Made in Sheffield: An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics 9781845459024

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES ON TEXT
INTRODUCTION
PART I ARTISANS
Chapter One MORRIS LTD
Chapter Two THE ‘RETURN’ OF THE INFORMAL ECONOMY IN ENDCLIFFE
Chapter Three WORKING-CLASS HOMES
Chapter Four WELCOME TO POLITICAL LIMBO
PART II PROLETARIANS
Chapter Five UNSOR LTD
Chapter Six ADIVIDED PROLETARIAT
Chapter Seven COMMUNITY UNIONISM, BUSINESS UNIONISM Two Strategies, the Same Phoenix
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

MADE IN SHEFFIELD

DISLOCATIONS General Editors: August Carbonella, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Don Kalb, Central European University & Utrecht University, Gerald Sider, The Graduate Center & The College of Staten Island, CUNY, Linda Green, University of Arizona The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neo-liberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and crossdisciplinary frameworks, which reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged, ethnographically informed, and theoretically incisive responses.

Volume 1 Where Have All the Homeless Gone? The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis Anthony Marcus Volume 2 Blood and Oranges: Immigrant Labor and European Markets in Rural Greece Christopher M. Lawrence Volume 3 Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People Edited by Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving Volume 4 Slipping Away: Banana Politics and Fair Trade in the Eastern Caribbean Mark Moberg Volume 5 Made in Sheffield: An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics Massimiliano Mollona Volume 6 Biopolitics, Militarism, and Development: Eritrea in the Twenty-First Century Edited by David O’Kane and Tricia Redeker Hapner

MADE IN SHEFFIELD An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics


Massimiliano Mollona

Berghahn Books Books Berghahn Providence NEW Y O R K • • OOxford X FOR D

00-prelims.qxd:00-prelims.qxd

3/4/09

11:55 AM

Page iv

Published in 2009 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2009 Massimiliano Mollona All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mollona, Massimiliano, 1969Made in Sheffield : an ethnography of industrial work and politics / Massimiliano Mollona. -- 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-551-4 (alk. paper) 1. Industries--England--Sheffield--History. 2. Working class--England-Sheffield--History. 3. Sheffield (England)--History. 4. Sheffield (England)--Politics and government. I. Title. HC258.S5 M65 2009 331.7009428'21--dc22 2008052538

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-1-84545-551-4 (hardback)

To Dad, ongoing source of inspiration

CONTENTS


List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Text

x xi xii

Introduction Anthropology of Labour Bourgeoisie and Proletarians History and Class Technological Fetishism Class and Kinship Notes on Fieldwork

1 1 3 5 9 12 13

Part I: Artisans 1. Morris Ltd The Factory as Socio-technical Space The Shop Floor The Market The Formal Organization Informal Organization A Short Social History of the Machines The Social Distribution of Knowledge in Morris Discussion about Value in the Break-room Political Economy Conclusion

19 20 21 24 25 29 31 33 37 40 43

2. The ‘Return’ of the Informal Economy in Endcliffe The Informal Economy Debate in Anthropology Informal Production Informal Exchanges Sex Market: the Elysium

45 49 51 54 55

viii

|

Contents

Khaled’s Conclusion

56 59

3. Working-class Homes Working-class Families and Poverty The ‘Post-kinship’ Turn Governmental Families and New Extended Households Conclusion

63 66 69 72 77

4. Welcome to Political Limbo Local History of Working-class Politics Folk Models of Class From Steel Town to Leisure Centre Cutlers versus Developers Fish, Fishermen and Steelworkers Reclaiming the Body: Sickness Benefit Conclusion

79 81 84 86 88 91 95 98

Part II: Proletarians 5. Unsor Ltd The Place The Production Process and Formal Organization A Normal Day at the Smelting Shop ‘Every Furnace is like a Good-looking Woman’ Stories of ‘Gods’ and ‘Donkeys’ during Break-times The Rolling Mill The Grinding Bay Health and Safety Politics in Bay 2 Farewell to Manual Labour Conclusion

105 106 106 110 112 113 115 117 120 121 123

6. A Divided Proletariat Charlie Moody: from Working-class to Nursing The Strange Disappearance of Charlie Moody Being Italian in Worksop: Antonio Masso Peperoni, Lampascioni and Vino Rosso: A Food Journey from the South of Italy to South Yorkshire Returning ‘Home’ Epilogue Conclusion

127 131 135 135 137 139 141 141

7. Community Unionism, Business Unionism – Two Strategies, the Same Phoenix Transmutations of Labour Representation The Phoenix Flies on the ISTC Divisional Office

143 149 150

Contents |

The ISTC in UNSOR Political Meeting at the ISTC or Community Unionism in Action The Same Phoenix, Different Trajectories Reorganization The AEU Factory Branch Business Unionism in Times of Reorganization Conclusion

ix

151 153 156 156 158 161 163

Conclusion Farewell to the Working Class? Labour and Alienation as Relational Values Relational Consciousness as the Basis for Class Struggle

167 167 169 175

Bibliography

179

Index

189

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


1.1 A view of Morris shopfloor 1.2 The production process 1.3 Bill on a Monday morning 1.4 Brian’s Ryder hammer 1.5 Grinding in Morris 1.6 Steve at the press hammer 5.1 Unsor Ltd organizational chart 5.2 Nominal and real wages in Unsor Ltd 5.3 Contractor at Unsor Ltd

22 26 31 33 36 37 108 109 117

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


I am grateful to all the colleagues and friends who supported me during the conception and the writing of this book, especially to my doctoral supervisors, John Harriss and Jonathan Parry, and my fellow Masters and Ph.D. students at the LSE. The Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths offered me a warm and vibrant environment which helped me to focus and refine my ideas. I developed the main themes of this book – alienation at work, working-class struggle and economic democracy – through a long conversation with my late father, Luigi, a financial accountant and member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). In various ways this conversation continued with my brother, Edoardo, my sister, Ludovica, and my mother, Angela, who have always been present even when far away. I have been lucky enough to have met Catherine, an inspiring woman and a wonderful wife and mother. I am also grateful to my daughters, Sofia and Rosa, who gave new life to old questions and relationships. Above all, my gratitude goes to the people of Sheffield for their friendship and help, especially to Silvia Harvey, Paul and Kate Skelton, Graham Goddard, Bill Moore, Steve Jinks, Tommy, Brian, Alan, Charlie and all my other workmates for their openness, generosity and solidarity.

NOTES ON TEXT


A modified version of Chapter 1 has previously appeared as ‘Gifts of labour. Steel production and technological imagination in an area of urban deprivation, Sheffield, UK’, Critique of Anthropology, 2005, 25(2): 177–198. A modified version of Chapter 2 has previously appeared as ‘Factory, family and neighbourhood. The political economy of informal labour in Sheffield, UK’, Journal of Royal Anthropological Society (JRAI), 2005 (N.S.) 11: 527–548. A modified version of Chapter 5 has previously appeared as ‘Organizational Control as Cultural Practice – A Shopfloor Ethnography of a Sheffield Mini-mill’, Accounting Organisation and Society (AOS), 2007, (32): 305–331 (co-written with Thomas Ahrens).

INTRODUCTION


Anthropology of Labour Made in Sheffield discusses the experience of labour of some steelworkers from Sheffield by combining anthropology and class analysis and through a critical engagement with sociology and economics. First, it bridges the sociological and the anthropological traditions ‘bringing back’ issues of production, labour value and class struggle from the oblivion of postmodern anthropological studies of consumption and identity politics. The book is partly inspired by the industrial ethnographies of the Chicago School of Anthropology and the Manchester School in Britain,1 vociferous critics of the Fordist regime of industrialization at home and in the colonies. Within the tradition of the Manchester School, particularly inspirational was the work of Tom Lupton (1963), whose discussion of a British electronics factory as a socio-technical artefact – where the fluid boundaries between humans and machines are drawn through the daily struggles between the workers and the capitalists – anticipated contemporary socio-technical studies of economic and scientific institutions.2 Partly, it is inspired by some Marxist sociological studies of manufacturing plants in Britain based on vivid and engaged ethnographies of shop floor labour and plant activism.3 Secondly, Made in Sheffield engages critically with current economic and management theories, unpacking the tensions between ‘economics’ as a set of abstract principles and ‘the economy’ as a field of material practices. On the one hand, it stresses the ‘performativity’ of the economy, that is, the impact of economic theories and managerial ideologies on peoples’ livelihood. For instance it shows that managerial notions of ‘accountability’ and ‘efficiency’ impact not only on the factory regime but also on forms of state redistribution and socio-economic regeneration. On the other hand, the book shows how economic practices ‘from below’ subvert and challenge the normalizing economic and managerial discourses of policymakers, managers, household patriarchs and local capitalists. But the fortunes of the two factories that I describe in this book

2

|

Made in Sheffield

show the painful consequences for labour of the existing gap between managerial ideologies and economic realities, with the modern, efficient, unionized and profitable middle-sized steel mini-mill closing down and the small, unionized, tax-dodging, exploitative and obsolete tool workshop remaining open and ‘profitable’. Made in Sheffield aims at reconstructing the tensions between ‘economics’ and ‘economy’, going beyond the notion of work and labour as mere technological processes and solitary, rational and competitive activities involving the transformation and valorization of objects. Following the anthropologist Mauss (1925), and in conflict with these partial representations of labour, it discusses factory work as a ‘total fact’, part of the broader labour of the selfvalorization and reproduction of society. Drawing on Marxian theory the book also recasts this tension between ‘economics’ and the ‘economy’ as a multi-layered, temporal and spatial conflict between capital and labour. Drawing on this tension between labour and capital I discuss production both as a field of material organization and as a force of labour commodification and in relation to broader processes of exchange and consumption. For consumption, I mean also child-care, education, leisure and community activities through which labour power is reproduced. Reelaborating studies on regimes of values and materiality in exchange and circulation,4 Made in Sheffield focuses on the transformations and permutations of labour in the different contexts of the factory, the family, the community and the state. In so doing, it discusses labour as a relational value emerging ‘in between’ the spaces of commodification and socialization.5 Thirdly, Made in Sheffield highlights the centrality of desires, hopes, fears and expectations in economic processes,6 looking at labour as an experiential category as well as an analytical one and as a dialectics between praxis and imagination.7 In fact, Made in Sheffield is, first and foremost, an ethnography of working-class consciousness, an exploration of the multi-faceted forms and artefacts through which the ideas, values and practical philosophies of waged and unwaged workers emerge. It does so historically by unveiling the tensions between praxis and potentiality, value and temporality and memory and consciousness and by casting long trajectories of working-class struggles. History complicates, enriches and ‘expands’ class analysis,8 showing the rich texture of everyday life from which ‘epochal’ shifts occur but also challenging the idea of Western capitalism as a monolithic entity endorsed with teleological inevitability and intentionality. Inspired by Marx’s potent ethnography of Victorian capitalism, Made in Sheffield is a study of factory labour in contemporary – de-industrialized, de-unionized, postKeynesian – Britain. It shows how the same struggles between ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletarians’ of the past take new forms and meanings in the present, and suggests that a critical awareness of the space in between the past and the present will lead to a better future.

Introduction |

3

Bourgeoisie and Proletarians In his piece ‘The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat’, Marx describes how the bourgeoisie creatively and powerfully make use of capital, machinery and labour organization to turn craftsmen, artisans, peasants, shopkeepers, tradesmen and small manufacturers into an ‘anonymous mass of labourers, crowded into the factory and organized like soldiers’ (1988: 251). Marx’s emphasis on the creative faculties of the bourgeoisie in revolutionizing production, social conditions, dominant paradigms and ‘prejudices and frozen social relation’ leaves little space for the creative faculties of the proletariat. Without property, family and nationality and reduced to a marginal category ‘the proletarian movement becomes the self-conscious independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority’ (ibid.: 254). Marx believed that the power of the bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the proletariat would be the cause of its annihilation. In pre-capitalist societies the oppressors had to ensure the reproduction of the conditions of existence of the oppressed in order to survive; capitalists, on the other hand, openly coerced and starved the oppressed classes. The lord offered patronage to his serfs and the king to his slaves; under capitalism, however, the bourgeoisie extracts the labour of the proletariat without having to provide for their subsistence. By forcing the proletariat into poverty and starvation the bourgeoisie produce, above all, ‘its grave-diggers’ (ibid.: 255). Marx was describing the early stage of ‘despotic capitalism’,9 when owners coerced the workers into production through direct supervision, punishment and low wages. But, with mass-production, industrial capitalists dismantled their costly apparatuses of coercion and co-opted the industrial masses into production by bettering their working conditions. Under ‘hegemonic capitalism’ the state reduced the workers’ dependence on the sale of their labour power through welfare policies that guaranteed a minimum level of living independent of the workers’ participation in production and through industrial relations policies that recognized basic workers’ rights. Unlike despotic capitalism, that coerced the workers into production, hegemonic capitalism exploited labour ‘indirectly’ by increasing the workers’ motivation to produce. An instance of a hegemonic workplace is ‘Allied’, a small machine shop in Chicago, studied by Burawoy (1979a). Discussing the lack of any analysis of the subjective content of class in Marxist labour studies, such as in Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capitalism (1974), Burawoy showed that in Allied capital exploited the workers’ subjectivity to its own ends. In Allied the workers’ productivity was positively related to them developing an informal culture consisting of jokes, shortcuts, mutual alliances and competitions and revolving around the individual maximization of the bonus system. Thus, the capitalists increased their profit through consent rather than coercion and by facilitating a ‘shop floor culture’ based on the values of individualism, competition and profitability. Burawoy suggested that under hegemonic

4

|

Made in Sheffield

capitalism the workers manufacture their own consent to their exploitation by reproducing the capitalist rules of production and social relations. Burawoy’s analysis was inspired by Gramsci’s discussion of the centrality of labour subjectivity in industrial capitalism and by the relationship he posited between labour organizations and labour consciousness.10 For Gramsci ‘hegemonic institutions’, such as factories, schools, churches, families, trade unions, political parties and voluntary associations, created homogenous worldviews among the industrial working classes and neutralized the social discontent produced by class antagonism. For Burawoy, the factory was one such hegemonic institution for the reproduction of working-class subjects. A similar Gramscian analysis of factory production was conducted by Italian Operaist (‘workerist’) Mario Tronti in his work ‘Operai e Capitale’ (1966). Tronti looked at the workers’ subjectivity and at class struggle as active components of capitalist development. He suggested that the proletariat was the ‘living part of capital’ and that, paradoxically, class antagonism and labour struggle forced capital into continuous innovations, transformations and changes in its hegemonic forms. At the apex of capitalist development and of the expansion of relative surplus value, the sphere of labour production and the sphere of bourgeois consumption blur, the whole of society becomes a factory and the factory becomes invisible. When the whole of life is turned into a moment of production, the workers can defeat the bourgeoisie by looking at themselves, recognising their dual nature and refusing to work. Like the early Gramsci, Tronti emphasized the dual nature of capitalist relations and the importance of the workers’ self-critique – critique of themselves as bourgeois subjects – to subvert capitalist organizations. Like Tronti, Negri located Marx’s analysis of labour value in the Grundrisse in the context of flexible production and immaterial labour. He suggested that with the ‘flexibilization’ and externalization of industrial production, the privatization of the welfare state and the rise of the service and ‘affective’ economies, the walls separating the factory from society collapsed and capitalist relations permeated the whole of society. Unlike the mass workers of industrial capitalism, the workers of late capitalism are ‘socialized’, that is, subjected to value through the entire span of production and reproduction. Today, immaterial capitalism and the bio-political state function mainly through the reproduction of capitalist subjects and, hence, the workers’ subjectivity is potentially revolutionary. In fact, class struggle is inevitably linked to labour’s critique of itself as modern capitalist subject. Combining this Gramscian tradition and the tradition of the anthropology of labour I discuss the cultural forms taken by class relations by looking at hegemonic institutions – the family, the pub, friendship, political associations and spaces of leisure and consumption – through which proletarian subjects are produced. Using an anthropological framework, I show that the process of polarization and struggle between bourgeoisie and proletarians emerges in contradictory, temporal

Introduction |

5

and mediated cultural forms. Wage-earners are located differently in the production process and have different degrees of control over it. Classified as ‘skilled’ or ‘unskilled’, split between capital-intensive and labour-intensive tasks, separated by machines and artefacts, wageworkers have often conflicting views of the labour process. Secondly, class relations take place in a cumulative and non-linear time, with present capitalist relations incorporating and reproducing pre-capitalist ones and open to the ‘double movement’ of commodification and decommodification.11 Finally, class relations are mediated through other forms of social relations, especially through kinship, which makes inequalities appear both familiar and natural. Below, I briefly discuss these three dimensions of class relations: history, technology and kinship.

History and Class Marx predicted that the classes of artisans, peasants and small manufacturers would ‘decay and disappear in the face of Modern Industry’ and turn into ‘the proletariat’, the only revolutionary class. But in Sheffield artisans and petty capitalists were not proletarianized. First, in the nineteenth century a highly sophisticated petty capitalism and cottage industry in the metal trade developed from the cutlery industry which delayed the development of the factory system. Cutlers lived in small cottages by the river, renting from the local aristocracy the water power for the grinding wheels. The cutlery industry relied on simple technology (the grinding belt attached to the wheel), a little capital and extended, contiguous and interdependent domestic networks. Controlling the rural and industrial labour of apprentices and kin, the artisans were a peculiar mixture of farmers, workers and patriarchal capitalists. Well into the 1850s in Sheffield there were only a few ‘masters’ either organizing domestic out-workers or concentrating journeymen in factories. The invention of the Bessemer converter in 1854, a small furnace that replaced the crucible pot in steel melting, led to labour intensification and economies of scale for the production of large quantities of steel to be used for railways, ships, bridges and other heavy engineering works. Nonetheless technological improvement did not turn the cottage industry into the factory system because steel mainly circulated in dispersed and localized markets. In the rural districts cutlers still produced scythes, grass hooks, hay knives and other agricultural edge tools for selfconsumption. Unlike them, the urban artisans of Endcliffe produced pocket knives, watches, fine cutlery, razors, carvers and umbrella frames for the emerging urban bourgeoisie. Second, the progressive alienation of peasants from the fields and their increasing urbanization and dependence on industrial wages, described by Pollard in A History of Labour in Sheffield (1959), was hampered by the interdependency between farming and steel-making. Many metal companies alternated industrial

6

|

Made in Sheffield

production and agricultural labour and wage-workers covered their subsistence needs through small-scale farming and urban allotments or with circular migration.12 Third, the aristocracy had dominated the metal trade since the creation of the Company of Cutlers of Hallamshire in 1624 and controlled urban and industrial rents and the steel and food markets well into the twentieth century. Its official body, the Master Cutlers, set the prices of land, metal and apprenticed labour, the production calendar, the ethical rules of trade and the sliding scale of wage-workers during early industrialization.13 In fact, in Sheffield the mechanization and standardization of labour in the mining and metal sectors were achieved under aristocratic management, rather than through industrial capitalism. For instance, the Earl of Fitzwilliam had put in place a fully integrated mill, including a giant wooden hammer for the forging of structural steel and expanded workers’ compounds, already in the eighteenth century. Between 1851 and 1891, industrial capitalists set up integrated steelworks in Encfliffe employing thousands of workers, but they still paid their rents to the Duke of Norfolk and lacked global distribution networks due to the Duke’s opposition to the construction of the railway system.14 Finally, Sheffield industrialists lacked the entrepreneurial spirit of ‘modern’ capitalism. Often of Wesleyan and lower-middle-class background, they saw the factory as a space of workers’ education, hard work and craft labour and rejected the scientific and speculative approach of the American and German industrialists. They did not seek alliances with the financiers and bankers, thus leaving their firms heavily undercapitalized, and did not entirely subscribe to the American principles of scientific management.15 In spite of the fact that by 1860 Sheffield steelmakers dominated the world market for railroads, armour and guns, they extensively relied on the crucible process – side by side with the Bessemer converter16 – and employed a variety of skilled artisans, such as cutlers, forgers, blacksmiths and tool-makers. They subsumed the unskilled steel labourers working at the Bessemer converter through the wage-relation but they established ‘market’ relations with artisans and skilled labourers. These people controlled the labour process, supervised, trained and employed kin and apprentices, and owned the main factors of production, such as hammers, cutters and crucibles. Some of these artisans worked outside the factory during working hours and participated in informal networks in the neighbourhood. Thus, if the modern factory forced proletarians into unskilled labour and wage dependency, it also increased the artisans’ entrepreneurship and the value of their craft labour. In 1870, when Sheffield’s lead in the world steel market had already ended, the steel industry combined ‘putting-out’17 and massproduction, wage and craft labour and the production of agricultural tools with state-of-the-art engineering work sold at international exhibitions. At the turn of the nineteenth century, America and Germany had become modern industrial nations under the lead of their cosmopolitan industrial bourgeoisies, whereas Sheffield was on the periphery of

