Precarity Was the Norm

Yet, like most British auto firms, Longbridge was not exactly a union fiefdom when Etheridge came to work there as a thirty-one-year-old in 1940. Although British trade unions had established a significant presence in the industry in the wake of World War I, they lost much of that power after the 1926 general strike’s defeat. Companies like Austin, Morris, Rootes, and Standard, as well as the UK branches of Ford and General Motors (Vauxhall), all successfully pushed union activists off their production lines, largely restricting membership to a craft worker elite.

At the beginning of the war, union density among car workers stood at just 24 percent, and one in ten among the semi-skilled. Autoworkers generally recalled interwar firms as being “hire-and-fire” employers, where you might get sacked on the spot for annoying a supervisor or saying the wrong thing in front of a company spy.

Under pressure from the British government, employers played nice with the unions during World War II. However, as soon as the war ended, management resumed hostilities, using the shutdown during the particularly bad winter of 1946 as an excuse to push out “troublemakers,” especially those known to have communist sympathies. At Austin, management carried out a couple of big purges, firing more militants in 1951 and 1953. It was only in the following decade that the union organisation there finally managed to fully entrench itself, declaring the factory 100 percent union — a “closed shop” — in 1964.

The idea that it took two decades after the war to establish this kind of hegemonic union culture among the classic subject of the era’s capitalism — the autoworker — cuts across stereotypical images of the “traditional working class,” even on the Left. We tend to think of the great cultures of class solidarity of the postwar period as having been almost a natural phenomenon that accompanied that phase of capitalism. It is as if they simply appeared at the appointed time as an organic outgrowth of large manufacturing workplaces. From this viewpoint, the collective rights to bargain and organise workers that accumulated during the thirty-year postwar boom seem like the product of a particular regime of political economy, rather than the organising strategies and agency of workers themselves.

This perspective often emphasises, too, the inevitability and permanence of the defeats subsequently experienced by the European and North American labour movements. We attribute the various features of an earlier time — “good union work,” with job security, collective bargaining rights, and benefits — to a fleeting postwar settlement, and we associate their absence in subsequent decades with the rise of neoliberalism and the emergence of the twenty-first-century “precariat.” Beset by all-powerful bosses, insecure economic conditions, weakened class consciousness, and the supposedly fractured politics of postmodern identities, the kind of combative solidarities that Etheridge and his comrades constructed at Longbridge became virtually impossible to re-create.

Yet precarity was the rule rather than the exception for twentieth-century workers, and the vast majority of labour organising had to be done under conditions similar to those that confront union activists today. When Etheridge arrived at Longbridge, his employer reserved the right to dismiss employees at will, even for trivial offences like rudeness to a supervisor. The company did accept some unobtrusive forms of collective bargaining, adhering to the national Engineering Employers’ Federation’s agreement with the officials of the engineering unions. But in practice, it used piece rates to set pay unilaterally, and it sought to victimise any union activists who made life difficult for the bosses.

The Union and the Workers

So, how exactly did it come to pass that Longbridge — and most other similar workplaces in the UK auto industry — developed such powerful factory union movements? And what might contemporary union organisers find interesting about the process?

Economic and political circumstances certainly did play a role. World War II and the period of reconstruction immediately afterward created tight labour markets that facilitated in-factory activism. Successive postwar British governments pursued “full employment” policies that generally kept unemployment below 3 percent of the working population until the 1970s. High employment reduced the threat of being out of work for labour militants and made workers less cautious about the dangers of losing an industrial dispute.

The threat of the blacklist and permanent unemployment remained in place for workers who had been identified as “ringleaders.” In general, however, workers possessed greater leverage in postwar economic conditions. Britain’s governments of the time also tended to favour collective bargaining as the most efficient way of organising industrial relations.

Crucially, though, while the postwar settlement did create more favourable conditions for organising, this did not automatically translate into class power on the ground. Even if national collective bargaining agreements made it more likely that terms and conditions for workers would meet some minimum standard, and labour shortages made it less likely that your employer would fire you, it did not follow that workers had much agency in their day-to-day working lives. Having your basic wage rates periodically negotiated by a full-time union official was better than nothing, but supervisors could still behave like petty tyrants at the point of production, and low “piece rates” — bonuses paid for working faster — could still turn any factory into a de facto sweatshop.

The key to wielding collective power in everyday working life did not lie in empowering the union’s national leadership to negotiate on their behalf, but in building organisation and solidarity on the lines and in the workshop. It was about building the real capacity for direct action among the workforce.

This was, of necessity, a painstaking and time-consuming process. As in our own time, workers in the classic era of union power had to confront multiple factors that potentially cut across the formation of collective interests and class consciousness. There were strict divisions between skilled and semi-skilled workers, and this was a line that the largest engineering union — the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) — tended to reinforce, with its different sections (and even different-coloured union cards) for “craftsmen” and “workers.” Class fractions could separate labourers from lineworkers and lineworkers from craft workers.

Production incentives and personal advancement often led workers to take a more individualistic path toward improving their working lives. Peter Vigor, a fitter at GM’s Vauxhall Plant in Luton, told the historian Len Holden that work discipline back in the 1940s “didn’t come from the management, it came from the people themselves.” As Vigor recalled, the low piece rates at Vauxhall led workers to push for faster-paced production. His coworkers used to “shout out ‘cuckoo, cuckoo’” when they caught him slacking off, “because they said I was fouling the nest.”

Individual motivations and subtle variations in fractional class status were one of several powerful forces pushing workers away from more combative forms of collective solidarity. Patriarchal gender norms also pushed women workers — who accounted for one in ten of the auto workforce — to the fringes of union activism. Informal “colour bars” excluded black and South Asian workers from better-paid manual roles and undermined union rights among the worst-paid sections of the workforce. It was far from inevitable that strong shop-floor union cultures would emerge, even if external conditions had become a little more promising after the war.

