Assembling cultures: Workplace activism, labour militancy and cultural change in Britain's car factories, 1945-82

By Jack Saunders

In British political discourse the idea that in the 1970s trade unions 'ran the country' has become a truism, a folk mythology invoked against the twin perils of socialism and strikes. But who exactly wielded power in Britain’s workplaces and on what terms?

Assembling cultures takes a fine-grained look at factory activism in the motor industry between 1945 and 1982, using car manufacturing as a key case for unpicking important narratives around affluence, declinism and class. It traces the development of the militant car worker stereotype and looks at the real social relations that lay behind car manufacturing’s reputation for conflict. In doing so, this book reveals a changing, complex world of social practices, cultural norms and shared values and expectations.

From relatively meagre interwar trade union traditions, during the post-war period car workers developed shop-floor organisations of considerable authority, enabling some to make new demands of their working lives, but constraining others in their more radical political aims. Assembling cultures documents in detail a historic process where, from the 1950s, groups and individuals set about creating and reproducing collective power and asks what that meant for their lives. This is a story of workers and their place in the power relations of post-war Britain.

This book will be invaluable to lecturers and students studying the history, sociology and politics of post-war Britain, particularly those with an interest in power, rationality, class, labour, gender and race. The detailed analysis of just how solidarity, organisation and collective action were generated will also prove useful to trade union activists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526133410

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Assembling cultures

Assembling cultures

Workplace activism, labour militancy and cultural change in Britain’s car factories, 1945–82

Jack Saunders

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Jack Saunders 2019

The right of Jack Saunders to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 3339 7 hardback

First published 2019

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction

1 Car workers, trade unions and public discourse

2 Organising the car factories, 1945–64

3 Decentralised direct democracy, 1964–68

4 Remaking workplace trade unionism, 1968–75

5 Towards ‘strike free’, 1975–82

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

List of figures

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book first took shape in 2005. At the time, I worked as a secretary in a health centre in Suffolk, taking out whatever time I could from database entry to read revolutionary tracts and argue politics online. I was in the office when I read about a wildcat strike by the baggage handlers at Heathrow, who had walked out in solidarity with their workmates in the outsourced catering company Gate Gourmet. I noticed that one consistent trope recurred in press coverage of events – the idea that industrial relations at Heathrow were ‘reminiscent of the 1970s’.

As a child of the 1980s, this refrain fascinated me. What did it mean to say that the baggage handlers’ attitudes and behaviour pertained to this earlier era? Why were these practices now so alien to most other workplaces and to my own, rather moribund, trade union? Fourteen years later, this book is the result, above all, of trying to answer those questions in a more general form. Where does the readiness to confront one’s employer collectively come from? What produces solidarity? What was the reality of the post-war industrial conflict that remains so important in popular narratives of Britain’s contemporary history?

That the answers to those questions eventually took shape as this monograph is thanks to the assistance of a large cast of people. Dr Michael Collins helped enormously in relating the work to the wider field of modern British history. Professor David D’Avray’s guidance on theories relating to rationalities was vital, as were Professor Margot Finn’s comments on early draft chapters. Professor Jon Lawrence and Professor Lawrence Black were both kind enough to read an early draft of the full manuscript and gave excellent advice on how to improve it. Without the fine work of the archivists at the Modern Records Centre, this book would have been impossible.

Professor Roberta Bivins and Professor Mathew Thomson have been hugely generous with their time, offering advice, support and encouragement throughout the final preparation of the manuscript. Dr Jenny Crane, Dr Jane Hand, Dr Natalie Jones and Dr Gareth Millward have all been wonderful co-workers over the past three years; their insight has been ever useful in my development as a historian, their willingness to listen to my endless nonsense more vital still.

The preparation of the initial proposal was enormously aided by advice given by Dr Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Dr Andrew W. M. Smith, as well as in seminar sessions at the Institute of Historical Research and at the University of Warwick Early Career Researcher (ECR) Writers Group. Professor Mark Philp was kind enough to make suggestions on how to improve it. The whole process of finally preparing the manuscript was improved greatly by Tom Dark, commissioning editor at Manchester University Press, to whom I shall be eternally grateful.

