Michael Richardson

Deference and Dissent provides a window into the working lives of compositors, letterpress machinists, and bookbinders and their relationships with their employer, J. W. Arrowsmith, over an extended period, 1855-1927. It looks at their collective voice, disputes, strikes, including the 1926 General Strike, workplace culture, mechanisation of typese...

While there are many academic studies of workers’ resistance and consciousness during the 1970s and 1980s, few accounts relate the personal-political experiences of the activists involved. Tremors of Discontent, however, explores how Mike Richardson’s individual consciousness came to change during that period. It shows how gradually his participati...

While there are many academic studies of workers’ resistance and consciousness during the 1970s and 1980s, few accounts relate the personal-political experiences of the activists involved. Tremors of Discontent, however, explores how Mike Richardson’s individual consciousness came to change during that period. It shows how gradually his participati...

Mike Richardson’s intriguing account of his aunt, Beatrice May Richardson and her biracial daughter Gillian, brings into stark relief the racism and sexism that existed in the United Kingdom during and after the Second World War. Sexual relationships between white British women and black American soldiers were regarded with disapproval both in the...

The emergence of ‘New Unionism’ in 1889, and the accompanying outburst of strikes across the country, was one of the most extraordinary and significant events in trade union history. Tens of thousands of ‘unskilled’ labourers, men and women, struck work, demanding an immediate improvement in their working conditions. In Bristol, gasworkers were at...

'Turbulence' examines the changes and tensions that developed within Bristol's aircraft factories, during the First World War. The influx of thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, both women and men, either substituting for craftsmen or working on newly routinised and standardised production lines, such as aircraft assembly, precipitated...

The Anglo – Catholic convert to the left, Hugh Holmes Gore, was a key figure in Bristol’s labour movement during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Gore linked Clifton Christian Socialists, morally concerned about the poverty and suffering caused by economic depression, with the working class revolutionaries in the Bristol Socialist So...

The history of Bristol's Great Western Cotton Works is little known. The story of its workforce - mainly low-paid women and children has never been told. From the late 1830s to the the early twentieth century Great Western cotton hands endured long working hours, high rates of industrial 'accidents' and ill-health from the cotton dust and humidity....

Approaching 20 years have passed since the election of Tony Blair‘s New Labour government in 1997. One of that government’s more salient employment policy initiatives was the promotion of workplace partnership as a key component of its drive to ‘modernise’ workplace relations. This development generated intense academic interest, both supportive an...

The labour processes and employment relations that characterise the working conditions of many professional workers might be expected to generate the high-trust environment required for cooperative, partnership-style management–union relations. However, few studies have focused on partnership in ‘professional’ and ‘expert labour’ employment sectors...

In the 1970s and 80s a revival of interest emerged in researching Bristol’s vigorous radical past, which has been echoed in the more recent historical studies concerning the involvement of the Bristol women’s movement in the nineteenth century in anti-slavery campaigns, social reform, and the struggle for the emancipation of women. However, signifi...

This is an author produced version of a chapter published in Business and Labour History: Case Studies. Bristol University Press. This version has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof corrections, published layout or pagination. Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of S...

In the UK automobile and aerospace industries, the struggle over job control and rewards for labour expended in the production process was particularly intense in the period of steady economic growth, high and stable employment, and low inflation following the Second World War. This struggle reached its zenith during a phase of increasing output in...

The 1910–14 strike wave in Britain is generally associated with the infamous and intense industrial battles in the coal, cotton, transport, metal, engineering, shipbuilding, and building industries.1 It is not surprising, therefore, that localized disputes involving a single employer, especially in rural areas not renowned for militancy, tend to be...

The business and labour history case studies presented in this edited collection provide valuable insights into the field of work organization, the social relations of production, and the detailed division of labour in some key British industries and workplaces between the 1830s and the 1990s. These studies reveal the constant ebb and flow of power...

There is a vast literature on the General Strike which has covered most aspects of the conflict and assessed its aftermath.1 The best known discussions of its impact have estimated its effects on trade unionism in general terms.2 Yet, as one recent commentator on the events of 1926 observes, a ‘fertile route’ for research ‘would be to examine case...

Purpose – The article aims to report on research into managerial practices at the workplace level in Britain and Italy in the automobile and aerospace industries. These are examined with regard to their impact on employees' perceptions of skill, training and their relationship to participation. Are advocates of high performance work (HPW) accurate...

This article questions the view of leading advocates of lean production and high-performance work practices that these increase employee influence. It examines workers’ experiences in the automobile and aerospace sectors in Italy and the UK. Despite national differences in industrial relations and cultural differences between firms, a significant d...

