Book review symposium: Response to reviews of Huw Beynon,Working for Ford: Men,Masculinity,Mass Production and Militancy

Back then

They say that ‘the past is a foreign country’. Linda McDowell’s reflections on the wage rates in the 1960s endorses this view, as does her reference to ‘performativity’ – a term, which, like so many others, was not part of the vocabulary of a nascent British sociology. In the 1950s, sociology barely existed as an academic discipline in the UK, with departments thin on the ground and no Business Schools until 1965. I had taken a degree in economics at Aberystwyth and, keen to develop my interest in industrial sociology, enrolled as a graduate student in the Department of Social Science at Liverpool University, which in the early 1960s ‘could claim to be the leading British centre for empirical social research [and] … the first to develop an empirical research programme into work and neighbourhood relations in Britain’ (Savage, 2011: 145; Scott and Mays, 1960). Here, the Diploma in Industrial Administration built on the Department’s research experience and offered what was then a rare pathway on research methodology.

In the post-war period and under the leadership of T.E. (later Lord) Simey, the Department had fostered a strongly inter-disciplinary and problem-focused approach rooted in the poverty of the inner city and the reconstruction of housing and industry. In this context, Simey had written of the benefits of ‘collaboration between the sociologist, the manager, the trade union official and the social worker’ in developing ‘experiments’ in industrial relations. The Department’s research teams had perfected the attitude survey backed with sound statistical techniques through several studies based in old established industries. The Dock Worker (Liverpool University Department of Social Sciences, 1954), based on the Manchester dock, is the most interesting. Here the research team (containing three remarkable women: Enid Mumford, Joan Woodward and Betty Gittus) revealed a willingness to flexibly build around the survey with discussion groups and other more participative styles of research.

By the mid-1960s, however, things were in flux. When Richard Brown (1965) published his positive appreciation of the Department’s work it was already on the wane, with internal conflicts affecting its capacity to adapt to the changing city and changes in the discipline. In 1964, the year of Wilson’s electoral victory, Ford had decided to locate its new manufacturing estate on the south side of the city, joining other mass production and light engineering industries on Merseyside and giving impetus to Liverpool’s claim to be the ‘city of change and promise’, transforming it from a commercial and transportation centre into a major manufacturing hub – a hub built around the mass production systems of increasingly large private corporations. In Manchester (and after many false starts) the UK’s first Business School was opened at the University, while each year across the country new sociology departments appeared, with large numbers of students enrolling on courses exploring the nature of this ‘new’ subject in the context of a changing world.

In 1968, I joined the new Department of Sociology at Bristol University as an assistant lecturer. While I was there I wrote Working For Ford (WfF). But this is to jump ahead of myself.

The politics of method

Having completed the diploma, I registered for the PhD programme with a topic that focused on variations in trade union activism. I was intrigued by the ‘double identity’ of the worker as both employee and trade union member and had read the US literature on workplace participation and the phenomenon of ‘dual allegiance’. By the time I went to Halewood I had already conducted detailed surveys of workers and their shop stewards in a power station and a large chocolate packing factory. ¹ These were based on an interview schedule with structured and unstructured questions relating to the job and the work process, the trade union, and the representative system as it operated in the factory. I was looking for another site and, after a conversation with Paul Roots, head of human relations at the Paint and Trim Assembly (PTA) plant at Halewood, I visited the factory. Roots was soon to be moved to the head office at Warley and while he felt that it would be difficult for me to get workers released off the line to be interviewed, he was happy to allow me into the plant to survey the shop stewards, if they were agreeable. I was pleased as the PTA plant (like the chocolate factory and power station) was dominated by the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) and would (I thought) assist in making comparisons across the union’s different trade groups. ² I had hoped that once inside the plant I might be able to find a way of interviewing the line workers themselves, and so it proved.

