grant’s unrelieved vision of hell on earth in County Durham was
perhaps more redolent of the contemporary French novelist and poet
of pessimism, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, than Zola: it was praised by the
intelligentsia but excoriated by labour movement critics, whether
MFGB officials or Communists, for its disregard of the miners’ soli-
darity and dignity and for eliminating resistance from the picture.28 A
ductions by Dai Smith. See also D. Smith, Lewis Jones (University of

Wales Press, Cardiff: 1982); G. Holderness, ‘Miners and the Novel: From
Bourgeois to Proletarian Fiction’, in J. Hawthorne (ed.), The British
Working Class Novel in the Twentieth Century (Edward Arnold: 1984). On
unemployment among South Wales miners there is Jack Jones, Rhondda
Roundabout (Faber and Faber: 1934); see also the autobiography, Jack
Jones, Unfinished Business (Hamish Hamilton: 1937).
27. See S. McIntyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working Class
Militancy in Inter-War Britain (Croom Helm: 1980).
28. J. C. Grant, The Back-to-Backs (Chatto and Windus: 1930). Its reception
parallels the left-wing criticism of Zola’s realistic depiction of French
workers in L’Assommoir (Oxford University Press: 1995; first published
1877); see the introduction to that edition by Robert Lethbridge. For
different views of Grant’s novel, see R. Colls, The Collier’s Rant: Song and
Culture in the Industrial Village (Croom Helm: 1977), pp. 184–91; A. Croft,
Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (Lawrence and Wishart: 1990),
pp. 75–80. Its reception demonstrates that union officials were aware, or
were made aware, of such novels. There is no evidence that fiction played a
role in cohering a sense of identity among miners or in institution-building
(cf. the commissioning of R. Page Arnot’s miners’ union histories after
1945). No miner was typical, but Arthur Lawrence’s reaction to his son’s
novels was one of bafflement rather than identification: he might as well
have been reading Hottentot: J. Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal
Record (Frank Cass: 1965), p. 49, and see n. 38 below.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 146
wider audience read and watched A. J. Cronin’s The Stars Look Down
(1935). The experiences of its hero, a former Northumberland miner
who becomes a Labour MP, are sometimes credited with contributing
to the significant change in consciousness represented by Labour’s
victory in 1945. Another bestseller was Richard Llewellyn’s How Green
Was My Valley (1939), a romantic retreat from the world that the pro-
letarian novelists confronted into a utopian pre-1914 South Wales.29
In the post-war years the proletarian genre re-exerted itself with
work such as the stories by north-east colliery blacksmith Sid Chaplin,
collected in The Thin Seam, later the basis for Alan Plater and Alex
Glasgow’s musical, Close the Coalhouse Door.30 The CP sought to
revive the socialist realism of the 1930s through publication of a range
of novels, perhaps most notably the work of Len Doherty, a young
Yorkshire miner from Thurcroft Colliery, Rotherham. Written against
the background of the party’s attempts to re-establish itself in the
important Yorkshire coalfield in the early 1950s, Doherty’s best book,
A Miner’s Sons, embodies many of the strengths and flaws of the earlier
work by Heslop and Jones.31 In keeping with the conventions of the
29. The Stars Look Down (1939), directed by Carol Reed, starring Michael
Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood; How Green Was My Valley (1941),
directed by John Ford, starring Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara and
Roddy McDowell. See also Gwyn Thomas, Sorrow for Thy Sons
(Lawrence and Wishart: 1986; written 1936); and Gwyn Jones, Times Like
These (Lawrence and Wishart: 1979; written 1936), which links the 1930s
in the South Wales coalfield with the lockouts of 1921 and 1926 and pow-
erfully conveys the miners’ demands for justice and dignity: ‘We aren’t
human beings. We are just like pick handles or old mandrils’ (p. 294).
There are valuable comments on the Welsh novelists in D. Smith, Aneurin
Bevan and the World of South Wales (University of Wales Press, Cardiff:
1993), passim, particularly pp. 115–49.
30. Sid Chaplin, The Thin Seam (Pergamon Press, Oxford: 1968; first
published 1949); Alan Plater, Close the Coalhouse Door, based on Stories
by Sid Chaplin, Songs by Alex Glasgow (Methuen: 1969). A fine histori-
cal novel of these years is Gwyn Thomas, All Things Betray Thee
(Lawrence and Wishart: 1986, with an introduction by Raymond
Williams; first published 1949), set in South Wales at the time of the
Newport Rising and Rebecca Riots.
31. Len Doherty, A Miner’s Sons (Lawrence and Wishart: 1956); idem, The Man
Beneath (Lawrence and Wishart: 1957). The problems with socialist realism
in the 1950s are suggested by the fact that A Miner’s Sons was Lawrence and
Wishart’s best-selling novel with just over 3,000 copies sold: I. Von
Rosenberg, ‘Militancy, Anger and Resignation: Alternative Modes in the
Working-Class Novel in the 1950s and Early 1960s’, in H. G. Klaus (ed.),
The Socialist Novel in Britain (Harvester, Brighton: 1982). Also of interest is
Margot Heinemann, The Adventurers (Lawrence and Wishart: 1960).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 147
genre, CP members are the central actors, the best trade-unionists and
the best people; there is no sense of the decline of the party, while the
Cold War and – in contrast with pre-war novels – Russia are almost
completely absent from the text. However, party issues dominate and
the problems of the CP tower over the pit and the union.
Too much of the novel is taken up with evangelical homilies by
idealized, cardboard cutouts. The prosy perorations of the Communist
teacher Mainwaring and the CP organizer Frank Wells are rewarded by
approving cries of ‘dead right’ from earnest young miners, the ‘party
lads’ who appear to develop through pedagogic induction rather than
action and experience. In a rare flash of insight, Wells, modelled on the
real-life CP organizer, Frank Watters, murmurs: ‘Och, I should have
been a preacher’.32 The hero Robert Mellers, prone to doubt, insecurity
and individualism, is a more rounded character and there are convinc-
ing episodes such as the organization and defeat of the overtime ban –
ironically through the intervention of the party – and a superbly
realized finale in which local union delegate Barratt resists the attempt
of management to buy him over. But the novel moves to its inevitable
conclusion: both Barratt and Mellers accept that they must subordi-
nate their inclinations to the discipline of a party, which represents the
best hope of the miners against capitalist power that has effortlessly
survived nationalization.
So it seems now. When I read it more than forty years ago I recall
that I found it inspiring if at times wooden and a little antique, in com-
parison with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness
of the Long Distance Runner. A year or so after the publication of A
Miner’s Sons, Doherty left the CP over Khrushchev’s speech revealing
the barbarities of Stalinism and the Russian invasion of Hungary.33 As
the 1960s dawned, even revamped socialist realism increasingly
appeared a quaint echo of a vanished world – certainly compared with
the portrayal of workers and their predicament by a new generation of
novelists, notably Alan Sillitoe, even Stan Barstow. A maverick
American socialist, Clancy Sigal, who settled in Britain and became
involved in the post-1956 New Left, attempted a different, and what
appeared at the time quintessentially modern approach with his exper-
imental, documentary novel Weekend in Dinlock. Stimulated by his
32. Doherty, A Miner’s Sons, p. 245. F. Watters, Being Frank: The Memoirs of
Frank Watters (Monkspring Publications, Barnsley: 1992), p. 31.
33. See Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiogra-
phy, 1949–1962 (HarperCollins: 1997), pp. 234–7. Frank Watters blamed
Doherty’s defection in characteristic terms on the influence of Lessing and
‘the social snobbery of his regular weekends with the literary elite’:
Watters, Being Frank, p. 31.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 148
friendship with Doherty and with a hero, Davie, who bears a resem-
blance to Doherty, the book is based on two visits by an American
observer to a Yorkshire pit village.34
Divided by almost a hundred years and hundreds of miles, Dinlock
is, like Montsou, a warring world unto itself, a genuine community
with an intense public life expressing itself through the pubs and clubs,
the union branch – an active forum – strikes – a real expression of
opinion – debate, argument and rivalries between miners and their
families. It is a masculine world ruled with a rod of iron by elitist face-
workers. Their work remains brutal but it still gives them their identity.
Their standing depends on their commitment to the village, their
abilities as miners, their union skills and their fists. They are cynical
about nationalization, militant about money, contemptuous of NUM
officials and insecure about the future of their industry. They are
narrow minded about women, those who leave the pit and those who
get ideas above their station, as well as Hungarian and Polish immi-
grants. Some support the Labour Party left-wing weekly Tribune,
others vaguely identify with the CP and at pit level the Dinlock miners
exercise an element of countervailing power; but no compelling alter-
native vision of mining or British society is articulated.
The gifted artist Davie, torn between Dinlock and flight from it, and
the hard, calculating Bolton, the NUM branch potentate suspected of
being on the brink of incorporation because of his desire to get on first-
name terms with the under manager despite his solidarity with the
Russian invasion of Hungary, are vivid and complex characters. Sigal’s
honest translation of what he saw attracted both approval and oppro-
brium. The criticism of his depiction of hard drinking, violence,
sexuality, the role of women and his extended account of a trip under-
ground recalled at times the fear of challenges to myth and dread of the
34. See n. 3 above. There are brief recollections by Sigal of his experience in
the New Left in Oxford University Socialist Discussion Group, Out of
Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 Years On (Verso: 1989), pp. 131, 133.
Lessing, Walking in the Shade, pp. 154–5, describes Sigal as a Trotskyist.
It is worth mentioning here that superb evocation of the decline of
American trade-unionism and socialism, Clancy Sigal, Going Away (Cape:
1963). For American mining novels, see, for example, F. M. Blake, The
Strike in the American Novel (The Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ: 1972).
Two films dealing with American miners stand out: The Molly Maguires
(1970) directed by Martin Ritt, starring Richard Harris and Sean
Connery, and Matewan (1987), directed by John Sayles and starring Chris
Cooper and Mary McDonnell.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 149
inauthentic vision of the outsider which had informed the reception of
Grant’s book thirty years earlier.35
Doherty and Sigal evoke a post-war era of pit politics in which
nationalization and the economic boom have only softened the
contours of conflict focused on piece-work and price lists. The great
national issues, immanent in earlier novels, are as distant as the old
masters, while industrial relations is restricted to the pit and the
branch. Power is mobilized at local level, but the National Coal Board
(NCB) bureaucrats remain ‘the bosses’ and, if real hardship has been
pushed to the margins, the greater affluence of the 1950s co-exists with
continued insecurity and fear of illness, accidents, closures and old age
with an inadequate safety net.36
However, the best novel of the 1960s set in a mining community had
little to say of industrial relations or pit politics. Barry Hines’s A Kestrel
for a Knave was a powerful reassertion of human potential and the
story of its squandering in the two decades after 1947. Billy’s talents
and his lively imagination open up all sorts of possibilities for a good
life; but he is destined by the system for the pit. His only hope lies in
the kestrel he trains, which symbolizes escape and egalitarianism: it was
the bird that both peasants and nobles could own in medieval society.
Neglected by his mother, Billy is betrayed by his brother Jud, a miner
who, maddened by Billy’s failure to place a bet that cost him a week’s
wages, kills the kestrel and Billy’s hopes. Compared with earlier novels,
Hines presents a harsh but subtle account of a mining community in
35. See, for example, R. Frankenburg, ‘First Thoughts on Dinlock’, New Left
Review, March–April 1960, pp. 65–6; ‘“Weekend in Dinlock”: A Discus-
sion’, New Left Review, May–June 1960, pp. 42–5. The book is also
memorable for a fleeting cameo appearance by a character Charles, suspi-
ciously like Edward Thompson, who pronounces Dinlock as ‘backward’:
Sigal, Dinlock, pp. 82–3. Another writer active in the New Left, Dennis
Potter, who came from a mining family in the Forest of Dean, devoted
himself largely to television plays. But see, on rites of passage, D. Potter,
The Glittering Coffin (Gollancz: 1960), and idem, The Changing Forest:
Life in the Forest of Dean Today (Secker and Warburg: 1962).
36. Other interesting novels of this period set in South Wales are Menna
Gallie, The Small Mine (Gollancz: 1962) and Ron Berry, Flame and Slag
(W. H. Allen: 1968). For pit politics and the period generally, see P.
Gibbon, ‘Analyzing the British Miners’ Strike of 1984–5’, Economy and
Society 17:2 (1988), pp. 151–94, particularly pp. 152–4. Among historical
novels published at this time Alexander Cordell’s books set against the
industrial revolution in Wales are worthy of mention: Alexander Cordell,
The Rape of the Fair Country (Gollancz: 1959); idem, The Hosts of
Rebecca (Gollancz: 1960); idem, Song of the Earth (Gollancz: 1969).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 150
which Billy is trapped with the majority of young people in the world
of manual labour and in the end becomes resigned to his fate.37
II
As far as I can discover, the re-emergence of national conflict from

