More life, less speed : industrial unrest at the Ford Motor Company in Britain and the politics of working-class autonomy in the long 1970s
Aside from contemporaneous material by activists, scant traces of the politics of working class autonomy appear in the historiography and wider literature on Ford in Britain. Focusing on the 1970s, this study reframes the firm's history in relation to these politics. Doing so highlights the role of workers' struggle at Ford, which was a key locus for more widespread unrest at a time of crisis and transition. As a work of twentieth century social and cultural history, it draws on a broad range of sources, including newly conducted oral history interviews and material from private papers not cited previously. In the USA, France and Italy, an international context linked the automobile sector to the emergence of autonomist politics, which were articulated in Britain from 1960 onwards by Solidarity, a group with links to Ford's workforce. Later that decade unrest at Ford became enmeshed with the ill-fated policies of a Labour government, leading up to the launch of the rank and file newspaper Big Flame. Influenced by Italian workerism, Big Flame became a national political organisation that intervened at Ford, where another strike confronted the subsequent Conservative administration's Industrial Relations Bill.
O'Cearnaigh, Eoin
More life, less speed : industrial unrest at the Ford Motor Company in Britain and the politics of working-class autonomy in the long 1970s. Aside from contemporaneous material by activists, scant traces of the politics of working class autonomy appear in the historiography and wider literature on Ford in Britain. Focusing on the 1970s, this study reframes the firm's history in relation to these politics. Doing so highlights the role of workers' struggle at Ford, which was a key locus for more widespread unrest at a time of crisis and transition. As a work of twentieth century social and cultural history, it draws on a broad range of sources, including newly conducted oral history interviews and material from private papers not cited previously. In the USA, France and Italy, an international context linked the automobile sector to the emergence of autonomist politics, which were articulated in Britain from 1960 onwards by Solidarity, a group with links to Ford's workforce. Later that decade unrest at Ford became enmeshed with the ill-fated policies of a Labour government, leading up to the launch of the rank and file newspaper Big Flame. Influenced by Italian workerism, Big Flame became a national political organisation that intervened at Ford, where another strike confronted the subsequent Conservative administration's Industrial Relations Bill.
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