Introduction |

7

the British financial empire. Its capitalist spirit was still embedded in the structures of Hanoverian society and its industrial bourgeoisie subordinated to financial speculators, entrepreneurial lords and petty capitalists. A ‘modern’ proletariat in the steel industry only emerged with the arms race between Germany and Britain in 1900s. The Great War created a huge market for the production of bulk steel for armour, guns, tanks and structural and engineering steel. This was necessary to support the grand scale of demographic movements, administrative consolidation and urban expansion linked to the emergence of the British nation. The Great War enforced discipline on the shop floor on an unprecedented scale. Government inspectors acted as overseers; rules of secrecy exposed the workers to the discipline of the military court and restricted their mobility; production schedules were set by the Ministry of Production; orders made through the War Office; and trade union activities monitored by the Labour Office. Thus, it was ‘geopolitics’ rather than ‘productivity’ that convinced the Sheffield steel-makers to adopt – nearly twenty years after their invention – the scientific principles of labour organization and to deskill and standardize craft work. Previously seen as ‘the aristocracy of labour’, the artisans of Endcliffe were made redundant and became ‘the reserve army’ of the proletariat. Nonetheless, their local economic networks and small-scale capitalism insulated them from the mass unemployment that afflicted on average a third of the industrial proletariat of Sheffield between the 1920s and the Second World War. In the post-War years, following Churchill’s suggestion that ‘the Great War was a Steel War’, the steelworkers became even more central to the national imagination. Under welfare capitalism the nation provided for them during unemployment,18 sickness and retirement; dispensed them with generous salaries, pensions, and working conditions; and secured their jobs through internal labour markets, seniority systems and ‘peaceful’ industrial relations. Welfare capitalism relied on Keynes’ idea that the state was the motor and regulator of the economy. Indeed, massive amounts of steel, melted and rolled in Sheffield, went into the frames and structures of council homes, high-density tower blocks, highways, ring roads, cinemas and shopping centres that transformed Sheffield’s half-bombed Victorian architecture. At the household level, the production of special steel was driven by the spread of mass-consumption of vacuum cleaners, aluminum sinks, freezers, electrical irons, televisions, caravans, cars and motorbikes. When the steel industry was nationalized in 1967, the British Steel Corporation (BSC) merged fourteen major companies and their 200 subsidiaries and became the second largest steel company in the nonCommunist world with a total capital of £1,400 million and a labour force of 270,000. The nationalization included only companies producing more than 475,000 tons of crude steel a year and left out smaller companies and the engineering sector. As a result, nationalization split the 60,000

8

|

Made in Sheffield

steelworkers employed in Endcliffe between ‘public’ steelworks and private machine shops facing each other along the Endcliffe Road. Under the regime of welfare capitalism, the ‘proletarians’ of the publicly-owned steelworks became the aristocracy of labour while the workers of smaller firms and the engineering sector were left to the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Expelled from the public spaces of the steel industry the artisans went to increase the pool of informal labourers and subcontractors for the private sector. Between the 1970s and the 1980s the BSC lost £2,846 million and its workforce declined from 252,000 to 166,400. After a long history of mergers, plant closures, strikes and redundancies a series of joint ventures between the BSC and the private sector were set in place, symbolically named ‘Phoenix’. Orchestrated by Mr. McGregor, the BSC’s new chairman, and the conservative Prime Minister Lady Thatcher, the ‘Phoenixes’ led to more than 52,000 job cuts, a reduction of 1 million tons of capacity per annum, fiscal deregulation, pay decentralization and the curbing of trade unions. With the privatization of the steel industry and mass redundancies, the grand narratives of ‘mass-production’, ‘class solidarity’ and ‘social partnership’ collapsed giving way to a new emphasis on ‘flexible production’. On the shop floor flexible production materialized as longer working hours, precarious, intensive and nonunionized labour and technological obsolescence. Outside the shop floor it became visible in the fragmentation and localization of the state into development corporations, regional and local authorities, private–public partnerships, job centres, advice bureaus, and other social and voluntary organizations. Today, after the collapse of the ‘myth’ of the national steel industry, ex-proletarians are employed as ‘journeymen’ and casual workers in the tool workshops, small firms and informal and illegal enterprises located in the ancient cutlery district of Endcliffe. The artisans expelled from the steel industry during nationalization used their redundancy money to set up these small businesses and workshops. Thriving from the current labour and capital deregulation, they are the main subcontractors of the privatized steel corporations. The history of labour in Sheffield shows that the ‘modern proletariat’ – the grand ‘subject’ of modernist historiography – emerged historically as a collation of heterogeneous class relations and was the product of a short-lived nationalist imagination. Industrial capitalists did not create a homogenous working class, they benefited instead from the workers’ fragmentation into ‘artisan’ and ‘proletarian’, ‘public’ and ‘private’ and ‘steel’ and ‘engineering’ labour. Challenging the myth of the historical ‘making of the working class’ is important in order to challenge the myth of its dissolution today. Under the current regime of flexible accumulation, the working class and the steel industry have not disappeared. They have acquired hybrid organizational forms and social relations which mix cottage industry and private-equity capitalism, small tool

Introduction |

9

workshops and integrated steelworks, and casual labour and the wagerelation. Looked at in historical perspective working-class consciousness did not follow a linear trajectory of progressive alienation and objectification of the proletariat, but underwent a circular involution leading to the paradoxical return of indentured labour, patriarchal capitalism and the cottage industry in the age of postmodernity. Mandel suggests that the processes of primitive and capitalist accumulation are not ‘merely successive phases of economic development but also concurrent economic processes’ (1975: 45). In a similar way, I argue that ‘proletarian’ and ‘artisans’ are two concurrent forms of class relations which reflect the uneven form of capitalist development. The dual structure of the book aims at reflecting this contradictory class dialectics. Part One is entitled ‘Artisans’ and discusses the experience of labour, family and politics of the workers of a small machine shop in Endcliffe, the ancient cutlery and working-class district of Sheffield. These workers mostly come from families of forgers, toolmakers and blacksmiths who have lived in Endcliffe for at least three generations and see themselves as ‘cutlers’, ‘craftsmen’ and ‘artisans’. Part Two is entitled ‘Proletarians’ and discusses the experience of work, family, and politics of some workers at a steel factory in Bexley Park. These workers have family histories of unskilled labour, residential mobility and unemployment and see themselves as ‘proletarians’ relying entirely on the sale of their precarious labour for survival. ‘Technology’ is central in the way these workers draw distinctions among themselves and experience their class position.

Technological Fetishism In the small tool workshop that I describe in Chapter One the workers use nineteenth-century hammers and forging, grinding and turning machines, whereas in the steel factory discussed in Chapter Four the labour process is integrated and highly mechanized. On both shop floors the workers draw distinctions among themselves through the technological system. The major distinction they draw through the technological system is the one between the ‘hot’ (steel-making) and the ‘cold’ (steel-finishing) phases of the labour process. In both the machine shop and the mini-mill the capital-intensive operations of making and forging steel are considered highly skilled tasks, whereas the labourintensive finishing phases are considered unskilled, in spite of the fact that steel-finishing might entail greater skills than steel-making. The workers at the hot phases of the production process think of themselves as skilled artisans, cutlers, blacksmiths; whereas the workers at the cold phases of the production process think about themselves as proletarians and unskilled labourers. Thus, their experience of class and labour is mediated by their relationships with the technological system. The more

10 |

Made in Sheffield

they work in proximity to machines (the economists’ capital) the more they seem to value their labour. Machines have an ambiguous role in class relations. As capitalist ‘assets’ they symbolize the conflict between capital and labour, but as aid to the workers’ labour and extensions of their bodies, they obfuscate this conflict. Machines are symbolic operators between the realm of capital and the realm of labour. In fact, from the perspective of manual workers, machines mark their skills and their class position, preserve and valorize their labour and provide them with physical and immaterial extensions, connections and relations. Thus, machines can be described as ‘fetishes’ – living and powerful entities which appear to give value to the workers’ labour – and ‘political technologies’ which obscure and depoliticize class relations. The study of fetishism is generally associated with the anthropology of religion. According to Pietz (1985) fetizos were religious objects endorsed with magical power collected by fifteenth-century Portuguese travellers to West Africa. Anthropologists Tylor and Haddon described fetishism as the primitive’s belief in the work of inanimate forces within inanimate objects. The sociologist Comte saw fetishism as a stage of religious thought which attributed human faculties to non-human subjects, similar to animism. Marx used the term fetishism to describe the ‘illusory’ experience of labour under capitalism. The Capital is a fascinating reconstruction of the ‘fetishes’, that is the false representations of reality, that animate the capitalist labour process. For instance, wages are the product of unequal social relations but the workers see them as a means of personal emancipation; commodities emerge from the capitalist division of labour but the workers see them as tokens of labour value; and machines are tools of labour fragmentation but the workers see them as extensions of their labour power. The Capital is a labour ethnography which critically engages with the capitalist cosmologies and with the objects – money, wages, machines, standards, and products – which animate the capitalist labour process and which have the magic power of producing capitalist subjects. Marxist anthropology also discussed the role of fetishes in obscuring and reproducing relationships of exploitation. For instance, Bloch (1989) showed the link between the belief of the Merina of Madagascar in the productive power of ancestral substance and the capitalist belief in the productivity of money or capital and Taussig (1977) discussed the fetishism of the casual labourers in the sugarcane plantations of the Cauca Valley in Colombia who attributed the power of productivity to small muñecas (dolls) disseminated in the fields. In focusing on the role of cultural or super-structural artefacts in ‘misrepresenting’ and obscuring relations of production Marxist anthropology rarely considered ‘technology’ as one of these artefacts.19 Only recently social constructionist studies of technologies have appeared. For instance, in assessing the impact of the ‘Green revolution’ in Bali in the 1950s, Lansing (1991) showed that the Balinese system of water irrigation was efficient and at the same time performed several

Introduction |

11

‘non-economic’ functions, including reinforcing the invisible power of the king, reproducing the cosmology of the holy water and facilitating regional political integration. The ‘temple water-system’ reproduced the political hierarchy through the active participation of the local community in the libation and offering of holy water and the negotiation of productive and distribution rights. Lansing concluded that irrigation technologies are complex socio-technical artefacts with wide political, economic and religious implications. Pfaffemberger (1987) also criticized the ‘Western fetishistic view’ of technological development. The failure of the Mahaweli irrigation development project in Sri Lanka was the consequence of the developers’ lack of understanding of the technology of water management as a ‘total social fact’ – made up of technical, economic, symbolic and political aspects – and of the control by local elites over these non-technological components. Elsewhere, he discussed machines as ‘public enactments’, ‘political statements’ and ‘ritual dramas’ used by political elites to build labour coordination through nonlinguistic and bodily knowledge (1992). Similarly, technology historian Misa (1995) challenged the view of mass-production as historical necessity, typically held by economists like Alfred Chandler (1990), and linked mass-production in the steel industry in America to the modern urban ‘visions’ of architects, entrepreneurs, planners and designers of intercontinental railroads, skyscrapers, bridges, cars and roads and to the new patterns of work and leisure of the urban bourgeoisie at the turn of the nineteenth century. Technological fetishism is not a feature of Western societies, but it is historically linked to the emergence of the science of political economy during early capitalism. For instance, David Ricardo in the Principles (1817) predicted the disappearance of human labour due to the expansion of fixed capital and machinery. Economist John Barton believed that labourers were destined to be substituted by an entrepreneurial middle class able to operate with expanded machinery and to speculate on fixed capital. Utopian entrepreneur Robert Owen regarded ‘machines’ and ‘labour’ as two conflicting forces and saw mechanization as exploitative and morally degrading for the workers. Political economist McCulloch criticized the assumption of the antagonistic relations between capital and labour and claimed that technology increased productivity by increasing the workers’ skills and ‘faculties’,20 rather than wages and capital. John Stuart Mill in the Principles of Political Economy (1848) related civilization and progress to the rate of capital accumulation and technological development. He contrasted European ‘civil societies’ to ‘savages societies’ – such as those of the natives of Paraguay, the North American Indians, the Hindus and the Chinese – characterized by a low rate of capital accumulation and technological development. Mills saw progress as linked to capital accumulation and, hence, considered inequality as a central feature of civilization and equality as a symptom of backwardness.

12 |

Made in Sheffield

Thus, early political economists, both from radical and conservative backgrounds, put the machines at the centre of the ‘workers’ question’ and held them responsible for class formations, proletarian fragmentation, the emergence of the middle classes and the development of civil society. Discussed in popular magazines, mechanics journals, encyclopedias, theatre, workers’ educational associations and mechanics institutes, machines became autonomous entities with a power of their own in the popular imagination. This centrality of the machines in the workers’ question depoliticized political economy and legitimized capitalist exploitation, mechanization and colonialist expansions. Given the role of technology in depoliticizing the economy and fragmenting the labour force, the anthropology of technology is a central tool for class analysis and for an anthropological critique of capitalist relations. My ethnography shows that technological fetishism is a central mechanism of reproduction of capitalist class relations. For instance, in Chapter Seven I show that the politics of the workers of United Steel Organization (UNSOR), and of the trade union which represents them, was informed by their perceived conflict between machines and labour and by their view of de-industrialization as the inevitable consequence of the displacement of humans by machines due to technological progress.

Class and Kinship Kinship is the third dimension through which class is experienced. Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) highlights the link between production and reproduction and between capitalism and the bourgeois ideology of the nuclear family. Today, the space of the factory and the space of the family are connected in two ways. First, the low level of industrial wages makes domestic labour necessary for working-class families to survive. Proletarian families combine minimum wages and female domestic labour, including service work and outwork. The families of artisans and casual workers, whose wages are below the legal minimum, live off heterogeneous pools of income including those derived from children’s and women’s work, the drug trade, prostitution and casual labour. Secondly, on an ideological level, the bourgeois ideology of the family reproduces the capitalist work ethic. The more estranged and alienated the workers feel in the factory, the more personal and intimate they see relationships in the family. The more involved they are in family relations, the less they build meaningful working relations and the more estranged they are in the workplace. James Carrier suggested that the workers’ experiences of a divided self – one linked to the impersonal realm of work and the other to the personal realm of the family – is a symptom of alienation in industrial capitalism (1992). The nuclear families of the proletarians living on the periphery of Sheffield, which I describe in Chapter Six, are alienated from the realm of work in

Introduction |

13

many ways. They live far away from their workplaces, have no social connection in the neighbourhood, and they construct a domestic identity through shopping and conspicuous consumption to counter their experience of fragmentation in the realm of production. Unlike them, the extended artisan families that I describe in Chapter Three conceive of the realm of work as an extension of the realm of the family. On the one hand, the dissolution of the welfare state externalized onto them the costs of welfare and reproduction and turned them into working groups based on intensive female labour and male patriarchy. On the other hand, flexible production and subcontracting redistributed income towards them, revitalizing their informal networks, their family-run businesses and their domestic economies. Class relations are experienced as personal connections and ruptures between people, objects and the environment and through constructed boundaries between the ‘private’ and ‘ the public’, ‘the intimate’ and ‘the impersonal’, and ‘work’ and ‘leisure’. Kinship is a central dimension through which these boundaries and connections are made. This is especially true in the current age of ‘socialized capitalism’, when businesses are run like families and families are exposed to factorylike social relations and regulations.

Notes on Fieldwork It took me six months to access the two workplaces where I conducted fieldwork. After many failed attempts to gain formal access to the plants, I decided to search for a job in Endcliffe, an ex-working-class area renowned for being an ‘area of urban deprivation’ and for its high criminality and unemployment. It seemed to me that these off-limits areas were precisely the kind of places where jobless people in desperate need of work would find employment. After I had bought a second-hand fishing rod I started to fish along the river Don and made a few friends in Endcliffe. During a fishing expedition one of them told me that at a local firm they were looking for a temporary worker. The following day I walked through the big blue doors of ‘Morris Ltd’ and asked Brian, one of the workers, for a job. For a few days I replaced ‘big Dave’ at the ‘bar chopping’ machine. ‘Big Dave’ often got drunk and was absent from work for several days, until he recovered. During my eighteenth months spent in Morris Ltd I worked eight hours per day, two days a week, following the career path of a young apprentice. In Endcliffe apprentices work for free for as long as it takes for them to learn to work on different machines and for a minimum of six months. I swept the floor, cleaned the toilets, chopped the steel and learnt to forge, hammer, twist, turn and grind. Slowly I was incorporated into the firm’s informal culture, made up of jokes, hierarchies, conflicts and rules of production and into the informal economy of the neighbour. On the day I left Morris Ltd, the workers banged their hammers, tools, and bits which they were using on their

14 |

Made in Sheffield

machines, producing a deafening noise on the shop floor. It was their way of wishing me luck, without delaying the normal flow of production. An Endcliffe ‘lad’ put me in touch with Mr Bates, the divisional officer of the Iron and Steel Trade Confederation (ISTC, now Community), who introduced me to the management of UNSOR. In the job interview the owners explained to me that UNSOR had been recently restructured and that some workers were resisting organizational change. They hoped that, with my background in organizational behaviour, I could convince ‘the guys’ to work ‘flexibly and in teams’. During the interview, I ‘talked economics’ with the two owners while the managers maintained a tense and unwelcoming silence. Two days after the interview, I did a training course in Health and Safety and I was given a blue overall and a brand new pair of protective boots. The following day I was taken to my desk located on Bay 2 of the shop floor of the cold department, where most of the workers opposed reorganization. After a few days I started to work on day shifts in the rolling mill and on night shifts in the smelting shop for an average of three days a week, under the supervision of the informal leaders of these departments. I then moved to work full time in the smelting shop as second-hand smelter. The managers soon realized that I was a ‘trouble-maker’ because I spent most of my time in the ‘restricted areas’ of the company talking with ‘the wrong people’ or working on dangerous machines. Nevertheless, they let me stay because I had signed a contract that released them from liability in case of industrial accident and because, since I had stepped into the shop floor, the workers had been more productive and compliant with the management. I left the shop floor one year later when the firm went into receivership. With the workers of UNSOR I attended political demonstrations, trade union meetings, and I had animated political discussions; with the workers of Morris Ltd I shared drinks, jokes and fishing expeditions. In fact, after a while I became a regular customer at the pub Khaled’s and at the Endcliffe Liberal Club, where I met my workmates on the weekends. Seven months into fieldwork I celebrated my official membership of the Endcliffe Liberal Club – deliberated after a half-hour long meeting of the Committee – with a colossal ‘piss-up’ at Khaled’s with workmates Teddy and Brian. I also became a member of the ‘workers’’ snooker team and a ‘proper’ working-class angler. For most of my fieldwork I lived a few minutes away from Morris Ltd. In the last few months of fieldwork I moved to Milly’s ‘Black Sparrow’, a three storey boarded-up pub in Endcliffe which offered B&B accommodation to migrant labourers, pimps, drug dealers and the unemployed. The place was dirty but the atmosphere friendly as most of the tenants were also ‘Cliff lads’. The workers supported my research for different reasons. Some considered me an apprentice whom they could pass their precious knowledge on to; some shared my political views; others liked to share with me their long pauses in the break-room, their canned food and lewd jokes. Generally, they liked the fact that I worked with them despite being

Introduction |

15

‘an intellectual’. Sometimes, it seemed that my research might have a real impact on their lives, through the contacts I had developed with sympathetic MPs, activists, academics and foreign businessmen. When UNSOR went into receivership I forced local MPs and trade union regional officers to meet the owners and discuss the future of the firm and pressed a local newspaper to write against the firms’ closure. During the fieldwork, I organized small workshops between academics and workers, lobbied MPs and ministers, helped organizing a discussion about a workers’ buy-out and fostered a joint venture between an Italian firm and a Sheffield engineering company which was threatened with closure. But my attempts at changing the course of the workers’ lives were mostly unsuccessful and they were much more relevant to my work and politics than I was for theirs. The making of the film Steel Lives provided me with the opportunity to fill this gap. Before starting the film I discussed with them my motivations, the film’s narrative and its intended audience. I used the film process as a way to reflect collectively on their labour and on alternative forms of labour representation. During the making of the film, I watched some of the raw footage with them and involved them in the editing process. Most of the workers were very engaged when they discussed their labour through images, so that our editing sessions became proper political meetings. Steel Lives was screened at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival in September 2000. Most of my main informants were present at the screening and enjoyed the film and the prolonged applause which the public directed at them at the end of the session.