1969 and the strikes of 1972 and 1974 produced no new novels. Perhaps
these strikes were lacking, at least in comparison with 1926, in
intensity, duration and hardship. Perhaps there is something in the old
adage that the labour movement prefers to commemorate its defeats.
Perhaps reading habits were changing.38 Whatever the explanation, the
small number of mining novels of the 1970s looked to the past,
although at their best they did so in ways that taught us about the
present. The most compelling example of this was a 1975 novel by an
underrated but gifted and committed writer, the son of a miner raised
in Kilmarnock, who has spent his life trying to portray and sustain
what he perceives as the vanishing sense of common predicament,
feeling, interdependence and endeavour to create a collective protection
against the wounds inflicted by capitalism and life, values which he
insists have characterized many working-class communities.
William McIlvanney’s Docherty narrated the story of three genera-
tions of miners in the imagined Ayrshire town of Graithknock from
1903 to 1921. McIlvanney’s hero, Tam Docherty, only a generation
37. Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave (Michael Joseph: 1968). The novel was
filmed as Kes (1969), directed by Ken Loach and starring David Bradley,
Lynn Perrie and Colin Welland.
38. The extent to which miners themselves read these novels remains largely a
matter of conjecture. Jonathan Rose’s small-scale study of the borrowing
ledgers of the Welsh miners’ libraries concludes of Tylorstown in 1941:
‘Miners were not much interested in reading about miners’: J. Rose, The
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale University Press, New
Haven, CT/London: 2001), p. 246. Nonetheless, at Markham Germinal
was the most borrowed novel between 1937 and 1940: ibid., p. 252. Dennis
et al., Coal Is Our Life, pp. 167–9, echoes other studies, suggesting that, in
one Yorkshire community at least, the preferred diet was westerns, crime
novels and romances. For the post-war years, however, there are references
to miners reading Chaplin: M. Pickering and K. Robbins, ‘The Making of
a Working-Class Writer: An Interview with Sid Chaplin’, in Hawthorne
(ed.), Working Class Novel, p. 143; and Sigal, Dinlock, pp. 142–3, while it
is claimed that William McIlvanney’s novels ‘are read throughout
Scotland’: N. Ascheson, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland (Granta:
2003), p. 126. At least some miners were not encouraged to write by their
workmates: ‘Yer writing about the pits? Nothing much to write about is
there? Just the muck and the dirt and that. An’ perhaps a nasty accident’:
J. G. Glenwright, Bright Shines the Morning (Martini: 1949), pp. 82–3.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 151
away from Connemara, is one of the often forgotten creators of
community in mining areas. He struggles to impose dignity, decency
and order on degradation, division and disease through the force of his
self-belief and integrity. The defeat of the 1921 lockout is for Docherty
one reverse too many in a lifetime of defeated struggles and, in a world
where decency is an act of heroism, he accepts death to save a fellow
miner. His attempt to create a world within a world has failed. One of
his sons, Angus, turns to self-interest and individualism. The others,
Conn and Mick, confront a choice between different political paths,
reformist and revolutionary, a division that McIlvanney treats with
disregard for absolute alternatives and a sensitivity to the strengths and
weaknesses of both roads which surmounts socialist realism.39
Despite its epic scale, the 1984–85 strike, like its predecessors,
produced little imaginative literature. I can trace only three novels40 and
39. William McIlvanney, Docherty (Allen and Unwin: 1975). McIlvanney’s

later autobiographical novel, The Kiln (Sceptre: 1996), continues some
aspects of the story. Neil Ascheson, Stone Voices, p. 75, exaggerates but
makes a point when he observes: ‘McIlvanney is the one writer whose face
is recognized in any Scottish street’. See also W. McIlvanney, ‘Growing up
in the West’, in K. Miller (ed.), Memoirs of a Modern Scotland (Faber and
Faber: 1970). Another Yorkshire mining novel set in the 1930s is Don
Bannister, Sam Chard (Routledge: 1979). Among historical novels of the
1970s, Alexander Cordell, This Sweet and Bitter Earth (Hodder and
Stoughton: 1977), imagining the early years of the twentieth century, is
worth reading. Cordell pays tribute to the historical memory of the miners
and the work of Page Arnot.
40. Barry Hines, The Heart of It (Michael Joseph: 1994); Martyn Waites, Born
under Punches (Simon and Schuster: 2003); David Peace, GB 84 (Faber and
Faber: 2004). Waites’s thriller deals largely with the consequences of the
strike. It portrays a journalist, footballer, gangster, a young woman student
who ends up in call-centre and a miner in the imagined town of Coldwell,
Northumberland, whose lives are changed by the conflict. It is depicted as
opening a bleak post-industrial age in which New Labour consolidates
Thatcherism and lives are impoverished, although optimism and hope are
never extinguished. At least one children’s novel is set in a pit village during
the 1984–85 strike: Bel Mooney, A Flower of Jet (Hamish Hamilton: 1990;
Puffin: 1991). It traces divisions in a community insulated from the shadowy
national dimension and, although it is set in Yorkshire, mines are working
from the start of the stoppage. Mooney attempts to develop the arguments
with fairness and sensitivity through the unravelling and remaking of friend-
ships among teenagers. But the book centres on a clash of principles which
prioritizes independence, conscience and standing up for beliefs, almost com-
pletely uncomplicated and unmediated by issues of democracy. While not
explicitly about 1984, Raymond Williams, Loyalties (Chatto and Windus:
1985), provides fascinating insights into the experience of socialist miners in
South Wales from the 1930s to the 1980s.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 152
I will discuss two of them here. The first, by Barry Hines, appeared ten
years after the convulsion. Hines was born in the mining village of
Hoyland Common, near Barnsley, and trained as a mining surveyor
before becoming a teacher and later a full-time writer. He had already
returned to mining country with the sombre novel, The Price of Coal,
which addressed class conflict more explicitly than its predecessor.41
It is the late 1970s and life at Milton Colliery is presented in two
contrasting episodes. The first part of the book, ironically entitled
‘Meet the People’, explores the consciousness of a group of miners and
their feelings of powerlessness, acceptance, resentment and antagonism
towards an official visitation by Prince Charles, with its consequent
flummery and cosmeticization of the colliery. The visit is inevitable;
within that boundary, some see it as an honour and some as an oppor-
tunity to improve pit conditions, while others use humour to express
resistance. Opposition is voiced by the central character, Syd, who sees
the choice of Milton as demonstrating the absence of power of its
union organization in comparison with other collieries. Milton has
been selected, ‘Because they know the Branch officials are as soft as
shit and wouldn’t oppose it’ (p. 46). Syd voices the absurdity and
inequity of the pantomime. When other miners point to the ancillary
benefits of the visit, he reflects: ‘But that’s the point, Ronnie … If all
this fuss is worth making, it’s worth making for us. It’s us who work
here … it should be our needs that come first, not his’ (p. 45). The event
passes without interruption; apart from ‘Scargill Rules. O.K.’ sprayed
in red capitals on the canteen wall.
The second half of the book, ‘Back to Reality’, involves an explosion
which blasts away the illusionary world of the royal visit: five miners
are killed and Syd is seriously injured. History repeats itself, the past is
still present. An album of cuttings presented to Prince Charles refers, in
a few terse lines embedded in extensive coverage of the visit of George
V and Queen Mary to South Yorkshire collieries in 1912, to the death
of eighty-six miners in an explosion at Cadeby Main. The alterations
made for the 1977 visit have not improved safety and working condi-
tions. As the NUM official remarks, it takes accidents to do that,
accidents caused by pressure. Thirty years after nationalization,
pitwork remains dangerous and unrecognized, and miners still see
themselves as powerless to change things. The Price of Coal is still
human lives.
41. Barry Hines, The Price of Coal (Michael Joseph: 1979; Penguin, Har-
mondsworth: 1982). The novel was based on Hines’s play, The Price of
Coal, screened in the BBC television Play for Today series in 1977, directed
by Ken Loach, produced by Tony Garnett and starring Bobby Knutt as
Syd.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 153
The novel is strengthened by its economy of narrative and character
and its occasional use of sections of film script. These techniques are
taken further in Hines’s novel about the strike of 1984–85, The Heart of
It.42 Echoing Lawrence, Hines uses the device of the revenant, now in
important ways an outsider, who on his return home reflects upon the
events of the great strike, seen, as in the traditional mining novel, through
the eyes and experience of a local community. Hines’s book, like earlier
work, is about alienation from, and reconciliation with, the values of that
community; the difference is that its culture is now vanishing into history.
Depicting the strike, the closures, privatization and disintegration, the
novel is about loss and the pain of loss. It records the disruption and then
the dissolution of a way of life. But it promises remembrance and
renewal. The book begins: ‘The houses had been demolished’ (p. 1). Its
final sentences return to Attlee Way: ‘The houses had been demolished
… but Karl remembered the people who used to live there’ (p. 280).
The novel’s central protagonist, Karl Rickards – known as Cal in his
new life as a scriptwriter in the South of France – returns in the 1990s
to the Yorkshire town where he grew up and where his father is now
seriously ill. Leaving home confirmed his estrangement, based on his
conflict with his father, Harry, an NUM activist and Stalinist, who
named his sons after Marx and Uncle Joe and would not have Bull’s
Blood in the house. The 1984–85 strike, which had little impact on the
individualist, upwardly mobile Karl, continues to pre-occupy everyone
he meets. It was a devastating turning-point: ‘The strike knocked the
stuffing out of this place, Karl. Destroyed it. It was like a police state
around here. The government was determined to win at all costs …
42. Hines, The Heart of It. A number of films touched on the strike but it was
central to the popular Billy Elliot (2000), directed by Stephen Daldry from
a screenplay by Lee Hall and starring Jamie Bell, Julie Walters and Jamie
Draven. In what might be seen as a sentimental counterpoise to Kes, Billy’s
ballet dancing and self-realization are presented in a loaded opposition to
the masculinity, militancy and rootedness of his brother and father. The
conflict reaches crisis when financing the boy’s education at ballet school
threatens his father’s commitment to the strike. However, all ends happily.
Social mobility is achieved, social inequality persists, the ladder is still
working. The film has just been adapted as a stage musical, with the score
written by Elton John. See also Channel 4’s ‘The Comic Strip Presents The
Strike’ (1988), directed by Peter Richardson and, for the aftermath, Brassed
Off (1996), directed and written by Mark Herman and starring Peter
Postlethwaite, Ewan McGregor, Tara Fitzgerald and the Grimethorpe
Colliery Band. Of the limited reflective documentary literature on the strike,
M. Hudson, Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village (Jonathan
Cape: 1994; Vintage: 1995), a portrait of Horden Colliery, County Durham,
locating 1984–85 in its past and its aftermath, is outstanding.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 154
When you try to tell people what it was like they don’t believe you’ (p.
14).
Neither at the beginning does Karl. Slowly, through a series of
encounters with the past, he relives, not the experience of the struggle,
but how it is remembered and how it has transformed the lives of the
people he grew up with. Putting aside his film script about a boy turned
into a dog by a mad professor, Karl journeys into the past. Gradually
shedding his impulses to opportunistic appropriation – the strike would
make a better script – and gradually accepting the limits of recupera-
tion of the lived experience of others – ‘You’ve no idea what it was like:
you weren’t here’ (p. 51) – he discovers the inauthenticity of the life he
has escaped to. Karl, too, is transformed by the strike.
What happened in 1984–85 is represented through the memories of
participants who struggled to understand and control calamities that
seemed to happen to them. Hines makes no attempt to provide a
history of the strike. This is a local narrative focused on the role of the
police, the courts and the media, depicted in clashes between pickets
and returning miners, pickets and police. Crisis and defeat is traced
through the story of Harry Rickards, who held the strikers together:
Harry’s decline embodies the decline of a way of life and his illness is
identified with his experience of the strike:
When he got beaten up by the police.

That and going to prison. He was never the same again somehow.
That’s a long time ago isn’t it, 1984?
These things can have a delayed effect, Karl. (p. 38)
The consequences of 1984–85 were destructive but they were also lib-
erating. The beneficial transformations the strike wrought are repre-
sented through the change in Harry’s wife, Maisie. She had always
seemed ‘totally dominated by your dad. She wasn’t after the strike
ended, though. They came out of it on equal terms … the women were
the backbone of the strike. If it had been up to them, the men would
never have gone back to work. They’d still be out now’ (p. 80).
With new confidence engendered by speaking at meetings and trav-
elling across Europe to raise funds, Maisie becomes an individual, a
creative force with the courage to explore her own troubled past. Her
daughter-in-law, Christine, also learns the lessons of the conflict and
develops a new decisiveness and a new autonomy. Karl’s journey into
the past affirms the continued relevance of collectivism and collective
responsibility, ‘that’s one thing people outside mining areas never
understand, how close we all are and how working together develops a
sense of comradeship and trust in each other’ (p. 76). It also affirms the
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 155
need for a new culture and a new solidarity based on the dissolution of
ancient oppressions and prejudices within communities. The strike was
defeated, the mines and the mining communities have disappeared; that
is not the most important thing. What lies at the heart of it is the con-
tinuation and extension of their best values.
Hines’s novel ends with the death of Harry on the last day of nation-
alization. His pit, recently closed, has given way to silence and
shadows: ‘Everything that he believed in and fought for has been
destroyed’ (p. 274). In these sobering times there is no call to arms. But
others are left to carry the torch of integrity, if in different ways. Karl
is unlikely to follow his father’s path of class struggle; but his capacity
for human sympathy is revitalized and he can create a more authentic
life and respond to his father’s reproach that he should ‘write
something that mattered’. But hope now lies in working-class women.
For Maisie the lessons are simple ones:
Whether we lost [the strike] or not what we did achieve was to show
what you can do when people work together, and the pride you feel
when you’re fighting for a cause. And what’s happened since with all
the unemployment and that, has started to make people realise that
perhaps selfishness and greed are not the answer. (p. 278)
Too hopeful, perhaps, ten years on, ten hard years which have seen New
Labour successfully accept a softened Thatcherism, socialism marginal-
ized, trade-unionism in sustained decline and feminism reject socialism
and marginalize class in favour of individualism and careerism. The
judgement that The Heart of It is not Hines’s best work may reflect these
profound changes. The sections of film script sit uneasily with the spare
narrative; the vox populi recollections sometimes become clichéd and the
sub-plot of Maisie’s affair with an Italian prisoner of war does not
always work. But The Heart of It tells us enough about the injustice and
inhumanity of 1984 and the human resistance to it to merit an hon-
ourable place in the long line of mining novels.
David Peace’s GB 84 is something different: it represents a startling
and significant break with that tradition. Peace, who was born in
Ossett, West Yorkshire, was only seventeen at the time of the strike. He
now lives in Tokyo and has become increasingly well known as the
author of the Red Riding Quartet which explores violent crime and the
subversion of morality and justice in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s
against the background of the Peter Sutcliffe ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ case.43
43. David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four (Serpent’s Tail: 1999); idem, Nineteen
Seventy Seven (Serpent’s Tail: 2000); idem, Nineteen Eighty (Serpent’s Tail:
2000); idem, Nineteen Eighty Three (Serpent’s Tail: 2002).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 156
A powerful influence on Peace is the American novelist James Ellroy,

