Workplace Militancy: A Rejoinder

Abstract

After many years of comparative neglect, the social history of British motor workers has now become the focus of extensive scholarly attention. The development of trade unions and shop steward organization, the evolution of management strategies, the formation of the labour force, the role of women, and family patterns have been examined in a spate of recent articles, theses and work in progress, much of it drawing on oral as well as documentary sources.' It was inevitable that this wealth of new research would modify in significant ways my account of the emergence of shop steward organization and job control based on the limited range of information available in the late 1970s (HWJ 10), and Dave Lyddon's critique (HWJ 15) does advance our understanding of these developments in a number of respects. But beyond purely factual questions lie substantive differences in interpretation which flow from contrasting methodological standpoints; and these differences in approach often lead Lyddon to misinterpret significantly the thrust of my arguments. In order to advance the debate and clarify the issues at stake, I will therefore attempt to disentangle empirical correction and interpretative disagreement in considering Lyddon's principal objections to my arguments, taking up in sequence the problems of periodization of union development, relations between unions and shop stewards, the role of migration, and the broader interpretation of the diffusion of job control and the distinctivejpess of workplace organization in the British motor industry. The area in which I am most prepared to accept Lyddon's critique is in his remarks on the periodization of unionism and the erosion of managerial control. It has become clear from his work, together with that of Tolliday, Croucher and others, that I exaggerated the strength of trade unionism and shop stewards during the late 1940s and early 50s and did not place sufficient emphasis on the gap between wartime gains and the achievement of high levels of unionization, which in most major firms came only in the late 50s or early 60s. In this respect, my argument followed too closely the account of Friedman's Industry and Labour (1977) which assigned a central role to the seller's market for cars in this period, and should have followed more closely the movement of union density and the outcome of strikes in these years. As Tolliday has shown, it was above all supplyside and reconversion problems (such as shortages of steel and fuel) which inhibited the industry's growth in the immediate postwar years, occasioning the periodic redundancies that weakened the hand of workplace organization.2 I would likewise agree that I was mistaken in following Friedman in generalizing from Standard Motors to the industry as a whole, or even to other Coventry firms, though this point remains less clear.3 But the distinctive managerial strategies adopted by British motor firms may nonetheless have contributed in more complex ways to the high level of job control achieved by shop stewards in the 1960s and early 70s. Wayne Lewchuk has argued convincingly that most British car firms were slower than their foreign counterparts in introducing capital-intensive production methods, preferring to rely on payment systems to maintain effort and output levels; and the weaker technical control over the organization of production which