In response to the threat of closure and redundancy at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders at the beginning of the 1970s, shop stewards decided to try a different tactic from the usual strikes or sit-ins that were the bread and butter of militant union activists. The now famous UCS ‘work-in’ was designed to show not only that workers were willing to work, but that work existed, and that unemployment was a political choice by governments – Conservative and Labour – more interested in maintaining the profits of corporate capitalism than protecting the interests of their citizens.
This is the second ‘long read’ on the topic of workers’ control, its history and relevance to the present. To be read alongside the previous post on Labour 1973 alternative economic strategy, this article provides the context to Tony Benn’s sharp shift to the left at the beginning of the 1970s. Benn himself admits in his Preface to John Foster and Charles Woolfston’s excellent book on the UCS that these brave Scottish shipbuilders made him realise that workers’ control was not only possible, but essential for democratic socialism.
‘This is the first campaign of its kind in trade unionism,’ declared Jimmy Reid, who became the face of the UCS work-in, to UCS workers and the media as the shop stewards locked the gates to the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders shipyard on Friday, 30 July 1971. “We are not going on strike. We are not even having a sit in. We do not recognise that there should be any redundancies and we are going to ‘work-in’.” The work-in would be a disciplined affair, he continued, insisting that there would be “no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism and there will be no bevvying.”
As Reid’s work-in colleague Bob Dickie later reflected, this last point was a shock to the workers listening to the speech, who understood the implication that shipbuilders were prone to such behaviours. But like all Reid’s speeches, and the strategic approach of the UCS work-in Co-ordinating Committee, a political point was being made, and the media were allowed in to the yard on that day for this point to be made to the British public. Despite the insistence by Reid that this was not an example of workers’ control, the work-in was designed to show that workers were intelligent, highly skilled and more than capable of running the yards.
And run it they did, for sixteen months. From the mass meeting on Friday 30 July 1971 when the work-in was first declared to the mass meeting on Monday 9 October 1972 where Cyldebank workers ratified the agreement with Marathon for the purchase of the remaining yard, the Co-ordinating Committee held their nerve and saved all four UCS yards and the majority of jobs. But perhaps more importantly, the UCS work-in sparked a wildfire of occupations and workers’ control initiatives across the UK in the following years and inspired a significant shift to the left within Labour’s industrial policy under Tony Benn.
Within months of the work-in beginning, just a few miles up the Clyde, the Alexandria-based electronics, defence and telecommunications company, Plessey, was occupied by workers to stop the factory owners moving machinery to more viable English plants. In October 1971, work-ins directly modelled on UCS began at the River Don Steelworks in Sheffield and at the BSA motorcycle factory in Birmingham. “In all, the period between July 1971 and December 1975 saw about 150,000 workers involved in over 190 factory occupations and work-ins,” note John Foster and Charles Woolfston, in their authoritative book on the UCS work-in. (1)
Benn, who came out strongly in support of the UCS shop stewards much to the ire of the then Labour leader Harold Wilson, in the Foreword to Foster and Woolfston’s book described the effect that the work-in had on the Labour Party at the time. “So great was the impact that they made, that those of us who gave full support from the outset found the response from local Labour parties and the Labour Party activists in the trade unions was so strong that it actually radicalised the policy of the party itself at successive party conferences, and this process continued playing its part in the democratic reforms that took place after 1979.”
While British shipbuilding was eventually largely dismantled and sold out to international capital like the rest of heavy industry under Margaret Thatcher, the UCS work-in shows how a single dispute can change history. Indeed, the UCS dispute, along with the 1974 miner’s strike, arguably did change history, undermining Edward Heath’s Tory government and thrusting Labour to power on its most radical platform to date. The work-in has much to teach us today, when the Tories are again in disarray and we are perhaps similarly on the cusp of a radical Labour government.
In the next section, I look at the significance of building anti-monopoly alliances, as claimed by Foster and Woolfston, and how this analysis might be applied to the current occupation at Harland & Wolff shipbuilders in Belfast and to the ‘Lexit’ question. In the final section I look at how the ‘work-in’ tactic could be used by activists working and/or studying in the UK tertiary education sector as a response to college and university closures.
