British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics

The Post-war Compromise, 1945-1964

John Mcllroy, Nina Fishman, Alan Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138607958
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429842962
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1999, this volume describes the political climate and state of trade unions after the second world war in Britain. Detailing the transition of individuals who had survived in the war or had taken part in the war effort to going back a civilian life in 1945. Following the rise of the Labour party in Britain until 1964.

PART ONE

Overviews, 1945–79

CHAPTER ONE

Sociology, Class and Male Manual Work Cultures

Mike Savage

Understanding the fortunes of trade unionism between 1945 and 1979 offers serious difficulties of historical interpretation. Looking backward to the interwar years, these were the culminating years of the ‘forward march of labour’ when trade unions reached their peak levels of support and influence.¹ Union membership peaked in 1979, when over half the workforce was unionized and the Labour Party itself was, though not the dominant political party, a serious political force. Governments felt that there was no choice but to deal with unions as one of the main power brokers in the country and the 1970s saw corporatist policy making reach unprecedented levels.² Looking forward, however, to the Thatcher era, these were also the years when cracks in the labour movement became evident. Certainly, these cracks – which, to be sure, some writers denied the existence of – were to become fractures only in the 1980s and beyond. None the less, debates about the significance of ‘affluence’, the implications of the new mass media, the development of youth culture and of unorthodox political currents and forms such as the New Left, feminism and pacifism, all hinted that established forms of working-class collective action were under challenge.

If we seek out potential seeds of decline amidst the strengths displayed by the labour movement in this period, one idea above all others commands attention. This is the belief that the collective work and class cultures which had supposedly spawned the labour movement were fading and that individualistic orientations and actions were becoming steadily more prominent. From the vantage point of the 1990s, the idea that contemporary social life gives the individual unprecedented prominence is commonplace. Many of the recent sociological glosses on the main elements of contemporary social change explicitly or implicitly endorse the view that collective solidarities have faded. Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens are particularly well known for arguing that the rise of ‘reflexivity’, ‘individualisation’ and ‘life politics’ have stripped down traditional class allegiances and solidarities.³ In the field of industrial relations, conceptions of the ‘new individualism’ have become one of the talking points in considering the reasons for the contemporary travails of trade unions.⁴

It can be argued that the 1950s and 1960s were a critical turning point in the elaboration of the idea that individualized identities were gaining prominence and that these spelled the erosion of class loyalties. This essay is a contribution to thinking about the key features of male manual work cultures, in ways which may further our understanding of the cultural roots of trade unionism. The aim is not to offer an original, source-based contribution to an examination of male manual work cultures, but to offer a series of critical reflections on how we can read the sociological accounts of these cultures which were produced in abundance in those decades. I will argue that for all their value and importance, these studies have left us a problematic intellectual legacy. A set of conceptual oppositions were set in place during this formative intellectual period which has ultimately provided us with an inadequate understanding of the relationship between work, class, and culture. The task I set myself here is to consider how we read the research contributions of the time historically, that is to say not as a contribution to the development of sociological research traditions but as documents whose meaning needs to be uncovered by placing them in their historical and intellectual context.⁵

The main argument I seek to develop is as follows. The contemporary emphasis on the alleged decline of collective solidarities and the rise of individualism has its intellectual roots in debates about work cultures that developed in the 1960s. I want to challenge the historicism that colours this work and the way such research has been enshrined in subsequent debates. Following Marshall and his associates, I will argue that in the 1960s a series of dualistic oppositions were put in place which conflated a number of quite distinct processes: the traditional, the collective, the solidaristic and the ‘class member’, were contrasted with the modern, the individual, the instrumental and the ‘non-class member’.⁶ These oppositions, I want to argue, have left a powerful legacy. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the recent, rather unsatisfactory, debate on class in British sociology continues to be dependent on the conceptual frame they provided, in seeing class identities as somehow dependent on a collective, rather than an individual basis.⁷ However, if we are to understand the contradictory nature of male manual work cultures both in the period between 1945 and 1979, and more recently, we need to rethink the relevant conceptual tools afresh and examine the complex inter-relationship between individual identities and social class.

