One of the challenges of historical work is the way in which concepts that have a powerful but limited traction in understanding episodes in the past are then used promiscuously and therefore unhelpfully. A recent example is ‘neoliberalism’, a term productively used to understand and analyse an important post-1940 intellectual movement, but commonly deployed to characterize all kinds of political and economic developments across the West since the 1970s. This is not, of course, an argument for not using the concept, but rather for its careful deployment. A similar problem can occur with ‘austerity’, which Clara Mattei applies to the years after the First World War when, following the initial post-war boom, restrictive economic policies were developed from 1920–21. Mattei offers a comparative account of Britain and Italy organized around ‘austerity,’ framed as a recurrent ruling-class strategy to suppress workingclass revolt. Her account is flawed by an exaggeration of the scale of the post-war labour insurgency in both Britain and Italy, and by the failure to assess the constraints imposed on their governments by the interconnectedness of the world capitalist order. She also greatly overestimates the role of economists in shaping the policy of austerity.

On Wednesday 3 June 1970, Warwick University’s Board of Social Studies discussed a memorandum cautioning against the expansion of ‘business studies’ by John Rex, the recently arrived professor of sociology. Distinguishing industrial relations from business studies, he argued that the latter should not be taught as an undergraduate discipline. Coming so soon after the issue of the ‘Warwick Files’, Rex’s memorandum was delivered into a charged situation in which many students and staff had become profoundly disenchanted with the university’s management. However, fifty years later the business school now dominates Warwick and almost all UK universities, being both its cash machine and its operating language. Industrial relations has been eclipsed as a field of enquiry but more important is the way that business and management practice now provides the operating language and governance of the university itself. It is now far too late to imagine that universities might have nothing to do with business, but there is an opportunity to radicalize what ‘business studies’ means. If we shut down the business school, then we must replace it with the School for Organizing, a place for studying how we rescue ourselves from carbon capitalism.

In its analysis of the pay determination of British Coal canteen workers, this article introduces that by Kathy O’Donnell, who argues that, in all but name, canteen workers were part of a single bargaining structure that included male surface mineworkers. It is drawn from the evidence prepared for the National Union of Mineworkers in late 1990 in support of an equal pay claim for female canteen workers and cleaners employed by British Coal. The claim was successful. Two points clearly emerge. First, job segregation allowed women workers to be placed in a separate grading structure from men, and even if there was some overlap between the two at the bottom of the one and at the top of the other, the situation was one in which there was no effective difference from the operation of a single grading structure. But for this institutional segregation, there would have been a much more transparent instance of pay discrimination.

The 1959 printing workers’ strike for the 40-hour week led to them winning that iconic demand which then spread to other manual workers. This success was all the more remarkable as the printing industry was riven by union ‘wage autonomy’ and craft divisions. The unity of the print unions’ federation allowed it to sustain a seven-week strike. The print employers’ long-standing concern had been labour supply, particularly apprentice numbers. This figured prominently in 1959, along with ‘efficiency’ measures, codified in a twenty-two-point list. The terms agreed were generally ‘permissive rather than mandatory’ and the employers would keep returning to this agenda over subsequent decades. The unions would not accept arbitration in such complex talks: two sets of pay negotiations (craft and non-craft), individual unions’ ‘domestic’ claims, and their federation leading on working time. When a related dispute at printing-ink manufacturers threatened national newspaper production, the Ministry of Labour appointed an independent chair to advise on discussions for a negotiated settlement in the printing strike. The twists and turns of this arrangement and the return to work are outlined.

The early experience of John Eldridge (17 May 1936 to 24 December 2022) in teaching adult classes and research in industry led him to appreciate the understandings and expertise of shop-floor informants, and to think critically about the unequal relations of authority and power that conditioned people’s working lives. His radical Weberian orientation to dispassionate research fused with his Methodist background to underpin a strong linkage between his scholarship and a commitment to social justice and peace. Fully conversant with sociological research and theory, John explored the complexity and the variety of forms of conflict and accommodation in a distinctive sociological contribution to the debate on the character of workplace industrial conflict in the 1960s and 1970s, and the centrality of analyses of contested cultures, power relations and control strategies in the organization and evolution of industrial enterprises. Later, this formed the basis for a systematic investigation of media bias in industrial relations reportage. He also explored the contested issue of ‘industrial democracy’. John’s essays for Historical Studies in Industrial Relations revisited key researchers and texts in the sociology of work and industrial relations, and highlighted their continuing relevance for understanding our world.

The Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy, 1975–77 (chair: Alan Bullock) was established to explore the Trades Union Congress’s proposals for board-level workers’ representation, which it saw as a means to locate workers’ interests within corporate strategy. Two issues emerged in the committee’s work: the macro division of class and ideology chiefly between union and union-sympathizing advocates of worker directors on the one hand, and business and business-sympathizing opponents on the other hand; and the micro division within the trade-union movement over worker directors. Two reports were published: the Majority Report recommended that one-third of company directors be elected, on a statutory basis, by union members employed in the company, whereas the Minority Report proposed the establishment, on a voluntary basis, of below-board committees elected by all workers. The Labour government did not accept the Majority Report and its White Paper proposed a diluted version of the Minority Report. There was no attempt to legislate. Comparing the Bullock Committee with the Low Pay Commission (of which he was the first chair) reinforced a central tenet of Bain’s experience of industrial relations, which is that meaningful redistribution of authority from employers to workers has only ever been achieved in the UK with a level of government support that is sufficient to override business opposition.

All over Europe, workers’ insubordination in the 1960s and 1970s became manifest in a growing number of wildcat strikes. In the Netherlands, under the guise of the so-called consensual ‘polder model’, trade unions were part of a repressive system of industrial relations. From 1963, rank-and-file opposition in ‘unofficial’ strikes forced the ‘official’ unions to abandon their support of restrictive wage policies. After a huge wildcat strike in the port of Rotterdam in 1970, the union leadership changed its policy and began to initiate strikes. In this article, rank-and-file mobilization and the union leaderships’ reaction are analysed in four wildcat strikes between 1963 and 1970. It concludes that in these strikes the union leadership and rank-and-file members, while opposed to each other, were also mutually dependent. The union leadership was forced to adapt to pressure from below, and strikers had to rely on the bargaining ability of union officials to reach an agreement with the employers. Both parties had to accept an involuntary symbiosis. In this way, the attachment of the trade-union leadership to the top-down consensus in the ‘polder model’ was undermined.

This paper examines the rates of pay of female canteen workers employed by British Coal as compared to male employees, with a focus on the reasons for the existence and persistence of a wage differential of around 20%. Four sets of interrelated issues are addressed: first, the structure of collective pay bargaining in the coal industry and the formal and informal relationship between bargaining arrangements for female canteen workers and male mineworkers; second, the empirical evidence on relative pay levels and rates of change for female canteen workers and other British Coal employees; third, the structure and influence of the external labour market for canteen workers and its relation to the position of British Coal’s female canteen workers; and fourth, the role of gender in influencing the level of wage differential between female employees and male employees of British Coal. The conclusion is that gender difference seems to be the main explanatory factor for the remaining differences in pay and conditions that exist between female canteen workers and mineworkers.

Anna Pollert revisits her 1970s ethnographic study of women’s working lives at the Churchman tobacco factory in Bristol to discuss her qualitative methodology and to summarize her findings. In vivid extracts, Pollert recalls the gendered world that women then faced at home as principal family carers and at work – pay, conditions, male managers, a male-dominated union – and analyses their views, values, and lives. Although the 2020s are a very different world from the 1970s, Pollert notes unwelcome continuities – occupational gender segregation, the gender pay gap (albeit narrowed), low pay, and the domestic division of labour in which women still do more work than men. A positive change is that women are more assertive about their rights. However, the greater openness and social liberalism has been accompanied by a fracturing of other certainties such as the availability of public provision and the growth of zero-hours and sub-contract labour. Pollert restates the value of ethnographic research in understanding what goes on at work ‘behind the headlines’ to understand the dynamics of workers’ consciousness and collective action.