Anti-monopoly alliance
Foster and Woolfston in their exhaustive analysis see the struggle’s greatest significance in the anti-monopoly alliance forged between the shop stewards and the representatives of traditional Scottish capital. “It is argued here that the UCS struggle reveals a potential of great practical importance today,” they write. “It demonstrates, in embryo, that the organised working class does indeed have the unique ability to unite an alliance against monopoly rule, and, in doing so, open the way to wider social transformation.”
Scottish capital, they argue, had been increasingly undermined by UK government economic policy in the decades leading up to the work-in, with Tory ideology moving towards the monetarism that would in Thatcher’s reign assume a central role. In this view, in contrast to Keynesian economics, national industry and the home-grown monopolies that had developed in these industries were not to be supported against foreign capital. The UK economy, by contrast, should take advantage of the cheaper prices created by outsourcing and international consolidation. The structural unemployment resulting from such policy was also not seen as a bad thing, but rather as a mechanism to break the power of unions, making labour cheaper and holding down inflation.
Of course, such policies increased political tensions, not just between workers and government, but also between the latter and national capital, which was increasingly threatened by international capital and felt betrayed by its traditional political representatives, the Tories. It was this tension, Foster and Woolfston point out, that the UCS shop stewards were able to exploit to their advantage through the work-in tactic.
A brief pre-history of the work-in will evidence this point. UCS was created by Labour as a last attempt to halt the decline of power in the shipbuilding industry not only of Upper Clyde, but of Britain. This industry had seen a boom after the Second World War, as competition in Germany and Japan had been thoroughly bombed by the Allies during this conflict. According to Alasdair Buchan, 48% of ships launched in the world in 1950 were built in the UK. However, ten years later, this figure dropped to 16%, and by 1964 it was down to a “sad” 6%, he laments. (2)
“By the beginning of the sixties,” Buchan explains, “the Germans and the Japanese had started up their shipbuilding industries again and the yards which had been flattened were rebuilt and modernised to an extent never undertaken in Britain.” New machinery, Taylorist management methods and massive economies of scale “produced flow line production enabling these countries to consistently under-price British yards.”
Meanwhile, British industry “obstinately refused” to re-invest some the massive profits made during the boom years, which Buchan notes “led to some very hard times.” Only £4-5m was re-invested by British firms in capital goods during the 1950s, compared to a yearly depreciation value of existing machinery of £9m through normal usage. Investment in research and development was also consistently low, at £250,000 a year, according to Buchan.
In 1965, Labour tasked Sir Eric Geddes to consider how greater competitiveness could be achieved by consolidating British shipbuilding into larger firms, with new methods of organisation and production introduced into these new firms. Out of this report came the Shipbuilding Industry Act, which Benn as Minister of Technology guided through Parliament unopposed. As part of this re-organisation, the five yards straddling the Clyde – Govan, Linthouse, Scotstoun, Clydebank, and Yarrow – were merged into a new company, the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Ltd.
However, the new firm soon ran into difficulty. Out of the consolidation, local unions had won a massive victory: a three-year guarantee of work for the newly consolidated labour force. While this meant that workers would not be laid off when there were no active shipbuilding contracts, providing much-needed security for local communities, it also meant that the order book had to be kept full to keep the labour force occupied. UCS to keep these orders flowing took on contracts with very tight profit margins. When inflation rose sharply at the end of the 1960s, the increased cost of materials plunged UCS into financial crisis, and in 1969 the firm ran out of cash.
When UCS turned to Benn and the newly created Shipbuilding Industry Board – which had the power to provide financial assistance to British shipbuilders – for help, Benn was less than enthusiastic about bailing out the struggling firm. Benn offered £9m – £6m less than UCS asked for – with a caveat that major changes would need to be made to modernise the company. As a result, Kenneth Douglas was brought in, and things started to look a lot better. Douglas introduced standardisation and computer technology into the shipbuilding process and converted the Linthouse yard from building ships to manufacturing pre-assembly steel units for the ships being built at the other yards.