Notes 1. Including Harvard, Cornell and Stanford University, but especially Roy (1952) and Burawoy (1979a) from the Chicago School of Anthropology. For a comprehensive review of shopfloor ethnographies see Burawoy (1979b). 2. Latour (1984) and Knorr-Cetina (1999). 3. Beynon (1973), Linhard (1985) and Westwood (1984). 4. Appadurai (1986), Thomas (1991), Maurer (2005) and Zelizer (1997). 5. Adopting a long-term historical frame, Polanyi describes the ‘double movements’ of capitalism, oscillating between the commodification of human labour and ‘the protection of society’ (1944: 130). Gudeman (2008) has recently discussed this as a tension between ‘the community’ and ‘the market’. 6. Guyer (2007) and Miyazaki (2007); Lee and Li Puma (2002). 7. Karatani (2003). 8. Here I am referring to Kalb’s (1997) notion of ‘expanded class analysis’ as non-deterministic and non-teleological historical approach to class relations. 9. The distinction between hegemonic and despotic capitalism is made by Burawoy (1979b). 10. Gramsci (1976).

16 |

Made in Sheffield

11. See also De Angelis (2007). 12. Seebohm Rowntree’s study of budgets in 1901 shows that gardens and allotments provided a quarter of the food consumed by families. 13. The sliding scale linked the wage for each trade to the market price of their products. 14. From this point of view, Sheffield’s industrial development strongly differed from the industrial development of Manchester and Liverpool, where the expansion of the railway between 1850 and 1890 fostered a’ second industrial revolution’ (Hobsbawm 1968: 87–100). 15. Frederick Taylor’s ‘Essay on the Piece-rate System’ (1895) in which he documented his experiments of ‘scientific labour organization’ on the tool workers of the ‘Bethlehem and Co’ was well-known among Sheffield industrialists. 16. In 1860 the firm ‘Jessop’ had 120 crucible holes, ‘Sanderson Bros’ 110 and ‘Firth’ 90 (Tweedale 1995: 51). 17. The putting-out system relies on domestic production co-ordinated by a merchant capitalist. 18. Burawoy (1985). 19. Friedman famously discussed the relations between fetishism and capitalism (1974). 20. Barton (1835) and McCulloch (1830) quoted in Berg (1980).

PART I

ARTISANS

Chapter One

MORRIS LTD


United we fall. Graffiti on a Ryder Hammer machine

Morris Ltd is a firm that produces tools with a small and non-unionised workforce and nineteenth-century machines. Always on the verge of bankruptcy, especially in the Christmas period, Morris has survived shutdowns, short-times, redundancies, receiverships, reorganizations, global mergers, flooding and the deaths of its more experienced workers. One day, one of the workers, aggravated by the prospect of another Christmas shutdown, exclaimed: ‘This place is not economical. It’s magical.’ The fact that the workers made a living using nineteenthcentury machines on a derelict Victorian shop floor made Morris Ltd magical indeed. It is easy to understand why Morris Ltd is ‘economical’ for Mr Greed,1 the owner of the firm, who evades taxes through Cole International Steel Company (CISCO), a small ghost firm that was built during my fieldwork on the Morris Ltd shop floor under the worried glances of the workers. By fragmenting the workforce into two legally distinguished firms, the owner benefits from legal advantages accorded to small firms. In fact, firms with less than twenty employees are not compelled to compile balance sheets, and are granted tax relief and reduced obligations in terms of employees’ welfare. By shifting income and workforce between the two shop floors he is able to under-declare the profits of CISCO and to keep Morris Ltd at the break-even point, that is, on the verge of bankruptcy. In fact, in Morris Ltd the costs are inflated by the costs of production of tools for CISCO. Morris Ltd’s insolvency also allows the owner to benefit from exoneration from the minimum wage legislation granted to firms facing financial hardship. Thus, CISCO is an empty box producing profits and Morris Ltd is a collection of secondhand machines and obsolete workers producing losses, the profits of the former originating from the loss of the latter and from the lack of legal status of its workers. What is more difficult to understand is in what sense the place is economical for the workers. In fact, the ‘magic’ of capitalist

20 |

Made in Sheffield

production consists in the workers’ belief that Morris Ltd is an economic place, in spite of the fact that it is constantly at a loss and that they provide for their own social protection, managerial supervision and salary. The emergence of Victorian sweatshops like Morris Ltd reflects the current regime of ‘despotic capitalism’ based on extensive subcontracting, labour and fiscal deregulation and the abolition of basic welfare and union rights. Casual labour and fiscal and welfare deregulation offer new opportunities for petty capitalists to set up small and informal businesses. The dismissal of basic union and welfare rights increases the dependence of the industrial workers on this informal, non-unionized and gruelling work to survive. This contemporary despotic capitalism, like the capitalism of the early nineteenth century, relies on artisan workshops and sweated domestic work subcontracted by large firms. But in early capitalism the workers were dependent on the employers and ruthlessly coerced into production, whereas today the workers of Morris Ltd are co-opted into production through an articulation of coercion and consent. Morris Ltd is a small subcontractor operating in a seasonal and volatile sector, with low profit margins, obsolete machines, reduced stock and low capital and is under constant threat of failure. In their constant fear and anxiety about the future of the firm, the workers consider the job of the capitalists as precarious as their own and see the capitalists as powerless as them visà-vis ‘the forces of global production’. The combination of this internalized fear and precarious labour, leads them to perform the managerial (supervision, recruitment, apprenticeship, marketing) and welfare (pensions, basic income, insurance) functions of capitalists and the state.

The Factory as Socio-technical Space Theories about firms normally take two approaches. Neo-classical theories, including some Marxist ones, see firms as functions or production, that is, as units of transformation of inputs – labour, capital and raw materials – into valuable outputs. These theories look at technology and the labour process as the main sources of economic value through their transformation of input into outputs.2 The Weberian or ‘bureaucratic’ tradition looks at firms as systems of norms and routines and discusses economic valorization as the outcome of rational processes of accounting and administration.3 A variant of the bureaucratic school is the School of Organisational Symbolism,4 which analyses economic organizations as belief systems and symbolical artefacts. The symbolist and neo-classical approaches consider ‘culture’ and ‘technology’ – the social and the technical – as two separate spheres. The symbolist school considers culture as encompassing the technical system, whereas the neo-classical school treats it as an epiphenomenon of the labour process. Both schools consider the firm as a closed, bounded, stable and coherent system.

Morris Ltd |

21

Unlike these views, I consider firms as complex socio-technical artefacts consisting of symbolic and material processes for the production, use, exchange and valorization of labour, capital and goods. They are not bonded units, but disorganized, heterogeneous and temporary assemblages of people, practices, devices, resources and perceptions.5 I argue that the actors of economic organizations are only ‘intentionally’ rational and are, in fact, embedded in partial cognitive perspectives, personal working routines and learning processes, and are in continuous transformation through their exposure to flows of resources and information. Unlike neoclassical approaches, which consider production as an activity of optimal transformation, I discuss the labour process as a network of routines, operatic memories, meaningful practices and living social relations. As socio-technical artefacts, capitalist organizations are ‘political machines’, which produce subjects through the valorization of objects, labour and machines. This chapter describes the workers’ experience of precarious labour and their activities of material, symbolic and social production. It suggests that under the current regime of despotic capitalism the workers are coerced into production not by ruthless capitalists but by fear and through their own imagination revolving mainly around the firm’s technology. In his seminal article on technology Alfred Gell (1992) claims that the Trobriand people tend to assess the value of labour according to magical criteria.6 For instance, they evaluate the standard of actual Kula canoes against the standard set by the mythical flying canoes and through the notion of effortless labour. As with the Trobrianders, the workers of Morris Ltd use their machines not only to produce objects, but also to craft social relations. In Morris Ltd machines are the imaginary fetishes through which the workers conceptualize the connections between people, objects and things. They are symbolical operators that mediate between the world of the objects and the world of subjects; they reveal the invisible properties of their beholders and emphasize the different status or class of the workers. The workers’ conflicting and ‘enchanting’ visions of technological artefacts obscure their common subsuming by capital.

The Shop Floor Morris Ltd is located along the river Don, in Endcliffe, Sheffield. The presence of an ancient grinding wheel right near its back door, together with an ancient weir, reveals one of the many industrial stages that have been witnessed and powered by the water of this river, that is the long period of industrial production of steel initiated by the Earl of Fitzwilliam in the seventeenth century. His family kept control of the cutlery trade until the end of the nineteenth century and actively fought – together with the cutlers’ trade unions – against the introduction of machinery into the recently developing capitalist mills. The many derelict mills reflected on

22 |

Made in Sheffield

Figure 1.1 A view of Morris shopfloor (author)

the surface of the river Don – described by Marx as the outcome of the new despotic capitalism in 1865 – have had a long history of expansions, nationalizations, rationalizations and closures before reaching the calm state of desolation in which they may be found today. These ancient and unsafe mills are still in use, in spite of the fact that the people in Sheffield believe that they are not and that nowadays steel is produced almost entirely on big, modern and fully mechanized shop floors. One day, following the rhythmical noise of Tommy’s hammer, I walked into Morris Ltd asking for a job. Under my eyes, a big open space approximately eighty meters long was filled with around a hundred machines, the majority of which dated from 1914 with a few of them made in 1860, when the firm was founded. After a brief consultation with the others, one of the forgers decided that I could stay and start my apprenticeship on his machine. There are two main entrances to the shop floor, located in a small street between the ‘Elysium’ brothel and a derelict red-brick building. One

Morris Ltd |

23

entrance leads into the office and is used by the manager and by the owner only, whereas the other leads into the break-room and is used by the twenty three workers when they come to work at six o’clock in the morning. Later on, a huge blue door – that is kept closed during the early morning – opens slowly as the day unfolds, leaving the air from outside free to run inside. This door is used mainly by the workers located on the ‘hot’ part of the shop floor who freely walk in and out through it. The workers of the ‘hot’ department have lost the sense of their bodily temperature by working near the fire, but they constantly complain about the hot air surrounding their machines. For this reason, they open the big blue door every morning no matter what the temperature is outside. During the summer, they have the privilege of having big white fans near their machines that they keep constantly running. The workers of the ‘cold’ department are always cold during the winter and hot during the summer, constantly complaining about the drafts coming from the big blue door during the winter and about the lack of ventilation during the summer. Thus, a subtle network of drafts and currents divides the shop floor into two distinctive microclimates. Besides, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ workers not only perceive distinct temperatures on the shop floor, but also different kinds of noises. In fact, the noises of the hammers used in the hot department are regular, low and rhythmic, whereas milling machines and grinding machines produce irregular, electric and acute sequences of noises that are refracted and multiplied in the small space where the cold workers are crowded. From the point of view of the worker’s health, the former kind of noise produces deafness, whereas the latter produce stress and high blood pressure. Light is distributed on the shop floor very unevenly. In fact, the cold department uniformly reflects the light of the sun coming from the big window overlooking the river and of the powerful neon lamps located high up on the ceiling. On the contrary, the hot department has no window, it is dark and porous and scattered with feeble neon lights located above each machine and oscillating from the distant roof rhythmically following the movements of the machines. Obscurity – punctuated by sharp rays of natural or artificial light and red waves of heat coming from the ovens – surrounds the hot workers, artificial uniformity surrounds the cold ones. The darkness of the hot department is constantly lit up by the red waves coming out from the ovens scattered by each machine, whereas the light of the cold department is refracted between the white wall at the back, the blue coolant liquid of its machines and the silver reflections of the polished bits of steel. As a result, the same dark green machines appear to be violet in the hot department and pale blue in the cold one. Because of the lack of light, dirt, grease and oil appear to be a natural extension of the machines located in the hot department, whereas in the cold department particles of dust are clearly distinguishable in their silver reflections in the light of the sun. Dust can be seen all around their machines, coloured with the same colours as their artificial coolants, of

24 |

Made in Sheffield

the bright yellow chemicals and of the blue silver of the polished steel. The hot workers are more preoccupied with dirt and fumes and the cold ones with dust; their opposite attitude towards air circulation also reflects the different degrees of volatility of their environment and different perceptions of its cleanliness. In fact, in order to breathe properly, the hot workers need to create circulation, whereas the cold workers need to prevent it. In order to have a clean machine, the former have to dissolve the dirt, the latter to concentrate it in one place. As a matter of fact, the hot workers control the air fluxes either through their control over the big blue door, or through the control of their fans. To prevent both the dust to dirty their clothes and the cold to ‘stiffen their bones’ the cold workers wear blue overalls on top of their normal clothes. Hot workers do not wear overalls and each of them has his own peculiar style of working clothes: coloured shirts open on their chests, T-shirts tight on their muscles, track suit bottoms or denim trousers. Getting changed is part of the hot workers’ daily routine during which they take pride in publicly displaying their semi-naked bodies. They arrive at 5.30 A.M., clock in, open their lockers, warm up their clothes near their ovens and get dressed near their machines. The cold workers arrive at 5.50 A.M., they clock in and quickly add their overall on top of their clothes. Thus, sensuously perceived, the technical system expands and dissolves its boundaries into waves of colours and smells, warm spaces veiled with smoke and dark corridors crossed with dust and cold air. The workers perceive and absorb differently the colours, smells, drafts and dust coming from the machines according to their different location in the production process, but they also reshape their technical and social boundaries by manipulating the microclimate of the shop floor.

The Market Morris Ltd was founded in 1860 to produce cutlery, augers and wood boring tools for railway construction. According to Tommy, one of the workers in Morris Ltd, the job of hand-boring the wood for the Railway was so wearing that in the past it was used to rehabilitate prisoners. Since the 1920s, the tools of Mr Morris have been exported to China, Africa and India, where they are still used today for railway construction. In these countries, according to Tommy, ‘workers are like slaves’ in that they still hand-bore the holes for the railway sleepers. Bill cannot give any rational explanation for the fact that both ‘London Transport’ and ‘London Underground’ use Morris Ltd bits for the same purpose. Today, ‘Morris’ produces about twenty different kinds of wood-boring tools and sells them to big DIY chains, such as B&Q, and to local tool shops. Its professional wood-boring tools are sold to local shops and private clients, giving high margins of profit, which allows the firm to survive in times of economic stagnation. Apart from this primary market, the hot workers

Morris Ltd |

25

sell or exchange their production in a variety of hidden markets, as I will show in the chapter on the informal economy.

The Formal Organization The Production Process ‘Morris’ produces roughly twenty different kinds of wood-boring tool. Each kind of tool can be produced in approximately five different sizes. The process of production is as follows (see Figure 1.1). In ‘the hot department’ (the forge) (1) Big Dave chops long bars of steel and distributes them into small metal boxes according to their sizes; (2) Teddy, Brian, and Tony forge and hammer them into shape; (3) Steve twists them; (4) the twisted tools are left to cool down on the floor for hours – sometimes days – before entering ‘the cold department’ (the machine shop). In the cold department the production process varies according to the kind and size of bits to be produced. For a ‘butter bit’, the production process is as follows: (5) every morning John – the manager – gives Big Dave a small piece of paper containing the daily orders. Accordingly, Big Dave distributes the rough bits to three grinders who smooth them; (6) Rob, Mick and Bernard cut them and bore a hole in them; (7) Alf grinds their central part; (8) after they are checked by Phillip (the supervisor) they go to Rob for tempering; (9) Steve and Dave bore them; (10) Philip or Kevin file them; (11) the bits return to Kevin for polishing until they reach a ‘shining’ state; (12) ready to be sold in the market, the ‘shiny’ are transported into the warehouse, where old Graham packs them and records them in the ‘counting book’. Irwin bits are ground, filed and bored one more time before going into the warehouse. A few features of the production process can be highlighted. First, the ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ departments have two completely different rhythms of production. In the hot department the production process is organized and ‘pushed’ by the workers. In the cold department the work is fast, fragmented and is ‘pulled’ by the market. Unlike in the hot department, where work is predictable, the workers of the cold department rotate on different machines and adapt their production to the new orders every morning. Second, in the hot department the workers perform capitalintensive and independent tasks, whereas in the cold department the tasks are mutually interdependent, fragmented and labour-intensive. As a consequence, in the hot department the technical system is subsumed to the social system, whereas in the cold department social interactions are restrained by production. Finally, the layout of the machines and the engineering of the production flow invisibly structure the social relations on the shop floor. In the hot department the centripetal flow of production around isolated machines empowers skilled and older workers, whereas the intensive, flexible, fragmented and centrifugal nature of labour in the

Figure 1.2 The production process

26 | Made in Sheffield

Morris Ltd |

27

cold department increases the power of the supervisor, who is strategically located between the finishing department and the warehouse.

Wages There are three levels of wage in ‘Morris’. At the first level there is the staff, with a basic weekly wage of £220. At the second level, the skilled and semi-skilled workers earn £180. Big Dave – the only unskilled worker – earns £160. The staff includes Graham, the old man who carries small boxes of finished bits from the rack to the ‘warehouse’, John (the manager), Philip (the supervisor) and Linda (the secretary). Apart from the fact that they have higher wages and redundancy packages, the workers cannot tell in what way the staff members are considered different from them. For instance, nobody understands why old Graham – always helped by someone to carry the small boxes of finished bits from the shelves to the warehouse and continuously busy lighting his pipe in some corner of the shop floor – is paid more than the others. In fact, old Graham performs exactly the same operations performed by Big Dave, the only difference being that Big Dave distributes dark and rough pieces of steel at the beginning of the process, while old Graham collects them finished and polished at the end of it. But their technical tasks in the process are exactly the same, and they both appear to walk slowly and randomly on the shop floor. Linda the secretary, according to the workers, is the only person worthy to be considered as a member of the staff, in that she deals with their wages, sick payments and holidays. She perfectly embodies their notion of ‘staff’ as something involving the feminine skills of pen-writing and machine-typing, and inhabiting the secluded and mysterious space of the company office. On top of the basic earnings, a bonus adds to the weekly wage. Bonuses vary from £5 to £50 per week, according to the different kind of bits produced. The cold department is responsible for the weekly bonuses for the whole workforce and the bonus level is calculated on the amount of products that ‘enter into the warehouse’. The chisel bits and boxes are the most profitable products for the owner, who sells them through CISCO. But for the workers these bits are a great waste of time and money, in that to produce the quantity required in order to get a bonus – at least 400 boxes and 700 bits per week – is virtually impossible. To resist the owner’s ‘logic’ of production, they slow down the production of chisel bits and boxes, by ‘hand straightening’ the bent chisel bits or regrinding them several times, while raising their output on the tight and more profitable bits by ‘hammering’ the tool inside the machines instead of setting them up properly. But the attempt of the cold workers to maximize the production of bits with higher bonuses is frustrated by four factors. First, because they work on different products and have limited knowledge of the overall bonus level unless they meet at the end of the

28 |

Made in Sheffield

day or during working time to sum all their production up. Secondly, some products acquire their final specification only after the finishing phase, performed by Philip, and therefore the workers often do not know which bonus they are working on. Besides, Philip is located between the grinding machine and the straightening desk, preempting the workers’ attempts at output restriction. Thirdly, the level of daily bonus is calculated on the number of bits that ‘enter the warehouse’ which usually differs from the number of bits produced, due to the rejection of some bits by the quality controller (the manager) or to the function of ‘gatekeeper’ carried out by old Graham. Finally, Bob (the fitter) fixes tight piecework rates on the bits with higher bonuses. Bob claims that he fixes tight piecework rates because otherwise the cold workers would break the machines by ‘setting them up with hammers, rather than with spanners’, and by burning the milling machine’s arms in their attempt to intensify production. Thus the workers’ collective attempt to maximize bonuses is frustrated by their lack of knowledge of their collective output. Burawoy’s (1985) hypothesis that the workers participate in their own exploitation by playing the same game of production revolving around the firms’ wage system, does not apply to Morris, where different groups of workers agree on different rules of the game and have conflicting notions of ‘profitability’ and ‘accountability’. For instance, the wages of the hot workers are totally independent of their daily production. Because the bonus is measured on the weekly amount of products worked in the cold department, the hot workers could easily stop working until the cooling area was empty and still receive their weekly wage. As I will show later, their disconnection from the pressure of the bonus system allows them to take part in a variety of informal economic transactions which parallel the main production process and to conceive of the weekly wages as an integration of their profit deriving from the informal economy of the neighbourhood. Differently, the production of the cold workers affects their bonuses but not their wages. Weekly bonuses are calculated on the totality of the bits produced, but basic weekly wages do not include the chisel bits that are sold by CISCO. Thus, for the cold workers the firm’s sales are more important than the owner’s profits. The game of production in Morris follows conflicting and inconsistent rules. The hot workers are preoccupied with increasing their profits and with protecting the value of their capital (the machines), the cold workers with increasing the firm’s sales. Burawoy’s conclusion that capital reproduces itself on the shop floor through labour’s consent, does not apply in Morris, where labour perceives capital in different ways and consents to produce for different reasons. The cold workers think about capital in terms of ‘money’ to maximize through the intensification of production; the hot workers think of capital in terms of ‘machines’ that are necessary for them to cultivate their transactions in the neighbourhood. If the cold workers reproduce the factory regime, the hot ones adapt it to their moonlighting activities. Mr

Morris Ltd |

29

Greed is interested in the profits of CISCO, which are related to the losses of Morris, and hence he has no motivation to enforce the capitalist discipline on the shop floor, which is performed by the hot workers instead as I will show in the next section.

