Twentieth Century British History Advance Access published October 17, 2014

Twentieth Century British History, 2014, page 1 of 24 doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwu053

Jack Saunders* University College, London

............................................

The Untraditional Worker:

Class Re-Formation in Britain
1945–65

Abstract
This article explores the development of shop-floor organization in the British
motor industry between 1945 and 1965. Where much of the social and labour
history of post-war Britain has explained rising industrial conflict from the late
1960s as a reaction to economic and political changes based on ‘traditional’ trade
union cultures, this article gives greater prominence to worker activism within
the factories themselves. Workplace trade unionism in the car industry in the
immediate post-war period was generally weak, with limited shop-floor
organization often accompanied by fatalistic attitudes and atomization. This
gave way to increasingly sophisticated shop stewards’ organizations in a process
of social and cultural remaking lead by worker activists. This article details the
ways in which workers were persuaded not just to join trade unions but also
participate in a range of social practices, establishing representation and
collective decision-making at shop and factory level. Parallel to this organization,
we also see a change in shared values within the shop, with forms of collectivism
becoming increasingly prominent and deferential attitudes in decline. The article
concludes by arguing that this social organization and these solidaristic values
were a necessary foundation for the industrial militancy that followed in the late
1960s, and that contrary to much of the existing historiography it neither was a
simple reaction to external forces nor did it draw primarily on a ‘traditional’
working class consciousness. In post-war Britain, new solidarities and values
could be forged, even as others were eroded.

‘They said the Austin couldn’t be organised’1

Dick Etheridge, Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) Convenor, Austin
Longbridge 1944–75

In 1965 the Wilson Government appointed a Royal Commission to

consider ‘the role of trade unions and employers’ associations in

*saunders.js@gmail.com
1
Stephen Jefferys, ‘The Changing Face of Conflict: Shopfloor Organization at
Longbridge, 1939-1980’, in Michael Terry and Paul Edwards, eds, Shopfloor Politics and Job
Controls: The Post-war Engineering Industry (Oxford, 1988), 54–82; 58.

ß The Author [2014]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions,
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2 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

promoting the interests of their members and in accelerating the social

and economic advance of the nation’.2 The ordering of such an
investigation by a Labour Government reflected the extent to which
increasing industrial conflict had become a cross-party concern. Yet, a
decade earlier, such developments had been largely unanticipated. The
immediate post-war period had seen a lull in strike activity3, leading
one industrial relations scholar to speculate that conflict had been
contained indefinitely by state corporatism.4
Historians of the post-war British labour movement have tended to stress
the extent to which rising industrial conflict from the 1950s onwards was
driven by changing economic and political circumstances. Keith Laybourn
highlights the ‘external pressures and developments’ which generated
strike activity, including irregularity of employment and earnings, as well as
the effects of incomes policies.5 Alastair Reid offers a general explanation
where union participation rose in line with declining unemployment and
increasing wages.6 Chris Howell in Trade Unions and the State outlined the
ways in which Britain’s changing industrial structure rendered labour
relations institutions increasingly unable to maintain order during the shift
to Fordist modes of production.7
A combination of a more favourable political climate, full employ-
ment, and high inflation was a fruitful context for greater worker
assertiveness. Yet we should be wary of positing an easy transition from
socio-economic motivations and political opportunities to workplace
activism. Strikes were ‘an exceptional habit’8, and the pressures and
opportunities which pushed some workers into action did not have a
universal effect. Whilst some groups earned or sustained a reputation
for industrial militancy, there were others like farmworkers who were
unmoved, and still others like taxi drivers9 amongst whom collective

2
Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, Report (London,
1968).
3
Alan Campbell, Nina Fishman and John McIlroy, ‘The Post-War Compromise:
Mapping Industrial Politics, 1945-64’, in John McIlroy, Nina Fishman, and Alan Campbell,
eds, British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, vol. 1: The Post-war Compromise, 1945-64,
(London, 1999), 69–116; 105.
4
K. G. J. C. Knowles, Strikes - A Study in Industrial Conflict: With Special Reference to the
British Experience 1911-47 (Oxford, 1952).
5
Keith Laybourn, A History of British Trade Unionism, 1800-1990 (Stroud, 1992), 172–80.
6
Alastair Reid, United We Stand: A History of Britain’s Trade Unions (London, 2005),
279–81.
7
Chris Howell, Trade Unions and the State: The Construction of Industrial Relations
Institutions in Britain, 1890-2000 (Princeton, NJ, 2005).
8
H. A. Clegg, The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain (Oxford, 1970), 328.
9
John Davis, ‘The London Cabbie and the Rise of Essex Man’, in Clare Griffiths,
William Whyte, and James Nott, eds, Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays on British History
for Ross McKibbin (Oxford, 2011), 102–17; 115–16.
THE UNTRADITIONAL WORKER 3 of 24

action diminished. Neither affluence and job security nor economic

motivation was sufficient in itself to produce ‘militancy’.
Trade union history, generally conducted on the level of institutions
and macroeconomics, has understandably had comparatively little to
say on changing social and cultural attitudes in British workplaces.
Analysing the actions of large organizations, historians have drawn on
the most universal economic rationalities and on analysis of concrete
institutional reforms. This type of history has only occasionally hinted
at the possibility of broader social and cultural changes. Yet, as Richard
Hyman has argued, ‘for discontent to be expressed in a strike, a
minimum of worker solidarity and organization is presupposed almost
by definition’.10 That is, strikes assume the social and cultural resources
which enable workers to engage in collective action. Post-war British
history has tended to take the existence of such a capacity for granted,
often attributing its origins to the corporate bargaining structures of the
post-war settlement or as inherent to a ‘traditional’ working-class
culture pertaining to some unspecified moment in the past.
Kenneth Morgan and Arthur Marwick’s general histories of post-war
Britain both attributed increasing working-class assertiveness to the
changed balance of power resulting from the post-war settlement11,
whilst Michael Savage’s Identities and Social Change in Britain Since 1940
argued that the strong sense of class associated with male manual work
cultures was ‘premised on old, rather than emerging, social relations’
and would prove ‘unable to recharge itself effectively in the decades to
come’.12 This tendency to see a direction of travel whereby a ‘traditional
class consciousness’ was gradually eroded by mass consumer society
echoed earlier generations of cultural commentators from Richard
Hoggart13 to John Goldthorpe14, and even Eric Hobsbawm15.
The impact of important works of cultural criticism like Hoggart’s
has often been to render unnatural the idea of the post-war period as
one where working class people formed new values and solidarities. Yet
developments in British workplaces in the two decades after Second
World War were novel in many ways. Whilst Britain had experienced
previous surges in workplace conflict, no previous ‘strike waves’ had
achieved the longevity of post-1945 organization. Moreover, although