Significantly for a later episode of the struggle, Douglas also began working more closely and constructively with the shop stewards. “In one year UCS was recording progress in productivity that was unequalled in British shipbuilding,” acknowledged Reid. “For the first time we had meaningful negotiations on production. Before that period, they would just come to you and say ‘Come on lads, co-operate to complete this order and meet a deliver date’, and then when the boat was delivered you were sacked.”
Then in 1970 the Conservatives returned to power under Heath, who was determined for the UK to join the European Common Market. As part of Health’s European vision, state intervention in industry was to be rolled back and the market left to decide the fate of what it called “lame ducks” like UCS. Another report was commissioned, this time by Conservative MP Nicholas Ridley (no relation!), who secretly advised Heath to appoint a government “butcher” to “cut up UCS and to sell (cheaply) to Lower Clyde and others the assets of UCS to minimise upheaval and dislocation.” After this was achieved, he continued, the government holding in the firm was to be sold “even for a pittance”.
Unfortunately for Ridley and Heath, this secret report was leaked to the UCS shop stewards, probably by Douglas, in the first of a general move away from support for the Conservatives on the part of Scottish industry. The revelation of the government’s secret plan to butcher the yards, despite indications – as pointed out repeatedly by Benn in parliament – that UCS was returning to profitability was hugely damaging for Heath, as was Douglas’ public declaration of support for the work-in as these facts came to light. As financial support from the British labour movement poured in to keep the work-in going, the thousands of local suppliers set to lose somewhere in the region of £15m if UCS closed also started to come out in support of the workers.
Eventually the government relented, but the political damage to the Conservative Party’s base in Scottish industry had been done. In the 1974 general election – which brought Labour back to power – the Conservative Party lost over a quarter of their 1970 Scottish seats, being reduced to the third largest party in the country behind the Scottish National Party. Foster and Woolfston attribute this loss of power and the rise of Scottish nationalism with the work-in, which had “brought the Health’s first major defeat at the hands of the working class” and had “done much to detach elements within small business and the professions form their traditional political loyalties.”
The national question today
There can be no doubt that the UCS used the work-in as a tactic to great effect, exposing the contradiction between the national interest in Scotland and the domination of these interests by international capital and its Tory representatives in Westminster. Both UCS strategy – key shop stewards like Jimmy Reid were key Communist Party activists – and Foster and Woolsfton’s analysis draw on Marxist theories of state monopoly capitalism, specifically Lenin’s insight that the right to self-determination against the dual power of international capital and its representatives in imperialist states provides a strong political and emotional base for anti-monopoly alliances.
Clearly this analysis is relevant today, with the right to self-determination arguably playing a huge part in the popular desire for the UK to leave the European Union. Not necessarily politically or intellectually articulated, there is widespread understanding that the EU, particularly the European Commission, represents a technocratic framework committed to the free functioning of capitalist markets across national borders. One can point to many instances where the EC intervenes against the public interest and state-protected industries to protect the right of corporations to exploit the common market for their competitive advantage, as well as to the imperialist behaviour of the European Central Bank in response to the Greek economic crisis and its left-populist response.
However, the EU also represents in an important way its social democratic foundations in German, French and British economic systems, where the worst excesses of monopoly capitalism are regulated at a pan-European level to also protect the public interest. In the cosmetics industry, for example, the EU has banned or restricted more than 1,300 potentially harmful chemical ingredients while the US has outlawed or curbed just 11.
In both instances, the EU acts in the interests of monopoly capitalism, either in greasing the wheels of profitability or in stabilising it through attenuation of its self-destructive excesses. Whether or not you agree with ‘Lexit’ arguments that say the left should side with anti-EU sentiment within the British working class and try to turn this into a progressive anti-monopoly alliance, it is important to recognise the qualitative and not necessarily unintelligent origins of this sentiment and its potential for radical expression.