To begin with though, I had to get the approval of the shop stewards and a meeting with the convenor, deputy convenor and three other stewards was arranged. They listened carefully to what I had to say before proceeding to interview me. After some discussion of where I came from, why I was doing the research and so on they decided that it was a piece of research that they wanted to take seriously. Being a man helped, but it wasn’t decisive. More important was the fact that I seemed to know something about them and their situation; that I was interested and involved in ‘the labour movement’; that I was open with them; and that they liked me. This reminded me of the way in which Alvin Gouldner and Maurice Stein wrote about the interviewing project in the gypsum mine in the US. There they discovered that the miners regarded them as people who were also interviewers and that friendly relations and discussion was a prerequisite for a successful interview. They concluded that:

Despite the fact that this seemingly violates the canons of good interviewing we were all convinced that our best data were obtained during such moments of real interaction. Our experience suggests therefore that there are some persons who cannot be interviewed unless the interviewer abandons appearance of lofty detachment and impersonal interest and unless he behaves with friendly respect. (Gouldner, 1964: 259)

The Dock Worker study also came to mind, for there the researchers noted that ‘far from resenting outside interference they seemed anxious for strangers to know what was really happening in the industry’ (Liverpool University Department of Social Sciences, 1954: 34). So it was at Halewood. There my relationship with the committee expanded and became more elaborate as time passed, creating a more engaged methodological stance than was possible through interviewing alone. This worked in a number of ways. From our discussions they knew that I wanted to interview every steward and also (if possible) a sample of members from the different sections of the PTA and they said they would help with that, encouraging all of their colleagues to take the project seriously. They helped in other ways too. When (for example) they knew the timing of the car model change that would replace the Anglia with the Escort, they alerted me to this and the ways in which the ‘down time’ involved would make it easy for the company to release workers for interview. Moreover, as the interviewing programme continued, they became concerned to ensure that I had access to all the facts that would enable me to write a ‘true account’. This involved moving me away from the comfort zone of the survey and meeting others: people who had previously worked at the plant; trade union officials who had had dealing with the plant in the early days; and so on. I was encouraged to shadow them on their sections, ‘hang around’, watch and listen. Also, as Paul Edwards explains, they invited me to all of their meetings and social events outside the plant. In these ways the stewards became active agents in the research and I learned the benefits of taking some of the cues from them and having a flexible approach to the development of the field work. Hence, the interview data were extended through my participation in the activities of the shop steward committee, and through a variety of more informal and ethnographic forms of data collection.

When I was with them I rarely asked questions. They were good talkers and it was important for me to be a good listener. Here Linda McDowell’s impression of me as ‘one of the lads’ is mistaken. I was the shy outsider. The stories I collected weren’t normally ones they told to me but to each other: all of them with references to the past, all helping to develop a strong esprit de corps. I wrote them down and asked about the details when they cropped up again. In this I became aware of the importance of metaphor in the ways in which both the stewards and workers communicated their understanding of their position in the company. The most prolific was the reference to themselves – the workers – as numbers. This was a repeated refrain and one that damned the company for its attitude and objectively described their position in the production process. I developed this metaphor in my writing, comparing the time of the ‘man on the engine dress’ with that of the reader – installing 40 gear boxes an hour, 200 in a shift. More elaborate was the reference made by the stewards to ‘the Cologne yard stick’, something which, again, I heard repeatedly before I understood its full meaning, encapsulating as it did a measuring process whereby workers in different parts of the world were being placed in competition with each other by the company that employed them. This process of workers being placed in direct competition with each other by large corporate employers was noted for the first time in WfF.