The friendship of many excellent young historians has sustained me through the ordeal of nervously committing my thoughts to paper. The constancy of Dr Harry Stopes’s assertions of my value as a historian and person, even when my own belief flagged, has been a source of comfort. Dr Camila Gatica Mizala’s encouragement and good humour are something every historian should have at their side. Thanks also to Dr Ben Mechen for listening to me prattle on about car workers after every European history class we taught.

I shall also be forever grateful to all the trade unionists who gave their time to be interviewed and to many other friends in the labour movement whose insight was invaluable to the project. Particular thanks go to Millie Wild, a great friend and comrade, happy to sustain a continuous multi-year ongoing conversation about car-factory trade unionism.

Finally, without ever consciously consenting to it, my family have given an enormous amount of energy to this project. My brother, Simon Saunders, put up with me as a lodger for seven long years, and was still good-hearted enough to listen to me ranting about car workers every other day. My mum, Kate Saunders, is a far better writer than I will ever be and the best proofreader anyone could hope for. Both she and my dad, Giles, have been as kind and loving as any son could ever wish for. Finally, thanks must go to Dr Lucy Dow, my partner, whose support, love and general intellectual brilliance are all a massive presence in this book.

List of abbreviations

Introduction

There’s more than just good humour behind the geniality of Woolfie, the man with his hands round the throat of the Chrysler motor company.¹

In 1973, 156 electricians at Chrysler’s Coventry Stoke Aldermoor engine factory went on strike for thirteen weeks, demanding the company fulfil a promise made months earlier to raise their salaries by £250 a year, a promise waylaid by Phase Two of the Heath government’s statutory wage restraint programme. The electricians’ labour was vital to maintaining continuous production across Chrysler’s factories and without it the possibility of temporary shutdowns and even redundancies was soon raised. Towards the end of the dispute, the company was threatening to sack 8,000 employees if the strike didn’t end within a week and even discussed pulling out of Britain entirely.²

At the centre of all this was Woolfie Goldstein, the senior shop steward for the factory’s branch of the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Trades Union (EEPTU). After thirty-three years as a relatively anonymous factory worker, in the autumn of 1973, he was cast as wrecker-in-chief of Chrysler UK. ‘WOOLFIE WIELDS THE BIG STICK’, blared the front page of the Daily Express on 26 September 1973, broadcasting the electricians’ plans for further disruption.³ ‘Chrysler Crisis Show Featuring Woolfie Goldstein’ said the Sun, two days later. The Daily Mirror dedicated a full page to him entitled ‘Honour and Dignity on 50 Fags a Day’.⁴

Such stories of destructive industrial conflict have come to define public understanding of the 1970s and of the decline of the British motor industry. Tales of greedy, tyrannical trade unions ruining British industry with outrageous pay demands, of slack workmanship producing shoddy cars and of political militants calling strikes on the slightest of pretexts have become part of our political folklore. Yet the details of the electricians’ strike reveal a world of complexity in the industrial politics and workplace culture of Britain’s car factories. Woolfie Goldstein, fifty-nine years old, five feet tall and heavy set, the son of Russian Jewish émigrés, was no union baron, only a relatively conservative shop steward (‘a pillar of the Rootes-Chrysler establishment’, according to one paper)⁵ leading a group of electricians angered that Chrysler had broken a promise.

The strike won no support from the most notorious ‘union barons’, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, who both insisted their own members work normally, in effect crossing the electricians’ picket lines. The strikers themselves expected to see no material rewards, with Goldstein estimating that by mid-October the strike had collectively cost them £100,000. It won them few friends amongst their fellow workers, who voted at a mass meeting early in the dispute to break their strike. Yet in spite of this, they pressed on, talking of promises broken and ethics to uphold. As Goldstein put it: ‘Do I want inscribed on my tombstone Woolfie Goldstein factory closer? Of course not. What I want inscribed on my tombstone – and not yet please God – is Woolfie Goldstein, aged ninety-nine, died a man of principle.’⁶

Goldstein’s principles, like those that informed the thousands of other similar disputes that occurred in the British motor industry between 1945 and 1982, were the product of cultural values and social practices that car workers had developed over time. They aimed to make sense of social relations in the changing socio-economic context of Britain’s car factories during the thirty-year post-war boom and were brought to life in workers’ organisations where power was diffuse and structured by divisions of occupation, class, age, gender, race and nationality, as well as the formal hierarchies of the trade-union movement.