10
Richard Hyman, Strikes (Basingstoke, 1989), 57.
11
Arthur Marwick, British Society since 1945 (London, 2003), 3–20; Kenneth Morgan,
Britain since 1945: The People’s Peace (Oxford, 2001), preface.
12
Michael Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method
(Oxford, 2010), 216.
13
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life with Special
Reference to Publications and Entertainments (London, 1992).
14
John Goldthorpe, The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (London, 1969), 60–1.
15
Eric Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London,
1984), 280–1.
4 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

some mobilizations did occur in historically well-organized sectors like

mining and port transport, in the motor industry, one of the most
prominent cases, there was little such tradition of trade unionism. Car
workers developed a notoriety for ‘militancy’ despite having little
history of collective action pre-1940 and in drawing on the instrumental
economic rationality of trade unionists, labour historians have seldom
questioned how their ‘minimum of solidarity and organisation’ came to
exist. This article will argue that within the motor industry such
resources were created through social and cultural processes, whereby
workers developed new social practices and moral values thereby
changing the ways in which many workers calculated their basic
material self-interest—their instrumental or pragmatic rationalities.
Studying the role of often overtly politicized worker activists in this
process will complicate narratives about the decline of solidaristic
workplace cultures in post-war Britain and shed new light on the uneven
responses to the problems and opportunities of the post-war settlement.
Although the post-war social democratic order afforded workers some
new social rights and economic opportunities, workers in the early 1950s
motor industry were confronted by many of the same problems as their
inter-war predecessors. The subsequent growth in workers’ collective
power that would characterize the decades to come was not an inevitable
outgrowth of industrial corporatism, but required the establishment of
new social resources capable of sustaining such behaviours. These largely
emerged through the activism of individuals and groups within factories,
who gradually won the uneven adherence, active or passive, of the
majority of the workforce to more assertive and more class conscious
cultures. Despite lacking the long-standing strong occupational identity of
miners16 and others, the increasing ubiquity of social practices like shop
meetings, wildcat strikes, and steward representation shifted many car
workers’ understanding of their experiences and social relationships,
encouraging the spread of greater worker assertiveness. In the motor
industry, rather than being a period in which workers reacted to a new
political economy and changing economic circumstances with long-
standing social practices, the two decades after the war should be seen as a
time in which car workers (and other sections of the working-class) made
new cultures and new solidarities at work.

Post-War Insecurity
From the early 1960s car workers became one of the most high-profile
groups of trade unionists, reflected in disproportionate media

16
Huw Beynon, Working for Ford (London, 1973), 90.
THE UNTRADITIONAL WORKER 5 of 24

coverage17 and a developing notoriety for industrial militancy in

defence of union power.18 By the 1980s the latter had persisted for so
long that even scholars began to treat it as ‘traditional’.19 Yet as late as
the mid-1950s many of the attitudes and social practices later associated
with car workers had yet to appear. Car plant life continued to resemble
the inter-war world of managerial authoritarianism and insecure
employment, with deference to managerial authority and acceptance of
existing conditions often a necessity for avoiding dismissal. This was
reflected in the industrial and personal relations that marked car
workers’ lives. Lacking meaningful job security, workers with patchy
collective organization confronted managers with almost uncontested
disciplinary power.
Despite elevating the status of the trade unions,20 1945 had
bequeathed a very limited form of collective organization to manual
workers. Although government regulation during the Second World
War had helped establish collective bargaining21, in many cases there
was substantial distance between workers and agreements being made
on their behalf, as most employers only formally consented to annual
negotiations over wages, hours, and holidays, reserving the right to
exercise unilateral control over production, working conditions, discip-
line, hiring, and dismissal.22 These arrangements reflected the reality of
union strength. Whilst the major car firms negotiated with unions at
company or industrial level, within their factories the four largest firms
(Austin, Morris, Ford, and Vauxhall) had substantial numbers of non-
unionists (‘noners’) and relatively few shop stewards. During the
working day, trade unionism and collective bargaining were marginal
and the typical car plant was weakly organized—a fact reflected in
unremarkable strike levels.23
Even as firms enjoyed a highly favourable commercial environment
in the post-war period, the limited union power workers had won
during the conflict was rolled back after victory. In Oxford, Len Barker,
the convenor at Morris Motors, was fired after a dispute in 194624,

17
Tim Claydon, ‘Tales of Disorder: The Press and the Narrative Construction of
Industrial Relations in the British Motor Industry, 1950-79’, Historical Studies in Industrial
Relations, 9 (2000), 1–36.
18
H. A. Turner, Garfield Clack and Geoffrey Roberts, Labour Relations in the Motor
Industry: A Study of Industrial Unrest and an International Comparison (London, 1967), 7.
19
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, 1946-1973 (London, 1983), 315.
20
Howell, 90.
21
Howell, 90.
22
Dave Lyddon, ‘The Car Industry, 1945-79: Shop Stewards and Workplace Unionism’,
in Chris Wrigley, eds, A history of British Industrial Relations, 1939-1979: Industrial Relations
in a Declining Economy, (Cheltenham, 1996), 186–211; 189.
23
Turner, Clack and Roberts, 23.
24
Arthur Exell, ‘Morris Motors in the 1940s’, History Workshop, 9 (1980), 90–115; 109.
6 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

followed by his counterpart at Morris Radiators, Arthur Exell, in 1947.

Exell, like many Oxford car workers, was an immigrant from South
Wales and from a union background, his rail-worker father having been
sacked for participating in the General Strike.25 He himself had arrived
in Oxford in 1929 as part of a hunger march and later joined the
Communist Party (CP) during agitation over living conditions on the
Florence Park estate.26 Exell had been an important figure in organizing
for the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) in the factory, and
during a brief factory closure, management took the opportunity to lay
him off and never recall him. After protesting, some months later he
and a local union official were granted a meeting at the factory,
whereupon he was formally dismissed:
‘Well, we have come to the conclusion, Mr Longworth [the union official],
that he is a communist agitator and we don’t want that sort of thing in the
factory’, and that’s when Longworth said, ‘And I don’t blame you either’.
So that was it. That was the final blow. Out I went. And I’d been out of
work for over four months then. And they never gave me my cards because
I’d never done anything wrong. . .27
The behaviour of both management and Longworth—a local official
of the AEU—reflected the attitude common to companies and to many
trade union officers, that firms had the right to dismiss their employees
without notice or compensation. Although an attempt was made to
secure his reinstatement, workers fearing the sack dared do nothing
more than send round a half-hearted petition.28 This episode contrasts
with later battles over company victimization of union representatives
and echoes the idea that ‘if the company doesn’t want you it has the
right to sack you’ that many workers held.29 With supervisors wielding
the power to sack, arguments with foremen often resulted in arbitrary
punishments. Such was the case with one worker at Longbridge,
suspended in 1947 for swearing at a foreman, saved only by his 31
years service and the pleas of the factory convenor.30 Other workers
were not so lucky, and the convenor’s notes reveal a number of
uncontested suspensions and dismissals for relatively minor offences