This paper provides case study analysis of the workplace experiences of British scientists working in the field of climatology. In the context of the restructuring of work organisation brought about by the interplay between the commercialisation of science and state modernisation policies, the paper provides evidence of a deterioration in scientist...

This article examines the dynamics of direct and indirect consultation processes in three high-skill work establishments in the UK. Drawing on a mix of case study survey and interview data, it analyses the experiences and attitudes of predominantly well-qualified professional employees. Adopting the concept of ‘embeddedness’ of employee consultatio...

Recent transformations, such as outsourcing, modularisation and high performance workplaces, have had a big impact on the international automobile industry. This book covers the most relevant and recent developments in the car industry internationally.

More than ten years have now elapsed since the TUC launched its ‘New Unionism’ project in 1996. As has been well documented, in its early stages ‘New Unionism’ embodied an attempt to arrest the decline of union membership and influence at work by incorporating certain elements of an aggressive organising approach associated with the North American...

Told from the viewpoint of the workers, the book chronicles how workers responded to a variety of management and union strategies, from piece-rate working, through measured day work. and eventually to lean production beginning in the the 1980s

The paper measures the effects of workplace partnership and selected high performance work practices on four different dimensions of employee experience. Whilst the partnership– high performance work systems nexus seems to have little impact on employees’ job satisfaction or sense of attachment, it does, however, have a negative impact on both work...

Now and again certain key industrial disputes serve as a reminder that the state not only plays a central role in struggles between capital and labour, but that its interventions tend to be heavily biased towards employers. One such dispute concerned the abolition of the National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS) in 1989, and the return of casual employmen...

The upsurge in strike activity, immediately preceding the First World War, 1910–14, involved many thousands of workers in key industries. By the summer of 1914, strikes, in the coal, cotton, transport, metal, engineering, shipbuilding and building industries, were viewed by the government as a crisis of severe proportions. This is a micro–level stu...

The Realities of Partnership at Work finds evidence of work intensification, increased stress and more job insecurity where partnership has been introduced in the workplace

In this chapter, we present survey data of different dimensions of employee experience of life on the lean production line in three European car plants. Our core research question is to interrogate the central employee-centred claim of the original IMVP researchers. That is, lean manufacturing offers something better for workers (compared to the ri...

Labour governments since 1997 have embraced ‘partnership at work’ as central to their agenda for industrial relations ‘modernisation’. Their efforts to influence private sector employers’ practices have been criticised as light touch (e.g. Terry, 2003). A heavier hand has been applied in the public services sector, however, and in the NHS in partic...

We have suggested in this book that partnership is rooted in government and employer strategies to redefine industrial relations. This is as a precursor to closing the UK productivity gap and ‘modernising’ public services. Partnership is the chosen vehicle for a renewed capital accumulation strategy predicated on ‘progressive workplace consensus’ a...

The finance sector in the UK now employs one in five of the workforce (Labour Force Survey, 2006). As such it is an important sector to study. Rapid growth in the sector followed the 1980s ‘revolution’ in the regulatory regime governing the provision of financial services (Moran, 1991), with employment in ‘banking, finance and insurance’ growing fr...

This book results from a project funded by ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) on the ‘Patterns and Prospects of Partnership at Work in the UK’. The research project, conducted between 2001 and 2005, is part of the ESRC’s ‘Future of Work’ programme. The project aimed to examine in detail the realities of partnership working in UK industry....

In the last two decades, public sector services have come under mounting pressure to improve performance and reduce costs in service delivery. Successive Conservative governments exposed many local public services to compulsory competitive tendering (CCT). The number of services provided by local authorities was reduced by transferring them to the...

Many accounts of the nature of the high-performance workplace (HPW) tend to derive from ‘technologist’ conceptions of industrial development. This often results in analyses that are neutral, or silent, on such questions as capitalist dynamics and class relations at work. For example, one of the leading groups of writers in the field, Eileen Appelba...

This chapter presents two case studies of workplace partnership in the aerospace industry, a key strategic sector for Britain’s manufacturing base. We first provide a brief account of organisational context by describing recent politico-economic changes affecting the sector along with the distinctive patterns of organisational restructuring that ha...

It is sometimes tempting to describe labour and organisational relations in the international automobile industry as having undergone significant transformations in recent years as if there were ever a period of calm in the sector. Workers and researchers of the industry understand well that the sector has always been a hot bed of technological and...

Drawing on case study data, this article analyzes contrasting workplace union responses to organizational restructuring in the United Kingdom's aerospace industry. It critically evaluates two distinct union strategies that resonate with contemporary debates governing the future role of trade unions in the British workplace. The first response is ba...