The values, social practices, organisations and power relations of Britain’s car workers form the basis of this book. Accounting for 512,400 employees at the industry’s 1971 peak, the British motor industry experienced substantial change in this period.⁷ In the immediate aftermath of war, and in the absence of significant competition from Europe or Japan, Britain’s largest car firms – the British-owned Standard, Rootes, Morris and Austin and the American-owned Ford and Vauxhall – all experienced a period of post-war prosperity. Heightened competition saw the ‘Big Six’ become four following mergers: Austin and Morris in 1952 to form the British Motor Corporation (BMC), van-maker Leyland’s takeover of Standard in 1960 and then BMC and Leyland joining in 1968 to form British Leyland. The latter would become the last British-owned mass-production car firm after Chrysler completed their takeover of Rootes.

Neither concentration nor foreign investment saved these firms from stagnation and, eventually, crisis. Declining global market shares in the 1960s, followed by the 1973 oil crisis, saw profits tumble, with every car firm except Ford sustaining substantial losses in 1974. The following year, British Leyland was nationalised and Chrysler bailed out to the tune of £180 m. The advance of this more perilous financial environment was coterminous with expanding workplace activism. As late as 1956, union membership levels were still below 50 per cent at BMC, Ford and Vauxhall, but they rose consistently thereafter to reach virtually 100 per cent across the sector by 1966.⁸ Levels of industrial conflict also increased dramatically, as car workers became one of the most strike-prone groups in Britain, a position they maintained into the early 1980s.⁹

The combination of British firms’ declining share of world car production and rising levels of industrial conflict left a mark on political culture which remains powerful to this day. In broader cultural and political life, the idea that strikes and excessive union power bore heavy responsibility for a period of prolonged economic stagnation continues to be an important part of popular narratives about contemporary history and the state of modern Britain. This could be observed in obituaries for Margaret Thatcher in 2013, many of which referenced the supposed neutering of trade unionism that took place under her government, often juxtaposed with the ‘bad old days’ of the 1970s, when the country was beset by the ‘rapacious demands of all-powerful trade union barons’.¹⁰

During the period itself, the idea that union power was a key problem for the nation was reflected in a multiplying body of literature diagnosing Britain’s ‘decline’.¹¹ As national politicians and the media became increasingly concerned by the capacity of organised workers to disrupt production, influence national politics, inconvenience the public and damage the economy, industrial relations became a regular feature in political debate. Industrial unrest and the supposed obstructionism of trade unions figured heavily in the emergent discourse of ‘declinism’, which became prominent from the late 1950s on and sought to discern the underlying causes of Britain’s perceived economic and political crisis.¹² Writers like Michael Shanks and Andrew Shonfield, then later Correlli Barnett, Douglas Jay and Samuel Brittan, made the inadequacies of trade unionism central to their diagnosis of Britain’s apparently deteriorating position, holding unions responsible for the inefficiencies of public corporations, lack of private investment, resistance to change in industry, low productivity in manufacturing and high inflation.¹³

The motor industry played a key role in these narratives. As the quintessential industry of modernity, vehicle manufacture was a metric by which industrialised nations measured their progress, and the economic difficulties experienced by British firms regularly gave commentators cause to doubt the health of the nation more generally.¹⁴ With most other strike-prone groups – miners, dockers, shipbuilders – concentrated in industries which had been contracting since before World War II,¹⁵ it was car workers who featured most often in decline narratives and who faced comparisons with their more efficient counterparts overseas.¹⁶

With high wages and substantial deskilling prevalent in the industry, car workers also figured prominently in narratives surrounding affluence, the phenomenon of rising working-class living standards. Scholars in both sociology and history have often seen that development as driving an increase in ‘privatism’ – a growing shift in orientation amongst manual workers from the public workplace to the private home, linked to a concomitant decline in class-based solidarity and political loyalty to the Labour Party (so-called ‘dealignment’).¹⁷ Although the increasing combativeness of workplace activism during the 1970s reduced enthusiasm for this thesis, the dissipation of labour militancy in the decades to follow gave it fresh impetus.

These dominant narratives have instinctively led us away from serious consideration of how worker activism and workplace culture developed during this period. Declinist accounts encourage us to consider industrial conflict as pathological rather than as a way car workers set about remaking their world. Notions of ‘privatism’ impose a vision of workers where any collectivism is depicted as ‘traditional’ and any individualism as novel. Consequently, historicising shifts in the other direction – towards greater collective assertiveness – became less of a priority. These frameworks hamstring efforts to understand in any detail either how power really worked in Britain under the ‘post-war consensus’ or how workers experienced the ‘high tide’ of trade-union power.