25
Arthur Exell, ‘Morris Motors in the 1930s’, History Workshop, 6 (1978), 52–78; 45).
26
Arthur Exell, ‘Morris Motors in the 1930s. Part II: Politics and Trade Unionism’,
History Workshop, (1979), 45–65; 51–2.
27
Exell, ‘Morris Motors in the 1940s’, 108.
28
Exell, ‘Morris Motors in the 1940s’, 108.
29
Kevin Halpin, Memoirs of a Militant: Sharply and to the Point (British Columbia,
Canada, 2012), 35.
30
Modern Record Centre, Richard Albert Etheridge Collection [hereafter RAE],
MSS.202/S/J/8/6, Richard Etheridge Daily Working Notes, June-November 1947; RAE,
MSS.202/S/J/8/5, Richard Etheridge Daily Working Notes, 1947–52.
THE UNTRADITIONAL WORKER 7 of 24

related to timekeeping, disrespect to authority, correct booking of

piecework, or clocking in other workers.31
On top of this authoritarian discipline, management tended to treat
their workforce as casual labour, laying people off as demand fell and
workers often found themselves suddenly unemployed.32 If they were
lucky, management might find room for them elsewhere in the factory,
but if not the joint shop stewards committee (JSSC) would simply note
the adjustment and move on.33 In the absence of redundancy
agreements, supervisors could ensure that ‘troublemakers’ were
weeded out and favourites retained, moulding the culture of their
shops. This effect could be amplified in everyday working life through
control over lucrative overtime schedules and job allocation, giving
supervisors scope for bullying and intimidation.
The social environment in weakly organized shops reproduced
hierarchical relationships, with management able to select personnel,
and exercise near absolute authority within the factory, with workers
often too precariously placed to challenge them.34 Equally, in the
immediate post-war period, horizontal social relationships were very
different from those associated with car workers from the 1960s. The
piecework system, blamed in the later period for weakening manage-
ment control and contributing to ‘wage drift’35, had a very different
effect on workplace culture in earlier decades. Employed in five of the
‘big six’ car firms until 1956, under piecework, workers’ pay was
determined by a basic rate supplemented by a production bonus. These
were set by a rate-fixer who timed the job and decided on the
appropriate price.
In the absence of resistance, an ungenerous rate-fixer could make a
job ‘tight’. Dave Buckle, a moderate shop steward at car body
manufacturer Pressed Steel recalled the physical toll required to make a
living: ‘We were working so hard that when we stopped at nine o’clock
all our nerves would be on the jangle, and we would sit there and our
arms and our legs would be shaking’.36 Elsewhere, Bill Buckingham
recalled losing seven stone working in the British Motor Corporation’s

31
RAE, MSS.202/S/J/8/4, Dick Etheridge Daily Working Notes, September 1946-
January 1947; Dick Etheridge DWN Jun-Nov 1947; RAE, MSS.202/S/J/8/8, Dick
Etheridge Daily Working Notes, July-August 1949.
32
Jon Murden, ‘‘‘All Those in Favour Say Aye’’: Responses to Redundancy in the
British Motor Industry, 1956’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 17 (2004), 75–110; 83).
33
RAE, MSS.202/S/J/1/2, Longbridge Joint Shop Stewards Committee Meeting
Minutes, August 1951-March 1953.
34
Lyddon, 189.
35
Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, 23–4.
36
Greg Lanning and others, Making Cars: A History of Car Making in Cowley by the
People Who Make the Cars (London, 1985), 67.
8 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

(BMC) service factory in Oxford; ‘you began to run down your

health . . . the physical effort needed to keep going month after month
really took its toll’.37 For the unorganized shop, even a ‘loose’ rate,
which allowed the workers to achieve a substantial bonus, would soon
come under threat, as management looked to retime jobs where effort
seemed slack or earnings too high. In the minority of Longbridge shops
where union organization was strong in the 1940s, a number of
disputes centred on attempts to retime jobs and lower prices, a practice
that was uncontested in weaker shops.38
Lacking control over the wage-effort bargain the collective culture of
the workshop could tend toward mutually enforced discipline. For
workers on a moving track, high earnings depended on their
colleagues’ productivity and as a result the piecework regime could
mould the social relationships of the workers. It could be co-workers, as
much as foremen, who drove operatives to work harder, maintain time
discipline, and keep production going. At its most developed this could
be more than just background social pressure, developing its own social
practices and moral values. Peter Vigor, a fitter at Vauxhall in the 1940s,
vividly described this form of collective culture:
The discipline didn’t come from the management, it came from the people
themselves, because if somebody came up to me and talked to me while I was
working, all the other chaps round me would shout out ‘cuckoo,
cuckoo’ . . . because they said I was fouling the nest . . . and so if it went
on long enough, and if I’d got in late in the morning, or anything like that,
they would bang the keys . . . so that everybody knew you were late, or
everybody knew that you were going home early when you should be
working overtime.39
In the absence of significant control over piecework, on occasion
workers developed social practices aimed at securing high productivity.
Where management dominated, piecework could promote greater
physical exertion in order to secure higher living standards, and
sometimes even a value system that criticized ‘fouling the nest’ on a
moral basis. This combination of values and social practices in some
cases encouraged a collective culture in which the dynamics of social
relationships between workers allowed management to sweat their
labour force.
Far from ‘traditional’ class cultures being dissolved by post-war
affluence, many of the social practices and collective values associated
with car worker militancy had yet to emerge on a wide scale and as a
37
Greg Lanning and others, 69.
38
RAE, MSS.202/S/J/8/7, Dick Etheridge Daily Working Notes May-July 1949.
39
Bedfordshire and Luton Archives, Len Holden Archive [hereafter LHA], X819/11/4,
Glyn Morgan Interview, 4 December 1979.
THE UNTRADITIONAL WORKER 9 of 24

consequence conditions were quite different from the job security and
financial security often assumed to form part of the ‘post-war
settlement’. Conditions in the industry echo Selina Todd’s critique of
the myth of a 1950s golden age of affluence and social mobility40, with
car workers in this period living in fear of arbitrary dismissal, without
notice periods, redundancy pay, or a guaranteed weekly wage.41 Car
workers had little tradition of positive collective identities on which to
draw in confronting these problems. Nor had more benign external
conditions in the form of union recognition and full employment
managed to entirely dissipate ideas of hierarchy and deference, or
changed substantially the asymmetrical distribution of power in the
workplace. The ways in which car workers set about changing
conditions, cultures, and class relations in the following decades reveal
much about the importance of work, horizontal social connections, and
worker agency in the development of more assertive class cultures.

Forging a Collectivity
During the 1950s more defined collectivities advanced across the car
firms, and by the mid-1960s shop-floor negotiation and representation
were central to industrial life. Confronted by intransigent employers,
and in many cases sceptical, fatalistic, or hostile co-workers, motivated
shop-floor activists created new social practices, attitudes, and
rationalities, substantially remaking the class culture and the class
relations of their workplaces. How this social process unfolded
demonstrates an important aspect of workers’ agency in this period;
the ability to use work as a key site where they could mould their
identities, cultures, and social power.
One major starting point for these changes was the establishment of
highly localized representation in the form of shop stewards. Although
the role had a long history in engineering, stewards were almost non-
existent in the motor industry until after 1940.42 Subsequently, they
played a crucial role in establishing strong collective cultures in their
shops—organizing key social practices like shop meetings, defining
problems and grievances, and encouraging others to participate in
social organization.
Stewards were key to the process of unionization. With occasional
exceptions, full-time union officials had only a walk-on role in building
up factory organizations, appearing occasionally at union meetings, or
40
Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910-2010 (London,
2014), 199–212.
41
Murden, 81–2.
42
Exell, ‘Morris Motors in the 1930s. Part II’, 53; LHA, X819/11/12 Jock Adare
Interview, 1 April 1981.
10 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

