There have been several moving obituaries following Michael Burawoy’s sad death in a hit-and-run accident early this year, many charting his contribution to sociological research and Marxist theorizing from the early 1970s onwards. This piece has a narrower focus. It concentrates on the ethnographic research Burawoy conducted for his Ph.D., and the resulting case-study monograph, Manufacturing Consent , which established his reputation as a radical sociologist of the workplace and as a Marxist theorist of both the consolidation and vulnerabilities of modern capitalism. The article examines the key features of Burawoy’s case-study analysis of the manufacture of consent and summarizes some of the strengths and weaknesses identified in both enthusiastic and critical responses to his influential work. It then discusses some of the leading themes that emerged from this debate, and especially from Burawoy’s auto-critique, which he pursued over the decades. His death has robbed us of a voice that would have continued to illuminate significant changes in the organization of work and the social relations of production across the globe. It falls to us to draw on the critical insights and analytical resources that Burawoy bequeathed to do justice to his intellectual legacy.
Neoliberalism has in some senses evolved into a sub-discipline of its own. A series of academic texts have emerged looking beyond the fetishizing of market relations and emergent political dominance to locate neoliberalism in a historical context. Some of the discussions locate pivotal moments of change such as the 1980s and the emergence of the New Right; others look back to trace the dominance of market relations, institutionally visible for some time beyond the writing of key figures such as Friedrich Hayek. This review essay focuses on two texts – Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018) and Nathalie Lévy et al ., The Anglo-American Model of Neoliberalism of the 1980s (2022) – both of which demonstrate the importance of historical analysis and sensitivity. Slobodian considers how neoliberal thought became central to state institutions and an international order long before the periods we normally scan historically as social and political observers. Lévy et al . focus on the construction and dissemination of neoliberalism in various national contexts nearly half a century ago and the attempts to ensure its dominance since then.
The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed exceptional social turbulence in Britain, not least rapid industrialization and squalid urbanization. Against this background emerged a genre of English literature – the ‘condition-of-England’ novel – whose authors drew the attention of the privileged classes to the living and working conditions of the urban poor, and suggested ways to improve them. These authors were sympathetic to the plight of the working classes but were at the same time invariably hostile towards the activity of trade unions, the very organizations that workers formed to help themselves. This article examines two questions. First, why were these authors so hostile to the collective action of the working classes, and why did that hostility begin to dissolve by the early 1850s? And second, what does analysis of these novels reveal about the evolving nature of the alternative solutions they proposed to resolve working-class poverty? By tracing an arc of development in authors’ attitudes over the period c.1830–1855 – from a focus on working-class education to reform of legislation on working time and conciliation between the classes – it tracks the gradual emergence of an innovative ‘sociological imagination’ in the later novels.
In introducing his new book, A Concise Introduction to Employment Relations (Elger: 2005), Richard Hyman notes that if anyone were inventing the subject today, they would not think of calling it industrial relations, which does tend to imply manufacturing industry, whereas the world of work today primarily involves very different forms of productive activity, including much external to the boundaries of the contract of employment and large organizations. Offering a critical discussion of Polanyi is one of the themes Hyman uses to analyse the landscape of contemporary work, the sustained assault on workers living standards and collective organizations, and the possibilities for a counter-mobilization by workers to confront the challenges of Covid-19 and its aftermath, international politics and European war, and climate politics and the green transition.
The Institute for Workers’ Control (IWC) bridged industrial relations and politics in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Formally founded in 1968, principally at the initiative of Ken Coates and Tony Topham, the IWC brought together a diverse group, including trade-unionists, academics, and political activists. Initially assembled in 1964 to unpack the slogan ‘nationalization under workers’ control’ in anticipation of a radical Labour government, it increasingly became a forum for the growing shop stewards’ movement, formulating and honing ‘alternative’ plans for industry and the economy. It helped to develop ‘new forms of industrial action’ used to challenge industrial rationalization and redundancies. While supporting occupations and workers’ co-operatives, and associated with Tony Benn, the IWC’s ‘adult education’ roots and approach gave space for initiatives, strategies, and tactics to emerge from organized workers themselves. The IWC promoted workers’ control through publications, conferences, and seminars, which provided a platform for discussing and developing alternative industrial strategies. The article examines the IWC’s different phases: founding, with arguments around purpose; heyday with the occupations and co-operatives; then the focus on workers’ alternative plans and the alternative economic strategy, through to its increasing alliance with the Labour left and eventual decline in the early Thatcher era.
