Factory Occupation, Workers’ Cooperatives and Alternative Production: Lessons from Britain in the 1970s

In 1971, following government withdrawal of financial support for the industry, shop stewards announced that they had taken over control of the gatehouses at the four Upper Clyde Shipyards in Glasgow, initiating a work-in. The work-in, as the British Cabinet at the time feared (CM-71, 12 October 1971), served as a catalyst for a wave of workplace occupations – work-ins and sit-ins – by UK workers (Coates, 1981; Sherry 2010). The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) proved the inspiration for more than 2601 further occupations in the following decade, used by workers against the impact of capital restructuring. This capital restructuring, as well as bringing redundancy and insecurity to the labour market, was to represent a major shift in hegemony which saw the decline of traditional industry – and traditional labour organization – alongside the emergence of a more assertive market ideology of neo-liberalism, replacing the idea of a Keynesian economic management of a mixed economy (e.g. Gamble, 1988, 2009). The focus of this chapter will be these occupations staged by workers in reaction and resistance to closures and redundancies; the impact on them of capital restructuring; and particularly the alternative they began to pose, in workers’ control and alternative plans, to the increasingly neo-liberal ideology of the restructuring. Instead of the intensified commodification and the increased subordination to the exigencies of the market, this alternative began to articulate an economy based around social utility.