providing leaflets for recruitment drives. Moreover, whilst some factory

organizations and branches did practice mass recruitment, primarily
through the distribution of handbills or meetings at the factory gate, the
bulk of recruitment fell on union members within their shops. It was
there that activists began to develop a base amongst their co-workers
and became important figures within their shops and the wider factory.
Initially, stewards struggled to establish their right to negotiate.
Without the formal rights they would obtain in later decades, a lack of
wider social practices and cultural values could reduce stewards to
impotent dues collectors. In the 1940s, Joe Harris, a ‘floater’ (cover for
absentees) at Rover Solihull saw his first steward in this way:
He’d call a meeting, and he’d acquaint you with the nature of the problem
and that, we’d debate it, discuss it, we would think of a rational way of
resolving it, he’d send the shop steward in to see the foreman and the
foreman used to bark at him and he’d come out and he’d say ‘the foreman
says this, and the foreman . . .’, and I thought well, that weren’t the way to
do our business, really. But the foreman shouldn’t exercise them kind of
rights.43
Harris, who would later become convenor, was from a ‘Labour
Catholic’ background and had been close to the CP since the late 1930s,
earning the nickname ‘Bolshie Joe’ for selling the Daily Worker at a
French motor factory.44 Despite his politics and experience, during this
stint as a floater at Rover Solihull he was unable to prevent this
powerless steward in a weak shop from being ignored by his fellow
workers and management. Changing this state of affairs involved the
establishment of a strong collective shop culture, where the workers
related to management and to one another in different ways, adjusting
the parameters of the class relationship.
Peter Nicholas, another Communist and AEU convenor at Rover’s
Tyseley component factory from 1949, gives an account of organizing
gearbox assemblers at Rover which illustrates the kind of shift that took
place. Nicholas listened to complaints about piecework rates, telling his
co-workers, ‘well look, unless you want this arbitrarily imposed on you,
you needs [sic] to get organized’, arriving with fifty union forms at the
next lunch hour.45 Nicholas then led the other workers through the
logic of his trade unionism—‘Look, no good you being in the union
unless you’ve got some representatives’.46 Having persuaded the

43
Modern Record Centre, Paul Worm Automotive Industrial Relations Collection
[hereafter PWAIR], MSS.356/7/3/5, Joe Harris Interview, 15 February 1979.
44
Modern Record Centre, 15 February 1979.
45
PWAIR, MSS.356/7/2/4, Peter Nicholas Interview, 4 August 1982.
46
PWAIR, MSS.356/7/2/4, Peter Nicholas Interview, 4 August 1982.
THE UNTRADITIONAL WORKER 11 of 24

workers to elect a steward, Nicholas’ explained the behavioural shift

needed in order to defend their right to representation.
This company has got a long record of anti-trade-unionism. If in any shape
or form these lads [the stewards] are touched by the company by means of
suspension or sacking, I’m not advising the use of procedure, the only way
you would protect them is, whatever they do to them, they’ll do to you. In
other words, if they sack ‘em, you go out till they’re back . . . if you want any
future . . . and you let any of these four lads be victimised and you don’t
defend them you might as well forget that you filled a form in.47
This discussion demonstrates the nature of this delegated authority.
In the face of hostile management, stewards had no formal hierarchical
role to draw on and into the 1950s workers representatives continued to
be subject to summary dismissal and inclusion on local blacklists.48
Creating the steward as a representative involved a conjuring act where
the workforce agreed to a social practice—the convention of walking
out in defence of a victimized steward—and to a moral value—
‘whatever they do to them, they’ll do to you’. Grievance meetings like
this one were an effective way of organizing a shop, simultaneously
stimulating the social practices necessary for defending representation
and generating the social power to challenge management.
As much as public discourse and the socio-economic conditions of
the age, the agency of individual workers and their ability to remake
social relations at work and in production was crucial to their changing
identities, rationalities, and behaviours. Nicholas was by this point a
relatively experienced trade unionist. Recruited to the AEU at Austin
Longbridge by future national official Les Ambrose in 1937, he had
become a shop steward and joined the CP prior to his dismissal in 1942.
His capacity to communicate both his personal convictions and his
experience was crucial in spreading the idea that collective solidarity
was a vital component of defending steward representation.
Such principles occasionally required mass strikes—at Longbridge in
1951 and 1953,49 at Dagenham in 195750 and at Morris in 195951—but
more typically supporting representatives involved meeting any sign of
management aggression with a demonstration of solidarity. A letter to
the Longbridge convenor in 1954 depicts one small-scale example.
Arguing over new piece rates, a foreman lost his temper with a steward
making comparisons to workers elsewhere in the factory, shouting ‘you
47
PWAIR, MSS.356/7/2/4, Peter Nicholas Interview, 4 August 1982.
48
Halpin, 22; Lyddon, 189.
49
Jefferys, 66–71.
50
Henry Friedman and Sander Meredeen, The Dynamics of Industrial Conflict: Lessons
from Ford (London, 1980), 59.
51
Alan Thornett, Militant Years: Car Workers’ Struggles in Britain in the 60s and 70s
(London, 2011).
12 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

are not to talk of people in other departments! Until I make another

offer you don’t exist!’52 He and his fellow stewards then returned to
work, reporting the incident to their shop committee, who passed a
resolution condemning this abuse. Two meetings with management
then followed where the works manager apologized and ‘assured us
that Bro [Brother] Jeans did exist and was recognised as S.S. [shop
steward] by himself and everyone else’. The letter later noted that the
workers had ‘let the management know that we are all together and
pretty quick to back our shop stewards up’.53
Considered alongside this kind of display, the importance of large
strikes against victimizations went beyond particular conflicts. The
social practices of striking—meetings, handbills, strike votes, picketing,
and demonstrations—reaffirmed the moral value of defending their
representatives, whilst even in defeat the damage inflicted by a long
strike could show management that attacking stewards was a
potentially costly exercise. In these sorts of ways the workers could
reconfigure workplace power relations to the extent that a forceful
resolution was often sufficient to defend their social organization.
Once representation and collective participation were established,
stewards and their supporters could challenge the unilateral character
of management, and gradually change the social relations of the
industry. This can be seen most clearly in the way in which workers
transformed the nature of the wage-effort bargain. Piecework was
turned into a motor for steadily improving wage levels and reducing
strain. As noted above, in a co-operative shop culture, ‘tight’ jobs
sometimes prompted social pressure to achieve a desired rate.
However, as pay was a natural subject of conversation between
production workers, upon electing representatives they usually asserted
the right to challenge timings and negotiate prices. Stewards used this
as the most straightforward means of building support. Bob Fryer, a
steward in the Morris Cowley paint shop remembered a particularly
blunt example:
‘Look, you are now on £10 per week on piecework’, I told them. ‘If you all
join the union and make it a 100% shop, I can promise within nine months
we will be on £20 per week . . . give me the strength, give me the
membership, and we can do it.’ Nine months later we had another meeting
on Phipps Road. They all produced their pay slips—they were all over
£20.54