Informal Organization The Workforce The hot workers are on average above fifty years of age and are typically old Endcliffe residents. They are the only official breadwinners of households with an average of five members of which at least two are unemployed or long term disabled. Thus, in order to sustain their families they have to add to the £5000 that they receive in Morris a variety of heterogeneous sources of income: state benefits, casual labour, illegal activities, informal revenues and free services exchanged in the neighbourhood. In fact, during the working day Tommy and Bob make some extra profits through informal production and exchanges in the neighbourhood. For instance, Bob fixes the carcass-processing machines at the chicken slaughterhouse on the other side of the street and the oven of Ted’s bakery, and Tommy repairs the furnaces and rolling mills of the local steel factories. The older workers of the hot department also work as subcontractors for bigger tool factories located nearby and they subcontract the production of the bits that are less advantageous in terms of bonuses to smaller tool factories, for instance to a factory in Ford Road, employing exclusively child labour. Hot workers co-opt in their informal production the younger apprentices and cold workers that they remunerate with cash given in the form of gifts at the end of each week. As I will show in the next chapter, Tommy and Bob also control the local trade of scrap and second-hand machines through their precious connection with Ned, the local scrap merchant, whom they meet every Friday night at Khaled’s, the local pub. Thus, the older workers of the hot department are only formally subsumed to the capitalist regime as they complement the wages that they receive in Morris with informal production and exchange in the neighbourhood. Their social capital – in the form of ties of kinship and friendship with local customers, producers, scrap merchants and secondhand machine dealers – insulates them from the volatile economy of the factory and at the same time increases their power on the shop floor. In fact, their stable network of subcontractors, customers and suppliers sustains the profits of the owner who therefore accepts the delegation of his authority and control of the production process to the hot workers. Bob organizes the layout of the machines, fixes the firm’s piecework ratio, and keeps a copy of the key of the company clock, which he made himself, so that when the workers are late in the morning he generally

30 |

Made in Sheffield

agrees to put the clock’s hands back, provided that they have good reasons for being late. Bob and the forgers also control the recruitment of apprentices, normally through local kinship connections. As a consequence of their control over the piecework rates, the layout of the machines and the recruitment and apprenticeship of new forgers, hot workers substitute Philip and John in the managerial function of the firm. Philip is strategically located at the end of the production process and his only managerial function consists in slowing down the production of ordinary bits and pushing the production of chisel bits, which are more profitable for the owner but produce lower bonuses for the workforce. The workers of the cold department are generally younger and sons of unskilled steel labourers who migrated from the Endcliffe slums during the 1960s. They own houses recently built in ex-working-class areas of Sheffield and pool their income with the income of their wives, employed in the local call-centres that have replaced the mining and steel industries. They enjoy an annual income of £13,000 and a lifestyle – new homes, cars and education for their children – higher than the lifestyle of the Endcliffe inhabitants. Nevertheless, these younger workers have no control over the labour process, apprenticeship and the internal labour market. In fact, unlike the hot workers, their recruitment follows formal channels (newspaper adverts, job centres) and requirements (GCEs; diplomas; previous work experiences) and it is directly supervised by Mr Greed, whose only concern is that the workers are not members of any union. Their lack of control over the apprenticeship and recruitment system, the firm’s internal labour market and the informal economy of Endcliffe makes them totally vulnerable to the volatile cycles of the wage-economy. When some engineering firms in the area close down, the workers made redundant and expelled from the ‘primary’ labour market enter into the so-called marginal labour market now occupied by the Morris’ machine shop workers. In times of recession this allows Mr Greed to recruit betterqualified machine shop workers at the same cost as the Morris ones. When made redundant, the cold workers who have not been lucky enough to be taken as apprentices at the forge sink into long-term unemployment. They are unable to find temporary and casual employment due to their lack of social connections in their new estates where they live and their wives’ under-remunerated and short-term jobs in the service sector do not cover the living costs of the family. Cold workers made redundant often migrate to Endcliffe, as their distant relatives did in the past, looking for casual labour, cheap accommodation and social connections. The workforce of Morris is fragmented into separate labour markets and different sets of social relations of production. The hot workers are only formally subsumed to capitalist production in that they control the recruitment and apprenticeship systems of the forge and complement their wages with profits linked to the informal economy of the neighbourhood. The cold workers are ‘proletarians’ fully dependent on the wage

Morris Ltd |

31

Figure 1.3 Bill on a Monday morning (author)

economy of the factory for their survival and from the elder workers for stable jobs at the forge and informal incomes. Thus, the authority of the older workers over the younger workers of the machine shop hides the authority of Mr Greed so that the conflict between ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ is experienced as a generational conflict within the workforce.

A Short Social History of the Machines Mauss pointed out that ‘when a generation transmits to the next the science of its gestures and of its manual acts, there is as much authority and social tradition as there is in linguistic transmission’ (1979: 104). Machines cumulate life histories that span over several generations of the workers’ lives. Through their fascinating and enchanting stories, some machines acquire power and visibility on the shop floor and increase the status of their holders. The histories of the machines are incorporated in the workers’ practices and exchanged on the shop floor as metaphors of past social relations to be reproduced through the invisible force of tradition. The workers describe the hot and cold departments as, respectively, the ‘forge’ and the ‘machine shop’. Forging involves the transformation of molten steel into a shaped object through the use of a hammer. In Greek mythology, Prometheus – a clever semi-human god – stole the fire from the gods and gave it to the humans, teaching them how to forge metal. By teaching them how to manipulate the fire and to craft tools to be used for

32 |

Made in Sheffield

agriculture and war Prometheus gave to the humans the power to challenge the gods. In the seventeenth century, as civilization spread the use of cutlery in court etiquette, the small hammers of the blacksmiths were transformed into giant water powered hammers operated by several workers employed by the Duke of Norfolk for the mass-production of knives and forks for the tables of the international aristocracy. Until 1890 the Duke – who owned the rights over the Endcliffe meat, fish and tool markets and the industrial land along the river Don – regulated the prices, quality and brands of the tools produced and assured that the trades between the local small capitalists and the journeymen followed fair rules of conduct. The capitalists did not employ the artisans on a stable basis but hired their work for small production tasks. In fact, because of the little capital required and the technical interdependence of the different phases of tool production, the forgers, blacksmiths and grinders controlled and organized their labour in dense productive networks shared among the families that lived in the neighbouring cottages along the river Don or in the same yard of the back-to-back houses in Endcliffe. During early capitalism forgers and craftsmen were displaced by the new capitalist machinery – Ryder Hammers, Spring Hammers, press hammers – which reproduced and substituted human labour. Milling machines developed as mechanical versions of the grinders’ hands, transforming their horizontal movement of friction into a sequence of circular cutting operations. At the end of the eighteenth century, merchant-capitalists took advantage of this improved technology and organized the production of tool and cutlery in small workshops. John Morris was one of these early capitalist who gathered some skilled artisans and grinding machines on a shop floor and organized tool production for railway corporations. This history of early capitalism is visible in the hot department, where the workers use the same tools – forging machines, hammers, cutters and dies – and machines used by the artisans in the past. For instance, the cutting machine used by Bob today was invented by the young Morris in 1850, when he started his apprenticeship at the pattern shop of master Dewhirst. The machine famously put out of work many file cutters and won a design prize at the Olympia exhibition in 1865. On the other side of the shop floor Italian, German and ‘Churchill’ milling machines ‘symbolize’ the history of the Second World War, when Morris underwent a second historical expansion when it became supplier of munitions to the Army. Dave still remembers his mother working at his milling machines, a black scarf tight around her hair to prevent them from getting trapped in the machine. England flags and old and recent photos of frigates, tanks and troops in conflict zones reinforce the nationalistic rhetoric underpinning steel-making on this side of the shop floor. The machines of Morris not only reflect the past industrial history but also the current politico-economy of the steel industry. With privatization and de-industrialization in the 1980s, the big and heavy machines of

Morris Ltd |

33

Figure 1.4 Brian’s Ryder hammer (author)

mass-production were dismissed, devalued and sold to ‘developing countries’, whereas the machines of early capitalism – the Ryder Hammers, Cutters and Spring Hammers – have reacquired their ancient functions and value. In Morris humans and machines share the same history of capitalist development. During industrialization capitalism foresaw modernity as a transformation of small scale, individualistic and hierarchical artisan labour into mass-producing machines and magnified proletarian workforces. Today, modernity is re-imagined in terms of fragmented workforces, miniaturized machines and individualistic and artisan forms of production. In the next section I show how the workers of Morris use this technological history to reproduce ‘past’ working knowledge and social relations in ‘the present’.

The Social Distribution of Knowledge in Morris In this section, I follow up on Tim Ingold’s (2000) critique of Harry Braverman’s hypothesis – in his Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974) – of the inherently deskilling and alienating nature of the capitalist labour process. Ingold claims that alienation is not a matter of social relations of production but the consequence of specifically Western cognitive/ cultural understanding of technology and of the labour process. Unlike Ingold, I suggest that cognitive understandings of the production process are inscribed in wider capitalist ideologies or cosmologies of labour that both encompass and transcend specific forms of labour organization. This

34 |

Made in Sheffield

capitalist cosmology consists in the belief in the free nature of wagelabour. From this point of view, alienation is more about people believing that they are free, rather than about people believing that they are not. In Morris, the hot department is conceptually perceived and organized by its workers as a blacksmith workshop, where work is individually performed following non-linguistic and not codified ‘constellations of practical tasks’ associated with specific tools.7 There are four features of the kind of knowledge associated with the manual forging of steel and iron. First, it relies on individual notions of relations between ‘means’ and ‘ends’ and is structured into isolated and self-enclosed tasks. Second, it is memorized and retrieved through sets of physical movements and does not require ‘thinking’; in the words of Bloch (1989), it is ‘implicit’. Third, when it is communicated linguistically it is not communicated through technical language, but through a language that describes the morphological traits of the material processed in terms of colour, shapes and metaphors. For instance, in Morris, hot workers communicate about their job in terms of the ‘redness’, ‘roundness’ and ‘patchiness’ of the bits they are working or of the ‘inner movements’ or noises of their machines. Fourth, this kind of knowledge is ephemeral because it is pulled together and held in mind as long as appropriate for a given task. Because of these four factors, the knowledge of work in the hot department is embedded in human bodies and socially organized in subjective, fragmented, ephemeral and centripetal spaces of action. This complex knowledge is transmitted through the social relation of apprenticeship. Apprentices are young male unemployed willing to work for free for a trial period, lasting up to one year. During the apprenticeship the older artisan reveals the language and metaphors of the job, moulds the apprentice’s body to his posture and personality, discloses the long history of his machine, maps its invisible idiosyncrasies and the capricious microclimate surrounding it. History is central to the reproduction of the forgers’ knowledge. For instance, during my apprenticeship at the forge, I learned the troubled history of the Ryder Hammer that since the 1860s was adapted to different motion powers and which witnessed the deskilling of its operators and the disappearance of some of its products. Labour at the forge relies on multiple forms of memory: bodily memory, the masters’ recollections of the history of the steel industry and the memory embodied into timeless objects such as old calendars and milk bottles, brooms without bristles, wooden handles, chairs and boxes eroded by time. Due to the immaterial, uncodified, subjective and ephemeral working knowledge of the forge, the apprentices are locked into a relationship of dependency on their masters’ invisible knowledge and personality. The fact that they are often related through kinship reinforces the asymmetry of the master–apprentice relationship. In addition, this relationship is framed through a non-economic morality, which states that the master’s gift of working knowledge and cash at the end of the week must be reciprocated with the apprentices’ free labour.

Morris Ltd |

35

Labour is not only indissolubly linked to the master’s body but also to his machine. Machines in the hot department are not seen as external functional apparatuses of production but as symbolic extensions of the workers’ bodies, metaphorical appendages of their sexuality, powerful technologies of enchantment and markers of social status. In the forge men humanize machines with photos, calendars and small personal objects, and machines progressively dehumanize workers by drawing them into their self-enclosed mechanical spaces. The forgers also produce tools and mechanical parts which they use in the production process and over which they have exclusive ownership and use the company’s chisel bits for their domestic activities. They conceive of tools, products and machines as different mechanical extensions of their manual skills. In conclusion, the forgers experience their labour as inalienable because it is entirely embedded in the personalities and bodies of humans and machines. Besides, they consider it as ‘uneconomical’ because it is not quantifiable and only circulates in the form of knowledge exchanged between master and apprentices and the production of tools as inextricable from their consumption. Finally, they consider their labour as belonging to the realm of ‘history’ and ‘the community’ that transcends the spaces of the factory and the individual lifetimes of the workers. The seven millers of the cold department organize their knowledge in a totally different way. A milling machine contains two mechanical arms that cut the tools with precision. Workers use two round gears to control the mechanical arms inside the machine. Each gear is framed with small numbers that translate the position of the mechanical arms in terms of space and speed. This mapping of the workers’ labour through standardized temporal and spatial dimensions allows them to rotate on different machines and to collectively adjust their labour to the standardized nature of the customer specifications that become relevant only in the final phase of production performed in the cold department. On each machine, chalk inscriptions translate the speed of the arms into piece-work rates so that each operator working on the machine knows with certainty the level of speed below or above which he is not allowed to go to meet the standard bonus level agreed by the workforce. The cold workers spend most of their mental energy on translating measures of speed into measures of bonus, making small chalk inscriptions on their machines to remember the complex arithmetic of their production, collectively exchanging their individual productive ratios, and comparing them to old Graham’s fragile recollections of the workers’ outputs. Unlike the forgers, who produce by remembering, the cold workers produce by forgetting and inscribing their working knowledge into external mnemonic devices: chalk inscriptions, production schedules, papers and drawings. Unlike the forgers, the grinders and millers see their labour as the outcome of the economic process of quantification, standardizations, fragmentation and the depersonalization of human labour. As bits flow from the forge into the warehouse, they slowly

36 |

Made in Sheffield

Figure 1.5 Grinding in Morris (author)

transform themselves from row pieces of steel into polished geometrical objects. The metamorphosis of raw steel into finished products is paralleled by the metamorphosis of labour on the shop floor: from individual and inalienable property of the workers into collective and alienable commodities in the cold department increasingly adapted to the morphology of the market as they approach the warehouse. In conclusion, in Morris the labour process is conceived of in terms of progressive personalization and individualization of human labour in the forge and progressive depersonalization, de-composition and dematerialization of human labour in the machine shop. Embodied in strong personalities in the hot department and dissolved in magnificent objects in the cold department, labour is seen as inalienable in the former and alienable in the latter. This workers’ imaginary understanding of their labour revolves around their belief in machines as technological fetishes. In the forge machines are seen as mechanical reflections of the workers’ personalities, in the machine shop they are seen as ‘technological monsters’ engaged in deadly competition with the workers’ labour. In both cases, machines are powerful fetishes that hide the workers’ contribution to the

Morris Ltd |

37

Figure 1.6 Steve at the press hammer (author)

production process and make labour entirely free and personal in the forge and totally alienated and impersonal in the machine shop. The workers’ common belief in technological monsters and in the inherent conflict between ‘human labour’ and ‘mechanical capital’ hides wider structural inequalities and polarizes the workforce between capitalist forgers who work for pure self-gratification and proletarian machine workers who work only for money. In contrast with orthodox Marxist readings of the labour process that claim that the workers’ consciousness reflects the capitalist division of labour,8 I suggest that the capitalist labour process reflects the workers’ technological imagination. But unlike culturalist or cognitive readings of capitalism,9 I claim that this technological imagination is inscribed in wider capitalist relations that both encompass and transcend specific forms of labour organization. Before I turn to these wider sets of social relations outside of the shop floor, I discuss the narrative through which the workers construct their political differences.

Discussion about Value in the Break-room At 10.30 A.M. the workers have a half a hour break. During the break, the hot workers regroup according to the hierarchical criteria of ‘skill’, whereas the cold workers gather together in the break-room, a small empty room with ten tables where the workers sit in pairs. Only a big clock adorns the empty walls of the room. The less skilled hot workers

38 |

Made in Sheffield

join the cold workers inside the room, eating their sandwiches and exchanging copies of The Sun, fishing tools and superficial conversations. The anonymity of the white room together with the peculiar small square coffee tables scattered in it, emphasize the public nature of the workers’ informal interactions and almost transfix them into staged dialogues. Measured statements, calculated irony and desultory conversations seem to mirror the workers’ strange encounter on the shop floor whose old machines are framed in the long window of the break-room. Bob and Tony do not take part in these discussions in the break-room. Everyday they take an old rococo table from a pile of scrap machines located near the big blue entrance door, and put it right on its threshold. On the table is written: ‘Dukes diner’. Every day they sit around the marble rococo table feeding pigeons and surveying the events taking place around them: the young girls going to work at the brothel a few metres from the blue door, the bridge on which the trains transport steel to the South, the tramp with his old dog trying to steal the bread from the pigeons, the workers from the chicken slaughterhouse having their break on the other side of the street. During their breaks around the rococo table, Bob and Tony often complain about the careless use of the machines by the cold workers and plan new methods of work and new investments in more efficient machines. Intimate and contemplative, their breaks around the rococo table reveal their constant worries about the bad management of the firm, the changing nature of work and the constant deterioration of their old machines on the shop floor. One day in the break-room, Alan made a bitter remark to me about Bob’s habit of keeping his tools locked. According to Alan, Bob is very selfish and self-centred when he works and he is extremely possessive both of his tools and of his machines. This remark was echoed by Steve who, interrupting his reading of The Sun behind us, claimed that ‘they [the hot workers] are selfish because in their job they care only for their machines, whereas we [the cold workers] need each other to do our job’. According to Alan the cold workers are the modern kind of workers because they work only for money and for the bonus and without getting personally involved in their job like the hot workers, whom he incidentally dismissed as ‘prima donnas’. Alan, the son of an unskilled steel labourer, profoundly dislikes the ‘snobbery’ of the craft workers. He believes that the cold workers’ modern attitude to work is due to the modern nature of their machines and of their labour organization that give real value to Morris’ production. Besides, the value of production depends on the collective efforts of the workers rather than on individual acts of production. Alan’s remarks reminded me of one of the early days that I spent in the cold department. My name was written in white varnish on a rough bit and each cold worker taught me their tasks working on this same bit, explaining to me that it acquired value because it incorporated the labour of ‘many different hands’. As the day went by, I saw the disappearance of my name under the shiny surface of the

Morris Ltd |

39

polished bit as a symbol that I was being incorporated into the working group and that my objectification was a central part of the process of value creation in the cold department. In the discussion Alan emphatically stated that, unlike them, hot workers are egoistic and selfish because ‘they are shut in the ivory towers of their machines and never dirty their hands working with other people’. ‘In the machine shop’, Alan added, ‘we are the same kind of people. Our labour is worth all the same and our hands are dirty all the same. We turn out money and bonuses for the whole firm. Forgers are like Mr Greed. They don’t care for the firm. They only care for their machines and for their own profit.’ Alan shares with his working mates a fascination with the big steel factories that populated Endcliffe in the 1960s, with their modern system of mass-production and their powerful union organizations. Their appreciation of labour intensification does not meet the approval of Mr Greed whom they believe to be parochial and unambitious and responsible for the poor financial state of the company. Tommy reacted to Tony’s accusations with mannered pride and objected that cold workers are greedy and ‘reverted snobs’ due to their obsolete class mentality that makes them value labour in terms of collective bonuses and wage rather than as ‘mechanical knowledge’, ‘human capital’ and personal commitment to the job. In a sudden burst of rhetorical inspiration, he claimed that the gap between the skills of the hot workers and the skills of the cold workers could be described in terms of the difference between a butcher extracting a liver from a dead chicken and a surgeon operating on ‘a human patient in a private clinic’. Forging, according to Tommy, is more a ‘form of art than a mechanical operation’ and goes back to the times of the medieval blacksmiths whose tools and cutlery were produced in very much the same way in which the hot workers forge their tools today. Tommy believes that ‘history repeats itself’ and is supportive of how Mr Greed manages Morris ‘as a cutlers workshop rather than a steel factory’, as the cold workers would like it. According to Tommy: he [the owner] knows his job. We have gone through bad times, in the 1980s, but he always kept us going. Nowadays, big factories have gone out of fashion and firms are more like the one-man workshops of the cutlery industry that made Sheffield famous worldwide. I am proud of my job, I am proud of Sheffield, because everywhere in the world people pick up forks and knives and read: ‘made in Sheffield’. And this makes you proud.