The chapter is organized as follows. In the first part I describe some of the major research works of the period, in order to draw attention to the distinctive intellectual moment within which these writings were formed. In the second section I go on to consider the emerging opposition between individual and collective cultures which increasingly came to colour these studies. My third section argues that, rather than contrasting the collective and the individual, and class and non-class, we should explore their inter-relationship. I suggest that the idea of ‘rugged individualism’ offers one way of doing so. The final section draws out some possible ramifications of this understanding of work cultures and leads to some brief conclusions.

The sociological analysis of work cultures 1960–79

Anyone examining the character of work cultures in the period after 1945, and especially after the mid-1950s, has a resource that was not available to historians of earlier periods. The post-war years saw the emergence of a remarkable wave of sociologically informed studies of work and employment that claimed to represent a bright new future for social scientific research. It can indeed be argued without much exaggeration that the period from 1955 to 1975 was the golden age of British occupational and industrial sociology. There was, of course, an older tradition of social scientific research, associated for example with Booth and Rowntree’s poverty studies, which as Yeo has recently shown was committed to a politics of ‘class communion’ and which invoked middle-class moralistic understandings of working-class life.⁸ By contrast, after the Second World War, a new series of pioneering sociological studies claimed to be concerned to understand male manual workers in their own terms and proved pivotal to the elaboration of a sociological research agenda of unprecedented breadth and depth. Dennis et al.’s Coal is Our life, Lupton’s ethnographic shop floor research, Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s ‘affluent worker’ studies, Runciman’s study of Relative Deprivation and Social Justice, and Beynon’s study of assembly line cultures in Working for Ford, were all part of this trend. They were undoubtedly diverse in methodology, politics, and in theoretical inspiration. None the less, they all shared one central commitment: to pioneer a methodologically rigorous way of looking at male manual cultures ‘from the inside’.⁹

These studies were informed by fascination as to how the ‘modernization’ of British social life would affect various social and cultural features of British society. One line of inquiry, which drew on Glass’s social mobility research at the London School of Economics, was interested in the implications of the rise of a middle-class, white collar workforce.¹⁰ Another line of approach was through the debate on working-class ‘affluence’, which first came to popular attention as a result of the difficulty experienced by the Labour Party in breaking Conservative hegemony in the period between 1951 and 1964.¹¹ Another focus of interest, manifest in the work of Hoggart, Williams and in Dennis and his associates, lay in considering how working-class values might offer an alternative to those offered by modern, commercial, mass, society.¹² Whichever line of inquiry was adopted, there was a common focus on understanding change through the prism of the self-understanding of the working class. Yeo links this moment to the rise of a new breed of academics from working-class backgrounds, educated largely in the grammar schools, who were determined to resist the conceptual labelling of middle-class outsiders.¹³

The emergence of this new stream of work was not simply the inevitable product of dramatic social change in Britain. Notwithstanding the concerns of the sociologists with British ‘modernity’, it is worth emphasizing that the period between 1945 and 1970 did not see dramatic occupational or industrial restructuring, certainly nothing on the scale of what was to come in the 1980s and 1990s. Between 1951 and 1971 the percentage of workers in manufacturing fell hardly at all (from 37.2 per cent to 34.9 per cent). Admittedly, some sectors saw significant declines, notably textiles and mining, and there were significant trends towards the expansion of the white collar workforce, though from a relatively small base.¹⁴ There was also a marked increase in the number of women employed in the labour market, and a general increase in real wages. But, notwithstanding the general fascination with the idea of working-class affluence, male manual wages did not increase markedly in relativ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Approaching Post-War Trade Unionism
• Part One Overviews, 1945–79
• Part Two Survey
• Part Three Case Studies, 1964–79
• Afterword: What Went Wrong
• Index