Elected as a minority government in February 1974 and winning a majority of three in the subsequent October general election, the Labour government’s Trade Union and Labour Relations Act (TULRA) 1974, as amended in 1976, was designed to replace the Conservative government’s Industrial Relations Act 1971. Bill Wedderburn, as the TUC’s standing counsel, led the discussions to remodel the Trades Disputes Act 1906 to eliminate the ambiguities and gaps seized upon by employers and their legal advisors, and accepted by the courts in the 1960s when formulating torts that restricted the 1906 Act’s protections for unions and workers taking industrial action. By January 1974 Wedderburn had prepared a draft of the Trade Union and Labour Relations Bill. The papers and correspondence published here illustrate some of the principal issues raised in formulating the 1974 Act and the role of the courts.
Peter Ackers’s biography of Hugh Clegg provides an account of Clegg’s life in family, among academic colleagues, and in public policy, with his academic papers summarized. Ackers moves from a detailed account of Clegg’s analysis and public policy views to brief claims as to failures and flaws, without locating such arguments in a broader account of the context and other actors. He argues that the collapse of trade-union power and of ‘social democracy’ was an ‘avoidable tragedy’ and that Clegg’s policy for industrial relations reform contained elements of a solution but that its failure was the ‘great defeat’. The attempt to draw wider lessons is terse and forced, especially his discussion of Clegg and E. P. Thompson. Some of Ackers’s conclusions seem to imply that Clegg was naive in his view of unions and the possibility of reform, whereas what he has uncovered is someone well aware of the tensions and ambiguities of the employment relationship and who strove to address them with, as befits a pluralist, recognition of the many competing interests in that relationship. He does not take the opportunity to elucidate his exposition of ‘neo-pluralism’. Although Ackers’s book is a testimony to Clegg’s life and work, it does not meet its wider goals. It does not dissect an intellectual generation and its account of reformism is unduly focused on Clegg himself to the neglect of the wider picture. And it does not explain why neo-pluralism would have been an answer.
In this edited interview, Peter Carr summarized his working life: from woodworking apprentice in the 1940s and his work on construction sites (in the mid-1950s) to being appointed Labour Attaché at the British Embassy in Washington (1978–82) while still holding membership of his construction trade union. In between, there are his spells in adult education – Fircroft College, Birmingham, and Ruskin College, Oxford – which he funded himself, before training as a college lecturer and then pioneering shop-steward training in Halifax, Yorkshire, and at Thurrock, Essex. He then worked part-time at the National Board for Prices and Incomes, before playing a leading role in the Commission for Industrial Relations and its successor, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service. After Washington, he was recruited into a series of high-profile, public-sector positions, initially in the Employment Department, then in the Health Department, where he worked part-time into his eighties. Carr’s life illustrates the informal way in which well-connected people could move into jobs at different levels. In that sense he was a product of his time, being particularly adept at cultivating networks in the labour movement world and the industrial relations community (when unions had more influence than in later periods). In his post-Washington years, his success reflected his hard work, networks, competence, and adaptability. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .
Peter Carr (1930–2017) was an important, albeit ‘behind-the-scenes’, member of the British industrial relations policy and practice community of the 1960s and 1970s. He was at the centre of major events and an influential friend and colleague to many of the key figures of that period. This foreword to the interview by Greg Bamber explores his contribution with more nuance and context than in the interview, using his published memoirs and other sources. He was a pioneer, when a college lecturer, in early shop-steward training, then, after a part-time role from 1967 at the National Board for Prices and Incomes, he took a leading role in the Commission for Industrial Relations (1969–74) and at its successor, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS). He worked at ACAS until his appointment, in late 1978, as Labour Attaché at the British Embassy in Washington. This foreword explores the range of his responsibilities and contributions in his different capacities during the 1960s and 1970s when the British state prized industrial relations expertise. He had remarkable success in navigating the upper echelons of the UK civil service, especially a ‘class ceiling’ that relatively few people from working-class backgrounds break though. If Carr had been born into a working-class family in an earlier or a later generation, would he have had such a successful career? This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .
Forty years after the UK mineworkers’ strike began, two new books of oral history have been published based on lengthy interviews with ex-mineworkers, miners’ wives, children, and supporters drawn from across the country. Both books are filled with extensive and often vivid quotation reflecting upon the events of the strike and a range of often deeply personal experiences. They are written in contrasting styles, which reflect different methodological approaches and motivations. Robert Gildea is concerned to develop a ‘national story’ from the interviews, one that (with some slight variation) has commonality across the regions and nations of Great Britain. In contrast, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson set themselves the task of deconstructing an existing national story, one that describes the involvement of women in the strike in heroic terms, emphasizing some activities and ignoring others. This review critically examines and contrasts these two approaches and places them in the context of the strike as it developed and changed. Drawing upon other materials as well as the author’s own memories and experiences of the strike, it attempts to convey something of the complexity of an event that has had such lasting significance.