As the conversation unfolded around the small tables, Tony insisted that the final value of production depends on the cold workers’ maximization of bonuses and variable capital and Tommy replied that it depends on the forgers’ preservation of the firm’s machines and mechanical capital. During the conversation Tony and Steve translated matters of economic value into discussions about modernity and equality, whereas Tommy explained ‘economic value’ in terms of individual knowledge, timeless tradition, pride and personal motivation. Thus, the

40 |

Made in Sheffield

workers’ technological imagination provides the workers with two opposite narratives with which they experience and talk about the value of their labour and draw political distinctions between them. The forgers of the hot department frame their labour in a specific pre-capitalist ethos of work, symbolized by the status of its elder workers; transmitted through implicit, subjective and bodily forms of knowledge;10 incorporated in powerful machines and organized through a cottage system rooted in the informal economy of the family and the neighbourhood. In the cold department the workers think of their interdependent, fragmented and flexible labour as being in deadly competition with the firm’s mechanical capital and in constant transmutation into codified, public, numerical and monetary forms shared by the same homogeneous ‘class’ of workers and following scientific principles of labour organization. Staged inside the break-room, this opposition recreated the usual equilibrium in Morris between the long-term worries of the hot workers for the firms’ machines – what economists call ‘fixed capital’– and the short-term involvement of the cold workers in the monetary bonuses – in the words of the economists, ‘variable capital’. Enclosed inside the white and artificial atmosphere of the break-room, the more fundamental contrast between labour and capital was turned into routinely staged antipathy between different generations of workers whose labour crystallized into capital with different degrees of mobility and into different institutional forms. On the shop floor, these technological narratives create solid boundaries between the hot and the cold workers, between the ‘market’ and ‘money’ that motivate the former and the ‘passion’ and ‘tradition’ that inspire the latter, and between the pure generosity that makes labour inalienable in the forge and the pure interest that makes it entirely alienable in the machine shop. In spite of their conflicting productive moralities and technological imaginations, the ‘hot’ and the ‘cold’ department, the informal and the wage economy, gifts and commodities and artisans and proletarians are two sides of the same capitalist coin. Younger workers maximize Mr Greed’s variable capital and absolute surplus, whereas the elder workers maximize the value of his fixed capital and relative surplus. The workers are aware of the fictional character of their mutual opposition and of the fact that they pertain to the same space of poverty. Nevertheless, through these narratives they are able to frame their strange encounter on a nineteenth-century shop floor as ‘an economic fact’ and to discuss their social fragmentation through the lenses of political economy.

Political Economy James Carrier (1992) in his historical sketch of the emerging alienation in relations of production applies a Maussian framework to the study of the capitalist labour process and describes alienation as an increased

Morris Ltd |

41

perceived separation between two conflicting moralities, one ‘purely’ economic and one ‘purely’ social. Carrier’s sketch draws on the work of Polanyi and Thompson and focuses on four stages of capitalist development located in a historical continuum: the cottage industry; the putting-out system; early factory production; and modern factory production. These developments reflect the increased capitalist control of the labour process and working knowledge through the standardization of the times and spaces of production. Early factories incorporated household production into the shop floor and mixed a commodity relationship between capitalist and contractor with a familial relationship between contractor and assistant. The concentration of production in a central place broke the workers’ control over the production process by substituting tools with machines and manpower with steam power. The abolition of formal apprenticeship fragmented the working community – their working knowledge, rituals and obligations – into individualistic workers negotiating salaries directly with the owner. The development of modern factory production accentuated this trend. It substituted kinship relations with impersonal working contracts and mechanized the shop floor, breaking down production into simple tasks and physically fragmenting the workforce. As a result, modern workers experience factory production as a separation between ‘their selves’ and the machines, the products and the environment that surrounds them. They are split between: two distinct aspects, a core and a periphery. The core is made of things that people believe to be internal to the individual or continuous with the individual as concrete being. This inalienable self is engaged in durable, inalienable identities and relationships. … The periphery, on the other hand, is made up of a set of less durable attributes and of relations among individuals entering into agreements to do certain things in accordance with certain standards or rules. In the context of these relations people experience each other not relationally, but autonomously, as independent individuals (ibid.: 552).

In my ethnography, the hot department closely reflects the early factory production described by Carrier. The workers control the production process through their control of the technology, the recruitment and the apprenticeship system; they organize production following the circular time of the fire rather than according to the mechanical time of the company watch and combine impersonal relations and kinship relations at work. On the other hand, the cold department easily fits into Carrier’s sketch of modern production. Their tools are incorporated into the machines whose movements dictate the rhythms of production, their sense of time is decoupled from the tasks they perform and anchored in the times of the factory (the company watch, the production times, the break-time), their working knowledge is externalized into mnemonic supports – production schedules, prices, accounts – and independent

42 |

Made in Sheffield

from specific machines, their homes are distant from work and their working relations are clearly separated from their personal relations. In Morris ‘early’ and ‘modern’ capitalist technologies and social relations are blended together on the same shop floor. The world of the forgers is a world of intimate connections between objects and persons, of permeable boundaries between human and machines, of inalienable labour that circulates between ‘the factory’ and the ‘family’ and among individuals bonded by a mixture of social, economic and familial obligations. The world of the machine workers is made of cuts, disconnection, separations between objects and people and of alienable and ‘breakdownable’ labour that is transacted among anonymous individuals between the factory and the global steel market. The emergence of hybrid moralities of work, rather than their separation, seems to be the current mark of the workers’ alienation. These hybrid moralities can be related to the wider political economy and the current regime of despotic capitalism, under which the generic forces of global capitalism have substituted the authority of the overseers. Besides, this hybrid morality of Morris reflects the wider dialectics between ‘artisans’ and ‘proletarians’ in Sheffield. Artisans, like the hot workers of Morris, diversify their sources of income rather than maximizing their wages. They mix the process of production inside the firm with a variety of economic transactions in the neighbourhood and combine productive and reproductive strategies of survival. They are not only wage-workers, but also steel subcontractors, middlemen, scrap merchants and petty capitalists, extracting surplus labour from young apprentices. As I show in Chapter Three, artisan families are extended working groups made up of relatives and loosely related individuals who pool together their incomes and exchange welfare services between each other. These families are controlled by patriarchs who negotiate with local bosses and petty capitalists the pay and working conditions of their children or wives who work in the drug, sex or metal industries. Proletarians, like the cold workers, live in nuclear families that survive entirely on the volatile wages of the spouses. Labour deregulation and extensive subcontracting, combined with their lack of informal socio-economic networks, push them into long-term unemployment. Thus, the current despotic regime involves experiences of de-industrialization and the casualization of labour that are fragmented along gender and generational lines rather than being homogeneous within the working class. Artisans read deindustrialization in terms of increased agency, entrepreneurship and control over the domestic community. Younger and female labourers experience de-industrialization as patriarchal exploitation. In spite of their conflicting narratives and moralities of labour, artisans and proletarians pertain to the same space of poverty outside the factory that connects the economy of the steel industry and the economy of smallscale engineering. In times of economic expansions, artisans are employed as subcontractors for the local steel industries, thus making the

Morris Ltd |

43

younger and better-paid proletarians redundant. In times of economic downturns, the younger proletarians are employed in the secondary labour market of the small engineering workshops of Endcliffe pushing the artisans into marginal informal economic activities. Thus, in Morris four sets of capitalist relations – between steel capitalists and subcontractors, between Mr Greed and the workers, between proletarians and artisans and between elder workers and their families – are mixed in the same social spaces of the factory. The workers’ narratives of separation, technological disjunctures and their illusion of class antagonism on the shop floor obscure their common subsumption to different sets of capitalist relations and the invisible mechanism of social redistribution and mutual cooperation at the level of the neighbourhood. In fact, since the distant past, the flow of scrap machines and unemployed proletarians into the informal tool workshops of Endcliffe has been counterbalanced by the flow of skilled artisans and recycled capital into the proletarian and middle-class spaces of the steel industry. Since the distant past, Endcliffe is a ‘space of poverty’ where the unemployed reuse their skills, derelict machines get back their ancient movements, boarded up buildings perform again their old social functions and forgotten economic spaces reemerge as profitable businesses.

Conclusion This chapter leads to three conclusions. First, applying Carrier’s framework to the experience of labour in Morris it appears that under the current regime of flexible production the coexistence of the morality of ‘pure interest’ and the morality of ‘pure generosity’ within the same space reveals, more than their sharp separation, the alienation of the workers who experience labour both as entirely free and as totally alienable. Secondly, despotic capitalism relies on institutions that have, at the same time, an economic function and a function of social redistribution. Under constant risk of bankruptcy and redundancy, the workers of Morris expand their social networks from the factory into the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood provides a framework to increase the firm’s incomes through the artisans’ social connections; the factory provides a context of inter-generational redistribution of the proletarian wages. In the current regime of precarious labour, alienation seems to consist in the alienation of economic institutions, rather than in the emergence of ‘the purely economical’ as a narrow reading of Polanyi might suggest. Lastly, the workers of Morris are ‘socialized’ and subject to value not only in the factory but also in the family and the community, with ‘capital’ permeating their whole life. Unlike other wageworkers, who are only formally subsumed to capital through the organization of production in the factory, the workers of Morris are really subsumed to it through their socialization outside it. But contrary to the futuristic prediction of

44 |

Made in Sheffield

autonomist Marxist Antonio Negri postmodernity in Endcliffe has not given way to immaterial forms of production,11 fluid social relations and flexible subjectivities cutting across idioms of class and gender. Rather, postmodernity materialized as a hybrid mixture of industrial wage-work and bonded labour, nuclear families and patriarchal ideologies of male productivity, real and formal ‘subsumption’, mass-production and cottage industry, mechanization and hard and wearing manual labour. As with many other small workshops in Endcliffe, Morris is not an economic institution but a ‘political machine’ for the externalization of the functions of the state and global capital onto individual workers through the articulation of the different value systems of wage and unwaged labour, permutations between fixed and variable capital and the incorporation of Victorian craftsmanship into the cogs of massconsumption.

Notes 1. This is not his real name but the name used by the workers. I have changed the names of my informants throughout the book in order to preserve their anonymity and due to the confidential nature of some of the issues discussed. 2. See Varian (1997). 3. Gouldner (1954). 4. For a review of the Organizational Symbolism school, see Alvesson and Berg (1992). 5. Economists Simon (1953) and March and Olsen (1972) discuss the cognitive complexity of economic organizations. 6. He defines technology as a form of ‘enchantment for the reproduction of the status quo’ (1992: 163). 7. Keller and Keller (1996) and Keller (2001) discuss at length the knowledge involved in the transmission of skilled practices. 8. Typically, Braverman (1974) and Burawoy (1985). 9. For instance, Ingold (2000). 10. According to Bloch, bodily communication structures authority more solidly than linguistic communications because ‘messages carried by the language of the body become ossified, predictable and repeated’ and ‘the acceptance of this code implies compulsion’ (1989: 38). 11. Negri (1989).

Chapter Two

THE ‘RETURN’ OF THE INFORMAL ECONOMY IN ENDCLIFFE


When an industry had thus chosen a locality for itself, it is likely to stay there long: so great are the advantages which people following the same skilled trade get from near neighborhood to one another. The mysteries of trade become no mysteries; but are as if in the air and children learn many of them unconsciously. Good work is rightly appreciated, invention and improvements in machinery, in processes and the general organization of businesses have their merit promptly discussed: if one man starts a new idea, it is taken up by others and combined with suggestions of their own; and thus becomes the source of further ideas. A. Marshall, Principles of Economics

Endcliffe is located in the East End of Sheffield. In the West the city borders the Yorkshire moors, whereas the industrial landscape of the East End expands into the Lower Don Valley as far as Rotherham. People give different explanations for the fact that the steel industry developed in the East End of Sheffield. Geologists claim that Endcliffe was the natural location for the development of the iron and steel industry because it is right on the carboniferous coal measures that run along the Pennines. Economists stress the importance of the East coast for a supply of iron from Sweden. The people of Endcliffe say that working-class suburbs could have never been built on the beautiful hills of the countryside to the west where the bourgeoisie has lived since the nineteenth century. The city’s West and East Ends also have invisible boundaries. Polluted gas and chemicals are said to lie underneath the brown fields of Endcliffe, whereas the western earth is said to be rich in clay, ganister and iron ore – the natural riches of the ancient cutlers. Two underground water pipes, one which runs between the industrial Lower Don Valley and Endcliffe and the other connecting the Derbyshire reservoir and middle-class suburbs, invisibly reproduce the city’s social stratification. Often flooded, littered with rubbish, covered with smoke blown by the westerly wind, and crossed by heavy traffic, Endcliffe is a liminal de-industrialized space which links the affluent West End to the industrial nodes of South

46 |

Made in Sheffield

Yorkshire. At Endcliffe the landscape along the River Don incorporates ancient, modern and postmodern natural and human artefacts. Ramblers and tourists walk along the ‘Five Weir Walk’ towards the Meadowhall Shopping Centre and observe with curiosity the hybrid landscape of Endcliffe. Medieval grinding wheels, weirs, derelict nineteenth-century steel mills, iron ore, industrial wastes, cables, roots and wild flowers punctuate the river bank, with scrap, salmon and rats swimming inside it. The noise of hammers and the voices of workers from broken windows, reveals to the passers-by that these ancient mills are still used. The Tinsley canal is the ‘North/East frontier’ dividing the Cliff lads and the Pakistani community. On the bridge, the ‘King’s Head’ – the last bastion of the white community – stands to provide the locals with daily passes to fish in the canal. Crossing the frontier, a row of hairdressers, betting agencies, butchers, Mosques, community centres and corner shops reveals the dense social and economic texture of the Asian community. On the ‘northern’ side of the border, Endcliffe Road has only a few shops: the electrical shop, the ‘swap-shop’, the second-hand tool shop, the exotic pet shop (selling snakes, tarantulas, scorpions and dead rats to feed them) the Elysium brothel and the Traveller Centre. At the top of Endcliffe Road stands the cemetery, where delinquents were hanged in the past. In the cemetery, the gravestones of the dead steelworkers are turned towards the big plants and the small shop floors in the Don Valley. The gravestones of local entrepreneurs and MPs are turned towards the street, inscribed with sober statements and facing each other in a circle as for a business meeting. Passed the cemetery the few remaining council homes and Khaled’s pub, Bettie’s ‘White Heart’ and the ‘Lib-Club’ are half hidden by the Sports Centre, the Bingo Palace and the Vodafone building and the heavy flow of cars moving towards the M1’s junction 34. Writing in the nineteenth century, economist Alfred Marshall believed that the myriad small machine shops, cutlers’ workshops, tool firms and metal trades of Endcliffe, constituted a unique organizational form. These ‘industrial clusters’ differed from the centralized and hierarchical structures of modern corporations and yet their coordinated and interdependent production processes made them ‘like’ the traditional firms of neo-classical economy. Marshall thought that these workshops of tool-makers, engineers, forgers and mechanics had flexible technologies, efficient production systems and expanded distribution networks due to ‘human factors’, such as shared knowledge, kinship networks, on-the-job training and ‘tradition’. Looking at the same firms of Endcliffe twenty years earlier, Marx predicted that these small workshops of artisans and petty capitalists would be annihilated by the advance of the modern steel factories located nearby.1 Today, the same clusters of bricklayers, mechanics, furnace-builders, tool-makers, and engineering firms are hidden in derelict buildings or industrial estates along the River Don and provide informal and casual labour to the local population.2 The

The ‘Return’ of the Informal Economy in Endcliffe |

47

industrial clusters celebrated by Marshall and despised by Marx are at the very engine of the current regime of flexible capitalism. Since the early 1980s there has been a renewed interest in regional economies and neo-Marshallian industrial districts among economists. Arnaldo Bagnasco (1977) famously described the industrial districts of the ‘third Italy’ – a region that spans between Venice, Bologna and Ancona – as the human face of Western capitalism in their creation of wealth and employment for local communities, unlike the factories in the north of Italy which are controlled by national and international capital. Similarly, Charles Sable (1982) suggested that small-scale firms and industrial clusters combine social cohesion and economic efficiency and adapt ‘optimally’ to volatile economic conditions. With their versatile technologies, strong inter-firm coordination and market flexibility they adapt better to capital and labour market volatility than the rigid Fordist corporations. Secondly, they are socially more cohesive because they rely on the active participation of vast segments of society, including women, ethnic minorities and the elderly, foster cooperative industrial relations and are supported by local governments. Carlo Trigilia (1990) also emphasized the contrast between the horizontal social networks of industrial clusters and the hierarchical structure of Fordist factories, and Giacomo Beccattini (1990) suggested that Italian industrial districts develop ‘trust’ and ‘shared identity’ due to the fact that their firms are rooted in community-based networks of trust and kinship, which ‘foster(ed) collective solidarity above class struggle’ (Beccattini 1990: 197). Anthropologists have criticized these ‘socio-economic’ studies of local and regional economies for their uncritical use of the terms ‘culture’,3 ‘trust’ and ‘shared values’. The contributors to Smart and Smart’s volume, Petty Capitalism and Globalization (2005), showed how family businesses and petty capitalists exploit their ‘local cultures’ and ‘community values’ to increase their profits and ultimately satisfy the interests of Transnational Corporations (TNCs). For instance, Rothstein (2005) provided a vivid account of the small-scale garment industry in San Cosme, Mexico, which developed as a consequence of free market policies and the industrial recession of the 1980s. Under constant pressure from powerful international retailers and manufacturers, the local garment industry operated through small family businesses. Rothstein suggested that the social proximity between kin, workers and capitalists in these family-run businesses obfuscated their class relations and gave them an illusory entrepreneurship which clashed with the power of global retailers. Similarly Narotsky (1997) showed how Catalan cultural idioms sustained small-scale capitalism in the rural area of Les Garrigues, Spain. For instance, the Catalan ideology of the casa forced women to accept low paid jobs in the garment sector. Simone Ghezzi (2007) claimed that industrial restructuring and intensive subcontracting in the industrial districts of Brianza, Italy, forced local petty entrepreneurs into self-