52
RAE, MSS.202/S/J/3/2/4, Agendas and Papers for Longbridge Joint Shop Stewards
and Works Committee Meetings, 1953-54.
53
RAE, MSS.202/S/J/3/2/4, Agendas and Papers for Longbridge Joint Shop Stewards
and Works Committee Meetings, 1953-54.
54
Thornett, Militant Years, 7.
THE UNTRADITIONAL WORKER 13 of 24

Fryer’s anecdote reveals what made piecework a fruitful area to

exploit. Since prices were task-based, personally acquainted workers
identified a common issue for discussion at shop level, which could be
resolved through more assertiveness and solidarity among their small
group. Victories over prices built on the organic social connections of
the workplace, using easily identifiable shared interests and cheap
victories, reinforcing the idea that collective assertiveness yielded
results. That assertiveness was expressed through social practices—
meetings, short strikes, and other sanctions—which reinforced collective
cultural values, making participation in solidaristic activities more
normal and more realistic, giving workers a new collective social
power.
Longbridge convenor Dick Etheridge’s idea of ‘Austin standards’
expresses the shift in expectations that these new social practices
created: ‘national agreements on piece work prices are so low that the
correct floor to floor time very much favours the ratefixer . . . it is custom
today to talk ‘‘Austin standards’’ and to barter for what we consider a
‘‘fair price’’ at already established prices’.55 Etheridge thought that
prices should tend toward parity with the better-paid sections in the
factory, with ‘fairness’ obtained through the vigilance of members. In
part, this was the rationality and values that lay behind steadily rising
expectations of collective affluence and economic progress amongst car
workers and similar working-class groups.
These practices and values were initially generated by workers
themselves in their experiences of everyday factory life, evidence of
their origins in a self-directed social process. Etheridge would himself
have experienced these shifts, having been a shop steward for the
gearcutters during the 1940s, confronted then by rate-fixers determined
to unilaterally apply timings. Different shops asserted first their right to
‘fair timings’, then to ‘fair wages’ (meaning rising wages, equal to the
best paid), and in some cases the rate-fixer was abolished entirely.
Workers at Rootes Acton boasted in 1961 that all their prices were
straight negotiation, without even the formality of the stopwatch.56 For
semi-skilled workers, like Bob Fryer’s paint sprayers or Peter Nicholas’
gearbox assemblers, such developments were creating previously
unprecedented social resources. Changing social relationships in the
car industry shifted asymmetries of power, giving pieceworkers a more
direct say in their working lives, and a different experience of the
inclusions and exclusions of class society.
Despite increasing commercial competition from abroad, profits,
employment, and production in the British motor industry continued to

55
Papers of Longbridge JSSC, 1953–54.
56
Ken Weller, The BLSP Dispute: The Story of the Strike (Whipsnade, 1962), 4–5.
14 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

grow in this period,57 helping to fuel the still uneven advance of more
militant attitudes and practices. At Longbridge, shop-floor bargaining
spread from just a handful of active shops in 1950—only five required
the convenor’s attention more than once58—to dozens of work groups
in 1960.59 Elsewhere, at Morris Cowley, such habits were virtually non-
existent until the mid-1950s, developing rapidly between 1956 and 1959,
stimulated by a partial victory in an official strike over redundancy.60
At Standard Canley, management conceded substantial collective
bargaining rights to their stewards in the early post-war period, and
then failed in an attempt to curtail them in the mid-1950s61. The
differing trajectories of shop-floor bargaining reflect to a large extent the
efforts of worker activists (and industrial relations policies), confirming
the idea that such cultures were also a product of the workers
themselves, rather than deriving simply from ‘traditions’.
Usually such cultures were strongest amongst male pieceworkers,
but they were by no means restricted to them. Although women,
concentrated mainly in sewing departments, were generally excluded
from leadership positions in factory organizations, they were usually
active in decentralized sectional trade unionism. The sewing machinists
at Longbridge organized themselves in 195362 and were thereafter a
consistent presence on the JSSC, even winning the committee to
acceptance of the principle of equal pay for equal work.63 Similar
activism can be seen in other sewing departments. Although the
famous 1968 Dagenham sewing machinists’ strike was widely seen as
novel, as Sheila Cohen has argued, both in terms of demands and
organization, it reflected the ongoing involvement of the Dagenham
women in shop-based trade unionism, and was conducted through
social practices like shop meetings and steward representation that the
women had been engaged in for more than a decade.64 Indeed, the
same group of Dagenham women had already been noted for their
strong trade union principles by the London District Committee of the
57
The British Motor Industry’s Pre-tax Profits Peaked in 1969, Total Employment in
1970 and Output in 1972, see Bowden, Foreman-Peck and Richardson, 151; Durcan,
McCarthy and Redman, 325, 336.
58
Dick Etheridge DWN, 1947–52.
59
In 1960, 33 different groups contacted the Longbridge JSSC looking for assistance,
see RAE, MSS.202/S/J/1/7, Longbridge Joint Shop Stewards Committee Meeting
Minutes, 1960–1961.
60
Alan Thornett, From Militancy to Marxism: A Personal and Political Account of
Organising Car Workers (London, 1987), 14; Ruth Frow and Edmund Frow, Engineering
Struggles: Episodes in the Story of the Shop Stewards’ Movement (Manchester, 1982), 297–8.
61
Tolliday, 208–15; Seymour Melman, Decision-Making and Productivity (Oxford, 1958).
62
RAE, MSS/202/S/J/1/3i, Longbridge Joint Shop Stewards Committee Meeting
Minutes, 5 October 1953.
63
RAE, MSS.202/S/J/3/2/5, Longbridge Convenor’s Log, 3 May 1954.
64
Halpin, 32, 34, 51; Sheila Cohen, ‘Equal Pay - or What? Economics, Politics and the
1968 Ford Sewing Machinists’ Strike’, Labor History, 53, 51–68; 53–9.
THE UNTRADITIONAL WORKER 15 of 24

National Union of Vehicle Builders (NUVB) during a strike 6 years

earlier.65
Women workers not directly involved in production found it more
difficult to undertake industrial action. Office cleaners and canteen
workers were more marginal to car manufacturing and consequently
had less leverage and typically found themselves leaning heavily on the
wider factory organization in order to improve conditions. In this
regard they bore some similarity to some male ‘indirects’ (non-
production workers) like labourers and storekeepers, who also
struggled with low pay. Paid on a flat rate, they were unable to draw
on regular production adjustments to change prices and it was often
not until sectional bargaining became widespread elsewhere that these
groups were able to advance pay claims, sometimes in conjunction with
other better placed indirects; like the material handlers who loaded the
tracks and the electricians, millwrights and setters who set up the
machines. At Longbridge, the hourly paid ‘dayworkers’ banded
together in one particularly successful strike in 1962, winning large
pay increases.66 Thereafter different groups of indirects were a source of
insistent demands and regular disputes.
That Longbridge hourly paid staff had to wait until 1962 for
substantial redress for their grievances is an indication of how difficult
life must have been for union activists at Ford. Unlike their
counterparts at the other large motor firms, Ford workers received a
flat hourly rate, decided at company level. Although a sit-down strike
in 1946 forced management to recognize stewards, management still
refused to negotiate over line speed or labour load, reserving the right
to transfer or dismiss employees.67 Ford pay and terms were
established through formal company-level bargaining, and agreements
were concluded between management and the unions with little
consultation.68
Consequently, shop-floor activists were granted little space to
negotiate, and often found it difficult to establish the social practices
and collective values necessary for sustained militancy. Thus despite the
successful 1946 strike, Ford generally avoided major disputes.69 It was
only after 1952, when Ford incorporated supplier Briggs Bodies, the
other large employer on the estate, that shop-floor organization began
to improve. Like their counterparts at Austin and Morris, Briggs
65
London Metropolitan Archives, National Union of Vehicle Builders London District
Committee Records, ACC 3289/10, NUVB London District Committee Meeting Minutes,
10 December 1962.
66
RAE, MSS.202/S/J/1/9i, Longbridge Joint Shop Stewards Committee Meeting
Minutes, 28 May 1962.
67
Friedman and Meredeen, 27.
68
Huw Beynon, Working for Ford (London, 1973), 48–9.
69
Tolliday, 87.
16 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