The changing forms that workplace activism took should be more than mere fodder for analysing what went wrong with manufacturing or what waylaid the progress of socialism. We need to grapple with why and how the likes of Woolfie Goldstein and his comrades found ‘their hands round the throat’ of powerful multinational companies and what that power meant to them. The trade unions were, by quite some distance, post-war Britain’s largest social movement, involving millions of people in political and social activism. Within the workplace, union activists and members played a key role in developing shared cultures and collective resources. It was within these cultures that workers set about determining what they thought work was, what it should be and how they could go about changing it. The organisations they created were ostensibly powerful – powerful enough for the perception that they ‘ran the country’ to be widespread amongst much of the public, the national media and even the governments of the day.

Given contemporary concerns around the marginalisation and atomisation of the working class following deindustrialisation, the importance of understanding power relations and workers’ agency in this period of British history cannot be overstated. Working-class people in the past were able to create a variety of different forms of collective power and shared cultural resources. Involvement in them, as Selina Todd notes, could produce in individuals a sense of assertiveness, confidence and combativity.¹⁸ These cultures shaped workers’ experiences, their social relations, their attitudes towards society and their perspectives on co-workers and capital in vital ways, just as the later disappearance of these forms of agency may be doing today. Looking at the composition of workplace social relations, as well as the mechanics of how they changed, is revealing not just of the nature of power and worker agency in post-war welfare states, but also, more generally, of how individuals and groups in class societies set about rearranging and remaking power relations.

Using sources specifically relating to shop-floor activism – including the correspondence, agitational propaganda, notes and meeting minutes of shop stewards, as well as life history interviews – this book shows how car workers reshaped their working lives. Exploring the nature and origins of the power they were understood to wield, I show how 1950s factory activists were able to change social relations on the shop floor and generate new cultures and behaviours.

As Arthur McIvor notes, post-war Britain experienced quite profound changes in the nature of work, as well as in the social and political institutions that structured life in the workplace.¹⁹ Comprehending the ways in which workers set about trying to bring about change offers an important insight into the power of ‘the organised working class’ in post-war British democracy. The collective and individual behaviours of car workers had a profound effect on Britain’s development. By looking at the records of workplace groups, I demonstrate how the social practices they developed both enabled and constrained their agency, structuring their ability to cooperatively shape their environment – their collective ‘social power’. By reconsidering the connections between labour militancy and worker subjectivity in this period, I place the conscious experiences, perspectives and beliefs of participants in workplace activism in their proper historical context.

Engagement with new sources enables me to disaggregate some of the many thousands of workers in the motor industry and develop a more nuanced idea of what drove their participation in collective action and to critique some of the more straightforward accounts of the motivations behind worker mobilisation. Through looking at these individual and collective experiences, we can more fully understand both why and how car workers influenced British life in the ways that they did.

Agency and subjectivity

The ways in which cultural processes, social practices, organisations and worker agency are connected is central to understanding how working life changed in Britain. The second half of the twentieth century saw collective bargaining and trade-union membership expand across the economy to eventually embrace the majority of the workforce. Simultaneously, hours of work, working conditions, job security, the experience of unemployment, health and safety, holidays, pay and pensions were all substantially altered. Average working hours per week for full-time employees dropped steadily from 48.6 in 1938 to 40 in 1980.²⁰ Legislation was passed introducing statutory redundancy pay (1965) and outlawing unfair dismissal (1971). Employers were also forced to guarantee the safety of their employees (1974). Gendered pay discrimination (1970) and racial discrimination in hiring (1968) were prohibited. Many of these laws were direct or indirect responses to industrial protest. Meanwhile, the percentage of men over sixty-five still in full-time employment dropped from over half in the interwar period to 30 per cent in 1951 and just 10 per cent in 1981.²¹ The rate of fatal injury at work fell from 10.5 per 100,000 in the 1950s to 2.1 in 1981.²² Working life became demonstrably less onerous and dangerous for most, and the imbalance of power between workers and employers was markedly diminished.