By the spring of 1968, I had completed my field work in the plant based on interviews with all of the stewards and the sample of assembly line workers and had notebooks full of quotes and detailed observations. At that point I was in a position to write a comparative account of work and trade union participation in three establishments, perhaps in the way that Paul Edwards has suggested (Edwards, 2013). However, events intervened. Although no longer visiting the plant I kept in touch with several of the stewards, especially Eddie Roberts who lived a few blocks away from me across Liverpool 8 in Selborne Street. As such I continued to talk about developments at Ford. These were soon to become tempestuous, with the strike of the female sewing machinists followed by a walkout of the whole plant. The Dock Worker study had had a similar experience with a strike breaking out in the middle of the data collection phase. I had always felt that the team should have taken more advantage of this event and fully incorporated it into the study, and that serendipity should be seen as an important and legitimate aspect of the research process. In 1968 it posed a different kind of dilemma for me – write the thesis or follow the story? In deciding to recommence the field work, I suspect that Paul will feel that I made a mistake. What is clear is that the decision was decisive and, as one thing led to another, the very shape of the project changed. ³ It became increasingly ethnographic and historical – less like a Liverpool and more like a Manchester study. This development, however, reflected in no small part the ethical commitment that I had come to feel towards the stewards and the subjects of the research.

Work and its discontents

In the early 1960s, we looked to the USA for sociological studies of the workplace. Ely Chinoy’s study of Automobile Workers and the American Dream (1955) had no parallel in the UK, where there was very little discussion of the impact of mass production upon workers’ lives. In early 1968, when Martin Nicolaus’s article on ‘The Unknown Marx’ appeared in New Left Review it introduced English language readers to the early writings on alienation. Shortly after, Sartre’s (1969) description of modern work was also translated, with its emphasis on a ‘vigilance without content’. Together these encouraged me to develop the idea of the mass worker, and the assembly line that never stops, as a central theme of the book, influencing the writing style which (rather than standing back in evaluating a quotation or a piece of activity) drew on the sentence construction of the workers as they talked about their grievances and emotions.

Today, things have changed greatly. Assembly plants are filled with robots and, as Linda McDowell points out, the work is less arduous, with women workers standing on the lines alongside men. However, in spite of this, and talk of post-Fordist labour processes, it was interesting to read the account by Carol Cadwalladr (2013) of work in Amazon’s modern high-tech facility in South Wales, where her narrative style is suggestive of an earlier period. She explains that ‘the manager tells us that we alone have picked 155,000 items in the last 24 hours. Tomorrow … that figure will be closer to 450,000’. She describes walking 15 miles a shift, starting breaks five minutes away from the canteen and toilet block, and ‘picking’ minute by minute. Here too we see the power of multinational corporations and their capacity to locate in the most advantageous locations, taking advantage of local labour markets and the nature of work without a trade union.

At Ford of course the workers were unionized and the process that formed the union is central narrative of WfF. Building on the resistance that developed on the shop floor and the key role of local leadership that came in the most part from young men brought up in a union city, the book documents the way they formed a cadre, with a strong commitment to involving the membership and ‘distrusting the bureaucrats’. One of the great, and lasting, achievements of the committee is seen in the part it played in democratizing the collective bargaining arrangements in the engineering industry. This was made most clear in the national strike of 1969, which deserved greater attention than it has received. At that time, travelling on the night trains back and forth to Bristol, listening to their talk of ‘the ball and chain’ and of ‘Victorian times’, it was clear that they all felt that they were part of making history. I had a subordinate role to play in this, as they were keen to point out: ‘We do it, he writes it down!’.

The capacity for trade unions (and the shop steward committees in particular) to humanize autocratic management should not be underestimated. Certainly the resistance at Halewood played a part in changing the management philosophy at Ford (Mackintosh, 2004). So too in Brazil, where José Ramalho recognizes the critical democratizing role that trade unions played during the period of the dictatorship when companies like Ford and VW collaborated with the regime. There was a similar story in South Africa with spontaneous strikes destabilizing the apartheid regime. In this context, Eddie Webster (2012) has explained how the idea of ‘factory class consciousness’, drawn from WfF, was helpful in understanding these developments and with it the question of rank and file leadership across the trade unions.