Echoing in many ways the UCS struggle almost half a century ago, the occupation of the Harland & Wolff shipyard under the leadership of Unite and GMB shop stewards offers a way to think through this question in a more concrete way. While the H&W shipbuilders are not ‘working in’, their demand for nationalisation and a just transition from military to green energy production refusal has the potential to destabilise Boris Johnson’s Tory government and open the door for Jeremy Corbyn’s democratic socialist Labour Party.
In his first speech as Prime Minster, Johnson tried to emulate Donald Trump’s rhetoric by promising to make Britain great again, specifically by “unleashing the productive power not just of London and the South East but of every corner of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.” GMB pounced on this hollow promise and demanded that Boris Johnson put “his money where his mouth is” and nationalise H&W and bring Royal Navy contracts back to UK shipbuilding, to make the yard viable until a just transition can be completed.
By calling Johnson’s bluff on the UK’s economic self-determination with a concrete and progressive demand, H&W workers threatens to unmask Johnson’s “no deal” Brexit for what it really is: a plan to turn the UK into an “offshore tax haven for the super-rich”, as Corbyn argues, selling out what British industry remains in the process. While Johnson and the DUP continue to ignore the H&W workers’ demands – claiming that it is a commercial, not a political issue – Corbyn and McDonnell have come out strongly in support of nationalisation, calling on Johnson to listen to Labour’s call to take H&W back into public ownership, so £1 billion of shipbuilding contracts can be delivered.
Given the current wave of insolvency in the UK – with British Steel placed into compulsory liquidation in May and the Scottish government promising to buy the Ferguson shipyard in Port Glasgow if no private buyer emerges within four weeks – and Johnson’s desperate attempts to represent British working class interests outside London, an escalation of the H&W situation could force a U-turn by a Johnson similar to that of Heath and, like in 1974, bring in a radical Labour government on a platform of public ownership and industrial democracy.
Meanwhile, the ‘green wave’ that has crashed its way through Europe in recent months, reflected in the ‘school strike for climate movement’ and the 15-seat expansion of the European Greens in the last EU elections, indicates that the anti-monopoly sentiment in the region may be finding a new avenue for expression. Young people especially are increasingly aware that the challenge posed by irreversible climate change cannot be met by neoliberal approaches to the economy. Inspired by ideas for a Green New Deal in the US, which proposes a multi-billion-dollar state investment in a just transition to a zero-carbon economy by 2050, labour movements across Europe have now begun to link climate politics with the new democratic socialism.
Under the banner of ‘Another Europe is Possible’, it might be that anti-monopoly alliances are better sought within a ‘remain and reform’ agenda. Rather than idealistically expecting Germany to give up its neoliberal hegemony over and for the EC simply to step aside in favour of democracy, the nationalisation of indigenous industries like H&W could set the stage for a confrontation between the public interest – aligned with the national interest but not exclusivity so – and the interests of technocratic neoliberalism. Such an aggressive position would not only bring the latter out into the open and spark economically literate conversations about European hegemony, but also provide leadership to other EU member states which may rally behind a democratic socialist member state willing to take Germany on.
From work-ins to teach-ins
Although Jimmy Reid distanced the UCS work-in from the “sit-in” tactic of earlier struggles, sit-ins played a big part in the development during the 1960s of another kind of work-in: the higher education “teach-in”. “One month after John F Kennedy declared his candidacy for president on 1 February 1960, four black engineering students sat in at a Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth store counter reserved for white people,” recalls Bill Dravies. “While there had been sit-ins and demonstrations previously, this one marked the entrance of college students into the civil rights movement, an entrance which would have a profound impact not only on civil rights but also on students themselves.” (3)
As the civil rights movement merged with anti-Vietnam war protests in the following years, students began occupying university campus buildings and creating alternative “free universities”, and sit-ins became teach-ins. As the inventor of the teach-in, Marshall Sahlins, recalls: “In February 1965, Lyndon Johnson dramatically escalated the Vietnam War by ordering a sustained bombing of the North and dispatching the first American combat troops to the South. The effect of the bait and switch in dissident university circles was redoubled opposition to American imperial policies, ultimately culminating in a campus-specific mode of political resistance.”