By 1979, 85 per cent of all employees had their terms and conditions determined in collective bargaining, compared to around half in 1945.²³ The scope and impact of representation at work also expanded. In 1961, there were 90,000 workplace union representatives, and this had grown to 317,000 by 1980, as the shop-steward system expanded into new industries and increased in density in its existing strongholds. This was particularly the case in the motor industry. In the first half of the twentieth century, most car companies were regarded as rather authoritarian ‘hire-and-fire’ employers, and by 1939, no major vehicle assembly firm recognised trade unions for their lineworkers. Ford in particular had a reputation for running an extensive espionage regime to root out potential troublemakers.

Whilst all car companies agreed to collectively bargain with national unions during World War II, they continued to harass, fire and blacklist active union members and attempted to restrict the scope of shop-floor bargaining into the late 1950s. Yet by the 1960s, every firm except Vauxhall had come to accept trade-union membership as mandatory for manual worker employees and engaged in extensive in-factory negotiation over a wide range of issues. In most factories, the number of shop stewards increased dramatically (from around 100 in the late 1940s to some 800 in the 1970s in the case of Longbridge), as the responsibilities attached to the role expanded from largely just collecting union subscriptions to a wide array of representative and organisational tasks.

The extent of the apparently growing power wielded by trade unions and their members became a key political battleground in almost every election from 1964 onwards, as politicians of all stripes grappled with how to contain industrial conflict. Yet the forms and origins of that power, as well as its role within changes to working life, were largely obscured by descriptions of dictatorial closed shops and over-mighty union barons. Such narratives were generally misleading. Contrary to popular wisdom, even at the peak of their powers, British trade unions were not especially overbearing in comparison to their equivalents elsewhere. Robert Taylor notes that ‘the national myth of obstructive and tyrannical trade unionism’ was derived more from polemic than evidence,²⁴ and that the power of British trade unions compared unfavourably with the formal institutional role in economic planning played by their Swedish, French and German counterparts.²⁵

Yet power within social organisations does not operate in simple ways, and it is important to be alert to the less obvious methods by which unions and their members imposed their will on the world. The extent to which workers exercise social power – shaping their own environment – is not solely determined by which committees their leaders are invited to sit on. Furthermore, workers who are members of organisations with comparatively weak institutional roles can still exercise considerable influence through their collective social power, by using direct action – strikes, boycotts, go-slows, demonstrations, sit-ins, sabotage, work-to-rules and so on – to transform conditions in their everyday lives.²⁶ In the case of the car workers, it was often this last form of power which gained them influence over workplace life and wider society, rather than their unions’ institutional roles within corporate bargaining structures.²⁷

It is this last means of shaping the world – through collective direct action and everyday activism within the factory – that interests me most. The Chrysler electricians were not politically powerful in any conventional sense. What influence they had depended largely on their willingness to take action together in defence of their shared principles and interests. Mid-twentieth-century car-factory shop floors were complex and dynamic places, where location in the work process, as well as the subculture of a particular workgroup and the practices and forms of organisation it supported, generated uneven and contingent capacities to bring about change.

This complexity is reflected in Huw Beynon’s 1973 sociological study Working for Ford, which describes the development of shop-floor organisation at Ford’s Halewood factory. Over the course of the 1960s, worker activists created strong shop-floor organisations on the basis of ‘sectional’ departmental meetings and shop-steward representation. By successfully prosecuting and resolving disputes within their workshops, the Halewood shop stewards carved out a role as a semi-stable part of factory life.²⁸ As their organisation developed, the workers were able to find spaces in which to discuss issues together and to engage in collective action to improve conditions, eventually developing a capacity for mass strikes which set the tone for wider trade unionism in the company, dragging (often reluctant) union leaders into conflict.²⁹

Although Ford’s rulebook granted little formal power to the stewards or the members they led, between them they developed a great deal of agency in shaping their lives at work and beyond. That social power stemmed not from the formal rights inscribed in the post-war settlement per se but from the contingent role that collective action had carved out for them. For shop-floor representatives, power was distinct from that wielded by unions, being based almost entirely on their role in workplace culture. It existed because stewards were entrusted over time with the task of representation, the result of an agreement amongst workmates that such an arrangement enabled them to articulate grievances in the face of an employer too strong for them to confront individually.³⁰ This power was delegated to the stewards by the consensus of a multitude of subjects acting in concert. It afforded the shop steward certain powers to act over their members, particularly speaking and organisational rights (chairing and calling meetings) and resources (money, a paper, leaflets), but carried an instability which meant this ‘ringleader’ role could only continue so long as ‘the steward act[ed] and live[d] through his members’.³¹

The contingency of these forms is crucial. The power that individual members, shop stewards or workgroups could exercise depended almost entirely on the cultures they had assembled. The readiness of a particular workgroup to act in concert and to trust one another’s commitment to participation, their acceptance of the leadership of a particular shop steward or of the union more generally, the place of that workgroup within the production process and in the wider social relations of the factory; all determined what different individuals could or couldn’t do in the realm of industrial relations.