Interpretations and re-interpretations

The book was published in the Penguin Education series thanks to the support of Tom Burns. It was extensively reviewed in all the national, and many regional, newspapers but largely ignored by the sociology and industrial relations journals, although David Rosenberg, a graduate student in the Bristol Department, delivered a piece to The Sociological Review. In The Times Literary Supplement, the anonymous reviewer pointed to the book’s non-overt, but important theoretical structure, describing it as ‘a remarkable work of industrial sociology’. In the Guardian, and as part of a more general piece, Peter Worsley commented favourably on its ‘literary style’. ⁴ However, and as I explained in the preface to the second edition, these views were not unanimous. The Ford Motor Company, for example, felt that the book was ‘not a serious attempt at sociology or education’. With the passage of time it seems that that view changed, with management introducing changes that ‘effectively demonised its own past’, unconsciously ‘endorsing Beynon’s seminal description of the alienating experience of shop floor workers’ (Starkey and McKinlay, 1994: 998).

The new edition was published (WfF2) in 1985, by which time sociology had become embedded as a discipline with departments in almost all major universities and (as then) polytechnics. In this new context the book came to take on a different presence. ⁵ Dorothy Smith, for example (while doubting the book’s capacity to serve as a complete sociology), thought that it came ‘about as close as I can imagine to doing a sociology from the perspective of working class men’ (Smith, 1987: 67). This was pleasing to read as this (without consciously using a gendered framework) had been my intention. At the time, of course, the British industrial workforce was predominantly male, and overwhelmingly so in the industries studied at the Liverpool Department. ⁶ In this regard, the chocolate factory study published as Perceptions of Work ⁷ (Beynon and Blackburn, 1972) with its dominantly female labour force broke new ground and also reflected changing times.

At Ford, the labour force was almost entirely male. The workers were drawn from all over the north west of England but with a majority residing in south Liverpool in that broad band from Dingle through to Garston and to Speke itself. One of the undercurrents in the book relates to the interface between the company (with its transnational structure and location policy) and the culture and politics of the working class on Merseyside. While common today it was unusual at the time, especially in the way this was drawn upon to explain the emergence of the leadership in the factory and of its style and confidence. It is hinted at in an account of the discussion and singing in the pubs. ⁸ Liverpool in the late 1960s had a vibrancy (relating in part to its popular music culture and the success of the football clubs) that differed from the account portrayed a decade earlier by Madeline Kerr (1958). In different circumstances (and had I stayed on in Liverpool) I could have broadened the account, as Linda McDowell suggests, to consider home, family and gender relations ⁹ but, at the time, my concern was with shop stewards and the workplace.

It was in this context that the book touched on gender issues. Many of the stewards felt that in order to do their job (as steward) properly they had to be free of debt, especially the debt of house mortgage. Debt, they felt, clouded the judgement and would make them risk averse and afraid of recommending strike action. ¹⁰ They also felt that to be shop steward and a leader they had to be as financially dependent upon their Ford wage as the rest of the membership and it was for this reason that they expressed unease at the idea of a two income household. Told from the perspective of the book, these were elements of a ‘factory class consciousness’, and emblematic of the fact that for the stewards ‘their overwhelming concern was “the plant” and the practicalities of living in the here and now’ (pp. 231–32). They were measures of commitment to the role of steward and leader of industrial workers in struggle. They can be looked at in another way (as patriarchal), and of course these ideas did not prevail as the two income family household became both commonplace and a financial necessity. At the time though they had a certain nobility. ¹¹

