In 1978, the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards’ Combine Committee produced its ‘alternative plan for socially useful production’. The Combine Committee was the organisation through which shop stewards of different plants of Lucas Aerospace came together to share information and coordinate campaigns for the transformation of production.
The 1970s was a period when UK-based engineering corporations – Lucas Aerospace, Vickers, British Leyland, Chrysler – were attempting to rationalise their sprawling assets with factory closures and ‘redundancies’. Self-confident shop stewards’ committees, increasingly organised on a company-wide basis and with considerable bargaining power – built up during the post-war boom – refused to accept that they and their members, mainly skilled engineers and creative designers, were ‘redundant’. To resist management plans, they not only took industrial action but also proposed alternatives, insisting that management should consider other ways to deploy their skills for public benefit.
Tony Benn, the Secretary of State for Industry in the 1974 Labour government, asked the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards what they thought about bringing the aerospace industry into public ownership. At first, the members of the Combine Committee were doubtful. The experience of previously nationalised industries, like coal and the railways, made them question whether public ownership would necessarily lead to secure employment. They responded instead by drawing up their own plan – in effect, their autonomous terms on which any form of state intervention in the company should take place.
Their plan was based on ideas put forward by union members across the company’s offices and factories and included around 150 medical, environmental, and transport products that these workers believed they could design and manufacture to save jobs – as alternatives to the military components that were the core business of Lucas Aerospace. The shop stewards intended that these proposals should be included in their collective bargaining with management. They hoped, moreover, that, following their discussions with Tony Benn, the Labour government would support their plan, make state funding for Lucas Aerospace Ltd conditional on negotiations on the plan, and shift contracts for military aerospace to contracts for medical and environmental equipment. The Lucas Aerospace shop stewards were, in the words of Karl Marx, demanding that collective bargaining go beyond ‘exchange-value’ (wages and working conditions) to use-value’ (the purpose and products of their labour).
The management declined to consider the alternative plan in labour negotiations. Lucas Aerospace CEO James Blyth, speaking to MPs who had been impressed by the plan and wanted to know why the company refused to engage with it, was obdurate: ‘We do not need the combine committee to tell us to diversify’, he said. The shop stewards had challenged managerial prerogatives. Plus, Tony Benn, contrary to the procedures of the civil service, had made direct contact with and met engineer and designer trade union representatives, on the frontline of production, rather than go through national trade union officials.
Management eventually succeeded in sacking Mike Cooley and Ernie Scarborough, two of the leading Combine members. The Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson moved Benn from the Department of Industry to become the Secretary of State for Energy, and the government finally sided with Lucas Aerospace management, though the union campaign did win a minor reduction in the number of redundancies.
Although the Combine Committee failed in its main objective, its efforts can be seen now as an early attempt at ‘transition bargaining’ or ‘bargaining for public benefit’. The development of the plan and the failure to be able to bargain over its implementation, contain important lessons for today’s challenge of moving to a low-carbon economy.
The final section of this essay asks how trade unions can turn limited industrial power (but advanced practical know-how) into an effective force for decarbonisation.
b) 2020–2024. Rolls Royce aerospace factories: shop stewards’ campaign to produce mechanisms for wind turbines to be in the company’s diversification plans
The decline in aerospace markets during and after the pandemic coincided with increased public awareness of the immediacy of the threat of climate change, in part stimulated by the strikes led by Greta Thunberg and the movement of school students whose futures are at stake. In this context, shop stewards understood themselves as citizens and parents as well as workers and when redundancies were announced at the Rolls Royce aerospace factories, they contacted the local Green New Deal campaign group associated with the Coventry Trades Council. They were eager to learn from the Lucas alternative plan to resist job losses with proposals for alternative, low-carbon, products.
Their company-wide union coordination was not as strong as the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards’ Combine Committee, but they too were confident in the usefulness of their skills and believed that they could and should shift their work from high-carbon aerospace to low-carbon alternatives. The Rolls Royce shop stewards insisted that ‘there is an alternative’ to redundancies, based on the usefulness of their skills to wider society.
As with Lucas Aerospace, management at Rolls Royce were resistant to what they consider to be their right to decide unilaterally on products and investment and the future of the company. But there is a contrast with the Lucas Aerospace experience: the movement for climate action has reached the point where the management realises that the brand’s reputation will be jeopardised if Rolls Royce is not at least seen to be reducing carbon emissions. This vulnerability has given the shop stewards an additional source of strength: the dependence of corporate profits on the reputation of the company brand. The unions were thus able to win a commitment from management, in a written Memorandum of Agreement, to explore products of benefit to the environment if existing employment opportunities came to an end.
Growing anger, most dramatically among young people at the failure of the elites to take action to reduce carbon emissions has also had an impact on workers’ own awareness of their responsibility to future generations, leading some to question their complicity in high-carbon production.