48 |

Made in Sheffield

exploitation, which was reproduced through the local ideology of ‘hard work’ and ‘quality production’. Current ‘regional economies’ can be seen as new forms of informal economies and industrial districts. Gavin Smith (2006) suggested that the process of European regionalization created a new regulatory regime through which flexible capitalism is reproduced through local ‘culture’ and ‘civil society’. Adrian Smith (2003) claimed that the Western hegemonic model of regional development based on Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) forced eastern central European countries to endorse capitalism, thus becoming low production units for western European markets. Radical geographers argued that regionalization is part of a broader process of the ‘re-scaling’ of the post-Keynesian state both at the supra-national and local levels. Neil Brenner (2004) argued that Thatcherism and successive neo-conservative governments in Britain created a ‘new geography of state power’ by empowering supra-national bodies and local authorities at the expense of central government. For instance, in the ‘post-Keynesian’ era, economic and social policies in exindustrial areas in Britain are set either through the funds,4 networks,5 and bodies of the European Community,6 or through urban planning programs and public-private subjects,7 such as regional development agencies and local authorities, rather than by the central government. In line with this argument, Erik Swyngedouw (2002) demonstrated that the mining sector in Belgium and the steel industry in Britain were both converted into leisure and tourist industries through European structural funds which bypassed national and regional powers and benefited local elites and public-private subjects. Indeed, the European Union (EU) ‘South Yorkshire Objective One’ programme played a major role in accelerating de-industrialization in Sheffield, by diverting funds from R&D and training in the manufacturing sector to the service, community and voluntary sectors. Similarly, the emergence of such private-public ‘local subjects’ as the Sheffield Economic Regeneration Committee, the Urban Development Corporation, and the Local Authority, accelerated the process of de-industrialization ‘from below’ by boosting urban rents and the leisure and tourist industries. This ‘re-scaling’ of the state depoliticized the industrial decline in Sheffield. Given the invisibility of the state in the current phase of postKeynesian capitalism, industrial workers and trade unions blamed the European Community and the ‘Brussels technocrats’, rather than the government, for the programmes of conversion and of social and economic regeneration and supported economic protectionism and antiEuropeanism. But casual labourers, petty capitalists and global corporations benefited from the process of regionalization ‘from below’. For instance, the New Deal and Welfare-To-Work schemes increased the pool of shortterm and precarious labour for local petty capitalists. Besides, the decentralization of economic policies to local authorities deregulated and

The ‘Return’ of the Informal Economy in Endcliffe |

49

informalized tax and employment. For instance, the PAYE (Pay-As-YouEarn) scheme, in which tax is deducted at source from employees, shifts the tax burden from the employer to the employees and fosters informal arrangements that overlap with or replace the wage relations in factories. In addition, the law grants so-called ‘family firms’ – firms with less than twenty employees – tax relief and exemption from the legal duty of ‘public accountability’ and from responsibility for workers’ welfare.8 This legal framework formally deregulates wage-labour and fosters smallscale capitalism and informal entrepreneurship that thrives on tax evasion, under-declared profits and casual labour. This framework also increased the regulatory power of local institutions – the Planning Department, the Environmental Authority, the Job Centre, and the Citizens Advice Bureau – in fostering local entrepreneurship and informalizing labour. Thus, in Sheffield the combined effect of regionalization, state re-scaling, labour and capital deregulation and extensive subcontracting made informal labour more viable and wage work less profitable and increased the permeability between these two realms. Industrial clusters are part of the history of Sheffield, but they also represent a new stage of capitalism characterized by the decline of middle-sized and integrated firms and the polarization of the industry into TNCs and small subcontractors. Small subcontractors are more efficient than integrated businesses because they externalize onto the workers and their families the capitalist functions of welfare and labour organization, including control, recruitment and training. They are also more flexible than corporations because they externalize the apparatuses of consent onto the community. As Burawoy shows, hegemonic capitalism relied on the workers’ ‘shop floor culture’, whereas current capitalist relations are reproduced through social institutions located outside the factory. Below, I elaborate on Smith’s suggestion that the current regime of flexible production shifts social regulation from the factory onto civil society and creates a state of ‘dispersed regulation’ based on ‘cultural factors’, such as trust, responsibility and shared values (2006: 622).

The Informal Economy Debate in Anthropology A number of studies on the informal economy claim that informal economic processes develop as a consequence of de-industrialization (Mingione 1985; Blim 1990). These studies emphasize the gulf that separates formal and informal economic processes, the increasing marginality of those people involved in informal or illegal economic activities, and the function of these latter in redistributing resources from the state and the middle classes to the socially disadvantaged. Other studies stress interdependence between formal and informal economic processes. Some authors (Standing 1989; Portes and Walton 1981; Leonard

50 |

Made in Sheffield

1998) frame this interdependence in the context of capitalist restructuring. Others frame it in the broader context of the relationships between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ countries (Quijano 1977) or between capitalist and noncapitalist societies (Meillassoux 1981). These authors claim that its exploitative potential arises from the fact that the informal economy comes to provide cheap, non-unionized, and flexible labour to main contractors in the formal economy. A third strand (Fortunati 1995; Redclift 1985) considers the domestic and informal economy as a form of capitalist appropriation of unpaid female and child labour through bonds of kinship.9 So-called ‘means of livelihood’ anthropologists (Hart 1973; Pahl 1984; Gershuny and Miles 1985) problematize the very distinction between formal and informal economy. For instance, Pahl’s (1984, 1990) and Pahl and Wallace’s (1985) focus on the way wage-workers actively combine formal employment in the factory and informal work in the household, in response to a shift from formal employment and the wage economy to informal and community-based work under the Conservative government in UK. Keith Hart’s seminal article ‘Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana’ (1973) shows that the formal and the informal economy of Accra, Ghana, West Africa are indissolubly linked. He deconstructs folk Western images of informal economy as being marginal and residual to show the rich social networks that support informal activities, the intense diversification of Accra’s informal economy and its redistributive effects. Hart’s article shows that ‘unemployment’ and ‘wage-employment’ are statistical abstractions that do not account for the variety of economic activities located between the wage and the dole. Indeed the official statistics on unemployment in Sheffield stressing the disappearance of the steel industry overlook the versatility and longevity of steel, its machines and labour, and their power of transformation between the spaces of ‘work’ and the spaces of ‘employment’. Steel is incorporated in durable objects of consumption that become raw material for the production of new steel objects at the end of their life cycles. Cars, beer cans and dishwashers have everlasting lives, because they are recycled into new goods when they reach the state of dead commodities. Local machines also have versatile and enduring lives. They can be made out of different mechanical parts, like the break stamp of Morris, which was made with an old file-cutter and a BT machine, or they can be broken down into smaller mechanical tools. They travel thousands of miles, adapt to different shop floors and change their value according to the contexts of their utilization. For instance, in the 1980s, ‘Brown Bayleys’ – a renowned firm from Endcliffe – closed down. Ned – a scrap merchant from Endcliffe – bought the company furnace and sold it to a Turkish businessman shortly after the closure. In the 1990s the furnace migrated from Turkey to Sweden where it was spotted abandoned in a field by the manager of UNSOR. The manager took the furnace back to Endcliffe,

The ‘Return’ of the Informal Economy in Endcliffe |

51

fixed it, and used it until a few months ago when the firm closed down and the furnace returned to Ned’s courtyard again. Wholesale scrap, overpriced rolling mills, and dismantled furnaces fly from Sheffield to Egypt or Yemen, following the trajectories of international development. The longevity and versatility of the machines is connected to the versatile skills of the local artisans, who ‘hand make’ broken mechanical parts, machine dies and precision tools and reuse them in the production process. Indeed Endcliffe can be thought of as a vast recycling space where the value of labour, machines and tools is constantly renewed through their conversion in the different contexts of production, exchange and consumption. The versatility and longevity of the local artisans and machines create enduring connections between the formal and the informal economy of Endcliffe and ongoing transformations of ‘labour’ into ‘work’ when its commodity form has expired. In Endcliffe tools produced become companies’ assets, unemployed acquire new value in the peripheral labour market and old mechanical parts are reassembled to be sold in second-hand markets. According to official statistics one in three people in Endcliffe is unemployed and 60 per cent of local employment is provided by the commercial and service sectors.10 These official statistics were confirmed to me by Ahmed, the officer of ‘Job Link’, a job placement contractor for the city council located in Endcliffe road. The son of a bus driver, Ahmed blames local unemployment on the residents’ stubborn refusal of jobs in the service sector and refusal to undergo computer training. The Job Link offers clerical jobs in leisure (bingo halls, shopping malls), services (callcentres, marketing companies), and community sectors but no jobs in the manufacturing industry. Local unemployed do not even bother to go to the Job Link because they believe that jobs in the service sector and leisure economy do not reflect the real economy of the neighbourhood still strongly rooted in the steel and tool industries. But these official views on unemployment hide the extent of informal work in the tool and steel industry in Endcliffe through which the workers of Morris complement their yearly wages of £7,000.

Informal Production The workers of Morris subcontract the production of the types of bits that attract low bonuses to external subcontractors and work themselves as subcontractors for other firms to supplement their wages. These informal productive networks run parallel to the main production process and take place without the involvement of the management among individuals who are socially connected in the neighbourhood. Hence, this form of subcontracting entails not only short-term economic returns but also longer-term effects such as investments in building social relations in the neighbourhood. The workers participate in the informal process of

52 |

Made in Sheffield

production in two ways. Firstly, decisions about outsourcing or about accepting outsourced work are taken following rules agreed upon by the whole workforce. The basic economic rule for this kind of transaction is to swap the production of tools with low bonuses for tools with high profits. This web of outsourced production among the different firms of the area is made possible by three factors. First, these small firms lack formal supervision on the shop floor and their workers can deal at the same time with the ‘formal’ and the ‘informal’ production process. Second, they are physically close to each other and located in Endcliffe, a notoriously offlimits area. Physical proximity increases the economies of distribution between producers, and their location in dangerous areas – generally avoided by people not belonging to the neighbourhood – minimizes the risks of visibility with regard to police, managers, environmental agents, dole officers, and tax investigators. Many subcontractors move to Endcliffe because there is no local check on noise levels, health and safety standards and working conditions and they can use unprotected and unsafe labour. Finally, this informal productive network is stratified along generational lines and embedded in kinship networks. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the small sweatshops run by or employing exclusively unskilled children,11 like the forge in Ford Road whose five teenage workers produce steel axes for Morris at a very low price. Dave, the twenty-two year old manager of the forge, is conscious of the exploitatively low margins that Morris imposes upon them, but he claims that he has to put up with them for the sake of ‘an old friendship’ between his father and Bob. He also claims that Morris provides them with many loyal customers and that Bob, due to his personal connections, protects them from intrusions by local police, fraud officers and robbers. At the top of the network are bigger firms, run by elder workers and self-employed artisans who act as subcontractors for big engineering firms by exploiting the labour of younger kin and apprentices. For instance, Phil, the brotherin-law of Tony, works in ‘Jonah and Albert’, a firm that in 1865 employed 700 workers for the production of steel guns and that today produces flat cylinders with a drop hammer and which has four workers. Inside the entrance framed by two crumbling art deco elephants, Phil operates a big 1850s Press Hammer, helped by four labourers. He negotiates the wages with the German owner, distributes them to his helpers and sets the price of the cylinders, according to market fluctuations. Phil is said to be the best presser in Endcliffe and is very well connected with local steel entrepreneurs and moneylenders. Bob uses Phil’s cylinders to replace the broken mechanisms of the file-cutter and he claims that they are very costly but that he buys them to maintain ‘friendly relations’. Thus, this informal subcontracting is not only based on short-term economic considerations, but also on the longer-term objective of cultivating social relations in the neighborhood. The second pattern of participation in the informal productive network of Endcliffe involves more restricted spheres of exchange and individualistic tasks. In fact, some productive

The ‘Return’ of the Informal Economy in Endcliffe |

53

transactions are restricted to the workers of the hot department only. This is due to the fact that the hot workers enjoy longer unproductive times during the working day than the cold workers, own the tools and control the labour of the apprentices. During the working day Bob produces tools for his personal clientele and often leaves the shop floor with his tools to service the conveyor belt of the chicken slaughterhouse located on the other side of the street or the oven of the old Fletchers bakery. Aside from this informal tool production, the workers of Morris are involved in casual labour for steel companies. Some of the forgers are employed off-the-books in local steel factories either as seasonal service workers (furnace bricklaying, maintenance jobs, cleaning, fitting) or as part-time contractors (in the coke cavern, furnace, or rolling mill). These contracted jobs offer no welfare or health and safety provision and are remunerated at an hourly rate of £2 to £3. This pattern of extensive subcontracting by steel corporations is widespread in the UK. For instance, Fevre (1987) shows that in the 1980s the British Steel Corporation (BSC) in Port Talbot extensively subcontracted production to local ‘sweatshops’. This subcontracting is a hybrid between outwork and wage-work. For instance, a renowned steel company produces steel bars in a rolling mill hidden in a derelict courtyard of Endcliffe which employs mainly contractors and which is locally known as the ‘British steel museum’. By separating the contractors from the core workforce and underpaying them the company cuts the production costs of the steel bars by 20 per cent. But they also develop with these subcontractors long-term relationships, shared working practices and coordinated production schedules and consider them as ‘quasi-firms’.12 Core workers stigmatize contractors because they push down wages and labour standards; marginal workers accuse them of stealing ‘their’ maintenance jobs during the summer shutdowns; managers dislike their independence and entrepreneurship; fitters complain of their careless use of the company’s tools and machines; some trade unions discount them from their official base. They work in confined areas and often end up having their ‘snaps’ in underground waste pools, around toxic ponds, or inside disused ovens. Endcliffe is a major centre for the recruitment of casual labourers for the steel industry in Sheffield and South Yorkshire for four reasons.13 First, because its residents are not in long-term unemployment and are more willing to accept casual jobs.14 Second, because they are highly skilled and are able to operate and repair the obsolete rolling mills, old furnaces and decrepit milling machines used by ‘modern’ steel corporations. Third, because local authorities allow these firms to operate with low environmental, health and safety and working standards. And finally, because the cost of reproduction of the Endcliffe workforce is extremely low, as I show in the next chapter. Some of the workers of Morris complement their wages with some building work as well as the related jobs of interior decorating, demolition, heavy gardening, painting and landscaping. According to official

54 |

Made in Sheffield

statistics, the construction industry employs 8 per cent of the male working population in Sheffield,15 but in Endcliffe the real scale of employment in the industry is much higher.16 Demand for building, gardening, decorating and painting skills come from the middle-class homeowners in the western suburbs of Sheffield, whereas re-landscaping is subcontracted by the city council. The building industry relies on the same social networks and organizational arrangements – long-term apprenticeship, piecework system and fragmented capital – as the local tool industry. For instance, Brian is a furnace bricklayer and also a building contractor. He hires the construction tools from the local ‘Hire Shop’ – after having received a loan from Mr Taher – and recruits his workforce at Khaled’s pub: Teddy’s grandson, Tony’s son or some other ‘Cliff lads’ willing to spend some weeks out of the neighbourhood and needing some ‘quick and easy money’. Sometimes the main contractors are local entrepreneurs involved in small speculations and redevelopments. But Brian works for faraway contractors, based in London, Norway and Sweden where he travels by van with his mates and from where he comes back with exciting stories of sex, wealth and friendship. These informal productive activities of the hot workers are not totally unknown to the owner who nevertheless does not openly discourage them, since Bob’s business networks in the neighbourhood are fundamental to increasing production for the local market when the orders of the stable customers of the firm decrease.

Informal Exchanges The formal transactions of tools produced in Morris constitute only a small fraction of the overall exchanges of objects that revolve around the factory. In fact the workers organize a variety of informal transactions embedded in the social texture of the neighbourhood. The most lucrative of these informal transactions is the scrap trade. There are two kinds of scrap traded in Morris: small scrap and machine scrap. Gypsy families control the market of small scrap – mechanical parts of machines, copper television wires or clasps. These family-run firms pay a sum of money according to the weight of the objects brought by customers, who tend to be tramps or local delinquents. Although the Morris workers claim that the scrap they sell is of a superior quality to the scrap traded by these firms, Bob often deals with such scrap merchants, buying mechanical parts and selling small scrap that he collects on the shop floor during the working day. Machine scrap – smaller cutters, twisters and hammers – are generally located in Bob’s fitting area and can be easily removed without Mr Greed’s knowledge. It is sold to Ned, a local scrap merchant. Ned made a fortune out of the closures of the Endcliffe steel firms during the 1980s and today he dominates the local scrap market. Ned is said to have good connections with businessmen and policemen due to their past

The ‘Return’ of the Informal Economy in Endcliffe | 55

common involvement in the business of contaminated scrap.17 Ned also subcontracts the supply of scrap to local merchants and employs several unskilled workers off-the-books such as ‘Shot-Hand’ Billy, who also sells to gypsy traders the small scrap that he smuggles from Ned’s warehouse. Merchants like Ned also trade second-hand machines between smallsized firms. This market is extremely profitable in Endcliffe. In fact, Ned buys machines at ‘scrap value’ and sells them as ‘second-hand’ machines, thanks to the repairs and servicing provided by experienced fitters like Bob. Bob and some other hot workers strongly rely on the scrap trade for extra income, and the manager and the owner of Morris do not discourage their informal transactions with Ned given the firm’s need to replace old machines with ‘newer’ ones. By disguising old machines as new machines, the owner inflates the firm’s depreciation costs and hence increases the company’s hidden profits. The forgers make professional hammers, chisels for dies and cutters, which they sell to local tool shops, forgers, carpenters, builders and DIY experts. Thus the tools made in Morris reach a variety of local informal markets before they reach the shelves of B&Q. Aside from these informal transactions of tools, the workers exchange stolen goods, fishing kit, drugs and cheap gin. These informal exchanges connect the factory to the illegal economy of Endcliffe, revolving around the local ‘swap-shop’ (a second-hand shop of stolen durables) and the pub, Khaled’s.

Sex Market: the Elysium The Elysium brothel faces Morris Ltd in Barren Street. It is open between 10 A.M. and 5 A.M. but work really only starts in the evening, with the exception of the work coming in from the Morris employees after the firm closes for the day. The owner of the brothel is a local Yemeni leader who also owns – together with Fara – the ‘Tandoori restaurant’ in Works Road. On the ground floor of the beautiful Victorian house there is a reception where the four teenage sex workers sit on a sofa watching TV during their free time. They live on the ground floor, where a long corridor connects a washing machine to the courtyard where the daily washing is hung out on a long yellow line on which the Morris workers constantly keep an eye. On two rooms on the first floor the workers meet their clients; and in the attic lives Farid, the housekeeper and supervisor. Clare (Teddy’s daughter) is the general manager. She deals with orders on the telephone, fields bad customers, markets the sex workers and collects preferences which she orders in a weekly schedule. Claire is also rumoured to offer her services to ‘posh’ people coming from ‘the West’. The four Eastern European girls working in the two massage rooms located on the ground floor receive only 20 per cent of their weekly revenues. The remaining 80 per cent is split between Claire and the owner of the brothel, after Farid’s wages and the household’s utility bills have

56 |

Made in Sheffield

been paid. The four teenage girls spend most of their non-working time sitting on the long sofa of the waiting room watching television. According to Claire the high turnover of the sex workers, who return to their home countries or become self-entrepreneurs, threatens the Elysium which is a family business competing with bigger commercial establishments. Small entrepreneurs are penalized by actual legislation that encourages corporate ventures and concentration in the sex industry.18 Claire says that the Elysium is like a small family and that she is more attached to the girls than to her real family. Half of Claire’s monthly income (£1,600) goes to her parents to cover her subsistence costs, against Claire’s will. In fact, often Claire shows up at the pub with a black eye, complaining to her friends that Teddy has stolen her salary again.

Khaled’s Khaled’s is one of four Endcliffe pubs where I went at weekends with four workers from the hot department. Due to the closure of local jobs, medical and welfare centres and their relocation in the city, Khaled’s is not only a space of leisure but also an economic and welfare institution. Mr Khaled came from Yemen fifty years ago to work in the Sheffield steel industry thanks to the help of a British soldier that he had met in Aden during the Second World War. After a period of political activism, he became shopsteward at the Brown Bayleys rolling mill and when the firm closed, he pulled together the money of the Yemeni community and applied for a loan to purchase the ‘Melters’ pub which he renamed ‘Khaled’s’. Mr Khaled is one of the community leaders of Endcliffe and he deals with funerals, marriages, legal claims and visa applications and employs about sixty Yemeni and non-Yemeni people in his local brothels, pubs, restaurants and scrap yards, plus a small group of young drug dealers who play with the pinball machine at Khaled’s until early in the morning. He lives at the top of the building together with Frida, his English partner, Fred and Lucy. The stairs to his home are visible behind a locked cage by the counter. At Khaled’s, the different strata of what used to be the local working class – now segmented into ‘unemployed’, ‘workers’ and ‘self-employed’ – mix together. The pub consists of three main rooms opening onto a central area where the local ale is served. One room is reserved for women to play pool; in another Yemenis watch television and play darts; and the third room is taken by the ‘Cliff lads’ for their snooker matches. In the past, Yemenis have shared many political and economic struggles with the local population and have been considered as ‘Cliff lads’ themselves. Nevertheless there are still invisible boundaries between the three rooms so that Yemenis rarely end up in the snooker room, the lads rarely bring their beers into the television room and women never engage in direct confrontation with the lads around the snooker table.