The ways in which Etheridge and his comrades elsewhere in the UK auto industry set about organising turned this diversity into something of a strength, with decentralisation and autonomous decision-making as the key. Historically, Britain’s trade union movement traveled light in terms of paid officials. The three biggest unions in the motor industry — the AEU, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), and the National Union of Vehicle Builders (NUVB) — employed a few local and regional officials but rarely paid dedicated “organisers.” For active recruitment, they depended for the most part on “lay officials,” individual members who were working on the job and took on additional organising responsibilities as shop stewards and dues collectors.

Unions conducted most of their recruitment within the factory, through face-to-face discussions, not generally through agitprop literature or paid outsiders. “The union,” as far as most new members were concerned, was not a logo or an institution, but a body represented personally by one of their coworkers — someone they knew, someone who usually worked a few feet away. In this manner, individual workers set about transforming life within their own workshops above all else.

Against Arbitrary Rule

For assembly-line workers and machinists, early organising centred chiefly on contesting the piece rate. Piece rates could act as a hard brake on collective solidarity, encouraging workers to discipline one another’s productivity to keep things moving and get a bigger bonus. But they could also be an obvious and immediate way in which to contest the authority of the bosses. Every time the company introduced a new work task, the rate at which the task would be paid, whether the job was “tight” or “loose” (hard or easy to make money on), and whether it was fair in relation to other jobs could all serve as natural discussion points for the work group — and potentially as a source of dissent.

Most of all, piece rates were something small that people talked about anyway and that active union members could affect almost immediately. Peter Nicholas worked at another Birmingham auto factory, making components for Rover, the manufacturers of the original Land Rover. He remembered listening to his coworkers complain about bad new piece rates during breaks and interjecting to add his perspective: “Look, unless you want this arbitrarily imposed on you, you need to get organised.”

Nicholas reappeared with a pile of union cards at the next lunch break and led his coworkers through some basic trade-union logic: “No good you being in the union unless you’ve got some representatives.” The group then elected a shop steward.

In his previous job — at Longbridge, as it happens  — Nicholas had been fired and blacklisted for union activity. His next move was to remind his new members what firms like Rover were really like:

This company has got a long record of anti-trade-unionism. If in any shape or form these lads [the stewards] are touched by the company by means of suspension or sacking, I’m not advising the use of procedure. The only way you would protect them is, whatever they do to them, they’ll do to you. In other words, if they sack ’em, you go out till they’re back . . . if you want any future . . . and you let any of these four lads be victimised, and you don’t defend them, you might as well forget that you filled a form in.

Nicholas took a small thing — the piece rate for one job — and used it to walk his coworkers through the whole logic of his union activism.

His organising activities were a microcosm of what happened across the British auto industry. Factories were not unionised in one big sweeping campaign, but workshop by workshop, line section by line section. No union ever mounted a single brilliant drive through agitational material or endorsement by local or national bigwigs. Shop stewards like Nicholas did the bulk of the work — people who went “union crazy” within their own workshops.

The issues that brought people in were always intensely local and intensely personal to the people involved. They would vary from one work group to another. For pieceworkers, it was often an argument over piece rates that stimulated organising. On the other hand, for “dayworkers” (those on a flat hourly rate), it would often be a collective rejection of excessive work norms, or irritation at a particularly obnoxious supervisor.

Since organisation was built from the ground up in this way, various features ended up being baked into the factory cultures of British autoworker trade unionism. Decentralisation was one — work groups elected their shop steward and tended to make their decisions in small groups by a show of hands, usually during tea or lunch breaks. Everything was workplace-based, and the union seldom did things on your behalf. The union was never a service for which you paid a subscription  — merely a vessel for workers’ own self-activity.

This meant there was a lot of autonomy for the shop steward and their shop, a tendency that helped unions to organise across diverse groups of workers. Workers, skilled and unskilled, high-paid and low-paid, could each elect their own stewards and make their own demands, without necessarily having to agree about what they wanted with their union leaders. Sometimes, this pattern of organising could provide marginalised groups with sufficient freedom to challenge structural inequalities that their unions would have preferred to ignore.

At Longbridge in the mid-1960s, low-paid labourers in the factory’s East Works, the majority of whom were Afro-Caribbean migrants, used their shop organisation to challenge racist barriers to job advancement, much to the irritation of many other trade unionists in the factory. Similar forms of organising lay behind the famous 1968 sewing machinists’ strike at Ford’s Dagenham Plant, where strike action by just one small section of the workforce forced the British government to legislate on equal pay for women.

The pattern of organising that transformed the British auto industry over the course of twenty years from being union-hostile and unevenly organised into an industry that was virtually 100 percent union has important lessons for contemporary union activists. We tend to think that work and class have changed so dramatically over the past forty years that everything being encountered today is novel. Yet much of what we experience — precarity, anti-union employers, company spies, the potential for different ideas, identities, and values competing for space with collective class consciousness — would be extremely familiar to mid-century organisers in the UK and across Europe and North America.

In the 1930s, the auto industry was a new sector on a global scale, certainly compared to heavy engineering, textiles, or coal mining. It took time to build trade union cultures that were sufficiently robust to withstand some of the brutal practices employed by these difficult employers. The agency of ordinary workers was crucial.

British autoworkers were never passive recipients of the good word of “trade unionism.” They were hardly ever recruited by paid “organisers” — unions helped them to create their own organisations, brick by brick. Factory union cultures were built not on the idea that unions in general win better pay and benefits, but on the specific priorities and immediate actions that small groups set and took through intimate personal meetings. Talk, organise, weigh the risks, back one another up, act together, win something, realise your strength  — that was the basic formula.