Managing the Modern Workplace

Productivity, Politics and Workplace Culture in Postwar Britain

Alan Booth, Joseph Melling, Joseph Melling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317101376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A recurring theme in the history of modern Britain in the twentieth-century has been the failure of its manufacturing industry and the record of disorder and conflict in the industrial workplace. This image was reinforced by the evidence of national strikes from the 1960s until 1984. This emphasis on decline and disorder in British manufacturing has distorted our understanding of workplace relationships and cultures in the post-war years. This volume provides a fresh assessment of the diverse and complex world of the workplace and Britain's production cultures during the long boom. Essays investigate the public and private sectors, and both manufacturing and service industries. The volume begins with a comparison of labour management in the post-war automobile industry, exploring the role of the foreman in the management of shop floor labour in Britain and the USA. The following two essays are concerned with relations between management and workers in the publicly-owned corporations. The first examines negotiations over pay and effort at the Swindon locomotive works, including the cultural values which informed the behaviour of the bargainers. The second investigates managerial responses to technical change in the British gas industry. We then move into the service sector, with an essay on the management of clerical staff in banks, including a discussion of the different roles available to male and female workers, and the incorporation of automated technologies. The final essay looks at the involvement of the unions in workplace productivity and the extent to which Labour politics informed union behaviour. The essays in this volume shed new light on the reasons for Britain's economic performance and opens up earlier interpretations of national decline and adversarial workplace cultures for further debate.

Chapter 1

Workplace Cultures and Business Performance: British Labour Relations and Industrial Output in Comparative Perspective*

Alan Booth and Joseph Melling

In the protracted debates on British economic performance during the third quarter of the twentieth century, two important themes have recently emerged. The first concerns the influence of cultural values over the behaviour of employers, managers, and employees as they formed relationships, engaged in production, and bargaining over the fruits of output.¹ The second is the impact that such values and relationships had on the performance of manufacturing industry in Britain and elsewhere. These debates have been coloured by a larger literature on long-term growth and the cultural legacy of bourgeois society. General accounts have included different narratives of genteel values of status and social ascent and their influence over attitudes to industrial achievement.² Business historians have drawn attention to the continued importance of family connections and provincial loyalties within Chandler’s model of Britain’s ‘personal capitalism’.³ Labour historians have also explored the cultural traditions and responses of working people to industrial capitalism, concentrating on the creation of workplace customs and the encroachment on managerial control by skilled and semi-skilled workers.⁴

This growing recognition of the power of cultural values at the workplace has not been absorbed easily by economists and economic historians, who have found it difficult to integrate a cultural ‘residual’ into their models and prefer the vocabulary of market structures and institutional interests. Mancur Olson, for example, has explained patterns of behaviour that have excited cultural historians in terms of the logic of collective action and the need for collective interest groups to cope with free riders.⁵ Elbaum, Lazonick and others have explained industrial decline by ‘institutional rigidities’, which include the craft defensiveness and managerial limitations that have also figured prominently in the work of cultural historians.⁶ This ‘new institutional account’ has, however, attracted significant criticism over its definitions of basic terms and its inflexibilities.⁷ More fundamentally, we may question whether institutionalist models are compatible with the growing evidence of the importance of cultural values in guiding market behaviour.

Before considering the ways in which workplace culture may be understood, we review recent literature on the relative decline of British manufacturing. We then examine the peculiar characteristics and cultural traditions of craft-unionism in the British workplace. Numerous authors have claimed that the distinctive patterns of workplace bargaining and industrial adversity may be traced to the roots of craft unionism as well as the particular forms of class conflict that have marked industrial relations since the nineteenth century. Finally, we offer an alternative perspective on business culture, institutional bargaining and economic performance. In our critique, familiar arguments regarding the rigidity of craft institutions and the detrimental consequences of workers’ behaviour for industrial performance are called into question. We suggest that cultural values informed market activity as well as institutional practice. Business and workplace cultures may be understood as a resource which provided actors with a rationale for action that rarely prescribed or precluded alternative strategies. We begin with an assessment of the evidence for manufacturing failure in post-war Britain to establish the parameters within which cultural explanations must operate.