workers had been pieceworkers and a strong JSSC had developed there.
Ford was unable to standardize their conditions until 1958, as workers
in the former Briggs factory fought a successful rearguard action to
defend rights over job standards, labour mobility, overtime, tea breaks,
and relief times.70
Thereafter activists from Briggs brought their influence to bear on the
rest of the estate, creating a unified JSSC and plant-wide newspaper.
When the company constructed its new Paint, Trim and Assembly Plant
(PTA) in 1957, transferred workers brought their collective culture from
Briggs and by the early sixties the PTA was the most strike-prone plant
on the Dagenham estate.71 Ford found itself fighting a variety of small-
scale conflicts, initially over the only area which stewards could
legitimately dispute—factory conditions—and then later over large
areas of managerial prerogative, including line speed, labour load,
movement of labour, redundancy, and discipline. Each informal
agreement was incorporated into ‘custom and practice’ and became
part of workers’ expectations.
Conflict erupted over seemingly trivial matters when management
and even trade union officials attempted to challenge these invented
customs. In one incident described by an anonymous worker to
Solidarity (a small iconoclastic libertarian socialist journal, which
solicited content from non-member contacts within industry), workers
responded to the abolition of their afternoon break by staging a
campaign of organized malingering: ‘Being the ungrateful, stinking
peasants the management always knew them to be, they just wouldn’t
co-operate . . . Instead of one or two of each section collecting a dozen or
so cups of tea from the tea trolleys for their mates, each man lined up
individually. Each wanted change from a £1 or 10/- note for a 3d. cup
of tea’.72 Brian Jeffreys, a worker in the Engine Plant, described this as a
refusal ‘to submit to the union officials and the Company interfering
with what we regarded as our religious freedom’.73
Striking over tea breaks became a great cliché, but Jeffreys’ facetious
description of their ‘religious freedoms’ masks the importance of small
victories in terms of forging organizations and cultures. Such minor
details really mattered: for one anonymous worker tea breaks were the
only part of the day that wasn’t dehumanizing; ‘For 10 minutes the
workers became ordinary human beings, drinking tea, eating
sandwiches, smiling, talking, reading the morning paper’.74 To
outsiders the tea break strike seemed petty, but for some workers,

70
Tolliday, 88.
71
Halpin, 55.
72
‘News from Ford’s’, Solidarity: For Workers’ Power, May 1962, 3–4; 4.
73
Brian Jeffreys, ‘Too Old at 50’, Solidarity: For Workers’ Power, July 1966, 20–22; 22.
74
‘I Work at Fords’, Solidarity: For Workers’ Power, May 1963, 3–8; 3.
THE UNTRADITIONAL WORKER 17 of 24

defence of these everyday conditions was crucial to the maintenance of

social organizations and social power.
A strike at Dagenham in October 1962 demonstrated the necessity of
consistently defending this self-made social power. For several months
prior to the strike the company attempted to speed up production
without consultation. This resulted in several walkouts, based on the
idea that workers had the right to be consulted over labour load and
that their existing levels of effort were ‘fair’. When workers responded
this way in October, management provoked a mass strike, subsequently
locking out the PTA labour force, and eventually dismissing sixteen
stewards.75
This defeat led to a noticeable deterioration in conditions, and
stymied shop-floor culture for a number of years. After the defeat the
company imposed a 30 per cent speed-up.76 Dagenham returned to
‘responsible trade unionism’, where management dominated produc-
tion and the union was restricted to national bargaining. The
consequences of defeat reaffirm the importance of strong collective
cultures in structuring class relations in the industry. With shop-floor
conflict quelled, management retook control of line speed, discipline,
and job allocation. With the connections that the workers had spent
years nurturing disrupted, management domination threatened to
decimate their hard-won conditions.
In spite of such setbacks, within a few years the same collective
cultures began to re-emerge. Although management could suppress
certain social practices and behaviours, even restore a sense that
resistance to management was unwise, the cultural shift in the second
half of the 1950s in terms of attitudes and expectations had been
sufficient to ensure that conflictual features of factory life reappeared as
soon as the opportunity arose. By the mid-1960s Ford found itself once
again trying to repair their industrial relations, this time through a
planned consultation with its stewards,77 evidence that this cultural
remaking remained able to ‘recharge itself effectively’78 well into the era
of consumer affluence.
By that point, life in the motor industry had largely taken the shape
that would later define it. In most firms, workers had secured formal
and informal rights over workplace negotiation. A dominant collective
culture had been established where workers collectively discussed
grievances and responded to management failure to meet expectations
on working conditions, job and wage security, and living standards
with a variety of social practices. These ranged from the simplest
75
Ken Weller and Ernie Stanton, What Happened at Fords (Bromley, 1967), 14.
76
Friedman and Meredeen, 63.
77
Friedman and Meredeen, 77.
78
Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940, 216.
18 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

demonstrations of solidarity—like a unanimous shop meeting vote—to

formal confrontation via strikes, or informal sanctions like shoddy work
or even minor sabotage.79 In shops with the strongest union cultures,
the dominant collective cultural values had been transformed. In
contrast to the more co-operative workplace cultures seen in some
shops in the 1940s, many workers had adopted more aggressive
versions of class consciousness, including the adversarial idea of the
100 per cent shop, where gains in workers rights were ‘the benefits of
trade union organisation’ and those who refused to accept the ‘trade
union responsibilities’ that came with them would not be tolerated.80 In
many cases, these cultures were strongest precisely amongst those
groups like semi-skilled assembly workers who were most distant from
the longer standing occupational craft cultures that marked inter-war
trade unionism.
Such ideas were not without their opponents. Once the concept of
100 per cent trade unionism became dominant across a shop, ‘noners’
either had to adapt to this new state of affairs or leave the industry.
Some, like Jim Barson at Cowley, participated in the union after being
compelled to join, becoming active advocates of moderate policies.81
Others were forced out entirely, as in one strike at the Longbridge
foundry in November 1960, where one attempt to enforce a closed shop
saw three workers targeted, of whom two joined and one left.82 For
most anti-union workers, as a more collective value system came to
passively or actively dominate their workplace, the usual solution was
reluctant acceptance. In the case of Ted Evans, an apprenticed Coventry
coach-builder from a conservative background, the rise of the NUVB in
the small Rover Helen Street Body Shop was an unwelcome
development. ‘I was never over keen. Even then there was the bullying
tactics and I never liked those. I never liked being bullied into
anything.’83 Evans joined reluctantly but later escaped by ‘getting on’
and taking a supervisory job at Rover’s Lode Lane factory.84
People like Ted Evans reveal how the closed shop functioned as a
localized culture, with workers’ differing degrees of acceptance and
rejection orientating themselves around a new set of cultural norms.
Local transformations later coalesced to create a more general shift at
factory and industrial levels. Observed from above this appeared to be
the product of external forces, but as we can see from Ted Evans’
79
Beynon, 139–40.
80
RAE, MSS.202/S/J/3/2/30, Ford Strike: Why We Are Out (Handbill) Sent to
Longbridge JSSC, 1959.
81
Thornett, From Militancy to Marxism, 14.
82
RAE, MSS.202/S/J/1/7, Longbridge Joint Shop Stewards Meeting Minutes, 28
November 1960.
83
PWAIR, MSS.356/7/2/20, Ted Evans Interview, 12 November 1982.
84
PWAIR, MSS.356/7/2/20, Ted Evans Interview, 12 November 1982.
THE UNTRADITIONAL WORKER 19 of 24