The ‘Return’ of the Informal Economy in Endcliffe |

57

The ‘unemployed’ are people like Steve who live only on state benefits. Steve drinks throughout the week and when he arrives at Khaled’s he has no money left to enjoy his night out, and is therefore cut out from the exchanges of drinks and jokes among the rest of the customers. The ‘unemployed on the dole’ are people like Shot-Hand Billy who add a variable income deriving from their casual labour to their state benefits. Billy can buy drinks and is therefore offered drinks and the same respect due to the ‘workers’. The category of ‘workers’ includes wage-workers with stable single jobs, wage-workers with multiple jobs and wageworkers claiming unemployment benefits. The ‘self-employed’ or ‘owners’ are ex-workers who used their redundancy money and local connections to deal in scrap, steel or coal. The workers are split between the respect they have for these self-made men and the distaste they have for entrepreneurs whom they call ‘middlemen’ who ‘exchange but do not produce’. Finally, the permanently disabled – like Terry the Gardener and Mad Jack – follow the activities of the pub in slight isolation. Nevertheless, they are respected for their generosity. In fact, because disabled people on income support cannot have more than £3,000 in savings for the whole year, they often spent half of their compensation money buying drinks for the lads. Khaled’s provides several welfare services. First, it functions as a local job centre where manual jobs are allocated and pay informally negotiated. This normally takes place during the snooker matches between the ‘owners team’ (composed of Ned, the scrap merchant, Mick, the steel merchant, Fred, the building general contractor and Joe, the coal merchant) and the workers’ team (Tony, Teddy, Brian and myself). At Khaled’s informal and illegal economic arrangements are also discussed. These include the transportation and storage of spirits, tobacco and drugs in the storage containers along the River Don, the trade of stolen goods and scrap, and the recruitment of children as drug couriers, builders or metalworkers. Khaled and the other members of the pub Committee – the elder and most influential representatives of the white and Yemeni community – administer the cash from the illegal economy and reinvest it in other businesses, give it as loans either to local workers who want to set up their own business or to local people in financial hardship or as ‘gifts’ to local policeman or tax inspectors. At Khaled’s people also exchange household services, such as plumbing, fitting and removing and negotiate their ‘equivalences’. Khaled’s also functions like a community centre. Single mothers working on night shifts drop their children and infants at Sally and Peggy’s line dance course on Friday and Saturday nights. Alf goes to Khaled’s every evening to have a chat with Jackie, the pub stewardess, and on weekends to play bingo and dominoes with Teddy, Brian, Tony and me. His age and lack of relatives – as well as the condition of his ‘rusted’ pacemaker that sometimes failed and caused him to have heart attacks – are constant concerns around the table when Alf does not show up at the pub. Jackie often offers counselling services to the bereaved and

58 |

Made in Sheffield

lonely while Terry the Gardener provides legal help on welfare issues and is always willing to share his vast knowledge of the intricacies of the DWP (Department of Work and Pensions) with some pub mates in exchange for a few pints. In the pub ‘the unemployed’ and the ‘disabled’ discuss common strategies of means test avoidance. People affected by ‘white finger’ exchange information on how to pass newly introduced medical tests and people on the dole discuss how to best give job interviews at the DWP or to combine informal work and benefits. Tony and the other Cliff lads ‘hate charity’ but are keen to play at Bingo, lotteries and betting that go to funding local initiatives such as summer trips, gigs and soccer matches. The homeless, drug and alcohol addicted as well as people ‘on the run’ are also offered shelter in the pub’s cellar which Khaled locks in the evening. In Khaled’s the social hierarchies that support the complex economy of the neighbourhood are reinforced through drinking and snooker playing. In local pubs people do not simply drink. They gain status by exchanging drinks with other members of the community. The act of drinking involves the public enactment of reciprocity and the denial of market transactions, which are restricted to the buyer and the steward. The exchange of drinks relies on credit, prestige and social connections and not on cash. Drawing on his social connections, Teddy is able to delay his payments by incorporating in the collective exchange the friends that he meets in different pubs. Skilled workers with high status rely on credit and delayed reciprocity, whereas wealthy contractors and self-employed reinforce their position at the top of the hierarchy of the neighbourhood through overt cash transactions and public displays of generosity. This ideology of reciprocity hides the unequal status of the members of the group and the uneven exchanges through which hierarchies between ‘workers’, ‘disabled’, ‘unemployed’ and ‘entrepreneurs’ are created. Snooker matches also reinforce group hierarchies. For instance, Teddy’s leadership of the group is visible in the crowd of people that gathers inside the room to watch his shots, in his theatrical way of bringing his cue inside a black leather case (like a gangster’s rifle case) and of distributing the coins among us to feed the timed neon light above the table. He is in charge of the diplomatic relations and snooker competitions with the local pubs, selects and disciplines the workers’ snooker team and deals in scrap and arranges business contracts with the owners during the snooker matches. The snooker room is a male space where muscles and gold rings are displayed, important decisions are taken and local politics animatedly discussed. Topics range from the recent death of a Yemeni labourer crushed under 200 kilos of steel bars at ‘Special Steel’, through the disappearance of the big carp from the Darnall fishery and the dodgy deals of its owner, to the decline of the heroin market linked to the rise in the consumption of crack among the local lads, to the increase in prostitution in the city centre which threatens the precarious survival of the local brothels. News of the neighbourhood – job

The ‘Return’ of the Informal Economy in Endcliffe |

59

cuts, fights, police raids, fishing matches – constitutes the core of Khaled’s political discussions and with the exception of Mad Jack people never get involved in ‘high politics’. Mad Jack is the only person in the pub allowed to make general political statements. When Mad Jack talks politics he swears loudly, smiles diabolically and challenges his audience by pointing his half finger at it: ‘I hope that I go to hell ‘cause I am sure that I will meet that … lady Thatcher – her face black like a miner’s face – and I will spend my eternity poking her arse with a big fork’. In spite of the fact that at Khaled’s women provide most informal social services and the younger lads provide most of the informal manual labour, white male elders and Yemeni community leaders control the local economy and the pub’s Committee where major economic and political decisions are taken. Thus, at Khaled’s petty capitalists consolidate their political power in the local community and their control over local young, ethnic and female labour. Through this informal control, they externalize the costs of production onto the local community and become successful subcontractors of global corporations. Thus Khaled’s pub is one hegemonic institution of late capitalism, which connects the local informal economy and the wage economy of global corporations through such socializing institutions as kinship, snooker games, gendered divisions of labour and the care for the elderly and children. Around the snooker table the conflict between the owners and the workers is ritualized and depoliticized and relationships of friendship, kinship and exploitation are confused through the informal authority of the leaders. For instance, Teddy’s allegiance to his snooker mates hides the broader interests he shares with the owners in the Committee room. The male elders’ control of the local economy and politics and their experience of the informal economy as increased agency clashes with the increased poverty that fragments and divides their households, as I show in the next chapter.

Conclusion Today, as at the time of Alfred Marshall, the economy of Endcliffe relies on networks of small artisan workshops with interdependent production, fragmented capital, domestic labour and horizontal social ties. These old fashioned economic forms re-emerged from the dissolution of the Keynesian project of ‘modern’ factory production and the informalization and deregulation of the economy by successive Conservative governments. Labour deregulation and extensive subcontracting increased the informal activities of the neighbourhood and the income generated by local small-scale firms at the expenses of middle-sized firms with higher welfare and labour costs, and hence they redistributed resources and stimulated entrepreneurship locally. But Pahl’s positive assessment of the liberating effects of the informal economy in Britain needs qualification. In fact, the wealth generated in the informal economy is distributed

60 |

Made in Sheffield

unequally in the neighbourhood. First, big steel subcontractors benefit the most from the deregulation of the labour market because they can rely on an army of non-unionized casual workers paid off-the-books. Secondly, petty capitalists like Ned command the labour of workers like Bob and Teddy through informal relationships cultivated at Khaled’s or through control over the capital and housing market. Thirdly, Bob and Teddy, through their involvement in the managerial function of the firm and their patriarchal authority, exploit the labour of younger cold workers and apprentices and of the teenagers of Ford forge. Fourthly, outside the shop floor, the elder workers coerce their children and wives into informal production and control the flow of money and labour of the extended families that have developed in Endcliffe following the council’s withdrawing of social and welfare provisions from the area. The informalization of labour dissolves the walls that separate the steel factories from the tool workshops and the spaces of home from the spaces of work. As a consequence, kinship relations penetrate into the progressively domesticated shop floors and family relations become increasingly commodified. In Chapter One I have shown how the ideology of the family and kinship shapes the economy of Morris. In the factories, the elder workers of the hot department organize production around kinship ties and control the labour of the young lads and apprentices. In the neighbourhood the clusters of small firms are stratified along kinship networks and the informal and illegal economy is controlled by the elder members of the pub Committee. In the next chapter, I show how patriarchal capitalism commodifies family relations in Endcliffe. Gavin Smith, in Confronting the Present (1999), suggests that ‘local economies’ increase the flexibility of global capital by providing informal labour arrangements that substitute the commodified labour contract. Drawing on Harvey and Gramsci, he suggests that global capital faces a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, returns on capital increase proportionally with its volatility, spatial diffusion, and temporal concentration. On the other hand, capital only acquires value in the physical form of machines and human labour which have a long economic life, are scarcely mobile and are resistant to changes. Hegemonic capitalism relies on institutions of capital valorization which are costly to set up and difficult to dismantle. But under the current flexible regime of production capital is valorized through the workers’ ‘culture’. The workers turn capital from an abstract notion into a living concept, incorporate its economic cycles into their personal life-cycle and create economic value through their personal and perishable assets – kin, tools, second-hand machines and social connections. Like Smith, I also suggest that local economies are mechanisms of capitalist socialization and that the informal economy of Endcliffe reconciles absolute and relative surplus maximization by rooting the global and volatile economy of steel in the local – small scale and family-

The ‘Return’ of the Informal Economy in Endcliffe |

61

based – economy of tool production. In fact, the informal economy is a tool of economic policy which tunes the local labour market to the fluctuations of the steel industry. By drawing boundaries between the formal and the informal economy, the state controls the flow of subcontracted labour between local subcontractors and the steel corporations. In times of economic expansion Keynesian states interrupt this flow by increasing social and welfare provisions to the wage-workers and their nuclear families and by ossifying the boundaries between wagework and informal labour and between work and home. In times of economic stagnation so-called neo-liberal states increase this flow by cutting welfare and social provisions, legalizing the use of casual labour, medicalizing industrial unemployment and blurring the boundaries between family and work. In Endcliffe, global capital materializes in recyclable and disposable assets – blacksmiths tools, Ryder Hammers, and second-hand machines – and in the social forms of putting-out, domestic labour, and patriarchal capitalism. As I show in Chapter Four, Endcliffe and other ancient cutlery districts are celebrated in local histories, industrial exhibitions and tourist information as symbols of Sheffield’s industrial heritage. These policies of industrial heritage have turned ex-industrial areas into leisure or residential zones for the benefit of new venture capitalists. Thus, paradoxically, in Sheffield de-industrialization goes hand-in-hand with the re-evaluation of its ancient ‘working-class culture’. But if leisure capitalists thrive on the celebration of the working-class cultural past, industrial capitalists profit from the workers’ reproduction of their past social relations in the present. In fact extensive subcontracting by steel corporations relies on the ancient working-class institutions of ‘the Cliff’ – the pub, fishing, patriarchal capitalism, extended families and the putting-out system – which reconcile domestic labour, wage-work and casual labour. When Teddy recruits cheap labour and disciplines his working mates during the weekly snooker tournaments he believes that he is increasing his leadership, entrepreneurship and grip over the local economy. In fact, he is reproducing the managerial and organizational capitalist functions from Morris into the neighbourhood. Besides, Teddy’s condition of exploited casual labourer in the steel industry is linked to his patriarchal grip over the unpaid labour of the family, as I show in the next chapter.

Notes 1. The Capital (ibid.: 368–74). 2. These workshops provide informal work to at least 800 workers, which is more than 10% of the formal employment in the metal and steel sectors according to statistics. 3. For an exhaustive discussion, see Smith (1999) and Narotsky (1997).

62 |

Made in Sheffield

4. Such as ‘Objective One’. 5. Such as European Action for Mining Communities (EURACOM); the METREX, representing metropolitan regions, and EUROGATEWAY, concerned with the promotion of small businesses. 6. In the case of the steel industry, the European Community for Coal and Steel (ECCS). 7. For instance, the Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) Enterprise Zones (EZ) and Simplified Planning Zones (SPZ). 8. Companies must make available their balance sheets for public consultation to the local Chamber of Commerce. 9. This strand variously follows up on Engels (1972). 10. http://sheffieldfirst.org.uk 11. The average age of the working children that I have encountered varies between 10 and 18 years. 12. Economist Ouchi (1980) calls ‘quasi-firms’ those subcontractors that develop stable relationships with their main contractors, which characterize the Japanese industrial system. 13. According to an informal source there are 10,000 contractors in the Sheffield steel industry and at least 2,000 men and women informally employed in the steel and tool industry in Endcliffe. Officially one out of three Endcliffe residents are employed in these industries (Economic Department, Sheffield City Council, 2000). 14. See also Westegaard et al. (1989). 15. http://sheffieldfirst.org.uk 16. In Endcliffe one of three people gets informal work in the building sector. 17. In the 1980s, the presence of uranium- and plutonium-contaminated scrap in the main steel companies fostered a series of investigations by the police and revealed collusions between marketing managers and scrap merchants. 18. See Day (2006).

Chapter Three

WORKING-CLASS HOMES


Anthropologists have emphasized the importance of houses in building and reproducing social relations. For instance, Lévi-Strauss famously described ‘house societies’ (1983) as societies suspended between modernity and tradition and revolving around ‘the house’ as a symbolic mediator between the realm of kinship and the realm of the state. Pierre Bourdieu (1977) claims that the layout of Kabyle houses reproduces kinship ideologies and patriarchal divisions of labour in peasant societies; Steven Gudeman and Alberto Rivera (1990) suggest that ‘homes’ are metaphorical instances of the Columbian peasant economy; and Jeanette Edwards (2000) shows how working-class identity in a post-industrial village of northern England is rebuilt around housing and neighbouring activities. Houses provide symbolical and material resources in time of war and social disruption. Tone Bringa (1995) argues that the Bosnian Muslims and Serbian Christians divided by civil war rebuild mutual social relations through the activity of ‘neighbouring’ and Frances Pine (1996) shows that the Gorales villagers resist collectivization by cultivating private identities in their houses. Similarly, the history of the houses of Endcliffe reflects the histories of their inhabitants and of the political economy of the steel industry. During the eighteenth century, the artisans of Endcliffe lived in cottages along the River Don together with their apprentices and families. The river was the symbolical centre of the house, where artisans and apprentices worked on water-powered grinding wheels, fished and collected iron ore and clay for making iron, bricks and pots. Bigger hamlets had their own crucible furnaces and workshops for the finishing of scythes and blades, generally performed by women, and separated lodging spaces for workmen and ‘little mesters’ (artisan capitalists), whereas in small cottages apprentices lodged with the artisan families. During early industrialization the artisans’ dwellings moved from the river to the city, following the invention of the steam engine, the illumination of the streets and the emergence of new urban markets of middle-class consumption. The socially dense and economically fragmented nature of the tool-making process was

64 |

Made in Sheffield

reflected in the insular and inward architecture of Endcliffe, dominated by alleys, courts and back-to-back houses. The courtyard was the focal point of these working-class houses. They accommodated pigs, domestic animals, tool workshops and privies shared by many neighbouring families. Courtyards mixed the smell of cooking with the smell of latrine, humans and animals and tool production and household tasks. They penetrated inside the spaces of the house through broken windows, collapsed roofs and missing doors and expanded towards the neighbourhood through cul-de-sacs, blind alleys and narrow lanes. This fragmented and varied structure of the back-toback houses reflected the heterogeneous networks of kin, young apprentices and petty capitalists who inhabited them and the combination of productive and reproductive tasks performed within them. The eminent doctors and Royal Commissioners of the Local Government Board were preoccupied by the promiscuous nature of the Endcliffe houses. In 1840 the Royal Physician George Holland linked the lethal grinders’ asthma to the proximity of their domestic workshops to their kitchens and sleeping rooms. Following the recently discovered ‘atmospheric theory’, he proved that minuscule particles of steel discharged from the grinding machines travelled through the atmosphere and penetrated into cooking substances and the clothes and skin of apprentices and family members causing their sudden deaths. In 1875 the Department of the Medical Officer of Health issued a survey of 5,549 back-to-back houses in Endcliffe which showed that the majority of them lacked windows and back doors and that their privies were shared by an average of twenty people and the sleeping rooms by an average of 5.2 persons. In addition to human overcrowding, the report documented that 112 horses, 60 cows, 211 pigs and 336 dogs were permanently accommodated in the houses’ courtyards and cellars. These irregular and heterogeneous working-class spaces conflicted with the standardized logic of modern urban planning that supported the emerging political economy of steel. In 1890, the Tory and Labour MPs and the steel entrepreneurs of the House Sub-Committee agreed to relocate 200 families of artisans into high-density company houses built in proximity to steel factories in the East End of Sheffield. High-density dwellings increased the return on housing investments and facilitated the disciplining of the working class outside the factory walls. The focal point of these new factory houses was the kitchen, typically stone-flagged and with a fire-range and a side-oven, where elder women coordinated the reproductive work of children and kin: cooking, pegging rugs, washing and mending clothes. At the end of the nineteenth century the urban spaces of Endcliffe split into two areas. The first consisted of a dense web of back-to-back houses owned and inhabited by networks of extended families of steel artisans, the second extended horizontally into the Lower Don Valley and consisted of the newly built dwellings for the proletarian families, organized into straight streets and a grid-iron layout, spatially

Working-class Homes |

65

grouped into regional areas, owned by local speculators or entrepreneurs and architecturally open to the glance of overseers and managers.1 Concentration in the steel industry, mass-production and the Wesleyan morality of the emerging Labour party pushed further towards the standardization of working-class spaces. In 1924 the ‘Abercrombie City Plan’ disentangled and separated residential and industrial buildings, tool workshops and steel factories and poor dwelling and respectable households, relocating the working class to residential areas. In the years that followed the plan, many back-to-back houses of Endcliffe were demolished and their residents moved to ‘garden city’ estates. The plan was supported by the Labour Party which believed that the working classes should be relocated away from the polluted industrial suburbs to live close to ‘nature’. The new focal point of these houses became the living room and the garden, where proletarian families cultivated their respectability through afternoon teas and the display of china, cutlery and domestic flowers. By the time the steel industry was nationalized, in 1967, the majority of the back-to-back houses in Endcliffe had been demolished and the residents relocated into high-density council estates, skyscrapers and high-rise maisonette flats. When Sheffield was known as the ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’ urban planning revolved around standard two-bedroom council flats built in cellular and pre-cast concrete structures. This architecture reduced the domestic spaces to their functional core based on the principle that welfare activities were now externalized outside the domestic unit. The architectural prototype of Sheffield Keynesian socialism was Park Hill Estate, built in 1960 to rehouse 3,500 working-class families. The modernist complex followed Le Corbusier’s dream of ‘streets in the sky’ and recast communal workingclass spaces in vertically expanding modular flats revolving around a central geometrical plaza with shops, pubs and schools. Sanitized kitchens were the focal point of these modular flats where women’s labour was individualized and mechanized – through Hoovers, dishwashers, and freezers – following their exclusion from the labour market. The Keynesian state also embraced the families of Asian and Caribbean migrant workers who were accommodated in new council flats built in Darnall and Tinsley, two areas only a few hundred meters from Endcliffe. From the 1980s onwards, the privatization of the steel industry and the dismantling of the welfare state by successive neo-conservative governments was accompanied by the privatization of council estates and the decentralization of the housing policies into ‘area specific’ regeneration plans. Under New Labour Endcliffe was further demolished, relandscaped with greenfield sites, shopping centres and high-tech industrial units and cut across by the new extension of the M1 motorway. Today empty council houses, boarded-up pubs and Victorian houses are still hidden between the MacDonalds, the leisure complexes and the Meadowall shopping centre. The rise of industrial capitalism can be read

66 |

Made in Sheffield

as the progressive standardization, sanitization and individualization of working-class homes and their separation from the realm of work. But the longevity of the back-to-back houses and workshops of Endcliffe and the residential stability of some of its residents show that working-class houses do not merely reflect the architectures of state ‘governmentality’. They are also spaces of political imagination where social relations are constantly reworked through the spatial reallocation of people, objects and animals. In the past, the labyrinths of alleys, lanes and paths, building extensions, illegal parking spaces, and built-in courtyards of Endcliffe challenged the standardized and modular logic of industrial capitalism, and its ideology of separation between the private and the public. Today, there is a paradoxical convergence between the flexible spaces of capitalist production and the dilapidated council flats, boarded-up homes and derelict Victorian buildings which accommodate the casual and flexible workforce of Endcliffe.