British manufacturing production and the ‘failure’ of economic performance

A recurring theme in the economic and business history of Britain in the twentieth-century has been that its manufacturing industry ‘failed’. The evidence for such a dismal view of economic performance rests on two vital points: firstly, commentators have stressed the fact that the British economy has grown more slowly than the other countries, particularly the ‘miracle’ economies of the early post-war period, such as France, Germany and Japan (Table 1.1). Secondly, British levels of output per worker are well below those achieved in comparable industries in the United States⁸ (Table 1.2). Together this evidence suggests that Britain’s manufacturing industry was the cause of relative decline during the long post-war boom, 1950–1973. Historians have competed to apportion the blame for this evident failure between owners, managers, workers, trade unions, financiers, policy-makers and so forth.⁹

Table 1.1 Rates of growth of output, living standards and productivity, 1913–1979 (annual percentage growth rates)

	1913–1950	1950–1973	1973–1979
Growth rates of real GDP
France	1.1	5.0	2.8
Germany	1.1	6.0	2.3
UK	1.3	3.0	1.5
USA	2.8	3.9	2.8
Growth rates of real GDP per capita
France	1.1	4.0	2.3
Germany	0.3	5.0	2.5
UK	0.8	2.5	1.5
USA	1.6	2.4	1.8
Growth rates of real GDP per hour worked
France	1.9	5.1	3.2
Germany	0.6	6.0	4.1
UK	1.6	3.1	2.3
USA	2.5	2.7	1.7

Source: Alan Booth, The British Economy in the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001, Table 2.4.

In this literature, many writers have located a vital defect in Britain’s system of industrial relations and its distinctive pattern of workplace bargaining. Pratten argued that British managers were historically constrained by workforce resistance to efficient practices. Prais suggested that the multiplicity of unions compounded the problems faced by managements, particularly in the largest plants with the highest records of strikes. Davies and Caves similarly found that union density and a proneness to strikes was higher in Britain than the United States and these factors contributed to the UK’s difficulty in catching up with American productivity rates during the 1970s.¹⁰ Many of the broader claims made by such scholars rested on surprisingly inconclusive statistical evidence.¹¹

Table 1.2 Comparative levels of output per employee in US manufacturing, 1950–1975 (output per UK worker is 100 for each industry and year stated)

	1950	1967/1968	1975
Chemicals and allied	356.4	281	226.8
Basic metals	274.4	294	251.1
Engineering/metal-working	337.3	294	190.6
Textiles, leather, clothing	197.9	225	222.8
Food, drink, tobacco	215.3	246	208.4
Other manufacturing	284.7	276	274.8
All manufacturing	273.4	276	224.7

Source: S.N. Broadberry, ‘Manufacturing and the Convergence Hypothesis: what the Long-run Data Show’, Journal of Economic History 53 (1993), p. 786.

Economic historians have attempted to repair this deficiency in statistical evidence during the past decade. Nicholas Crafts is the most influential contributor to the new research assessment of post-war economic growth, interpreting British economic performance in terms of a ‘conditional convergence’ of leading economies. The technological lead established by the US during the second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century was based on new technologies, mass production and features of business organization familiar to readers of Chandler. These lessons were effectively ‘learned’ by other economies and their benefits diffused only in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Supply-side constraints left the UK trailing badly in the race to catch up with the United States. Crafts has suggested that the extent of this under-performance was slower aggregate growth by as much as 1 per cent per year.¹² For Crafts it was the weak competitive pressures on British firms in manufacturing, more particularly the heavier metalworking sectors, which fatally undermined national growth. Within this context, the incentives to improve the quality of human capital, management deficiencies, old-fashioned institutions and obstructive trade unionism were weak and badly eroded the capacity of British business to respond to the challenges which it faced.¹³

The case for the weakness of British manufacturing outlined by Crafts has been qualified by other leading researchers. Feinstein used the conditional convergence framework to conclude that Britain’s growth potential was limited, noting the small agricultural sector which the UK possessed by that time, and suggested that the levels of productivity reached in the 1950s were reasonably high.¹⁴ While a close collaborator of Crafts, Broadberry has pointed out that over the long period 1870– 1990, the trend rate of Britain’s manufacturing productivity growth did not deteriorate relative to either Germany or the United States. He also emphasized that the relative advances in productivity levels recorded in the last two countries at the level of the national economy were attributable to changes occurring outside manufacturing, including sectoral shifts from agriculture.¹⁵ This echoes the earlier work of Denison and more recent findings of Temin in highlighting the advantages gained by other countries where such shifts reallocated labour into more productive occupations and produced a once-for-all boost to the postwar growth rate.¹⁶

Closer examination of the data presented by scholars such as Broadberry allows for a rather brighter view of British manufacturers than Crafts and even Broadberry himself acknowledges. Booth has noted that 1950 is an inappropriate base year for a comparison with Germany since that country’s delayed postwar recovery in manufacturing was concentrated into the years 1948–1952. More than two thirds of all gains made in German m...