the celebrated exponent of contemporary Californian noir. Ellroy has
graduated from an extended alternative history depicting the corrupt
world of Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s through the eyes of police,
criminals and victims, to work dealing with political corruption and the
assassination of John F. Kennedy.44 His writing passes lightly over dis-
tinctions between fact and fiction and his evocations of the past mix
staccato prose, stream of consciousness, extended conversation,
newspaper and archival reports in a harder, profane adaptation of the
collage, cinéma vérité and multiple narratives of the great twentieth-
century American novelist, John Dos Passos.45 Peace is indebted to
Ellroy for both his method and his dark vision in which evil is all-
pervasive.
GB 84 takes Peace’s earlier experiments further. Working on a
canvas broader than any other novel we have looked at, or indeed any
other attempt to address the strike, and rejecting traditional forms, he
uses these techniques to produce an extended fictional history of the
conflict as a microcosm of Britain in 1984. George Orwell may have got
the specifics wrong, but he got the flavour of things about right. The
New Right’s attempt to organize GB75 to keep the workers in their
place was premature: with Mrs Thatcher the hour for class war
arrived.46 In GB 84 the Arthur Scargill figure, referred to only as ‘The
44. His best-known novels are James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia (Mysterious
Press: 1987) and idem, L. A. Confidential (Mysterious Press: 1990). See
also the excellent film of the latter, L. A. Confidential (1994), directed by
Curtis Hanson, starring Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Kim
Bassinger and Danny DeVito. The first volumes of his political trilogy are
James Ellroy, American Tabloid (Century: 1995) and idem, The Cold Six
Thousand (Century: 2001). See also J. Walker, ‘James Ellroy as Historical
Novelist’, History Workshop Journal 53 (Spring 2002), pp. 181–204.
45. The John Don Passos trilogy, USA (Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1966; first
published 1938), remains of great interest to historians of America and its
labour movement. See D. Pizer, Dos Passos’ USA: A Critical Study (Uni-
versity of Virginia, Charlottesville: 1988).
46. The efforts of the founder of the Special Air Service (SAS), Colonel David
Stirling, to create a para-military group, termed GB77, to intervene in
industrial disputes during the mid-1970s are documented in P. Hain,
Political Strikes: The State and Trade Unionism in Britain (Penguin, Har-
mondsworth: 1980), pp. 162–4.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 157
President’, carries Germinal everywhere.47 Its presence is one of the few
connections between Peace’s ambitious book and the traditional nar-
ratives of earlier novels.
True, we witness through the book the day-to-day experience
of Martin and Peter, two young Yorkshire pickets for whom Scargill
now unquestionably rules. But their story is conveyed in a
stream-of-consciousness interior monologue, spiked with clipped con-
versation and profuse profanity.48 This torrent of Yorkshire demotic,
often terminating in mid-sentence, prefaces each of fifty-three chapters,
every one covering a week of the war. These stanzas, saturated in detail,
chronicle the machinations inside the NUM hierarchy, events at the
NCB headquarters, the role of politicians and the Trades Union
Congress (TUC), and the activities at all levels of the strike-breakers.49
But their account of the high politics of 1984–85 is encased within
underground narratives featuring a gallery of sordid desperadoes whose
deployment demonstrates for Peace the determination of the state to
destroy the NUM and its summoning of dark forces for that purpose.
In the nocturnal world of GB 84 we encounter the watcher and fixer,
Paul Dixon of Special Branch; Dave Johnston, the Mechanic, available
for hire and dirty tricks; Malcolm Morris, Tinkerbell, who taps the
phones; Diane Morris, the temptress agent; Julian Schaub, another
dirty-jobs operative and paedophile; Roger Vaughan of Jupiter Securi-
ties, who knows people upstairs and passes jobs on to Neil Fontaine,
who knows people under the floorboards and passes jobs on to
Brendan Matthews, who organizes the scab drivers; while the Mechanic
trains assault squads to break the picket lines and get the scabs through
and is watched all the time by Paul Dixon of Special Branch. Orgreave
is a set-up. The NUM’s dealings with Colonel Gaddafi are engineered.
47. Peace, GB 84, p. 95. The Roger Windsor character is also reading
Germinal, but he ‘can’t get into it’: ibid. A further parallel with Zola lies in
Peace’s use of the vernacular and melodrama. Leonard Tancock, in his
introduction to Germinal (Penguin: 1954), refers to the ‘coarse, direct and
often obscene’ language of Zola’s characters (p. 15). Peace, too, writes as
miners spoke; but although there is no shortage of gore in GB 84 it rarely
surpasses the mutilation of the murdered shopkeeper Maigrat’s corpse in
Germinal.
48. One of the best books on the dispute focuses on Yorkshire: J. and R.
Winterton, Coal, Crisis and Conflict: The 1984–85 Miners’ Strike in
Yorkshire (Manchester University Press: 1989).
49. The chapters are divided into five parts, initially headed by contemporary
songs such as Nena’s ‘Ninety-Nine Red Balloons’ and Frankie Goes To
Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes Go to War’ but culminating in March 1985 with
‘Terminal or Triumph of the Will’.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 158
The human costs in this bleak landscape between the coercive state and
the fascist fringe include torture and severed heads carried in paper
bags. These subterranean stories spiral off into sub-plots dealing with
the Hilda Murrell episode and the Brighton bombing.50 They lend the
novel its texture of nightmare and its complexity. It is a complexity that
taxes, sometimes overpowers, and reminds me of Raymond Chandler’s
comment that he himself did not know who had murdered the
chauffeur in The Big Sleep.
Peace’s ‘Argument’, which prefaces the text, is that the strike was a
war. It was provoked. It was prepared. It was about power: electricity,
gas, political and personal. Its purpose was to destroy the power of
British miners in the interests of capital and the state.51 In developing
this theme he has meticulously researched extensive sources. For
example, his account of the pickets embraces some of the lesser-known
literature that the strikers and their supporters have continued to
produce since 1985.52
Martin and Peter move through history from the confidence of
March as the mobile pickets cross the border into Nottinghamshire to
the final days of desperation as their enemies close in for the kill. As
early as May, Martin’s marriage is in trouble; after Orgreave he is
falling apart: ‘Lifted. Threatened. Beaten. Hospitalized. Broke in every
fucking sense – I lie here and I listen to rain on our windows. To her
tears …’ (p. 110). Peter shares the pain: ‘That was Great Britain in 1984
for you – Policemen could belt fucking shit out of an unarmed shirtless
kid on national television and get away with it’ (p. 150); the elation:
‘Fucking brilliant. To see him lie there in road. That cunt off his white
bloody horse. That cunt and his horse that have chased and fucking hit
us all over bloody county’ (p. 282); and the learning: ‘grew up thinking
50. The Murrell case is examined in J. Cook, Unlawful Killing (Bloomsbury:

1994). The bombing of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, in October 1984, an
attempt to kill Mrs Thatcher, resulted in five deaths: T. P. Coogan, Ireland
in the Twentieth Century (Hutchinson: 2003), p. 603.
51. The arguments and evidence are in J. Saville, ‘An Open Conspiracy: Con-
servative Politics and the Miners’ Strike 1984–5’, in R. Miliband, J. Saville,
M. Liebman and L. Panitch (eds), Socialist Register 1985–86 (Merlin:
1986); A. Taylor, ‘The “Stepping Stones” Programme: Conservative Party
Thinking on Trade Unions, 1975–9’, Historical Studies in Industrial
Relations (HSIR) 11 (Spring 2001), pp. 109–33; P. Smith and G. Morton,
‘The Conservative Governments’ Reform of Employment Law, 1979–97’,
HSIR 12 (Autumn 2001) at pp. 131–8; J. Hoskyns, Just in Time: Inside the
Thatcher Revolution (Aurum Press: 2000).
52. Particularly A. Wakefield, The Miners’ Strike Day-by-Day (Wharncliffe
Press, Barnsley: 2002). Peace acknowledges a range of texts and songs
used in writing what he terms ‘a fiction based on fact’ (pp. 464–5).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 159
that blacks had a chip on their shoulder and that Irish were all bloody
nutters. I don’t think that now’ (p. 182).
As the scabs emerge in Yorkshire, Martin returns to the fray with
mixed feelings: nostalgia for 1983, work and his marriage; bemusement
at militants going back, even at Cortonwood; dreams of NACODS (the
National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers) as
an unlikely Seventh Cavalry. With Peter he witnesses the emergence of
a mini-police-state in Yorkshire: ‘Like something you saw on the news
from Northern Ireland’ (p. 322) – and tastes defeat: ‘Shoulder to
shoulder. United – Marching as one. Now it’s too fucking late’ (p. 452).
None of the earlier novels really addressed union leadership or man-
agement strategy.53 In GB 84 ‘The President’ is the disembodied agent
of historical forces: he is programmed, implacable, paranoid and, in his
own world, infallible. In a non-stop stream of left-wing trade-union
jargon he attempts to direct a machine over which nobody else,
certainly not ordinary miners such as Martin and Peter, possesses any
control.54 Likewise disembodied personifications, the other leaders
Dick (Mick McGahey?) and Paul Hargreaves (Peter Heathfield?) defer
to the President’s power and only once – in July – ineffectively urge the
case for concessions and settlement. Peace traces the demonization of
the President, ‘the Yorkshire Galtieri’, against the unfolding mobiliza-
tion and militarization of the police, manipulation of the law and sub-
version of NUM members.55 Yet the miners still stand alone. This is not
53. The only relevant novel I know of which attempts to deal in detail with
problems of leadership and bureaucratization on a personal level is
Howard Fast, Power (Panther: 1966; first published 1962), which traces
the career of an American miners’ leader; see also Joe Eszterhas, FIST
(Pan: 1978), based on the screenplay for the 1978 film of the same name,
directed by Norman Jewison, starring Sylvester Stallone, Rod Steiger and
Peter Boyle. It is loosely based on the career of the US Teamsters’ leader
Jimmy Hoffa, as is the eponymous Hoffa (1992), directed by Danny
DeVito and starring Jack Nicholson. A superb but neglected novel about
labour organizing in 1930s’ California is John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle
(Heinemann: 1936).
54. There are two studies of Arthur Scargill: M. Crick, Scargill and the Miners
(Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1985); P. Routledge, Scargill: The Unautho-
rised Biography (HarperCollins: 1993).
55. For discussion of the role of the police in the strike, see B. Fine and R.
Miller (eds), Policing the Miners’ Strike (Lawrence and Wishart: 1985). On
the use of the law, see J. McIlroy, ‘Police and Pickets: The Law against the
Miners’, in H. Beynon (ed.), Digging Deeper: Issues in the Miners’ Strike
(Verso: 1985); idem, ‘The Law Struck Dumb: Labour Law and the Miners’
Strike’, in Fine and Miller (eds), Policing the Miners’ Strike; and idem, The
Permanent Revolution? Conservative Law and the Trade Unions
(Spokesman, Nottingham: 1991), pp. 87–93.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 160
the second or third English civil war. The majority of the roundheads
epitomized by the TUC in the figure of the Fat Man (Norman Willis)
have not the slightest intention of taking the field.56 Peace replays a tale
of evasion and empty invocations of support, powder kept dry in the
interests of self-survival in order to impose a final settlement. The fab-
rication of solidarity at the September 1984 TUC, in which all sides are
complicit, is savagely summed up:
A dirty fucking lie
And everyone saw it … Everyone heard it … Everyone smelt it –
Tasted it. Knew it –
Everyone except the men and women out in the minefields. (p. 236)
Unrelenting to the end, the President’s rhetoric is revealed as a substi-
tute and finally no substitute for power. By March 1985, when he
abdicates and declines to cast his deciding vote in favour of either set-
tlement or return, he has lost the support of the area leaders. His final
speech to the conference is greeted with ‘Total. Fucking. Silence’ (p.
449). Among some of the rank and file it is different. As he promises
the intransigents outside the conference hall a renewal of struggle, ‘the
men screamed back at him “No surrender! No surrender! … Sell Out
… You’ve been betrayed… You’ve been betrayed!”’ (p. 449).
The NUM headquarters in Sheffield are the scene of planning,
paranoia and intrigue. An embattled leadership with a bunker
mentality, distrustful of incompetence in the areas and fearful of secret-
service penetration in Yorkshire, struggles to centralize decision-
making, direct picketing like a military operation and foil sequestration
of NUM assets through laundering funds. Conversations are clipped
and coded – pickets are ‘apples’, policemen ‘potatoes’ – as ‘the tweeds’
jostle with ‘the denims’, the Communists with the Socialist Workers,
the areas with the national bureaucracy. Central to this narrative is
Terry Winters, the NUM’s national executive officer, loosely based on
his real-life counterpart, Roger Windsor. Here Peace has creatively and
brilliantly used the research gathered together in Seamus Milne’s The
Enemy Within.57
56. I presume that the appellation stems from Willis’s penchant for perform-
ing at any opportunity the old music-hall song: ‘I am the man, The very
fat man, Wot waters the workers’ beer’.
57. S. Milne, The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners (Verso:
1994; new edition 2004). Peace has also used coverage of these issues in
Robin Ramsay’s journal, Lobster, and Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay,
Smear: Wilson and the Secret State (Grafton: 1992). Codes were used by
trade-unionists in the 1926 General Strike, to neutralize police agents and
telephone tapping; see, for example, J. Symons, The General Strike
(Cressett Press: 1957), pp. 140–1.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 161
Milne concludes – and the evidence he assembles is perhaps more
suggestive than conclusive, although the standard of proof required in
these matters is always difficult to decide – that Windsor was planted
by MI5 to destabilize the NUM and undermine Scargill.58 Peace is less
explicit. He presents an enemy within who is an ambiguous figure,
drawn into a world of treachery and moral squalor, through his own
demons and itching libido by the agent Diane and the growing hostility
of his colleagues. However, Winters follows Windsor along the trail of
money-laundering and creative accounting that leads to the embrace of
his ‘fellow trade unionist’ Colonel Gaddafi and in Winters’s case
breakdown and self-destruction.
Like the President, Mrs Thatcher and Ian McGregor, ‘the
Chairman’, are elemental representations of class forces far removed
from characters in the realist novel.59 NCB headquarters at Hobart
House is perceived by capital’s class warriors as unreliable. Replenish-
ing Thatcher and stiffening the Chairman is Stephen Sweet, the profes-
sional strike-breaker whose career is based on the real-life activities of
David Hart.60 Sweet is connected to the Conservative leadership but
also to the secret world through his chauffeur, Neil Fontaine, who, like
Sweet, ‘has his orders’. Presumably as perceived through the eyes of
such feral elements as well as the Conservative plutocracy, the volatile,
self-lacerating Sweet is referred to throughout the book as ‘The Jew’.
Living in daily dread of negotiations – a settlement is unthinkable
and ACAS (the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) stands
58. Seamus Milne’s evidence was based on testimony of the ex-MI5 officer
Michael Bettaney that there was an unnamed spy at the National Union
of Mineworkers (NUM) head office and on information provided by
informants to Milne and Tam Dalyell MP, one of whom stated unequivo-
cally that Roger Windsor was an MI5 plant: Enemy Within, 1994, pp.
238–9. It is now strengthened by MI5 operative David Shayler’s claim that
there was a source in the NUM head office: Enemy Within, 2004, pp.
391–2. Milne’s evidence on surveillance, telephone tapping and dirty tricks
in relation to the NUM and other unions is persuasive. Few would deny
the existence of MI5 agents in the labour movement, as evidenced by ex-
MI5 operative Cathy Massiter’s naming of Harry Newton, well known in
trade-union education and research, and the claim in the programmes
True Spies (BBC2, October–November 2002) that twenty-three senior
union officials, including the NUM’s Joe Gormley, acted as informants.
See also J. Saville, Memoirs from the Left (Merlin: 2003), pp. 124–7.
59. The best-known account of the strike from the management’s perspective
is I. MacGregor, with R. Tyler, The Enemies Within (Collins: 1986). An
intriguing study is N. Smith, The 1984 Miners’ Strike: The Actual Account
(Ned Smith: 1997).
60. For Hart see Milne, Enemy Within, 1994, particularly pp. 364–75.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 162
for Appeasement, Compromise And Surrender – Sweet is the quintes-

sential voice of the New Right, searching for the grail: surrender of the
miners and the disgrace of the President. He soon establishes ascen-
dancy over the Chairman: ‘They get on like a house on fire, the
Chairman and the Jew – They love Capitalism and Opportunity. They
hate Communism and Dependency’ (p. 134). More successfully than
the President, he directs a military-style operation, manipulating
the media and the police and distributing largesse and persuasion all
the way along the path that leads from Silver Fox (Silver Birch) to the
National Working Miners’ Committee and eventually the Union of
Democratic Mineworkers. Victory is achieved, the past is set to rights.
A veteran of the defeats of 1972 and 1974, now near breaking-point in
the service of the secret state, makes a farewell pilgrimage to embrace
the ghosts that haunt Saltley Gates. David Stirling takes the stage but
his form of traditional ruthlessness is now outmoded.61 So too is Sweet.
The miners are broken, he has outlived his usefulness and he is
discarded by Thatcher.
In GB 84 there are no soft landings, no happy endings. The novel is
permeated with anger and despair. In style, scope and sensibility it rep-
resents a seismic shift in the mining novel. It lends vindication to the
argument that while technological development would have devastated
the workforce, there was nothing inexorable in what happened to coal
and its miners. The demolition of the industry was a political decision.
A way of life, whatever its inadequacies, was wantonly destroyed. The
final message as Martin watches the strikers marching with the wraiths
of long-dead miners, while Thatcher squats triumphantly on a
mountain of skulls, tells of the destructiveness and sterility of the new
order. Peace has written a memorable and at times beautifully written
novel. Some will find it atmospheric and addictive, although what
others will see as its excesses and its undeniable intricacies may deter
not a few potential readers. Like the work of Dos Passos it is about
power and the malignancy of power, not only when wielded by the state
but when embedded in man-made institutions which turn into
machines, debilitating humanity. The danger is that Peace’s bleakly pes-
simistic portrayal of the corruptions of power erases the nuances, sub-
tleties and tensions of the traditional novel. As a critic of Ellroy
observed: ‘In his pitch blackness there is no light left to cast shadows
and evil becomes a forensic banality … a supersaturation of corruption
that fails any longer to outrage.’62
61. See n. 45 above.