complaints, from the shop floor it looked more like the result of worker
activism (or, in his eyes, bullying). Prominent within this activism were
workers animated by political convictions, particularly members of the
CP. By the late 1950s CP members were convenors at several important
factories, including Dick Etheridge at Longbridge, Bill Warman at
Standard Canley, Kevin Halpin at Dagenham, and Harold Horne at
Luton Vauxhall. CP members also led company-wide combine
committees for both Rover and BMC, as well as the short-lived
national Motor and Allied Industry JSSC.
How much the Party itself contributed to this activity is debatable.
Kevin Halpin certainly attributed great importance to factory branches,
describing how they ‘developed and disseminated long-term policy for
their industries’.85 However, like most CP stewards he seldom received
orders from party headquarters and in any case stewards would never
have had the power to implement such instructions unilaterally. What
the CP members provided, along with other motivated activists, was
encouragement for members to adopt and share effective social
practices and information. Eddie Parry, a shop steward at Canley and
briefly a CP official, saw considerable influence; ‘policies that we
advocated at some stage later on were finally adopted by many of the
industries and the trade unions’.86 However, he saw the effect of the
party on those policies as more complex than simply gradual
acceptance and ideas like resistance to redundancy were not always
adopted in their original form.
They [the CP] weren’t too happy about the idea of a shorter working week to
retain labour because they said that it was merely sharing the poverty, that
we ought to resist the sack and at the same time fight politically for a policy
of expansion . . . But we in industry thought that was a little bit airy-fairy
because people on the shop floor could see immediately . . . that there wasn’t
enough work to go round for everybody, and saw more logic in the idea of
working a shorter working week to retain all the people.87
Industrial militants worked with a substantial degree of autonomy
from the party, and in some instances used their experience of factory
life to modify policy. Like combine committees, factory branches
encouraged the dynamics that were already expanding shop-floor
activism by sharing information about rates and working conditions,
which stimulated new demands.88 CP members attempted to influence
85
Halpin, 21–2.
86
Coventry History Centre, Oral History Collection, PA1662/2/169, Eddie Parry
Interview, 1987.
87
Coventry History Centre, Oral History Collection, PA1662/2/169, Eddie Parry
Interview, 1987.
88
Shirley Lerner and John Bescoby, ‘Shop Steward Combine Committees in the British
Engineering Industry’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 4 (1966), 154–64; 163–4.
20 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

policy, but they were never a radically separate caste attempting to

import ‘foreign’ ideas to the factory, and the same social processes were
also widely promoted by non-Communist stewards like Les Gurl and
Frank Horsman at Cowley.
Communists actively encouraged the development of shop-floor
organization, but were neither a necessity nor a guarantee of its
emergence. At Vauxhall Luton, union organization had been led by
Harold Horne, a Londoner who came to Bedfordshire after being
blacklisted in London for political activities. Despite such leadership, by
the 1960s more militant workers dubbed Vauxhall ‘the cabbage patch’
on account of its more placid workforce.89 Contemporary commentators
struggled to comprehend Vauxhall’s success in avoiding trouble, with
many attributing it to a consultative style of personnel management,
which included an elected Management Advisory Council (MAC)
consisting of 20 delegates elected as full-time departmental
representatives.90
According to foreman Jack West, the system resolved petty
grievances: ‘Every month they had a meeting. ‘‘What’s the trouble?’’
‘‘Not enough sugar in the tea’’, or any little thing was bought up and
thrashed out . . . And of course he was trouble free of strikes, because
everything was . . . scotched off beforehand . . . it didn’t have a chance to
ferment’.91 However, Vauxhall was not the only major car firm to have
consultative institutions. At all four British firms, workers were
elected to Joint Production Committees, which focused on similar
incidental issues, unconnected to production. Furthermore, judging by
the responses of Vauxhall assemblers to The Affluent Worker survey,
the MAC was not particularly effective in alleviating grievances. Of all
the workers that Goldthorpe et al questioned, Vauxhall workers were
the least satisfied, commenting on the monotony and meaninglessness
of their tasks.92
Yet, Luton genuinely was the least well-organized and least strike-
prone car plant.93 What seems to have been key was how Vauxhall
combined consultation with the repression or diversion of workplace
conflict. Everyday grievances that elsewhere helped stewards to cement
their position and workers to develop their collective cultures were
generally directed toward the MAC, where committee members offered
grievance resolution that was removed from the social power of the
89
Spartacus, ‘The Vauxhall Struggle’, Solidarity: For Workers’ Power, September 1967,
3–6; 3.
90
Len Holden, ‘Fording the Atlantic: Ford and Fordism in Europe’, Business History, 47
(2005), 122–7; 122.
91
LHA, X819/11/9, Jack West Interview, January 1981.
92
John Goldthorpe and others, The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour
(London, 1968), 18.
93
Lyddon, 187; Glyn Morgan Interview, 4 December 1979.
THE UNTRADITIONAL WORKER 21 of 24

shop floor. This created distance between workers and representatives,

with some complaining that MAC members were more difficult to
convince than management.94
The influence of the MAC waned from the early 1960s, with turnout
in committee elections dropping to a small minority.95 At this point
workers came to depend more on stewards, a development that
Vauxhall discouraged, often refusing to allow job relief for stewards,
assuring complainants that MAC members would be easier to obtain.96
‘Troublemakers’ were also subject to other forms of subtle repression.
Activists claimed they were moved around the factory to prevent strong
work groups forming. One complained in 1967 that he had ‘worked in
nearly every building in the Luton plant. There have been no doubts
whatsoever that this has contributed to the gradual and systematic
breaking up of the pressure groups within our more militant
departments’.97 A combination of limited consultation, co-option of
activists and obstruction of militants enabled Vauxhall to perpetuate
managerial dominance over production.
This system, like the social practices that prevailed at other factories,
created its own attitudes and cultural values. In contrast to Peter
Nicholas’ workers at Tyseley, whose grievances resulted in represen-
tation that was perpetuated through solidarity, at Vauxhall limited
grievance resolution was conceded unilaterally by management,
obviating the need for such support. In place of a steward conjured
by his workmates, Vauxhall had permanent committee members, which
encouraged a more clientelist ethos. One steward wrote to Solidarity
about the attitudes he felt this produced amongst his fellow workers.
Describing an incident involving a dirty floor in the paint shop, he
described how the workers continued to paddle around in a puddle,
‘whinging’, for an hour and a half. When their shop steward arrived
and had it cleared he was told, ‘about bloody time!’ This, thought the
steward, was representative of the culture at Vauxhall—‘shop stewards
are often blamed for not doing their jobs by workers who will not lift a
finger to help themselves’.98
What Vauxhall activists’ complaints of impotency reveal is not
necessarily conformity, but they does hint at why that factory only
rarely experienced the kind of self-organized wildcats that were a
constant feature of life in other factories. Grievances were not sufficient
to provoke collective action and Vauxhall’s industrial relations policies
stymied the horizontal social relationships that emerged at other