Existing scholarship on the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) has not addressed the rationale of state action against unemployed dissent. This paper argues that the NUWM disrupted a tentative and fragile accord between the state, capital, and labour to institutionalize industrial conflict, necessary to secure governability and social order. The interwar British state used its intelligence and coercive apparatus, the law, and the police against the NUWM. The paper offers an analytical perspective which emphasizes the influence of the interwar economic constrictions on the capacity for state action and explains the need for its officials to reject expressions of industrial discontent and protect the notion of industrial peace as a raison d’état .
As a member of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) 10/156 Road Transport Commercial branch, Fred Beach was a key activist in the hire and reward haulage strike, January–February 1979. Looking back in an interview on 21 November 1996, Beach reflected on the origins of the dispute, in particular the role of rank-and-file networks in driving the TGWU to call a strike to challenge the 5% pay increase imposed by the Labour government in the 1978–79 pay round. He outlined the role and nature of picketing and the support from other workers, especially Hull dockers, in closing down much of haulage distribution in the area. He explained the work of the branch’s dispensation committee, which supervised the movement of goods. This provoked anger among representatives of local haulage firms, which lasted many years. Beach argued that though a significant pay increase was won, other issues such as holiday leave and pay should have been agreed. Since the mid-1980s, pay and conditions have deteriorated.
The hire and reward haulage strike, January–February 1979, burst upon an unprepared government and media. It was the control over road haulage that made the strike so distinctive, because rather than being ‘a simple absence … a withdrawal of labour’, workers asserted class power across road haulage distribution, symbolized by the lay committee’s issuing or denial of dispensations. It was this that prompted the ire of respectable opinion: workers were to work, not exercise power. Moreover, the strikers in the hire and reward sector called upon all heavy goods vehicle drivers, including those employed by own-account companies and by the National Freight Corporation, to respect their picket lines. They were also supported by workers across much of manufacturing and, above all, in the docks. The Hull strikers were effective in this, though no more than in many other areas, though perhaps for reasons of geography they were especially visible, as Beach explained.
An important figure in twentieth-century British politics, Beatrice (Nancy) Seear’s principal legacy is her contribution to ensuring the passage of equal pay and sex discrimination legislation, first as an academic and adviser to the Ministry of Labour and then as a Liberal life peer (appointed in 1971). She led a remarkable life combining academic work at the London School of Economics, policy influence, and political leadership. Through her research on the organization of work in industry, which was informed by her experience as a personnel manager, she helped to found personnel management as a distinct field of study, and she made a significant contribution to the professionalization of its practice by teaching cohorts of practitioners and leading professional associations. This article reappraises Seear’s work in light of recent critiques of the gendered nature of industrial relations research and of the continuing struggle for pay equality. The work of pioneering women social scientists has recently enjoyed renewed attention as feminists seek to uncover hidden lives and challenge masculine bias.
In 2023 the Modern Records Centre (MRC) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Since its opening in 1973 it has become Britain’s leading archive for national trade-union and employers’ association records, and holds significant material relating to fringe politics, pressure groups, higher education, and cycling. This article charts the MRC’s early development, and discusses the historical and research climate at the time of its establishment and the initial controversy over its role in the archive world. It studies four of the MRC’s collections – the National and Local Government Officers’ Association, the Howard League for Penal Reform, Fakenham Enterprises Ltd, and the Disablement Income Group – showing the range of topics covered in the archive’s early deposits and the ongoing relevance of these today. Along with how and why these collections came to the MRC, the article reflects on the sorts of records contained within them and what this means for those who use them.
This article examines the interactions between the British labour movement and those West Indian workers, trade-unionists, and socialists involved in the wave of strikes and riots that engulfed the region from 1934 to 1939. It focuses on the English-speaking Caribbean, covering eight countries – St Lucia, St Vincent, British Honduras, Trinidad, Barbados, British Guiana, St Kitts, and Jamaica. The disputes are examined through local contemporary reports and subsequent studies. The labour movement in the UK, meanwhile, was focused on the ravages of mass unemployment, the rise of fascism, wars in Spain, Manchuria, and Abyssinia, and the debates over protectionism and rearmament. Some of the deeply rooted attitudes towards the colonies, colonial workers, and the empire more generally within the ranks of labour are explored. These continue to raise sharp questions of the role of the British working class and their organizations (parties, unions, pressure groups) over the legacy of imperialism and racism.
Why is it that some strikes continue despite no apparent chance of success? And why do followers continue to endorse leaders who no longer appear effective in achieving union collective goals? This paper offers insights into these two questions in an analysis of leaders’ language and action during a lengthy, unsanctioned, and unsuccessful strike in Australia. The analysis is framed within the industrial history of the strikers and the themes of collective identity, collective (moral) values, and collective vision and goals. It suggests that emotion-laden identity-signalling by leaders may dominate content and contextual awareness. The dispute illustrates the complexity of the worker–activist relationship and supports an explicit discussion of workers’ agency in the leadership dynamic within mobilization theory. The paper concludes with an analysis of changes to the law on strikes and considers a potential model for union mobilization in the future.
