Preliminary Programme

Municipal socialism has a long history in Britain dating back to the 1890s and assuming especial importance at different periods, particularly after the two world wars. Frederick Engels was one of its early proponents, as were also John Burns and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and it is exemplified in the emergence and subsequent establishment all over the country of local authority direct labour organisations, or DLOs. Thus, whilst the socialisation of production in much of Europe was promoted through syndicalism, in Britain it was also accomplished through the setting up of DLOs.

The paper begins with an account of the origins of the DLOs in the 1890s in London, beginning with the first, set up by the London County Council (LCC) in response to the failure of private contractors to provide an adequate building service, to achieve better employment and working conditions for building workers, and fulfil the terms and conditions of the Housing of the Working Classes Act. Battersea followed the LCC’s lead in 1894, undertaking all its own building work, and West Ham in 1896, to be followed by other local authorities in London and throughout Britain. The history of council housing and local authority public works has since then been entwined with the role of the DLOs, with the departments gaining a new impetus subsequent to the first world war, when seventy new DLOs were set up, and again after the second world war, when their numbers doubled. This contrasts with, for example, Germany after the first world war, where, Bauhütte or building guilds were set up by the construction unions. By the end of the 1960s DLOs employed over 200,000 building workers, with those in Manchester, the Greater London Council, and Glasgow alone each employing 5,000.

Not only did the DLOs have good trade union negotiated employment and working conditions and construct and maintain good quality buildings, they also played a critical role in training for the building industry, introduced notable innovations in building methods, and pioneered in employing women and those from ethnic minority groups. Indeed their very success provoked serious attacks from the private building sector and from a succession of Conservative governments, contributing to their decline under Thatcher.

Using documentary, oral and visual evidence, the paper draws out the significance of DLOs to the construction industry and to social housing throughout the twentieth century, analyses the reasons behind their chequered history and shows their importance to the development of labour in Britain. Above all, it addresses the question of why this form of municipal socialism has been so distinct to Britain in contrast to Germany. (Show less)

Contemporary discussions on labour and technology have mainly been concerned with technology’s impact on labour and how labour should adapt to it. Labour’s ability to influence the form and content of work has been disregarded due to an implicit technological determinism. By studying a series of conferences organised by Swedish metal workers in the 1930–1950s, this paper presents a contrasting picture of workers opposing and counteracting employer attempts to introduce new labour regulating technologies.
The study is based on material from the Separator Corporation (today Alfa Laval), a pioneer in time- motion studies in Sweden. These taylorist measures impelled numerous conflicts at the corporation’s shop floors and led to organised resistance among workers. From 1928 and onwards, workers at Separator’s different production sites organised conferences where discussions about time-motion studies were held. Minutes from these conferences show how workers used a range of tactics – among them go-slows, sit-downs, and study circles in time- motion studies – to contest scientific management.
These empirical results have wider implications for our understanding of labour market policy in the 20th century. The period 1930–1950 marked significant institutional changes to industrial relations in Sweden. The debate regarding industrial rationalisation was at the core of the negotiations that resulted in the Saltjo?badsavtalet 1938, a treaty between labour and capital that formed the basis of the Swedish corporatist labour market model. Despite the treaty, many conflicts arose on firm level that stemmed from employers’ increased use of time-motion studies. The conflicts eventually resulted in the Time–motion study agreement between the Trade Union Confederation (LO) and the Swedish Employers’ Association (SAF) in 1948. As a result, this paper highlights workers’ ability to not only resist technologies that they fear would strengthen employers, but also to influence the institutional form of the labour market. (Show less)

This paper examines the political role of organized labour in the British defence industry in the reorganization of weapons production in the UK away from the domestic market towards arms sales to the Persian Gulf during the Thatcher era. In turn, it positions this process as constitutive to the project of industrial privatization more broadly. It does this by focusing on one firm, British Aerospace, which was among the first state-held firms to be privatized under Thatcher and which over the 1980s relied upon a single arms deal with the Saudi government for its viability post-privatization in 1981. Using documents from Thatcher's personal papers, the Ministry of Defence, the Trade Office, and various trade unions representing workers in the defence industry, my paper examines the contours of this deal and its negotiation, as well as the labour management techniques employed by the state and the private firm during this period. It argues that arms deals played a key role in manifesting the 'consensus' between labour and management which sat at the heart of the Thatcherite project and that this specific deal, and the petrodollars which made it possible, was important in ensuring the success of privatization as a political programme at a particularly vulnerable moment in its history. Moreover, it charts the shifts in union strategy in relation to these political-economic developments, locating the emergence of a trade unionism of 'consensus' in an industry rarely examined in labour histories of Modern Britain, and the importance of the Middle East in general, and Saudi Arabia in particular, in this history of class struggle and consensus. (Show less)