62. M. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso:
1990), p. 45.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 163
III
There is little danger of that in contemporary labour history or in an

industrial relations that paints power and its problems out of the
picture, sanitizes its ruthless actors, believes that the discipline can and
should peacefully co-exist with the opportunist unitarism of human
resource management and, if it conceives of class struggle at all,
conceives of it in an inverted vision as essentially the property of
workers. The lessons of the mining novel, and in particular GB 84, for
specialists in industrial relations and for historians of labour, do not
require underlining.63
More broadly these novels remind us of the debt that society owed
the miners. As Orwell put it in the 1930s:
It is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons
can remain superior. You and I and the Editor of the Times Lit.
Supp. and the nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and
Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants, all of us owe the com-
parative decency of our lives to the poor drudges underground,
blackened to the eyes with their throats full of coal dust, driving
their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.64
Mining novels enable us to hear something of the authentic voice of

these workers. They teach us not a little about their lives and their
human and political predicament. They reinforce our understanding of
the successes and failures, the potential and limits, of even strong trade-
unionism in twentieth-century Britain. In the context of Orwell’s reflec-
tions they provide one means of looking back in understanding and
anger. Looking back at the calculated inhumanity which the historical
record, as well as the imaginative literature, affirms was inflicted on the
miners in return for their indispensable contribution to society. Edward
Thompson recalled the advice of a Yorkshire coalowner when Charles
II was on the throne: ‘if the colliers complain, be sure to give them
less’.65 In the following three centuries, despite heroic struggles of
63. Cf. C. Whitston, Review of P. Edwards (ed.), Industrial Relations: Theory

and Practice, HSIR 17 (Spring 2004), pp. 160–6. And for a recent uncon-
vincing attempt to write class out of labour history, see ‘Editorial’, Labour
History Review 68:3 (December 2003), p. 292.
64. G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1989; first
published 1937), pp. 30–3.
65. E. P. Thompson, ‘A Special Case’, in idem, Writing by Candlelight (Merlin:
1980), p. 65 (an expanded version of an article first published in New
Society, 24 February 1972).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 164
‘inconceivable stubbornness and courage’,66 less was what they got; less
than men and women needed to lead lives of dignity; less than what
they were worth. Even nationalization was less than emancipation,
conceived and carried on in something less than Lawrence’s spirit of
true democracy. The miners remained the loose change of history, paid
in loose change. Then they were wiped from the face of the earth. The
preordained imperatives of Heslop and Jones never came to pass. The
futures envisioned in different ways by all these novelists from Zola and
Lawrence onwards never happened.
We should not forget. With Hines we should remember the pits and
the people who lived there. With Heslop and Jones, Doherty, Sigal and
McIlvanney, we should register the timeless potential for resistance in
a world where resistance is as necessary as it ever was. With Peace we
should reflect on the supple perennial re-invention of capitalist power.
But we should also remember the future. Although British miners will
play little part in it as a social force, we should ponder the possibility
of other groups of workers learning from the lost worlds of Britain’s
miners; learning new methods of countering capitalist power in decisive
ways, which, for all their stubbornness and courage, the miners them-
selves failed to achieve. The past and present demand pessimism. But
we should not forget that it was not all that long ago that 1984–85 and
its aftermath was an unexpected future.
Department of Sociology, University of Manchester

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL
Thanks to Ian Birchall, Alan Campbell, Bob Jones, Dave Lyddon, Gina, and
Paul Smith for their help.
66. Ibid.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 165
HSIR  ( AUTUMN ) ‒ 165
History of Britain’s Trade Unions

Dave Lyddon
Alastair J. Reid, United We Stand: A History of Britain’s Trade Unions

(Allen Lane: 2004) xvii + 471pp., hardback £25.00, ISBN 0-713-99758-3.
‘The serious history of British trade unionism’ started with Sidney and
Beatrice Webb in 1894, wrote Eric Hobsbawm some forty years ago. He
continued: ‘If we leave aside the herculean attempts … of its founders
and G. D. H. Cole, its progress for the first fifty years was disappoint-
ing’. Yet in the twenty years preceding Hobsbawm’s 1964 essay there
was a ‘sharp’ increase in ‘output’, mainly of single-union histories – so
much so that a new synthesis was possible.1
Henry Pelling, the historian of the Labour Party, produced A
History of British Trade Unionism, just such a work of synthesis, which
went through five editions from 1963 to 1992;2 in the same period the
original researche of industrial relations specialist Hugh Clegg, initially
with two collaborators, produced three major volumes on the years
1889–1951.3 Labour history flourished, particularly in the 1960s and
1970s. The valuable literature reviews by A. E. Musson and John Lovell
were testament to this.4 Histories of individual unions have continued
1. E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Trade Union Historiography’, Bulletin of the Society for

the Study of Labour History (BSSLH) 8 (Spring 1964), p. 31.
2. H. Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Macmillan: 1963) was
followed by new editions in 1972, 1976, 1987 and 1992. As well as revising
the text and the ‘Further Reading’ where necessary, each new edition
extended the narrative. The book was also generally available as a Penguin
paperback.
3. H. A. Clegg, A. Fox and A. F. Thompson, A History of British Trade
Unions since 1889, Vol. 1: 1889–1910 (Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1964); H.
A. Clegg, A History of British Trade Unions since 1889, Vol. 2: 1911–1933
(Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1985); idem, A History of British Trade Unions
since 1889, Vol. 3: 1934–1951 (Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1994).
4. A. E. Musson, British Trade Unions, 1800–1875 (Macmillan: 1972); J.
Lovell, British Trade Unions, 1875–1933 (Macmillan: 1977).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 166
to be written and the flow shows little sign of dissipating.5 In the 1990s
new general histories of trade-unionism, by Keith Laybourn and W.
Hamish Fraser, also appeared.6
The audience for general histories once was more clearly working-
class. The Webbs were not just interested, as Fabian socialists, in
educating the opinion-formers in society, they also sought a trade-
union audience – by presenting inscribed copies of The History of
Trade Unionism to trade unions in 1898 and, later, by printing cheap
editions for ‘students of the Workers’ Educational Association’ and
‘the trade unionists of the United Kingdom’.7 The tradition of writing
labour history, but with a clearer political message, for working-class
activists, can be seen in, for example, W. W. Craik’s short history, aimed
initially at members of the National Union of Railwaymen, Raymond
Postgate’s series for the National Council of Labour Colleges, and
Allen Hutt’s for the Communist Party of Great Britain and its sup-
porters.8 The most outstanding recent example, aimed at activists, was
Tony Lane’s The Union Makes Us Strong, published over thirty years
5. D. Lyddon, ‘Industrial-Relations Theory and Labor History’, Interna-

tional Labor and Working-Class History 46 (1994), p. 138, n. 38, lists six
published between 1988 and 1991 alone.
6. K. Laybourn, A History of British Trade Unionism, c. 1770–1990 (Sutton,
Stroud: 1992); W. H. Fraser, A History of British Trade Unionism,
1700–1998 (Macmillan: 1999). For Fraser, see D. Lyddon, ‘Review’, His-
torical Studies in Industrial Relations 9 (Spring 2000), pp. 167–70.
7. C. Wrigley, ‘The Webbs: Working on Trade Union History’, History
Today, May 1987, pp. 51–5; for correspondence on the economics of cheap
editions, see, for example, N. MacKenzie, The Letters of Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, Vol. 3: Pilgrimage, 1912–1947 (Cambridge University
Press: 1978), pp. 128, 134.
8. W. W. Craik, Outlines of the History of the Modern British Working-Class
Movement (London District Council, NUR: 1916); idem, A Short History
of the Modern British Working-Class Movement (Plebs League: 1919); R.
W. Postgate, A Short History of the British Workers (Plebs League: 1926);
idem, A Pocket History of the British Workers to 1919 (London: 1937);
idem, A Pocket History of the British Working Class (NCLC, Tillicoultry:
1942), with new editions in 1947 and 1964; A. Hutt, British Trade
Unionism: An Outline History (Lawrence and Wishart: 1941); revised or
extended editions of Hutt followed in 1942, 1945, 1952 and 1962, culmi-
nating in idem, British Trade Unionism: A Short History (Lawrence and
Wishart: 1975), with a concluding chapter by John Gollan. Also see
Ruskin History Workshop Students Collective, ‘Worker-Historians in the
1920s’, in R. Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory
(Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1981), pp. 15–20; I am grateful to John
McIlroy for drawing this to my attention.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 167
LYDDON: HISTORY OF BRITAIN’S TRADE UNIONS 167

ago. In it he argued that the working class’s ‘one durable monument’
was the trade unions.9
Yet Cole, who was pre-eminent in writing labour-movement, rather
than just trade-union, history,10 once emphasized the indivisibility of
the labour movement: ‘Until there are Trade Unions, there is no
Labour Movement … [for they are,] historically, the first form of
distinct working-class organisation … [and are] the principal schools in
which the workers learn the lessons of self-reliance and solidarity’. As
importantly, ‘Trade Unions, Co-operative Societies, political parties
and Socialist organisations … together’ made up ‘the modern working-
class movement’. They were, ‘at bottom, not three or four movements,
but one and indivisible’.11 Raymond Williams further observed in the
late 1950s that working-class culture had been ‘primarily social (in that
it ha[d] created institutions) rather than individual (in particular intel-
lectual or imaginative work)’. The formation of the ‘collective democ-
ratic institution, whether in the trade unions, the cooperative
movement, or a political party’ was ‘a very remarkable creative
achievement’.12
As the Webbs long ago proclaimed:
Trade Unions are democracies: that is to say, their internal constitu-

tions are all based on the principle of “government of the people by
the people for the people” … These thousands of working-class
democracies, spontaneously growing up at different times and
places, untrammelled by the traditions or interests of other classes,
[are] perpetually recasting their constitutions to meet new and
varying conditions.13
9. T. Lane, The Union Makes Us Strong: The British Working Class, Its Trade
Unionism and Politics (Arrow: 1974), p. 28.
10. One of his most famous works was G. D. H. Cole and R. Postgate, The
Common People, 1746–1938 (Methuen: 1938) – this was revised as idem,
The Common People, 1746–1946 (Methuen: 1946), which was periodically
reprinted with minor corrections until 1961. Other books on the labour
movement include A. L. Morton and G. Tate, The British Labour
Movement, 1770–1920 (Lawrence and Wishart: 1956), and M. Davis,
Comrade or Brother: The History of the British Labour Movement,
1789–1951 (Pluto: 1993).
11. G. D. H. Cole, A Short History of the British Working-Class Movement,
1789–1947 (revised edn; Allen and Unwin: 1948), pp. 6, 7.
12. R. Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Penguin, Harmondsworth:
1961; first published 1958), p. 314.
13. S. and B. Webb, Industrial Democracy (Longmans, Green and Co.: 1897),
pp. v–vi.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 168
Trade unions are created, and re-created, by their members, in a society

many of them would not have chosen. Although general histories of
unions do not now tend to be written for a trade-union audience, they
are necessarily drawn upon by, among others, trade-union and labour-
movement activists, whether the books sit on library shelves or appear
in affordable paperback editions.14 These histories also reflect, in some
way, the changing preoccupations of authors and the concerns of
changing audiences.
United We Stand is the direct successor to the trade-union histories by

Pelling, who had collaborated with Alastair Reid on the last edition of
his A Short History of the Labour Party15 and had put Reid ‘in touch
with his publishers’ (p. 423) before he died in 1997. Reid’s book is an
ambitious attempt to cover around 250 years of trade-union history in
some 400 pages of text. When it is considered that Clegg’s volumes on
British unions, covering just over sixty years, are nearly four times the
length of United We Stand, the difficulty of the task is obvious.
Most general British trade-union histories, starting with their
origins, take a more or less chronological approach. Reid is more
ambitious. His book is divided into four main periods – designated as
early, middle, classical, and modern – incorporating, in turn, roughly
50-year periods corresponding to ‘economic waves’, each generally
involving ‘phases of expansion’ that followed ‘phases of instability and
decline’ (p. xii): the 1770s to the 1820s, the 1820s to the 1870s, the 1870s
to the 1920s, and the 1920s to the 1970s. The first and second periods
occupy together about the same number of pages of text as is devoted
to the third and fourth individually; one must assume that this was a
conscious decision. A prologue, ‘From Medieval Guilds to Modern
Trade Unions’, and an epilogue, charting the years after the first
general election victory of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, complete the
text.
Within each period there is a thematic subdivision into chapters.
These follow specific groups of workers and their unions. The first
group is of workers ‘mainly concerned with assembling products from
14. J. Saville, Memoirs from the Left (Merlin: 2003), p. 180, notes that idem,
The Labour Movement in Britain: A Commentary (Faber: 1987), was ‘to
my surprise my most commonly used text in public libraries’. Reid’s book
is being published as a Penguin paperback in 2005.
15. H. Pelling and A. J. Reid, A Short History of the Labour Party (11th edn;
Macmillan: 1996).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 169

a number of components’, known here as ‘assembly workers’, and their
form of organization, ‘craft unionism’. A second type consists of
‘process workers’ who were ‘mainly concerned with processing a single
raw material through a variety of stages’, such as in textile manufac-
ture, coalmining and iron and steel manufacture (railways are also
eventually included in this category); ‘seniority unionism’ is used to
describe their organization. A third group, which does not make its
appearance in Reid’s book until the 1870s, are the ‘general workers’,
‘who performed general manual labouring tasks’, not just in fixed
workplaces but particularly in transport operations; their union bodies
‘evolved into what here will be called federal unionism’ (pp. ix–xi). The
individual chapters following the fortunes of these groups are further
subdivided and thus move back and forth through the allotted half-
centuries. The final chapter in each period discusses trade unions’
involvement in and with political movements; a slightly more chrono-
logical arrangement is necessarily adopted here.
Reid’s justification for separating workers and their unions into
three groups is that:
British trade unionists were not a uniform army marching towards

a single goal under a disciplined leadership, but rather a cross-
section of the working population attempting to meet their
immediate needs by whatever means lay at hand, and consequently
acting in different ways and at different times. (p. ix)
This leads him to stress the ‘significant continuities within each of the
types’ of unionism (p. x). The craft unions’ commitment to voluntarism
‘became the basic underpinning of wider labour politics in Britain’
(p. xi), notwithstanding the dependence of the seniority and federal
unions on government intervention in, or regulation of, their con-
stituent industries. Industrial continuities are paralleled, in Reid’s
judgement, by political ones. Given the stress on the different industrial
experiences of Reid’s three groups of workers and unions, the book’s
title, United We Stand, is perhaps surprising.
One result of Reid’s arrangement of material is that some of the
familiar landmarks of trade-union history are diluted, appearing
briefly in more than one chapter. This is clearly not a reference book.
For example, his coverage of the ‘Great Unrest’ of 1911–14 is frag-
mented: nine of the period’s fourteen major strikes, examined by
Clegg,16 are dispersed across three chapters by Reid (between p. 175
16. Clegg, History of British Trade Unions, Vol. 2, p. 26, Table 1.

HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 170
and p. 227). Only late on, when discussing (on pp. 225–6) the transport
workers’ strikes (quite separately from his account of the 1911 national
railway strike – on p. 207 – despite their interconnection in Liverpool),
does Reid acknowledge that there was anything special about these
years. Similarly, the General Strike of 1926 merits just a dozen lines in
an account of the mining crisis (p. 315), followed some fifty pages later
by interspersed comments on the political consequences of the strike
(pp. 365–7). In between, there is the first of many mentions of the
‘Winter of Discontent’ (pp. 355–7), of which more below.
Another consequence of covering particular years or events up to
three or four times is the dispersal of information on relative price and
wage movements. Thus, we are told of engineers (p. 282) and railway
workers (p. 310) experiencing wage cuts through the 1920s and into the
early 1930s, but only when Reid addresses the same phenomenon for
the textile workers are we informed that this might relate to ‘the fall in
the cost of living’ (p. 311). We are not always given even this amount of
information. Thus Reid claims that coalminers, after their successful
1974 strike, ‘were able to gain regular wage increases of anything up to
30 per cent a year’ (p. 329), but no figures are cited for the level of
(price) inflation. The public-service strikes of early 1979 (p. 355), part
of the ‘Winter of Discontent’, resulted in the public employees’ union
having to accept a 9% rise. Yet we are not informed that prices were
rising at over 9% per annum17 at the beginning of that year nor (until
later on the same page) that there was a 5% pay norm – the juxtaposi-
tion of which two factors precipitated the public-service and other
strikes of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in the first place. Given the sensi-
tivity of wage movements to (rising or falling) price levels and (for the
1960s and 1970s) to incomes-policy norms, the specialist as well as the
general reader requires some assistance.
One feature, which marks out Reid’s history, is that he begins each
of the thematic chapters with a potted biography of a trade-unionist
who spans the period in question: namely, in order, Francis Place, John
Doherty, John Gast, Robert Applegarth, Alexander Macdonald,
George Howell, John Hill, J. H. Thomas, Mary Macarthur, Arthur
Henderson, Hugh Scanlon, Joe Gormley, Jack Jones and James
Callaghan. This technique introduces an important human note but
17. Department of Employment Gazette, November 1979, p. 1161, Table 1,

shows a continual rise in the annual rate of increase of the Retail Price
Index (RPI) from late 1978 through 1979. In mid-January 1979, the RPI
was rising at an annual rate of 9.3% and by mid-May this had increased to
10.3%.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 171

Reid’s selection highlights some of its drawbacks. First, among their
various national positions, nine of these individuals became the leading
official of their union, one the first Trades Union Congress (TUC)
secretary, and four of them also became MPs, including three Labour
ministers. Not surprisingly, only one woman features in such company.
Second, by selecting figures whose active life usually spans the fifty-
year periods into which the core of the book is divided, Reid confines
his examples mainly to those reaching prominence at the end of these
periods. Thus, for the 1920s to 1970s, we have three major union
leaders, Scanlon, Gormley and Jones, and Callaghan, a Labour Prime
Minister (and former white-collar union official). The generations rep-
resented by the likes of Ernest Bevin, Arthur Horner and Walter
Citrine, for example, do not fit this schema.
The written or spoken words of (or occasionally words about) these
fourteen trade-unionists provide one-half of the book’s endnotes –
some 73 of 143. The remaining notes are also only given for quotations.
Even this relative paucity of sources is a significant advance on Pelling,
who directly referenced nothing in his successive editions. Like Pelling,
though, Reid does provide a guide to ‘further reading’. He acknowl-
edges his ‘main intellectual debts’ here; interestingly, Reid does not cite
the Webbs in his lists of further reading. Yet, for Pelling, in 1992 as in
1963: ‘the classic work by Sydney and Beatrice Webb … remains indis-
pensable for any detailed study of the subject’ and, even more impor-
tantly, ‘of great value is the Webbs’ Industrial Democracy … , an
analytical survey of the changing character of trade unionism’.18
Even the Webbs ‘acknowledge[d] the value’ of the work of their own
forerunners:19 Lujo Brentano – with whom they debated for several
pages, in the first chapter of their History, on his view that unions were
the direct descendants of the guilds – and Howell, who, from his
position as a leading trade-unionist and reformer and then an MP,
chronicled the development of trade-unionism in various books.20 As
noted by Hobsbawm, and others, the Webbs’ History transformed the
subject: their work was rooted in primary, secondary and newspaper
sources. In their 1920 revision some 250 pages were also added for the
18. Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (5th edn; 1992), ‘Further
Reading’, p. 328; in the first (1963) edition (p. 264) the word ‘classical’,
rather than ‘classic’, is used.
19. S. and B. Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (Longmans, Green and
Co.: 1894), Preface, p. x.
20. Three of Howell’s books are cited in the Webbs’ bibliography in ibid., pp.
518–19. The only one mentioned by Reid (p. 134) was published after the
first edition of the Webbs’ History.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 172
years since 1890, but relatively few sources were cited.21 After the
Webbs, Cole was the most prolific writer on unions and their history
but, in his more general works, his easy style of writing was built on his
profound knowledge and he also did not tend to display his sources. He
was a popularizer.22 In some ways this feature was less important than
the general neglect in union histories of the Webbs’ theory of trade-
unionism, developed by them in Industrial Democracy (published three
years after their History). Unfortunately, the Webbs’ updating of the
History in 1920 did not integrate the insights of Industrial Democracy.
Hence a separation between history and theory was built in; with a few
notable exceptions, most subsequent historical accounts of trade-
unionism (either of individual unions or the wider movement) have
been distinctly atheoretical.
II
Reid’s book is no exception to this neglect of theory, though his sepa-

ration of workers and their unions into three main groups is a serious
attempt to recast two centuries of trade-unionism. Yet his chosen
division reproduces, but not in name, the traditional, but inadequate,
textbook classification of craft, industrial and general unions.23 It
would have worked better if Reid had used other authors’ insights more
explicitly. Instead, there are a number of weaknesses in his categories:
assembly workers and craft unionism; process workers and seniority
unionism; general workers and federal unionism.
The most stimulating attempt, after the Webbs, to theorize union
structure and government was by H. A. Turner. He put forward a
typology of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ unions, based on whether the union
regulated entry into the occupation or whether it did not.24 Clegg
disputed the utility of Turner’s typology and John Hughes’s develop-
21. S. and B. Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (revised edn, extended to
1920; Longmans, Green and Co.: 1920).
22. See L. P. Carpenter, G. D. H. Cole: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge
University Press: 1953), ch. 7.
23. G. D. H. Cole, An Introduction to Trade Unionism (Labour Research
Department and Allen and Unwin: 1918), pp. 13–18, though this also
offered some other classifications; ibid., (Allen and Unwin: 1953), pp.
76–88; A. Flanders, Trade Unions (Hutchinson: 1952), p. 26; ibid. (7th edn:
1968), p. 25; H. A. Clegg, The Changing System of Industrial Relations in
Great Britain (Blackwell, Oxford: 1979), p. 165.
24. H. A. Turner, Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy: A Comparative
Study of the Cotton Unions (Allen and Unwin: 1962), p. 114.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 173

ment of it.25 For Clegg, their categories were ‘of very limited value in
describing the unparalleled complexity of British union structure.
There is no acceptable alternative to examining individual unions in
turn.’26 Despite this, even Clegg did attempt to identify patterns; the
one that most concerns us here, as we will see below, is that encom-
passing what he identified as the ten ‘conglomerate’ unions with over
50,000 members each in 1976.27
Before examining Reid’s classification of unionism, it is necessary to
challenge his phrase ‘assembly workers’; these were really manufactur-
ing workers. Assembly has connotations of flow production, with
workers putting together interchangeable components. In practice,
most craft workers made, by hand (i.e., manufactured), the constituent
parts of the product, fitting (rather than assembling) them together. In
processes where machines (as opposed to mechanical aids) were
increasingly used, craft workers were often, but not always, displaced
from these operations. In the classic twentieth-century assembly
industry of motor cars, craft unionism was slowly marginalized, with
craftsmen pushed out into toolmaking, maintenance or development
functions. So when Reid discusses ‘Shop-floor Bargaining among the
Assembly Workers’ (the title of his Chapter 12 on the 1920s to the
1970s) and emphasizes the car industry, it is misleading to suggest that
this industry was anything other than a meeting ground of craft, ex-
craft and general unions. Here Turner’s dynamic typology of open and
closed unions would have been helpful. In some industries craft unions
were able to retain, despite technological change, the traditional area of
work for their members and so remained closed; in others they had to
find a way of regulating those non-craft workers now undertaking
some of their former work. In the latter cases, Turner argued that when
an ‘originally-closed’ union, for example the Amalgamated Engineer-
25. J. Hughes, Trade Union Structure and Government, Part 1: Trade Union
Structure and Government, Royal Commission on Trade Unions and
Employers’ Associations, Research Paper 5, Part 1 (HMSO: 1967), paras
7–39.
26. Clegg, The Changing System of Industrial Relations, p. 165.
27. Ibid., pp. 171–4, 165 n. 3. Clegg also identified eighteen public-sector
unions with over 50,000 members in 1976; these were generally single-
service/industry unions with the exception of the National and Local Gov-
ernment Officers’ Association and the National Union of Public
Employees (NUPE). Finally, there were eleven private-sector unions of
this size, with ‘relatively simple structures’; these again were either single-
industry or industry-group unions: ibid., pp. 166–71.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 174
ing Union (AEU), opened up, its government would be dominated by

an ‘aristocracy’ of the skilled members.28
The originally-closed union did not have to have apprenticeship-
based craft members: the cotton spinners and their subsequent recruit-
ment of the ‘piecers’ would be an example of a different type of
aristocracy. Turner also extended the term ‘aristocracy’ to those
‘largely-vertical unions operating in industries where the higher-grade
(or better-paid) wage-earners have secured some control over their own
recruitment’. He gave, as an example, ‘face-workers in the miners’
unions’.29 Clegg was more matter-of-fact: in ‘trades where there was no
apprenticeship, … the unions systematized the rules [many of which
predated the unions] governing the size of each team and the
promotion ladder from labourer to the top man; and the top men ran
the unions’. Clegg referred to these bodies as ‘promotion-line unions’.30
Reid’s second group (the process workers) exhibit, according to him,
‘seniority unionism’. While this term is less precise than Clegg’s, Reid
does capture an important aspect of trade-unionism in textiles,
coalmining, and iron and steel. Here there was a division between the
senior workers, paid on piece-work, and their helpers (often employed
by the senior workers on a subcontract basis), who were usually on
time-work.31 Whether it is useful to extend the category of process
workers into the very different world, and pay systems, of railways, as
Reid does, is doubtful.
There is, though, one feature of unionism in coal and cotton, in par-
ticular, that does stand out and has attracted the attention of the major
writers in the subject: that is, its federal nature. It will be argued here
that federal unionism is a much more meaningful term for Reid’s
second group than his attempt to use it for the unions of general
workers. Turner even noted that a ‘federal structure appears … to have
been quite typical of such “Old Unions” as were not also craft organi-
zations’.32 As early as 1926 Cole had drawn attention to the existence
of two ‘new models’ in the third quarter of the nineteenth century: the
28. Turner, Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy, pp. 289–90.
29. Ibid.
30. Clegg, The Changing System of Industrial Relations, pp. 26, 182. Turner,
Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy, pp. 234, 260, referred variously
to occupations with a ‘promotion ladder’ and a ‘job ladder’.
31. H. A. Turner, ‘Trade Unions, Differentials and the Levelling of Wages’,
The Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 20:3 (1952), pp.
264–5.
32. Turner, Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy, p. 230; by ‘Old Unions’
he meant before the ‘New Unionism’ of the 1880s.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 175

unions of the engineers and of the cotton operatives. The engineers had
‘a centralised constitution, but local bargaining’ while the cotton oper-
atives had ‘a localised constitution, but tended … to central bargain-
ing’.33 The ‘amalgamations’ in cotton unionism had nothing to do with
the craft amalgamations: ‘The local [cotton] associations … , instead of
becoming mere branches of a national body, retained their separate
existence and funds, only uniting in a central “amalgamation” for
industrial purposes.’34
The coalminers also developed a series of federal organizations
during the nineteenth century, both regionally and nationally, culmi-
nating in the establishment of the Miners’ (later Mineworkers’) Feder-
ation of Great Britain (MFGB) in 1889. The Northumberland and
Durham associations were the last regional bodies to join the MFGB
permanently (in 1907–08). In between times regional federal unions
were still being created: the Scottish Miners’ Federation was formed
during a strike in 1894 and the South Wales Miners’ Federation as a
result of a lockout in 1898.35 In the first part of Industrial Democracy,
the Webbs praised, at length, the representative institutions of the
coalminers and the cotton operatives, not only observing their ‘federal
basis’ but advocating generally that for union organization ‘to reach its
highest possible efficiency’ it ‘must … assume a federal form’ (added
emphasis).36
Beyond federal unionism there also existed a separate tradition of
union federations, where autonomous unions joined together, for
mutual support, particularly for bargaining purposes but sometimes
for political ends (such as the United Textile Factory Workers’ Associ-
ation in the cotton industry).37 These federations were to be found in all
types of industry.38 Thus craft and general unions united in the Feder-
33. Cole, A Short History of the British Working Class Movement, 1789–1925,
Vol. 2: 1848–1900 (Allen and Unwin: 1926), pp. 62, 63. Almost exactly the
same formulation is found in J. W. F. Rowe, Wages in Practice and Theory
(Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1969; first published 1928), p. 123, n. 1.
34. Cole, A Short History, Vol. 2 (1926), p. 62. Also see G. D. H. Cole, ‘Some
Notes on Trade Unionism in the Third Quarter of the Nineteenth
Century’ (1937), in E. M. Carus-Wilson (ed.), Essays in Economic History,
Vol. 3 (Edward Arnold: 1962), pp. 202–19.
35. Clegg et al., History of British Trade Unions, Vol. 1, pp. 123–5, 407 n 3.
36. S. and B. Webb, Industrial Democracy, pp. 57, 140.
37. S. and B. Webb, History (1920), p. 553, noted a shift from ‘loose alliances’
to ‘negotiating bodies’. Cole, An Introduction to Trade Unionism (1918),
pp. 23–5, identified three main types of federation.
38. B. C. Roberts, Trade Union Government and Administration in Great
Britain (Bell: 1956), noted that there were forty-nine separate trade-union
federations listed by the Ministry of Labour in 1952.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 176
ation of Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades in 1891 (reconstituted as

the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions in 1936;
with the AEU finally joining permanently in 1947).39 The National
Federation of Building Trades Operatives (NFBTO, 1918) went further
than involvement in national and regional collective bargaining,
forming ‘composite branches’ in places where the separate unions were
too weak to set up their own branches.40 It was only disbanded after the
formation of the industrial union UCATT in 1971.41 As with the
Printing and Kindred Trades Federation (1901), which, after a number
of union mergers, was dissolved in 1974,42 the NFBTO brought
together unions representing skilled and unskilled workers. Reid notes
(p. 335) that most of the constituent unions of the other big, though
short-lived, union federation, the National Transport Workers’ Feder-
ation (1911), formed the Transport and General Workers’ Union
(TGWU) in 1922.43
Having argued the case for categorizing many of Reid’s second
group of unions more accurately as federal (though not denying the
vertical nature of employment practices), we now turn to his third
group. According to him, the TGWU was ‘a federation of trade groups’
and the National Union of General and Municipal Workers
(NUGMW) was ‘a federation of regions’ (p. 336). There is some truth
in the former, as it reflected what generally became separate industry-
wide bargaining units; yet the trade groups in the TGWU had limited
autonomy (certainly no financial powers) while the general executive
council had a mixture of trade-group and regional representation.44
39. A. I. Marsh, Industrial Relations in Engineering (Pergamon, Oxford:

1965), pp. 6–7.
40. Clegg, History of British Trade Unions, Vol. 2, p. 202.
41. The Union of Construction and Allied Trades and Technicians.
42. J. Gennard, A History of the National Graphical Association (Unwin
Hyman: 1990), pp. 274–6; separate provincial and London federations had
been formed earlier but with no independent income: J. Child, Industrial
Relations in the British Printing Industry: The Quest for Security (Allen
and Unwin: 1967), p. 195.
43. Reid wrongly claims that only the seamen’s union stayed out. The
Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU)’s withdrawal from the
federation in 1923 dealt it ‘a mortal blow’ and it ‘faded away’ in 1927: A.
Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, Vol. 1: Trade Union Leader,
1881–1940 (Heinemann: 1960), p. 222.
44. J. Hughes, Trade Union Structure and Government, Part 2: Membership
Participation and Trade Union Government, Royal Commission on Trade
Unions and Employers’ Associations, Research Paper 5, Part 2 (HMSO:
1968), paras 78–80, explained the ‘adaptability’ and ‘limits’ of the trade-
group structure in the TGWU.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 177

The NUGMW had a much stronger regional structure: the regional
(formerly district) secretary ‘wields very great power’ (elsewhere, Clegg
referred to them collectively as the ‘barons’). While Clegg claimed that
the NUGMW was ‘considerably more decentralized than other
unions’, the regions were clearly not independent organizations in the
federal tradition.45 In fact, the presence of the regional secretaries on
the NUGMW national executive committee was inherited from the
move away from a ‘local’ executive by the Gasworkers’ union in 1908.46
According to Reid, these unions were ‘poorly equipped for the long
economic boom after 1945’ (p. 336). The TGWU’s ‘centralized consti-
tution’ (hardly a feature of federal unions) ‘remained unchanged’ even
after the reforms under Jones. The ‘welding together’ of the organiza-
tion ‘still depended … on the qualities of leadership provided by the
general secretary … This was not a stable basis’ (p. 345). The govern-
ment of such unions of general workers has been categorized by Turner
as ‘popular bossdom’, though he distinguished between the ‘central
and usually dominating role of the General Secretary in the T&GWU’
and ‘the virtual oligarchy of District Secretaries in the NUGMW’.47
Reid’s account of such unions does not find any support in the liter-
ature of industrial relations. Clegg observed that the ‘conglomerates’,
as he described most of the largest unions (which included those of
general workers), were ‘the main beneficiaries from amalgamations’,
one of the two main causes of change in the external structure of
unions (the other being the rapid membership growth or decline of
some unions). Clegg also argued that, while ‘[f]or some years’ after the
Second World War, the conglomerates ‘might have been represented as
inflexible bodies’, they showed themselves in the 1960s and 1970s to be
‘highly flexible … ; capable of adapting their forms of government; and
capable of responding to radical alterations in the structure of collec-
tive bargaining’.48 The TGWU, in particular, was a merger-friendly
45. H. A. Clegg, General Union: A Study of the National Union of General and
Municipal Workers (Blackwell, Oxford: 1954), pp. 51, 55. The ‘barons’
quote is in Clegg, The Changing System of Industrial Relations, p. 211.
46. H. A. Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society: A Short History of the
National Union of General and Municipal Workers, 1889–1964 (Blackwell,
Oxford: 1964), pp. 50–1. I am grateful to Paul Smith for drawing this to
my attention.
47. Turner, Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy, pp. 290–1; Hughes,
Trade Union Structure and Government, Part 2, para. 34, argued that,
within popular bossdoms, ‘there are many gradations in the relations
between officers and members, in the forms and extent of participation,
and indeed in the “popular” character of the “bossdom”’.
48. Clegg, The Changing System of Industrial Relations, p. 225.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 178
union.49 It was also able to accommodate two big shifts of influence

within its ranks in the 1970s: from national officers towards shop
stewards; and from members in the docks and London buses towards
those in manufacturing industries.50
The term ‘federal unionism’ is surely then a misnomer for Reid’s
third group of unions. ‘General’ unionism, or Turner’s ‘open’
unionism, would be preferable and not as misleading as Reid’s choice,
which should be used for the second group. In the book’s last chapter,
Reid does refer to ‘massive new conglomerates’ when discussing the
results of some big mergers from the 1980s onwards; the GMB,
UNISON and Amicus are specifically named (pp. 411–12). Due to
Reid’s lack of referencing, it is not clear whether he has gleaned the
term ‘conglomerate’ from Clegg or if it is his own; but as he also uses
the expression ‘mega unions’ (p. 420), one suspects the latter.
Reid’s tendency to use the term ‘federation’ when discussing what he
conceives to be federal unionism (and the limitations of his use of this
latter term) is further shown in his account of white-collar unions in the
1960s and 1970s. The ‘white-collar bodies which were growing most
rapidly were those … adopting the federal ambitions of the large
general manual workers’ unions’; and he notes the ‘explosive growth’ of
‘the new federations’, such as the ‘significantly renamed’ National and
Local Government Officers’ Association (NALGO), the Association of
Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS) and the National
Union of Public Employees (NUPE)51 –– mistakenly identifying the
last as white-collar (pp. 348–9). Yet while NALGO moved in the 1960s
to some autonomy for its different public-service groups, according to
its historian it ‘emphatically rejected the idea of a federal system’.52
ASTMS was a general white-collar union, one of Clegg’s white-collar
‘conglomerates’, having ‘little regard for either occupational or indus-
49. R. Undy, V. Ellis, W. E. J. McCarthy and A. M. Halmos, Change in Trade

Unions: The Development of UK Unions since the 1960s (Hutchinson:
1981), p. 218, described the TGWU (along with the Association of Scien-
tific, Technical and Managerial Staffs) as a union that possessed ‘features
that facilitated mergers’, particularly its trade-group structure (original
emphasis); also see n. 44 above.
50. J. England, ‘Shop Stewards in Transport House: A Comment upon the
Incorporation of the Rank and File’, Industrial Relations Journal 12:5
(1981), pp. 16–29.
51. According to Reid, NUPE’s position in early 1979 ‘manifested all the
familiar weaknesses of federal unionism’ (p. 356).
52. A. Spoor, White-Collar Union: Sixty Years of NALGO (Heinemann:
1967), p. 325.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 179

trial boundaries’, whereas NUPE was, according to Hughes and Clegg,
a ‘sectoral-general’ union in the public services;53 the government of
both at the time would fit Turner’s ‘popular bossdom’ category,54 far
removed from federalism.
Overall, though, the rise of white-collar and public-service unionism
(with considerable overlap between the two) merits only a few pages’
discussion in Reid’s book (pp. 346–50), despite their growing impor-
tance since the 1940s and their centrality to the trade-union movement
of today. The role of women is also briefly addressed at this point
(pp. 350–3), given their numbers in public-service white-collar unions.
While both topics receive only limited coverage, it is an advance on
Pelling’s meagre fare.
III
Whether or not Reid’s categories of trade union could have been

improved, there are a number of areas where his interpretation of events
needs challenging. The first concerns ‘new model’ unionism. Because
Reid does not discuss the Webbs’ work, let alone take issue with them, he
misses the opportunity to give his view on a long-standing debate. He
does admit: ‘There has been much discussion about whether the
craftsmen’s organizations in the middle of the nineteenth century deserve
to be called “new model” unions [the Webbs’ term], as they drew many of
their practices from earlier organizations and their methods were far from
universally adopted.’ He continues, ‘Be that as it may, Applegarth and his
colleagues may still be referred to as “new model” unionists’ (p. 87).
The Webbs have been accused of exaggerating the importance of the
novelty of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) as a ‘new
model’. A. E. Musson and Allen, for example, were among the critics,
with the latter declaiming that calling the ASE a new model union
‘ranks as a piece of historical fiction’.55 Yet the Webbs made clear that
53. Clegg, The Changing System of Industrial Relations, pp. 176, 169; Hughes,
Trade Union Structure and Government, Part 1, para. 16.
54. Hughes, Trade Union Structure and Government, Part 2, para. 29 for
NUPE.
55. Musson, British Trade Unions, 1800–1875, ch. 6, summarized the debate.
See, also, A. E. Musson, Trade Union and Social History (Frank Cass:
1974), pp. 9, 17–21; V. L. Allen, ‘Valuations and Historical Interpretation’,
in idem, The Sociology of Industrial Relations: Studies in Method
(Longman: 1971), p. 32. For earlier expressions of these authors’ views, see
the separate contributions by V. L. Allen, A. E. Musson, and H. Clegg, in
the conference report on ‘The Webbs as Historians of Trade Unionism’,
BSSLH 4 (Spring 1962), pp. 4–9.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 180
the ASE took over ‘in its entirety, the elaborate constitution, the
scheme of benefits, the trade policy, and even the official staff of the
Journeymen Steam-Engine and Machine Makers and Millwrights’
Society’.56 For the Webbs, it was ‘the dramatic events of 1852 [i.e. the
survival of the lockout] which made the establishment of the … [ASE]
a turning-point in the history of the Trade Union Movement’, espe-
cially as a trade union which ‘could count on a regular income of £500
a week was without precedent’.57 Turner made a similar point, stressing
‘the undoubted stimulus the … [ASE’s] survival of its 1852 lock-out
gave to the idea of closer grouping in other trades where the seeds of
organization had already taken firm root’.58
Reid does revise the generally accepted understanding of the role of
collective bargaining in nineteenth-century craft unionism: according
to him, during the ten years after the 1852 engineering lockout
‘employers began to recognize the union [ASE] and to reach compro-
mise agreements with it over wages and working conditions on a
district-by-district basis’ (p. 99). More generally, he contends that the
‘central demand’ of craft unions was ‘for the recognition of collective
bargaining, in which they were largely successful by the end of the
1860s’ (p. xiii). This claim seems to be based mainly on the experience
of the building crafts; J. W. F. Rowe argued long ago that the effective-
ness of local collective bargaining in building was ‘almost unique’ and
explained it by the industry’s ‘peculiar economic structure’ and the
prevalence of hourly wage contracts, allowing ‘great potential fluidity
of labour between different firms in any district’.59 As a result there was
‘an almost natural standardisation of wage rates’ in a town or district.
By the 1880s, ‘once agreed a rate continued to operate until revised …
[A]lterations were demanded by either side as and when the state of the
labour market, and the state of trade … appeared to provide an oppor-
tunity’.60
Allan Flanders suggested that collective bargaining in engineering
developed during the 1870s and 1880s, though Clegg, Fox and
Thompson claimed that any such bargaining was based only on
‘uniform advances or reductions in the existing spread of rates for the
district’. Employers did not recognize the union’s (minimum) district
56. S. and B. Webb, History (1894), p. 194.

57. Ibid., pp. 198, 195 n. 1; once the ASE started growing again, its ‘income …
surpassed the wildest dreams of previous Trade Union organisations’,
ibid., p. 203. Reid (p. 144) mistakenly cites the date of the lockout as 1851.
58. Turner, Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy, p. 201.
59. Rowe, Wages in Practice and Theory, pp. 126, 65–6.
60. Ibid., pp. 130, 126.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 181

rates. The union enforced these, where it could, by withdrawing those
individual members who received less than the district rate, and paying
them benefit, using what the Webbs called the ‘strike in detail’ and the
method of mutual insurance.61 For Rowe, even in 1886, ‘collective bar-
gaining in the engineering industry … was a very limited affair’ and
Flanders identified bargaining arrangements in building and engineer-
ing in the late nineteenth century as ‘two extremes’.62 Printing is
another (though smaller) industry where Reid’s dating of the institu-
tion of collective bargaining is premature: ‘In 1890 there was hardly
one effective written agreement in the printing industry. By 1914 there
were more than eighty’. This period saw the transition from ‘regulation
by union rule’ to ‘bilateral collective bargaining’ in the printing
industry.63
In keeping with his account of collective bargaining in engineering,
Reid continues: ‘by the early 1870s’ the ASE was ‘strong enough … to
impose improved conditions unilaterally on reluctant employers during
a district-based campaign for a nine-hour day initiated on Tyneside’
(p. 99; added emphasis). In fact, the movement started with a four-
week strike in Sunderland before spreading northward. As the Webbs
made clear, what became a four-and-a-half-month strike on Tyneside
was not led by the ASE (‘the greatest trade movement since 1852 was
undertaken in spite of the official disapproval of the governing body’);
it was a movement mainly of unorganized workers, with a local ASE
activist leading them in a temporary ‘Nine Hours League’.64
While unions and employers could ‘impose’ terms on each other,
this would usually only occur in the absence of negotiation. In chapter
8, Reid uses the term ‘impose’ on at least ten occasions when he is
61. A. Flanders, ‘Collective Bargaining’, in A. Flanders and H. A. Clegg (eds),