As Linda McDowell points out, gender issues emerged most explicitly in the strike of the sewing machinists in 1968. This was a complicated issue that was rooted in the impact of the new grading system upon the gendered division of labour in the plant. All of the sewing machinists were women and they worked in a room off-set from the main PTA plant and it had proven practically difficult, and not entirely logical, to include any of them in the interview programme. The strike began at the Dagenham River Plant, where Henry Friedman was the tactically astute convenor and a man who, at that time, I hadn’t met. It extended to Halewood, where it became clear that the final assembly of cars could not continue without seat covers and, with the women on strike, the men were laid off. What was also clear, and the women would point this out forcefully, is that they were the only workers who had to pass a skill test in order to be employed by Ford. Yet these skills were not recognized in the new grading scheme that placed them in the second lowest category – B. In demanding re-grading on a par with the skilled men, they unsettled the men who worked on the assembly lines who also felt that they had been unfairly treated. It seemed clear to me that the ‘science’ of grading had bowed to expediency and the women had right on their side when they challenged their evaluation. However, this was not how the dispute was settled. The women at Ford faced another discrimination. Amazing as it may seem today, at every grade point the female rate of pay was pegged at a percentage of the male rate, and in a way that was familiar across British industry – tables of wage rates contained columns for male and female rates (WfF, p. 161). It was this that was seized upon to settle the dispute, with the company offering to ‘narrow the differential so that women employees will in future receive 92 per cent of the men’s wage for a similar job’. In shifting the focus to an issue of equal pay, Ford was, oddly enough, let off the hook and the injustice of the grading grievance left in the air to be pursued year on year by the women. ¹²

What this produced at Halewood was a complicated set of tensions that the shop stewards’ committee found difficult to deal with. Here the men’s feelings of exploitation by the company were exacerbated, in confused and contradictory ways, by the actions of the women. I try to bring this together in a paragraph that starts with sentences beginning with ‘he’ (WfF, p. 166). Written today it would no doubt have included some discussion of masculinity but I think it is there to be seen and exemplifies the book’s stylistic approach. ¹³

What sociology?

Mike Savage (2011) has written of 1962, and the decade that followed, as the ‘moment of sociology’ in the UK. It was a time when the expansion in the subject was matched by dramatic changes in the economy and society. It was a time when we all seemed to be reading new books with new ideas as we argued about the nature of sociology and its place in the world. In the midst of this I was thinking about writing WfF and teaching classes on research methodology and introductory sociology in the new Department in Bristol. I had become convinced that if sociology was to serve in the enlightening role that we explained in our lectures, it would need to be critical and involve engagement as well as the craftsmanship that Mills wrote about in The Sociological Imagination. ‘Sociology for sociologists’, I wrote, was an absurdity. I had read in Sartre’s (1963) account of seriality and ‘fused groups’, a way of thinking through how workers could break the isolation and anonymity of labouring under mass production. I also came to see it as a way of unlocking the egoism and detachment of the intellectual/writer. As such I was concerned that the book was read beyond the academy and needed to be written in a way that would help create such an audience. In the Preface to WfF2, I give a full account of the different ways in which the book was read, drawing in particular upon the letters I had received from factory workers. One put it this way:

I have spent a working life of forty-five years in engineering, from foundry, to fabrication of steel-work and the motor trade. Everywhere I have seen the repercussions of the incoherent feeling in the back of people’s minds that they are less important than the machine. (WfF2)

Burawoy (2005) subsequently identified my work as ‘public sociology from below’ (a contrast he made with Giddens’ ‘from above’) and the debate that he set in train in 2004 fits well with the way in which I have tried to work. I discussed many of these issues with researchers and students in Brazil. They also provoked discussion in South Africa and Eddie Webster’s appeal for researchers there to ‘go back to the shop floor’ and ‘listen to the workers’ voices’. In subsequent years others have picked up the book, or had it thrust upon them, and found it to have a contemporary relevance (Hatherley, 2010).

Nearer home, WfF and Living With Capitalism, the book I worked on at Bristol with Theo Nichols (Nichols and Beynon, 1977), were influential in opening up the world of work as a route to a broader understanding of economy and society. In this, commentators (e.g. Darlington, 1994) most commonly linked WfF to the emergence of a number of critical feminist studies published in the early 1980s (Cavendish, 1982; Pollert, 1981; Westwood, 1984), all based on shop floor observations and interviews. More generally, when taken together with the work of Tony Lane in Liverpool and Richard Hyman in Warwick, they can be seen to have paved the way for studies of the labour process and a new sociology of work (Hyman, 1975; Lane, 1974).