Partnership theory proposes that an appropriate integration of direct and indirect employee participation mutually benefits the workers and the company. This study explores the putative employee voice gains and the risks for union effectiveness by comparing employees' evaluation of partnership practices at two financial service companies with non-u...

Non-union forms of employee representation have become increasingly prominent in UK workplaces in the last 15 years. In addition, partnership working has been encouraged by New Labour, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the Confederation of British Industry and the TUC as a route to higher commitment and higher individual and org...

Purpose – This paper explores employee experiences concerning job security/insecurity, workload, job satisfaction and employee involvement in the aftermath of Best Value reviews in a local authority. Design/methodology/approach – Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques employees' experiences of Best Value reviews in...

This article addresses the role of ‘employee voice’ in workplace partnership. Drawing on two organizational case studies from the UK’s aerospace sector, it analyses employee experiences of two key dimensions of worker participation in partnership environments: joint consultation and union representation. Specifically, it investigates what consultat...

This chapter explores the links between work-life balance and workplace partnership, principally through a local authority case study. This was one of six organisations studied in our research on ‘patterns and prospects for partnership at work in the UK’, part of the ESRC Future of Work programme.1 The local authority case study is of particular in...

The fragmentation of previously single corporate entities into more complex business unit structures was, in both case studies, one of the central building blocks of the high performance work regime. The principal objective was to secure for management a more transparent framework of cost control. However, ‘decentralization’ did not stop at the lev...

We hear much these days, from politicians and media commentators alike, about the need to ‘modernize’ UK workplace relations. It is a term which, as a rhetorical device, is intended to convey a sense of rationality and progress. Thus, attempts to ‘democratize’ the workplace by way of new forms of employee participation bolstered by distinctively co...

Work participation, flexibility and regular skill acquisition together constitute the core employee dimensions of the high performance workplace. Systematic skills training and career progression are therefore important facets of the necessary development of human capital in these work contexts (Appelbaum et al., 2000; Chaykowski and Gunderson, 200...

In one of the more influential pieces of business analysis to emerge towards the end of the twentieth century, Walton (1985) argued for a fundamental rethink of the management of workplace relations. Incorporating a managerial philosophy of multiple stakeholderism, Walton championed a proposed shift from direct employee control to employee commitme...

It has been our argument throughout this book that, in the final analysis, the conflict of class interests that is inherent to capitalist dynamics at work will inevitably frustrate and, in time, invalidate attempts to create partnerships between employers and labour. In reading the different analyses of the proponents of partnership and high perfor...

Technical workers are one of the largest occupational groups in Britain’s manufacturing sector and the largest in aerospace itself. Their role of indirectly productive workers within ‘mental’ labour (Smith, 1987) or ‘productive intellectual labour’ (Armstrong, 1987) makes them as indispensable to production and the generation of profit as productiv...

Under the guise of the mantras of ‘enterprise’ and ‘flexibility’, the typical large British manufacturing firm became subject to considerable restructuring during the final two decades of the last century. The new environment of globalization, characterized by significant increases in capital mobility, international trade and market competition, al...

The beginning of aircraft production in Britain nearly a century ago provided new settings for capital accumulation. Workers in this developing industry, however, still faced many of the problems associated with authoritarian employers whose power was premised on ownership of the means of production. Technological advance in an age of modernity did...

In the unionized sectors, partnership is fast becoming the new orthodoxy in British industrial relations. This is partly a function of employer responses to intensified global competition and neo-liberal imperatives. It is also a function of the post-1997 shift in politicoeconomic conditions and in particular, successive Labour Governments’ quest f...

This article considers issues of workplace union strategy in a study of a National Health Service hospital trust in which the focus of the investigation is the 'employee voice' gains, or losses, arising from partnership and worker participation. The impact of government policy on local management and, in turn, employees' opportunities to participat...

This article provides case study analysis of the impact of high performance work practices and workplace partnership on skilled workers in the UK's aerospace industry. In contrast to assumptions that such practices increase empowerment and participation, we find evidence of a democratic deficit in workplace decision-making and deterioration in the...

The adoption of new management strategies and flexible working practices in the manufacturing industry has caused a fragmentation of the traditional collective base of British trade unions. Such changes have led some commentators to argue that, in order to survive, manufacturing unions must reject oppositional stances and instead offer support for...

The TUC's ‘New Unionism’ project contains contradictory tendencies in its promotion of both partnership relationships with employers and the adoption of more aggressive organising techniques. This paper investigates the impact of partnership-organising tensions on union activity at the workplace level in local government and the NHS. We explore the...

Management-union relations in British workplaces changed significantly in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In the private sector, firms had been subject to increased market competition, corporate turbulence and labour rationalisation. In the public sector changes had been driven by marketisation and cost cutting imperatives. In both c...