Being a ‘Clydesider’ in the age of deindustrialisation: skilled male identity and economic restructuring in the West of Scotland since the 1960s

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between long-running deindustrialisation and skilled male employment culture in the West of Scotland. The age of deindustrialisation is a valuable designation: the contraction of industrial production and employment in the United Kingdom was gradual rather than sudden, managed carefully in the 1960s and 1970s and then recklessly in the 1980s. In Scotland there was an important transition in the 1960s from established to younger industrial sectors. In the sphere of employment culture this tested the Clydesider skilled male identity, which was constructed and reproduced in workplaces and industrial communities. The resilience of this identity is tracked through oral history examination of workers employed at the Fairfields shipyard in Govan, Glasgow, and the Linwood car plant, ten miles west in Renfrewshire. The Clydesider identity was derived from shipyard employment culture. It privileged earnings, workplace voice and relative autonomy from managerial supervision. Workers at Linwood used the Clydesider identity to advance their influence on the shop floor, contesting the frustrations of assembly goods manufacturing and asserting skill and autonomy.The article shows how manual workers on the Clyde adjusted to and made sense of deindustrialisation in the 1960s and 1970s in moral economy terms. The protracted and incomplete 'half-life' of deindustrialisation contained positive as well as negative effects.'We not only build ships on the Clyde; we also build men'. These are the famous words of Jimmy Reid, Communist, skilled engineer and union steward in John Browns yard during the 1971-72 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in. The work-in was triggered in Clydebank and Glasgow when Edward Heath's Conservative government refused to extend credit to UCS. The group faced liquidation despite an extensive order book, threatening 8,000 men with redundancy. The work-in mobilised a cross-party alliance of labour, employers, MPs and civic leaders in Scotland against market forces and Westminster decision-makers who Reid characterised as 'faceless men', remote physically and socially from the yards.The work-in inspired trade-union, socialist and counter-cultural support from far and wide, including a bouquet of roses and a cheque for £5,000 from Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Heath's government was forced into retreat, conceding a major programme of investment that secured the retention of 6,000 shipyard jobs (Foster and Woolfson, 1999).The work-in was often analysed in emotive terms. The shipyards, depending on perspective, were the front line in a war waged by employers and policy-makers against greedy workers (Broadway, 1976), a scene of grave policy-making confusion (Johnman and Murphy 2002), or the crucible of antiworking class prejudice and industrial butchery (Buchan, 1972). Across these competing narratives there was common emphasis on industrial decline, influenced by interpretations of deindustrialisation as a sudden phenomenon that followed the election of Margaret Thatcher's first ...

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Review of periodical literature for 2021

“…Union responses to deindustrialization emerged as another core theme in the 2021 literature. Phillips’ article on the Scottish engineering union activist Jimmy Airlie traces his contribution to working‐class struggles for economic security through his time working in the Clydeside shipyards and in his later career as full‐time union official responsible for workers in American‐owned plants. A special edition of Labour History Review addressed factory occupations.…”