“We were going to take our classes off-campus to profess against the Vietnam War. When Governor George Romney, the university administration, and other powers-that-be came down on our heads with threats and recriminations—some of our colleagues accused us of riot-envy, suggesting we were jealous of the contemporary Free Speech Movement at Berkeley – the strike metamorphosed into the original teach-in.”
“In the months and years following the first teach-ins, mounting student anxieties about military conscription gave an impetus to draft-card burnings and other student political action, but not so much as in the early days of the Johnson escalation, when the university resistance, at the instigation of the left-liberal faculty, broke out en masse. It was the teach-ins that largely politicized the countercultural generation and effectively nationalized antiwar protests.”
“Within weeks of the first teach-in at Michigan, over a hundred others took place on campuses across the country – including a mega teach-in of 30,000 people at Berkeley. In May, the original Michigan group organized an all-day National Teach-In in Washington, DC, that was covered in part by several American and foreign TV networks – a telegraph in support arrived from Jean-Paul Sartre – and in whole by PBS. It was also broadcast by radio to over 200 campus stations. The teach-ins did not end the war, which went on for many years, but they began the peace. Leveraged by the mass and energy of the students, they awakened the conscience of the nation.”
Occupations, teach-ins and free universities were, of course, a huge feature also of the 2010 student movement, documented by Matt Myers in his excellent recent book. (4) I myself was involved in a few occupations and was a founding “professor” at the University for Strategic Optimism. If we see another wave of student protest and UCU activism in the coming months – perhaps sparked by the inevitable strikes over the failure to resolve the pensions crisis in pre-1992 universities, or maybe by the spread of the inspirational “school strike for climate” movement to higher education – we will no doubt also see the return of these tactics, perhaps, inspired by UCS, under the banner of the ‘right to learn’.
But how can student and teacher activists learn from the UCS work-in? As I’ve argued elsewhere, if the Tories decide to implement the Augar Review’s recommendations to cut student fees by 20%, from £9,250 to £7,500, without plugging this income with reinstated public funding, the financial viability of many debt-ridden universities may be undermined, leading possibly even to closure. In response to rising levels of borrowing in the sector to fuel capital spending, Office for Students’ head Sir Michael Barber has also said that the new regulator would “not bail out providers in financial difficulty.” This would put some universities in a very similar situation to UCS in 1971.
In the case of a university failing, students may decide to occupy parts of the campus and academics would likely show solidarity by teaching in. It is more likely that an occupation would come from students, as academics would need to be careful not to break any laws that would prevent UCU from protecting them against individual victimisation. However, if such an occupation were to escalate, the teach-in could become more like a work-in, with teachers refusing to stop delivering the classes and marking the papers that contribute to the attainment of undergraduate degrees. After all, universities are autonomous institutions with degree awarding powers, in principle, a degree awarded by teachers working-in would be as valid as any other.
Of course, such an alliance of students and teachers would quickly need to get the support of non-academic staff to make such a situation sustainable, especially the administrative and security staff who could easily frustrate such an initiative. But if an occupation like this could show the discipline and strategic nous of the UCS work-in, it could cause a lot of trouble for a Tory government refusing to support a public institution like a university. It goes without saying that I am not advocating for students or academics to try this out, but you never know, it just might just work.
References
(1) Foster, J. and Woolfston, C. (1986) The Politics of the UCS Work-In: Class Alliances and the Right to Work. London: Lawrence and Wishart
(2) Buchan, A. (1972) The Right to Work: The Story of the Upper Clyde Confrontation. Whitstable: Calder and Boyars
(3) Dravies, B. (1980) The Free University: A Model for Lifelong Learning. Chicago: Association Press
(4) Myers, M. (2017) Student Revolt: Voices of the Austerity Generation. London: Pluto Press
Marketisation of Higher Education 