94
Ken Weller, Truth about Vauxhall (Whipsnade, 1962), 8.
95
LHA, X819/11/2, Harold Horne Interview, July 1978.
96
Weller, Truth about Vauxhall, 10.
97
Spartacus, 3.
98
‘Inside Vauxhall’, Solidarity: For Workers’ Power, June 1969, 21–2; 22.
22 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

factories, encouraging workers to participate in vertical structures.

Despite a similar social situation to other car workers, Vauxhall workers
had a very different experience of class and work, which was
structured as much by their relations with their peers as it was by any
domination inherent to the class structure. In many ways this attitude
toward collective organization reflects the ‘rugged individualism’ that
Michael Savage has attributed to this very group, a combination of both
assertiveness and privatism.99

Conclusion
Luton’s industrial relations were the exception, even within Vauxhall.
At their Ellesmere Port plant, opened in 1962, the workers were notably
more strike-prone.100 The rapidity with which conflict became endemic
there and the other three assembly factories built in the 1960s—Ford
Halewood, Standard Speke, and Rootes Linwood—demonstrates the
extent to which worker activism had changed the industry. At
Halewood, the company initially reached a sweetheart deal with the
AEU and the General and Municipal Workers Union, encouraging
‘reliable’ men to become stewards.101 This broke down as some workers
challenged the ‘phoney stewards’ to do their jobs properly:
When I got here, put on a section, I asked around for the steward. I
eventually found out who he was but when I went up to him he told me
that we couldn’t talk about the union in the company’s time. The
management would object he said. So I thought, sod you. He asked me what
union I was in and I said ‘not yours you bastard’.102
By the time worker activists at Halewood came to organize, some
had a very strong conception of what they felt a union should look like.
One hundred per cent unionism was becoming the industry norm, as
were formal agreements over job and wage security. In terms of trade
unionism, shop-floor representation was now so ubiquitous that the
troublemaking militant steward was a cliché. It was from this new
reality that reformers would generalize, with evidence from the car
firms key to the 1965–68 Royal Commission.103

99
Michael Savage, ‘Sociology, Class and Male Manual Work Cultures’, in Alan
Campbell, Nina Fishman and John McIlroy, eds, British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics,
vol. 2: The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964–79 (London, 1999), 23–42; 31–4.
100
David Marsden, The Car Industry: Labour Relations and Industrial Adjustment (London,
1985), 143.
101
Beynon, 66.
102
Beynon, 80.
103
Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, 102–5.
THE UNTRADITIONAL WORKER 23 of 24

Between 1940 and 1965, a new collective culture was forged in the
motor industry, changing social relations there, contributing to wider
developments in industrial relations and the nature of class in Britain
more generally. Changes in three elements of workplace culture—social
practices, pragmatic rationalities, and moral values—reinforced one
another, producing many of the distinguishing features of the post-war
working class, including its notorious industrial militancy, and much of
its collective social and political visibility.
The role of worker activism in this shift in the 1950s and 1960s has
been marginalized in much of the historiography, as many historians
attributed changing behaviour to different modes of political economy,
prioritizing the state and capital as agents.104 It has also been obscured
by the attribution of ‘traditional’ status to the strongest collective
cultures in British workplaces105, obscuring the extent to which post-
war workers made their own new capacity for collective action. In the
motor industry, in contrast to the atomization that has often been
assumed to have taken place in other aspects of British life, we find the
creation rather than the erosion of horizontal and collective social
relations between working-class people. New works on other historical
spaces, like Ben Curtis’ history of South Wales miners between 1964
and 1985106 and Ben Jones’ study of working-class communities in
Brighton107, indicate that it was perhaps not the only sphere of British
life in which this may have occurred. Older workplace social histories
like Fred Lindop’s work on the post-war London docks also suggest
that activist-led social processes may have encouraged a new
combativity even amongst traditionally class-conscious groups.108
Social experience and collective agency were at the heart of these
changes. The manifestation of class and work in the lives of car workers
in this period was constituted as much by the way in which they
changed the pattern of their social relationships as by domination or
patterns of exclusion. Although many of the social conditions which
defined the post-war settlement were in place by the 1940s, it was only
later that workplace cultures in the industry became more assertive,
and the workers’ collective social and political power was strengthened.
As a result of this process their experience of class exclusion also
changed. Many of our subjects moved from a situation of isolated

104
Reid, 15; Laybourn, 172; Ben Pimlott and Chris Cook, Trade Unions in British
Politics: the First 250 Years (London:, 1991), 185; Howell, 16.
105
Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940, 216.
106
Ben Curtis, The South Wales Miners; 1964-1985 (Cardiff, 2013), 71–7.
107
Ben Jones, The Working Class in Mid Twentieth-Century England: Community, Identity
and Social Memory (Manchester, 2012).
108
Fred Lindop, ‘Unofficial Militancy in the Royal Group of Docks 1945-67’, Oral
History, 11 (1983), 21–33.
24 of 24 JACK SAUNDERS

fatalism to the active assertion of their rights at shop, factory, and

eventually national level.
The social and cultural resources that resulted from this remaking
were limited in a variety of ways and symbolized different things for
different people. Whilst we can observe a trend toward a workplace
culture that was more collectively assertive, by no means everyone
wished to participate and conflicts over determined ‘noners’ and
strikebreakers remained an occasional feature of workplace life. Beyond
the principled ‘noner’ and the committed activist lay large numbers of
workers whose trade unionism veered between passive, reluctant, or
purely instrumental but sometimes also active and highly committed,
depending on changing situations and historical moments. With these
caveats in mind, it remains worthwhile to restore to post-war workers
ownership of the social organizations they created and the collective
actions they participated in. Once recognized as the product of
working-class agency, the task of understanding more fully how shop-
floor social relationships operated, enabling or stifling democratic
interventions into industrial and national life, becomes a vital area of
study. Crucially, in identifying the origin of these cultural changes as a
social process led by the workers themselves, we return agency to our
historical subjects. Instead of being ‘traditional’, simple products of
their epoch, they are present at their own creation, engaging in a
process of self-making. Identifying this process and the social power it
gave to workers in the car industry, we understand more fully what
distinguished them from many of their counterparts and successors.