The cultural roots of social power

The development of the stewards’ organisation at Halewood reveals the intimate connection between power and culture. Without shared assumptions about the importance of electing and defending shop stewards and the desirability of acting together to advance shared interests, the ability to confront the powerful Ford Motor Company would not have existed. Forms of solidarity rooted in cultural ideas about working life and industrial relations created new forms of organisation, new ways of making demands and of bringing about change. New forms of social power then structured workers’ expectations of each other and of their working conditions. The capacity to overcome atomisation, to cooperate, to build a power structure together, could change how people thought and acted.

The workings of this process reveal how groups of people can build shared values, invent new social practices and develop new forms of direct action, making and sustaining social power. As H. A. Clegg notes, even during the ‘high tide’ of labour militancy, ‘striking was an exceptional habit’ and one which met with increasing disapproval in mainstream public discourse.³² Analysis of car workers’ historically specific perception of the ‘industrial’, the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’ is crucial. Explaining the ideas behind post-war workplace culture in the motor industry is more complex than simply determining what underlying economic self-interest lay behind particular behaviours. Unpicking what kind of motivations sustained industrial activism amongst these ‘exceptional’ minorities involves understanding not just the stated reasons for particular actions, but also the micro-cultures which structured calculative reasoning in the first place.

In this context, Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social practices and habitus proves instructive. In The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu argues that an individual’s behaviour within their habitus is subject to constraints, ‘limits set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its [the habitus’] production’.³³ This allows the generation of an infinite number of actions, though with a tendency to ‘generate all the reasonable, common-sense, behaviours … which are possible within the limits of these regularities, and which are likely to be positively sanctioned because they are objectively adjusted to the logic characteristic of a particular field, whose objective future they anticipate’.³⁴

Such ideas have obvious applications for understanding labour militancy. Car factories were a particular kind of habitus, within which certain behaviours (say, assertive collective bargaining or striking) took on the appearance of ‘reasonable’ or ‘common sense’ activities in a way which they did not do elsewhere, and we can analyse both the development and the operation of these spaces. We can pick out the social practices and cultural norms that made many car workers feel that certain forms of collective action were legitimate where other groups did not. We can also draw out how those same norms placed limits on who could draw on this power and for what purpose, which is particularly crucial in addressing questions of how gender or race may have structured participation.³⁵

By thinking of the workplace in this way, we can begin to see the general rules for workplace culture within which workers employed their rationality, whilst also disaggregating the attitudes of particular individuals. That is, we can begin to ask not just why workers went on strike, but also how they came to assume that such collective action was possible and why they calculated their self-interest in this collective way in the first place. We can also move towards exploring the framework in which politics and industrial issues were discussed more generally, historicising the variety of opinions to be found within those discussions. This lays the foundation for new histories of both labour and political culture, histories that situate subjectivities, behaviours and attitudes within the lived experiences that people shared in the workplace.

Crucially, although in Bourdieu’s formulation the logic of social practice generally reproduces itself, between 1945 and 1982, forms of power and culture were constantly remade in Britain’s car factories. Within the workplace, power worked in multiple directions and was invested in multiple actors; it changed quite dramatically over short periods of time and in ways not intended by those in formal authority – be they politicians, union leaders or employers. These changes were primarily based in uneven cultural and social developments within the factory. As workmates organised within their factories, discussions between them subtly shifted attitudes, encouraging them to develop higher expectations of their employers and greater confidence in their own capacity for assertiveness in collective bargaining. Demonstrations of the efficacy of direct action and protest cemented the position of potentially fragile representatives and organisations, in turn making their attendant social practices appear increasingly ‘common-sensical’. Where a worker might have hesitated to challenge an overbearing supervisor in 1945 for fear of the sack, by 1960 they were considerably more likely to consider such an action wise and reasonable.

The significance of social power

These developments owed much to economic