The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain: Its History, Law and
Institutions (Blackwell, Oxford: 1954), p. 267; Clegg et al., History of
British Trade Unions, Vol. 1, pp. 11–12; S. and B. Webb, Industrial
Democracy, p. 169 and part 2, ch. 1.
62. Rowe, Wages in Practice and Theory, p. 131; Flanders, ‘Collective Bar-
gaining’, p. 268.
63. Child, Industrial Relations in the British Printing Industry, p. 203 for first
quote; the other terms are the titles of chapters 9 and 13 of ibid.
64. S. and B. Webb, History (1894), pp. 303–4; E. Allen, J. F. Clarke, N.
McCord and D. J. Rowe, The North-East Engineers’ Strikes of 1871: The
Nine Hours’ League (Frank Graham, Newcastle: 1971). The Webbs
suggested that the strike lasted five months, but the dates given in Allen et
al., above, indicate four-and-a-half months.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 182
referring to agreements;65 thus, ‘employers’ associations … shifted …

towards the imposition of formal procedures’ and ‘[t]he strongest [union]
bodies could sometimes impose national agreements on the employers’
(pp. 165, 177; added emphasis).66 On the other hand, the Engineering
Employers’ Federation is credited with being ‘prepared to grant …
shop-steward recognition’ (though, in 1917, without the ASE and, then,
with it in 1919) – as a result of ‘the unions’ new position of strength’
(p. 183), according to Reid. Yet the government pressured the employers
to make such an agreement, and mainly as a mechanism for the ‘offi-
cialization’ of the shop stewards’ movement and the isolation of the rev-
olutionary shop stewards, rather than as a response to union strength.67
For a later period, Reid exaggerates the influence of, first, the unions
and, second, their shop stewards. He claims that the working week for
craft unions was generally reduced from 48 to 44 hours in the years
1945–47 (p. 291), with the engineers making ‘significant progress over
… shorter working hours’ before the war (p. 288). Yet the working
week in engineering remained at 47 hours from 1919 until 1947 when it
was reduced to 44.68 What does not come across in Reid’s account is
that many of the post-war reductions took place against a background
of industrial action – for example, in printing and road haulage.69 A
similar process had occurred at the end of the First World War, when
the first national strike of all the cotton unions, in 1919, over a shorter
working week, was the largest dispute that year; in coalmining and
engineering, reductions in working time led to large district-wide
strikes in 1919 over their implementation.70
65. Later in the book there is a further confusion of terminology when the
shift from multi-employer to single-employer bargaining is described as a
move to ‘unilateral, organization-wide decision-making’ (p. 408).
66. Reid wrongly claims that the ASE withdrew from the national engineering
procedure in 1913 (p. 171); this seems to be conflated with the Boilermak-
ers’ Society’s withdrawal from the shipbuilding national procedure in the
same year (p. 173).
67. G. D. H. Cole, Workshop Organization (Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1923),
chs 8–9; p. 77 for ‘officialization’. J. Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’
Movement (Allen and Unwin: 1973), ch. 8; Clegg, History of British Trade
Unions, Vol. 2, pp. 187–9.
68. Marsh, Industrial Relations in Engineering, p. 150.
69. Clegg, History of British Trade Unions, Vol. 3, pp. 331–7. The printing
unions had already negotiated, after a successful strike ballot, a 45-hour
week in 1937: ibid., pp. 47–8.
70. Clegg, History of British Trade Unions, Vol. 2, pp. 267–71. Reid does
discuss the 1919 engineering strikes in Glasgow and Belfast for a further
reduction in working hours (p. 184) but underestimates how long the
strikers were out (particularly in Belfast).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 183

Again, it is claimed that, in the post-war years, overtime rates were
generally ‘time-and-a-half in the evenings and double-time at
weekends’ (p. 292). This is misleading.71 In engineering, by far the
largest manufacturing industry, it was very different: namely, overtime
was paid at time-and-a-third for the first two hours on a weekday, and
then at time-and-a-half (which was also the rate for Saturday), while
Sunday work was paid at double-time; and ‘time’ was not the hourly
earnings figure, but the national minimum rate (which was a declining
proportion of actual earnings, as Reid himself acknowledges on p. 292),
so the monetary advantages of overtime are greatly overstated.72
From exaggerating overtime rates of pay, Reid then suggests that, in
the post-war period, ‘the allocation of overtime to individuals became
one of … [the] major functions’ of shop stewards (p. 292). It is true that
in well-organized workplaces, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s,
stewards would often keep an overtime rota (with some accepted rules
on how it should operate), in order to ensure fairness in its distribution;
but only in a small minority of workplaces would controls over
overtime working extend much further than this.73 Yet, at one point,
Reid makes an even stronger assertion: that shop stewards ‘took over
many of the traditional functions of gang leaders in the assembly
sectors, including … allocating overtime and piece-rates to individual
members’ (p. 286). This usurping of managerial function seems to be
based on a reading of one company in one industry at a particular
point in time, the Standard Motor Company (which Reid cites) from
the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. Even if something similar may have
applied to a few more factories, in certain labour- and product-market
conditions, it does not justify the generalizability that Reid implies.
71. Of 88 ‘major’ collective agreements covering manual workers in all

employment sectors at the beginning of the 1970s, 61 paid time-and-a-
third or less for the first two hours of overtime on a weekday; only one
agreement specified double time during any of the first four hours of
overtime on a Saturday: National Board for Prices and Incomes, Hours of
Work, Overtime and Shiftworking, Report No. 161, Cmnd 4554 (1970),
p. 98, Table 1A, and p. 99.
72. Marsh, Industrial Relations in Engineering, p. 154.
73. W. E. J. McCarthy, The Role of Shop Stewards in British Industrial
Relations, Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associa-
tions, Research Paper 1 (HMSO: 1966), para. 22; A. I. Marsh, E. O. Evans
and P. Garcia, Workplace Industrial Relations in Engineering (Kogan Page:
1971), p. 105, Table 30; P. K. Edwards and H. Scullion, The Social Orga-
nization of Industrial Conflict: Control and Resistance in the Workplace
(Blackwell, Oxford: 1982), pp. 205–9.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 184
IV
As with all labour historians, including those who are, in John Saville’s
expression, ‘outside the orbit of the labour movement’,74 Reid has an
ideological position on the role of working-class organizations. His
views on the British labour movement are clear from his consistently
antagonistic attitude to anything left-wing. This is flagged up in the
book’s introduction: the ‘first burst of political radicalism after the
French [i.e. Napoleonic] wars … had nothing whatever to do with
socialism’ (p. xiii); the ‘wider labour politics’ of the 1870s–1920s period
saw ‘a marked continuity with nineteenth-century popular Liberalism.
Moments of excitement over “class struggle” and the “revival of
socialism” were brief exceptions’ (pp. xiv–xv); and the ‘growth of
informal shop-floor bargaining’ after 1945 ‘had very little to do with
any mood of revolutionary revolt’ (p. xv). Later there is a throwaway
comment on those Scottish workers who were ‘disturbed by fantasies
of Bolshevism’ in 1919 (p. 184). And the ending of the General Strike
and the defeat of the miners in 1926 was, according to Reid, a ‘turning-
point for the far left in Britain … [It] dissipated the dream of a revolu-
tion exploding out of ordinary industrial conflict’ (p. 367).
This general perspective can be illustrated further by his treatment
of individuals. W. P. Roberts, the Chartist solicitor, described by
Raymond Challinor as ‘the People’s and the Miners’ Attorney-
General’,75 is accused by Reid of becoming ‘increasingly wild’ and, by
implication, of encouraging the defeated four-month miners’ strike in
the north-east of England in 1844 (p. 127). When discussing the Inter-
national Working Men’s Association (founded in 1864), Reid refers to
‘its more revolutionary elements’ (p. 145) but cannot bring himself to
mention Karl Marx as one of them, despite the profound importance
of that fact for the international communist movement.76 It is thus not
surprising that Eleanor Marx’s practical involvement in British trade-
unionism in the 1880s and 1890s is ignored, despite being a rare
74. Saville, Memoirs from the Left, p. 118, uses this expression to describe
Henry Pelling.
75. R. Challinor, A Radical Lawyer in Victorian England: W. P. Roberts and
the Struggle for Workers’ Rights (I. B. Taurus: 1990), p. 1; see chapters 8
and 9 for a different account of Roberts’s role in the 1844 strike.
76. See H. Collins and C. Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour
Movement: Years of the First International (Macmillan: 1965).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 185

example of a woman elected to a union executive committee in the
nineteenth century.77
Reid’s antipathy to the left is underlined by his claim that Gormley,
president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) during the
1970s, and Thomas of the National Union of Railwaymen from an
earlier era, were ‘pragmatic masters of the technical detail and group
psychology of collective bargaining, and they took far more satisfaction
from achieving favourable settlements than from engaging in dramatic
industrial action’ (p. 308; added emphasis). Reid presumably discounts
the possibility that there might be a connection sometimes between
industrial action and favourable settlements. Thomas’s role in ‘Black
Friday’, 1921, is noted; Reid considers that presenting this as ‘straight-
forward betrayal’ of the miners is ‘too simplistic’ (p. 313); Thomas’s
later close involvement in the calling off of the General Strike, and the
consequent abandonment of the miners, in 1926 is not mentioned.
In contrast to the praise lavished on Gormley, Arthur Scargill’s rise
in the NUM apparently ‘guaranteed’, according to Reid, that any
impending showdown over pit closures in the industry in the 1980s
‘would be particularly controversial, drawn-out and eventually disas-
trous for ordinary working miners’ (p. 403). Scargill ‘and his far left
supporters on the executive’ launched what ‘proved to be a disastrously
backward-looking strategy’ (p. 404). While damning Scargill, Reid does
not do the same for his nearest historical equivalent, though he cannot
resist a barb. Thus, ‘the much-publicized outbursts of such far-left
figures as [miners’ national secretary] A. J. Cook’ are not blamed for
prolonging the 1926 miners’ lockout; instead, Reid recognizes, as have
other historians, the ‘extraordinary determination of the mining com-
munities themselves’ (p. 315). The parallel with 1984–85 is not specifi-
cally drawn.
In conclusion, Reid finishes his book by suggesting that there will be
‘a major revival of British trade unionism’. This is consistent with his
belief in the continuation of fifty-year cycles, ‘one of the organizing
principles of this historical account’ (p. 418). It makes a refreshing
change from those who would merely extrapolate the present into the
future. He also looks to the past for inspiration that ‘new types of
workers have repeatedly defied widespread assumptions that they could
77. Eleanor Marx served on the executive of the National Union of Gas-
workers and General Labourers from 1890 to 1895: Y. Kapp, Eleanor
Marx, Vol. 2: The Crowded Years, 1884–1898 (Lawrence and Wishart:
1976), pp. 383, 632.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 186
not be organized’ (p. 419).78 He believes that, ‘[a]s unemployment falls,

… managers will, sooner or later, be reminded of the advantages of col-
lective bargaining’ (p. 418). At the same time, and in line with his
distaste for militancy, Reid sees unions as likely to be ‘spending more
time on the negotiation of realistic initial settlements’, as part of ‘a
better-coordinated annual pay round’ (p. 419; added emphasis). He is
aware, though, that past experience indicates that unions cannot always
‘respond to their members’ rising expectations’ (p. 420), but seems
unaware that ‘realistic’ settlements might not assuage such rising expec-
tations.
This highlights the weakness running through the other main
organizing principle of United We Stand: Reid’s understanding of
unions and his particular categorization of them in order to explain
their differences. Here it is appropriate to return to Hobsbawm, with
whom this review essay began. Industrial relations specialists, he
claimed, had ‘advanced the subject’ of trade-union history. They were
responsible for ‘the serious study of the process, the theory and
practice, strategy and tactics of union activity’; and the Webbs had
been ‘the great pioneers’ with Industrial Democracy.79 By engaging only
half-heartedly with this tradition,80 Reid unnecessarily shackles
himself.
Centre for Industrial Relations

Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG
78. This mirrors the point made in R. Darlington and D. Lyddon, Glorious
Summer: Class Struggle in Britain, 1972 (Bookmarks: 2001), p. 230.
79. Hobsbawm, ‘Trade Union Historiography’, BSSLH, p. 33.
80. See D. Lyddon, ‘History and Industrial Relations’, in P. Ackers and A.
Wilkinson (eds), Understanding Work and Employment: Industrial
Relations in Transition (Oxford University Press: 2003), pp. 89–118, for a
discussion, among other matters, of how most labour historians ignore
industrial relations theory and concepts while most current industrial
relations academics neglect history.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 187
HSIR  ( AUTUMN ) ‒ 187
Book Reviews
Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globaliza-

tion since 1870 (Cambridge University Press: 2003), xv + 238 pp.,
hardback £45, ISBN 0-521-81751-X, paperback £16.99, ISBN 0-521-
52077-0.
This book, a product of the Fernand Braudel Center, whose well-

known core focus is capitalism as a world system, is the culmination of
a programme of work examining patterns of labour unrest, with the
goal of relating such patterns to the dynamics of capitalism as a world
system. This vast task is approached in two ways: development and
analysis of a database, and what I can best describe as a historical essay
in the style of the New Left Review on labour protest and ruling-class
strategies in a global context.
The book has many excellent qualities. It is grounded in a clear
theory of class relations, which expects that capital’s organization of
work will produce a working class that challenges capitalist rule. It
identifies four strategies (‘fixes’) that capital can use to try to reduce its
labour problems and three sources of workers’ bargaining power – and
uses these notions systematically. It applies these ideas to a wide sweep
of examples from across the globe, demonstrating that the global reach
of capital does not necessarily undermine workers’ power and that
struggles between capital and labour take place on new sites as capital-
ism advances and new groups of workers are proletarianized. And it is
written with verve and clarity. John Kelly judges it to be ‘one of the
most important books on globalization and labour to have appeared in
many years’.1 I have to return a more qualified assessment.
The empirical core is the World Labor Group (WLG) database of
labour unrest. Unrest constitutes any protest against, or reaction to,
labour’s commodity status, and it thus excludes peasant or soldier
demonstrations but is broader than strikes. It was measured using
reports in two major newspapers, The Times (London) and the New
York Times over the period 1870–1996. These papers were chosen
because of their global spread. The unit of analysis is the ‘mention’.
Each mention of unrest was counted separately. Reports in the two
papers were then added together, except that reports relating to the
paper’s own country (e.g. the UK for The Times) were not counted. The
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 188
key ground for this approach is that papers record episodes that are
non-routine and are in some way seen as significant enough to report
(p. 38 n.). And the data are used not to try to count all cases of unrest
but as statistically reliable indicators of changes in patterns over time
and place. Further justification is provided by reference to reliability
checks reported earlier. These examined the WLG against other infor-
mation in seven countries and concluded that the data catch the main
turning points of major unrest. But, in the words of the study of
Germany, the WLG indicator ‘privileges unusual, or disruptive, or
politicized, or politically significant forms of labor unrest’.2 As long as
it is grasped in this way, the index does perform a very useful function.
The issue is its use. The database is huge, embracing 91,947
‘mentions’. I hoped to see it analysed in rather more detail. Three
examples will suffice. First, there is no discussion of the different com-
ponents of unrest so that, despite the effort to embrace hidden forms of
resistance as well as strikes, contrasts in the use of different types of
weapon of protest are not made. At a minimum, one might expect a
description of what went in to the total of 91,947. Second, there is no
effort to control for the size of the population at risk. Thus perhaps the
chart to which most readers will turn is Figure 4.1, which shows the
total of ‘world labour unrest, 1870–1996’. If there has been a rise in the
relevant population, the figures will exaggerate rises and underestimate
falls over time. This problem may not be easily resolved, but it surely
deserved discussion. Third, there is no systematic statistical analysis of
patterns, for example of any links between unrest indices and the level
of globalization of the world economy.
Silver’s preferred strategy is to use the data as a starting point for a
series of essays on labour unrest. These range widely, covering patterns
of class action, ruling-class strategies, US global hegemony, the impact
of world wars, and much else. Silver stresses the importance of a
‘systemic’ analysis (p. 29), as distinct from a comparative study of
different countries that, in her view, stresses variation at the expense of
understanding similarities and connections. Two main questions are
posed: whether the development of capitalism tends over time to erode
workers’ bargaining power; and whether labour internationalism
remains alive or, alternatively, has been eroded by the collapse of the
working class as a key actor.
Analysis proceeds in three stages. Chapter 2 addresses the world
automobile industry. The WLG data demonstrate a clear spatial shift
in the location of unrest, from North America in the period 1930–60,
through Europe and on to such countries as Brazil and South Africa.
These data are placed in the context of a historical review of class
conflict in this industry. The emphasis here is the relative distribution
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 189
BOOK REVIEWS 189

of unrest, which is the proportion of ‘mentions’ in a set of countries; it
would also be useful to know what the level of unrest was. Silver’s
argument is that capital tried a ‘spatial fix’ (moving to new locations)
and a ‘technological fix’ (post-Fordism), but that neither was success-
ful.
Chapter 3 turns to a ‘product fix’: moving from sectors where profits
are hard to achieve to newer industries. Starting by comparing the
product cycles of the automobile and textile industries (with strong
echoes of the work of Andy Friedman,3 though this is not cited), Silver
identifies a shift in unrest from the latter to the former. She then
examines transportation industries, expecting them to account for a
substantial proportion of unrest and that the distribution will shift
from railways towards aviation. These expectations are met (though
again on the basis of relative rather than absolute figures). Finally,
prospects in a series of newer sectors such as personal services are
addressed. As against those who equate class and collective protest
with manufacturing industry, Silver is clear that there are new groups
of the working class in formation. She concludes, however, that in
general their bargaining power is relatively weak (p. 123).
The overall picture is analysed in Chapter 4. Figure 4.1’s essential
story is of a rise of unrest from 1870 to 1920, major fluctuations up to
1950 with peaks after the two world wars, and then a steady decline to
about 1980, with a rapid fall thereafter. As against those who see this
last decline as irreversible, or those from a rather different view who
expect labour protest to peak under conditions of mass production,
Silver stresses long-run ‘swings of the pendulum’, shaped by
movements in world politics and experience of world wars. In addition
to the previous ‘fixes’, Silver now introduces a ‘financial fix’, wherein
capital shifts out of trade and production and into finance and specu-
lation. Such a fix was the key explanation for the decline in unrest
during the 1980s and 1990s: one might expect spatial fixes to increase
the bargaining power of workers in recipient countries, but any such
effect was overwhelmed by the power of global capital flows (pp.
165–6). The overall conclusion is thus that labour’s bargaining power
has been weakened, but Silver stresses that new classes are in the
making and that the future of class conflict remains uncertain.
In addition to issues with the use of the data, my main qualifications
are three. First, much of the analysis ranges very broadly, so that the
connections with patterns as revealed in the data are loose and indirect.
There is something of a disjuncture between the data on ‘unrest’ and
the much larger essay on class relations. Second, the book is a short
(180 pages of main text) treatment of some massive themes, and some
of the writing becomes rather breathless. It is in effect an extended
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 190
essay that raises more issues than it can resolve. Third, though the ana-
lytical point that classes are being reconstituted and that worker
responses to capital may generate new forms of resistance is profound
and important, the use of this becomes at times strained. Measures of
‘unrest’ have declined and it is not yet clear what form new class action
might take, or indeed whether it will appear in guises that measures of
major unrest as noted in newspapers cannot capture. All this leaves one
thinking about the nature of the historical project. I formed the impres-
sion that for Silver the new working classes are essentially like their
forebears, developing bargaining and associational power and then
engaging in unrest. That a proletariat is emerging in countries like
China is not in doubt, but its nature and consciousness may or may not
imply unrest in established forms.
All that said, Silver’s clarity and boldness of analysis suggest a
strong future research agenda. Her book may not have answered all its
questions, but it has posed them in new and important ways, and it
should act to inspire further research.
Paul Edwards
University of Warwick
Notes
1. J. Kelly, book review, British Journal of Industrial Relations 42:3 (2004), p.

567.
2. J. Casparis and F. Arrighi, ‘Labor Unrest in Germany, 1906–90’, Review
(Fernand Braudel Center) 18 (1995), p. 147.
3. A. L. Friedman, Industry and Labour (Macmillan: 1977).
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 191
HSIR  ( AUTUMN ) ‒ 191
Abstracts
Apprentice Strikes in the Twentieth-Century UK Engineering and Ship-

building Industries (pp. 1–63) Paul Ryan
Between 1910 and 1970, apprentices in engineering and shipbuilding

launched nine strike movements, concentrated in Scotland and Lan-
cashire. The average dispute lasted for more than five weeks and drew
in more than 15,000 young people for nearly two weeks apiece.
Although the movements were essentially unofficial, they comple-
mented official sector-wide negotiations. Two interpretations are con-
sidered: a political-social one, emphasizing political motivation and
youth insubordination, and an economics–industrial relations one,
emphasizing collective action and conflicting economic interests. Both
interpretations prove relevant, with qualified priority to the latter. The
apprentices’ actions influenced economic outcomes, including pay
structures and training incentives.
Worker Mobilization in the 1970s: Revisiting Work-ins, Co-operatives

and Alternative Corporate Plans (pp. 65–106) Michael Gold
This article analyses work-ins, social audits, co-operatives and alternative

corporate plans as shop-floor responses to redundancy and factory
closures in the 1970s. It uses mobilization theory to bring these disparate
forms of collective action together into one analytical framework to
explain what these advances had in common, and why they became so
popular over this period. It focuses on the conditions that inspired
workers to challenge managerial prerogatives and property rights in
attempts to institutionalize types of industrial organization based on
their own interests. It also examines the reasons for the eventual demise
of many of these alternative models of worker involvement.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 192
Free Trade-Unionism in Latin America: ‘Bread-and-Butter’ or Political

Unionism? (pp. 107–34) Magaly Rodríguez García
The deteriorating relations between East and West in the early post-war
period favoured the propagation of ‘free trade-unionism’ as a major
ideology within the international trade-union movement. Supported by
non-Communist unions, extensive networks were established to dis-
seminate this ideology. The idea of ‘free trade-unionism’ had appeared
in Latin America even before the foundation of the International Con-
federation of Free Trade Unions in 1949. The paper focuses on the
development of the principles of free trade-unionism in the region and
it seeks to clarify such questions as: where and when the ideology was
born; its concept of freedom; the methods used to reproduce the
ideology; and the achievements of the free labour movement in the
western hemisphere. The conclusion briefly discusses the debate on
labour internationalism and, more specifically, the (political or
economic) role of the free trade-union movement and its prospects in
the post-Cold-War era.
Look Back in Anger: Mining Communities, the Mining Novel and the
Great Miners’ Strike (pp. 135–64) John McIlroy
In an essay commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the 1984–85

strike of British miners the author explores how mining communities
have been depicted in the novel. He addresses the work of Émile Zola
and D. H. Lawrence as well as pre-war novelists such as James Welsh,
Harold Heslop and Lewis Jones. The essay assesses post-war writers
such as Len Doherty, Clancy Sigal and William McIlvanney, before
discussing two novels based on the events of 1984–85, Barry Hines’s
The Heart of It and David Peace’s GB84. The author concludes by
reflecting on the fate of mining communities in twentieth-century
Britain.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 193
AIMS AND CONTENTS OF THE JOURNAL 193
Aims and Content of the Journal

Historical Studies in Industrial Relations has been established by the Centre for
Industrial Relations, Keele University, to provide an outlet for, and to stimulate
interest in, historical work in the field of industrial relations and the history of
industrial relations thought.
The editorial committee has no rigid assumptions as to what falls within the
compass of Historical Studies in Industrial Relations. The content would
broadly cover the employment relationship and economic, social and political
factors surrounding it – such as labour markets, union and employer policies
and organization, the law, and gender and ethnicity. Articles with an explicit
political dimension, particularly recognizing divisions within the working class
and within workers’ organizations, will be encouraged, as will historical work
on labour law.
The journal will also contribute to existing historical debates on the gendered
division of labour and promote discussion of the role of language in industrial
relations. The Centre for Industrial Relations at Keele has particular research
interests in public-sector industrial relations and trade-unionism, and we wish
to stimulate historical research in these areas. A series of articles will analyse
important strikes (and, where possible, the employers’ role within them), a
subject currently out of fashion in Britain. We also intend to carry historical
studies on management’s role in the organization of work as well as in the reg-
ulation of the employment relationship.
Contributions on countries other than Britain, particularly those with a
comparative focus, are welcome, as is work on the nineteenth century and even
earlier.
Journal format
The journal will be published twice a year (Spring and Autumn). Articles will
generally be of no more than about 10,000 words, though longer ones will be
published where the nature of the topic dictates. Briefer contributions are also
welcome, especially short ‘Research Notes’. There will be a regular ‘Essay’ on a
significant or neglected industrial relations publication from the past. Shorter
‘Review Essays’ will deal with more contemporary work. Most issues will also
include a ‘Discussion and Comment’ section to provide a forum for more spec-
ulative pieces and for (short and long) replies to earlier articles. The editor is
happy to have informal discussions on possible contributions.
HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 194
Submission of papers
All contributions should contain references and sources in the form of

endnotes; except in the case of book reviews, these will be printed as footnotes
in the published journal. Three copies should be sent to the editor, on A4 paper,
with both the text and the endnotes double-spaced; the author’s name should
appear on a separate front sheet. Contributions should also be accompanied by
a short abstract. A style sheet for prospective authors is available from the
editor; this includes instructions for submitting material on disk.
Any paper published will have been considered first by the editorial
committee and then reviewed anonymously, usually by two external referees.
Send papers to: Dave Lyddon or Paul Smith, Joint Editor HSIR,
Centre for Industrial Relations, Keele University,
Keele, Staffs ST5 5BG, England.
Fax: 01782 584271 Tel: 01782 583396/583254
email: ida01@keele.ac.uk (Dave Lyddon)
ida04@keele.ac.uk (Paul Smith)
Subscription Rates
Subscription rates for 2004 (two issues), including postage:
Individual rate UK/Europe £18

Rest of World £25
Special two-year individual rate UK/Europe £30

Rest of World £40
Concessionary individual rate (UK/Ireland: students/pensioners)

One year £12
Two year £20
Institutional rate UK/Europe £50

Rest of World £58
Cheques (in pounds sterling) should be made payable to ‘Keele University’ and
sent to: Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, Centre for Industrial
Relations, Keele University, Keele, Staffs ST5 5BG, England.
Any other subscription enquiries (including details of payment by credit card)

should go to the same address.
Fax: 01782 584271 Tel: 01782 583396/583254
email: ida09@keele.ac.uk

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HSIR 18(29/3) 30/3/05 5:59 pm Page 1

HSIR  ( AUTUMN ) ‒

Apprentice Strikes in the

‘Was it serious? I don’t know. It certainly had serious consequences.’1

1. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (Vintage Books: 2000), p. 69.

2 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS 

3. N. Branson and M. Heinemann, Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (Weiden-

RYAN: APPRENTICE STRIKES IN UK ENGINEERING & SHIPBUILDING 3

Studies of vocational training showing the same omission are G. Williams,

4 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS 

cultural, economic and IR. Although the evidence compiled to date

5. ‘Narrowness’ is represented by consideration of typically only one or two

RYAN: APPRENTICE STRIKES IN UK ENGINEERING & SHIPBUILDING 5

Between 1910 and 1970 the engineering and shipbuilding industries –

8. The sector is taken to include all metalworking manufacture, including

Table 1: Attributes of apprentice strike movements, UK, 1910–70

1921 21 June–20 July; Manchester; Manchester, 33 6,500 n.a. n.a. n.a.

1937 18 March–5 June; Clyde; Scotland, 94 32,500 406,000 12 3

1939 18 May–5 June Clyde Clyde 16 2,200 19,000 9 7

1941 5 February–5 April Edinburgh Central Scot., 62 25,100 220,000 9 1

1944 28 March–12 April NE.Eng. Clyde, 16 17,000 150,000 9 4

1952 7 February;f Clyde Scotland, 24 16,400 194,000 12 1

10 March–2 April N.Eng., N.Ire.

1960 24 February;f Aberdeen Scotland 27 36,900 347,000 9 1

1964 7 September;f Manchester N.Eng., 23 6,000 26,000 4 9

Averageg 38 17,500 187,000 10

b. Calendar days (from column 2).

8 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS 

10 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS 

‘youth only’ strikes in federated engineering establishments between

The quantitative importance of apprentice strikes can be gauged from

14. Engineering Employers’ Federation (EEF), Strike Record from 1920

RYAN: APPRENTICE STRIKES IN UK ENGINEERING & SHIPBUILDING 11

contrast, the number of non-apprenticed junior male employees in

1400 Manual Male

WDL per 1000 employees

RYAN: APPRENTICE STRIKES IN UK ENGINEERING & SHIPBUILDING 13

Large factories and shipyards featured prominently in the strike

14 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS 

employees, but also by limited participation of apprentices, particularly

21. Federation records indicate 1,100 engineering apprentices in Birmingham

Year Industry Districts Date Days No. Apprentices Participation

into disputea of employers employed rate

1941 Shipbuilding Clydeside 10–12 March 11–13 23 2,828 57.2%

1952 Engineering Central Scotland 7 February;b (1) 174 8,138 32.5%

1964 Shipbuilding Clydeside 24 November 22 22 1,781 31.0%

b. Initial token strike.

16 HISTORICAL STUDIES IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS 

Table 3 shows that nearly three-quarters of time-rated apprentices in

Table 3: Apprentice employment and strikers by method of payment,

Payment Employment Strikers

Time-work 1,886 66.7% 1,398 86.3% 74.1%

Source: CSA, TD 241/12/242, MLG.

25. Apprentices may have been selected, by their own or by employers’

RYAN: APPRENTICE STRIKES IN UK ENGINEERING & SHIPBUILDING 17

Table 4: Employment share and relative earnings of apprentices

Age Number of Bonus Relative pay of

Engineering 1948 16–20 n.a. n.a. 118.6%

Shipbuilding 1952 16–20 11,503 57.8% 125.7%

Notes: Apprentices employed by federated firms only.

Table 5: Apprentice employment and strikers by trade in three Clyde

Trade Employment Strikers