Working-class Families and Poverty In the Introduction to the book, I have discussed how the local aristocracy set rules of fair trade and apprenticeship in the metal sector and the Sheffield industrial bourgeoisie morally opposed the principles of scientific capitalism throughout the nineteenth century. The confusion between ‘morality’ and ‘economy’ during early industrialization in Sheffield was reflected in the policies of poverty alleviation of the local government. The Sheffield Board offered gifts, loans and advice only to the poor who were considered respectable according to a ‘character classification’ and employed them in workhouses and charities. But the modern factory system dislocated the moral economy of steel by turning the moral issue of ‘poverty’ into the economic problem of ‘unemployment’. The standardization of factory production led to new techniques of population management, welfare policies and statistical classifications – such as households, nuclear family and family head – which normalized kinship and personal relations. For instance, between 1830 and 1880 the social legislation that excluded women and children from factory labour also domesticated them into marriage and motherhood.2 Similarly, the Unemployed Workers’ Act (1905) outlined a statistical profile of the unemployed as male breadwinners living in nuclear households and stable homes.3 The extended families of artisans and tool-makers mixed foster apprentices and kin and domestic labour and wage-labour and hence challenged this statistical profile of ‘deserving unemployed’ and were disqualified as recipients of public welfare. Parish priests condemned the mixing of contractual and family relations in the artisans’ extended families; royal physicians denounced the unhygienic nature of their households-cum-workshops;4 policemen lamented the uncontrolled behaviour of their children outworkers,

Working-class Homes |

67

compared to the waged ‘boys’ of the factories of Leeds and Manchester. Thus, the statistical invention of the nuclear family not only excluded women and children from factory production, but it also curbed the putting-out system of the tool artisans centred on the labour of the extended family. By tackling unemployment, rather than poverty, local capitalists and state bureaucrats were able to synchronize the movement of people out of work to the requirement of industrial production. Under the Unemployment Insurance Act (1911) factory workers ‘temporarily’ out of work received National Insurance from the state, whereas the ‘long-term’ unemployed fell under the provisions of the Poor Law and were dealt with through the local Board of Guardians. This legislation created a twotier system of ‘poverty relief’. The artisans permanently dislocated by the mechanization of production were considered as ‘undeserving poor’ and used as casual labourers in local workhouses or enterprises, whereas the temporarily unemployed factory workers received state benefits. The Means Test legislation (1935) under the Labour Government increased this trend towards the nuclearization of working-class families and the polarization between deserving and undeserving poor. According to the legislation the claimant (i.e., male wage-workers) had the responsibility to give full details of the income of every member of the family under threat of prosecution. The total weekly income of the family was worked out and the amount by which it was greater than the Poor Relief was then deducted from the main claimant’s benefit. This legislation linked the average working-class income to the industrial wages of male breadwinners and hence criminalized domestic and informal labour. Besides, it gave new powers of surveillance and policing to the inspectors of the Unemployment Assistance Board – often of working-class background – and legitimated the intrusion of the state in the local community. Under the post-war regime of welfare capitalism, state benefits, occupational welfare and social services increased relative to the wage component of workers’ income thus, as Guy Standing (2002) suggests, decommodifying labour relations. In the context of industrial policies of wage equalization, collective bargaining and nationalization, welfare policies were constructed as a pact of generalized reciprocity between the state and the national collective worker. This pact of reciprocity between industrial workers and the state extended beyond the labour contract, and comprised free transport, childcare and education. The Keynesian state still targeted the nuclear household – made up of two adults and two children – as the standard recipient of social protection but it also opened the boundaries of kinship to the Jamaican, Pakistani and Yemeni families of steelworkers of recent migration. In 1979 the massive closures of steel and engineering works led to an unprecedented level of unemployment at 19.5 per cent. In the context of worldwide trade liberalization and labour deregulation, ‘job security’ appeared as the primary cause of economic crisis rather than its solution.

68 |

Made in Sheffield

Since the 1980s, successive neo-conservative governments embraced the mantra of labour flexibility through increasing job insecurity and personalizing and commodifying the social security system in three ways. First, people out of work are encouraged to take active and independent measures in order to re-enter the labour market. For instance, the Social Security Act (1989) places the onus of proof of active job seeking on the unemployed, reintroducing the old logic of the early means test legislation. Second, the Department for Social Security (DSS) encourages ‘independence’ and the centrifugal dispersion of the members of the family. In fact, as a general rule, single persons are given more benefits than couples and children from 16 to 18 years old living at home receive half of the amount of the benefits that they would receive as independent children. For instance, Teddy and Freda receive £51.40 in Income Support weekly per person because they have declared themselves as a ‘noncouple’. Had they claimed to be ‘a couple’ – or had they been married – they would have got a joint income of £80, with a net loss of £1,900 per year. Similarly Mark, the 16-year-old forger of Bowden Forge, receives £40 every week in income benefits. Had he declared that he was living with his parents, they would have received a Child Allowance of only £25.90 per week – a net loss of £1,000 per year. Thus a couple with children can ‘earn’ more than £3,000 per year by declaring that they are all independent from each other. For each independent child, the family as a whole gains £1,000 per year. Finally, married people on Income Support have their benefits reduced when they work, whereas non-married couples can add up their income benefits. Thus, under the current welfare system ‘individuals’ rather than ’households’ are the main welfare recipients and independence is a central attribute of the ideal citizen. Nevertheless, this independence is hard to achieve, given that welfare benefits provide little more than £5,000 yearly for every sick or unemployed individual so that people helped by the state are still struggling below the poverty line. In fact, even if the state covers the house rent, their running costs – gas, electricity, water – exceed their disposable income and when nursing and child-care costs are added they are constantly in the red. These needs for extra care and for spreading the fixed costs of living among several members ‘pull’ the family back together. In Endcliffe people on benefit can hardly set up independent households, because they still need help from their families. They are torn by contradictory experiences of the system that, on the one hand, highly praises social mobility, individualism and independence from the family but at the same time forces them into mutual dependency, resource pooling and cohabitation. Their domestic spaces are precarious, transient and split between centrifugal fissions in search of independence and cyclical returns when help is needed. The first cycle of dependency comes with childhood. Officially independent at sixteen, working children are rarely independent from their parental families because they are rarely entitled to public housing

Working-class Homes |

69

without parental consent. Besides, homeless children living in alternative public accommodation, such as B&Bs, are often forced to make some extra cash payment to landlords or to offer unremunerated services. The second cycle of dependency comes with parenthood, when adult sons and daughters return to their parental homes, with their children and partners, because they cannot afford independent housing and child-care. As a result, different nuclear families coexist under the same roof and with flexible kinship arrangements. The third pattern of dependence is linked to illness and old age. The people of Endcliffe prefer to care for their ill parents privately rather than rely on public care. For instance, Tony and Big Dave prefer that someone from the family takes care of their ill parents rather than having a carer from the city council in their homes who could easily find out that Tony is moonlighting and Big Dave working whilst being on the dole. Besides, there is a widespread local belief that ‘you would never put your mum into the hands of the social’. In spite of the ideology of independence and individualism, structural conditions have recreated the working-class patriarchal families, revolving around the elder male kin and a variable number of kin and relatives who leave the household temporarily. The history of workingclass families is strictly interrelated with the trajectories of state capitalism. Welfare capitalism standardized factory production, nationalized the economy, targeted nuclear households as recipients of public entitlements and put ‘the family’ at the centre of working-class respectability. Contemporary post-Keynesian capitalism deregulates labour, enhances flexible production, individualizes and customizes public entitlements and fragments working-class families through policies that encourage both dependency and atomization.

The ‘Post-kinship’ Turn Peter Laslett in his famous study of pre-industrial household structures in western Europe (1988) suggested that the nuclear family existed in England since the sixteenth century, thus confirming Hajnal’s (1983) and MacFarlane’s (1978) claims of the typicality of nuclear kinship structures in pre-industrial north-western Europe. The nuclear family was also a central preoccupation of early British anthropology, which looked at nonWestern societies through the eyes of Western kinship. For instance, Meyer Fortes (1949) shows its absence among the Tallensi of north-west Africa and discusses how extended families function as expanded political structure. Bronislaw Malinowski questioned the opposition between ‘typically’ Western nuclear families and non-Western extended families, ‘discovering’ the nuclear family among the Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Raymond Firth challenged the claims of the fragmentation of the extended family in Western urban and industrial contexts and showed the existence of extended kinship networks in

70 |

Made in Sheffield

working-class communities in Borough (south London),5 and Michael Young (1952) argued that among the working-class families of Bethnal Green, east London, different generations of kin clustered either in the same neighbourhood or in the same home, constituting domestic units similar to the Ashanti studied by Meyer Fortes. Young and Willmott’s (1957) follow-up study of family and kinship in Bethnal Green departed from the traditional anthropological emphasis on patrilinearity and emphasized the matrifocal and extended structure of working-class families and the network of mutual aid and support in working-class neighbourhoods. In their more recent study of the area (1973) the authors showed how housing relocation and gentrification fragmented the extended families and inter-household kinship networks of the local working class. The late Michael Young and his associates (2006) assessed the impact of the migration of Bangladeshis into Bethnal Green on the local working-class community. They found that the bureaucratization of the housing policy and the individualization of benefit entitlements under New Labour broke the extended kinship networks of the local white working class to the advantage of Bangladeshi families and middleclass ‘yuppies’. These studies of kinship in working-class communities challenged the assumptions of early anthropologists that extended families are a cultural feature of primitive societies by showing the existence of extended families in industrial contexts. But it could also be argued that these studies replicated these essentialist assumptions by exoticizing the working class and portraying it as embedded in timeless kinship and social patterns. David Schneider in his influential American Kinship (1980) suggested that Western folk models of kinship assumed a distinction between relationships based on ‘blood’ – for instance, that between mother and daughter – and relationship based ‘on law’ – for instance, that between husband and wife – and considered the former as more significant because they are rooted in ‘nature’ unlike the latter, which are based on ‘culture’. Schneider’s influential book led to a number of studies focused on the ‘cultural divide’ between Western kinship models, characterised by the separation between natural and legal kinship, and non-Western kinship that mixed these two realms. For instance, Marilyn Strathern (1988) suggested that the fluid kinship relations of the Melpa people of Papua New Guinea contrasted with the compartmental and individualized ways in which Westerners imagine intimate relations. Elsewhere she argued that English kinship models assume the primacy of the order of nature over the realm of culture.6 Janet Carsten (2004) recast Strathern’s opposition between ‘rigid’ Western kinship models and ‘fluid’ non-Western ones in terms of ‘degrees of relatedness’ and highlighted some Western contexts, for instance in the field of reproductive technologies, where kinship is imagined in fluid and malleable terms too. On similar lines, Jeanette Edwards (2000) showed the performative nature of kinship among the ex-industrial communities of Bacup, UK, where

Working-class Homes |

71

people produce kinship through the active practice of ‘neighbouring’ and conceive of kinship as hybrid networks of ‘blood’ and ‘residence’. Here, I combine these ‘post-kinship’ approaches with the anthropological tradition of structural Marxism which links ‘the work of households’ and factory work. The families of Endcliffe do not think about kinship as separation into ‘nuclear’ or ‘extended’ structures, but as a process of connection and disconnection taking place in-between these two spaces. Like the Melpa people of Papua New Guinea they rely on fluid patterns of relatedness and ‘permeable’ kinship arrangements, such as fostering, fissions, and cohabitation of relatives, friends and kin of different generations. They also collectively share parental obligations – child-rearing, the provision of food and shelter, education – rather than allocating them individually. But, unlike the Melpa people, they experience painful contradictions between the ideology of love, attachment and conjugal stability, on the one hand, and the ideology of individualism, independence and flexible labour, on the other. I connect the flexible kinship patterns and fluid notions of relatedness in Endcliffe to state policies and to structural economic factors. In times of contraction in the steel industry, welfare, housing and economic policies favour flexible households and workforces, whereas in times of economic expansion, they foster the nuclearization and the centralization of the workers’ relatedness. There is a growing body of American literature that suggests the reemergence of extended families following labour deregulation and the privatization of state welfare and housing provisions. For instance, Stacey (1990) revealed patterns of cohabitation, fictive kinship and extra family support-networks among the urban underclass that emerged from the collapse of the high-tech industry in the Silicon Valley of the 1980s. Poverty had shattered the belief in the ‘American way of life’, including nuclear households and stable marital relations and, ironically, forced postmodern families to draw on ‘traditional pre-modern kinship resources’ (ibid.: 252). Similarly, Carole Stack (1974) described the folk system of parental rights and duties and the complex patterns of fostering, reciprocal child-keeping, fictive kinship and cohabitations among working-class families of the Chicago council flats and Kessler-Harris and Brodkin Sacks (1987) discussed the re-emergence of extended households among working-class families following deregulation and feminization of labour in America from the 1970s onwards. My approach differs from these studies in two important ways. First, they assume unitary interests within poor urban households, whereas I stress the gender and generational inequalities that fragment working-class families. Second, they read extended kinship structures as forms of resistance against de-industrialization, whereas I suggest that the patriarchal ideology of the extended families of Endcliffe reproduce the current regime of flexible production. Besides, these approaches focus on ‘household’, whereas I focus on ‘relations’, discussing kinship and the economy – production and reproduction – as two

72 |

Made in Sheffield

interwoven domains where subjects emerge through the making of sensuous and material connections.

Governmental Families and New Extended Households Social policy studies and official statistics emphasize the collapse of the nuclear family that followed the closure of the steel factories in Sheffield’s East End. These studies tend to focus on the social fragmentation of exworking-class families made up of lone women working part-time in the service industry, children out of school, and absentee unemployed men. For instance, Hilary Bowman (2001) in her study of poor neighbourhoods in East Sheffield has shown that 43 per cent of local families consist of lone parents; 65 per cent of them are on welfare benefits and 80 per cent of them have one or two children under eighteen. The statistics of Sheffield City Council confirm Bowman’s study and in addition they show that 25 per cent of all children live in households with no earners, that the percentage of children who do not pass any GCSE is 25 per cent (compared with 3 per cent of the pupils of the affluent neighbourhoods) and that 30 per cent of them are homeless.7 Anthropologists have stressed the ‘disciplinary’ impact of statistics on kinship. For instance, Collier at al. (1990) claim that the statistical notion of households reproduces gender stereotypes and patriarchal divisions of labour, and Mitchell (1991) highlights the disciplinary effect of statistics on ‘household’, ‘family’ and ‘education’ under the French colonial administration in Egypt. But statistics also reveal interesting contradictions in official policies and government narratives. For instance the combined statistical facts that 60 per cent of local council flats are empty and that 50 per cent of the families of Endcliffe consist, on average, of 4.2 people – against a national average of 3 – suggest that family members might chose to concentrate themselves in the same house rather than live in separate accommodation. Besides, the fact that 25 per cent of all children live in households with no earners but only 12 per cent of these non-earner parents receive Income Support for their children might suggest that more than half of local children under the age of eighteen are in employment. The fact that only 24 per cent of the households on income benefit consist of ‘adults with children’, combined with a very high rate of child homelessness suggests that homelessness can be a joint family decision. Finally, the fact that 60 per cent of women in Sheffield of working age are in paid work, 78 per cent of whom are in the service economy, combined with the fact that 50 per cent of them are on income benefit, suggests the short-term nature and precariousness of female employment in the service economy. Inverting the disciplinary order of statistics, it can be claimed that male unemployment, homelessness, urban deterioration, divorce, and lone parenthood are the effects of state economic and welfare policies, rather than their source. In fact, my suggestion is that the dissolution of the nuclear family

Working-class Homes |

73

highlighted by official statistics can be read instead as the emergence of new patterns of flexible kinship in the context of extensive subcontracting and precarious labour in Sheffield’s East End. There is an interesting friction between the social entanglement implicit in government categories of domesticity – such as marriage, love and parenthood – and the flexible logic of contemporary capitalism and between official statistics that lament the disappearance of stable domestic institutions and social policies that encourage flexible domestic arrangements. Below, I describe the dialectics and internal contradictions between ‘attachment’ and ‘flexibility’ taking place among the artisan families of Endcliffe today.

Milly’s ‘Black Sparrow’ The ‘Black Sparrow’ is a boarded-up Victorian pub whose back-garden wall runs along the fences of the Sheffield Leisure Centre. Today, a scrap dealer owns the Black Sparrow and lets it to Milly, the 72-year-old exstewardess of the pub. When her husband died, Milly transformed it into a B&B and started to sublet rooms to a core of fixed tenants – old friends and ex-customers of the Black Sparrow pub – and to a variety of young immigrants and runaways who pay their £20 weekly rent and disappear after a while. The inside of the house is dark and full of old furniture: the long counter, the dart room and the men’s toilets with a long row of wallmounted urinals. Milly lives in the attic of the building; Jim, ‘Shot-Hand’ Billy, and Terry ‘the Gardener’ live on the first floor and Hamed and Georgy on the second floor. On the ground floor, Steve occupies ‘Room number 3’, the old snooker room. The division of labour in the Black Sparrow follows rules that have been consolidated over the last seven years of cohabitation by its tenants. Milly prepares breakfast in the morning, washes, irons the clothes and cleans the toilet. Steve repairs the electrical and mechanical appliances while ‘Shot-Hand’ Billy buys cigarettes and drugs from Khaled’s and deals with Bill’s swap-shop for the supplies of stolen goods, furniture and clothes. Old Jim walks and feeds Bob (Milly’s dog) and supplies the home with the fish he catches in the Don. Terry the Gardener cultivates his powerful connections with the dole office, thanks to his diplomatic savoir faire and his deep knowledge of the intricacies of the DWP’s bureaucratic rules, due to his permanent disability. Apart from Terry, who is well off due to his permanent disability allowance, the other members of the household are casual labourers who spend their time between the local steelworks or scrapyards, the dole office and the several pubs in the area where they start drinking early in the morning. Georgy worked at the scrapyard owned by the landlord. He was also said to work as a crack dealer for the Jamaican competitors who threatened the local heroin business. When he disappeared from the household, various rumours circulated at the Black Sparrow. Some claimed that the merchant killed him due to major economic disagreements and that he is now buried under the pile of scrap

74 |

Made in Sheffield

in the courtyard. Others claimed that Georgy found a ten-kilo bag of heroin inside the body of an old Ryder Hammer machine and that he migrated back to his country where he is now a renowned drug baron. The Black Sparrow is an example of a peculiar domestic arrangement in which individuals who are not related by blood or by law cohabit in the same household for a prolonged period of time and develop quasi-kin relationships. For instance, Milly portrays herself as the mother of the house and describes her relationship with the others as a family rather than a contractual relationship. Steve, who returned to Endcliffe after a troubled and wrecked life, appreciates Milly’s nurturing attitude, whereas ‘ShotHand’ Billy finds it oppressive. But in spite of their attitudes, all pub tenants agree that they are ‘just like a family’. These quasi-kinship arrangements force some of the tenants into emotional and economic dependency. For instance, the disabled, alcohol-addicted and elderly tenants of the Black Sparrow give Milly most of their welfare benefits because they consider the pub as a sort of caring institution, where they can find assistance in times of addiction, weakness or depression. In so doing, they become economically and emotionally dependent on Milly. Besides, in the pub, informal relations and wage-relations mix together. The pub landlord employs some of the young migrants who stay at the Black Sparrow in local scrapyards and factories. Having arrived in England illegally, these migrants have no money to pay the rent and are constantly in debt towards their landlord and in fear of migration officers. Unwillingly, Milly becomes the supervisor of these migrant workers during their leisure time.8

Teddy and Freda Teddy and Freda’s household is an example of a patriarchal extended family. Teddy – a forger in Morris – is 58 and lives in Endcliffe. He divorced five years ago when Freda, his new partner, moved in. Teddy and Freda met at Firth-Brown where Teddy was a forger and Freda worked at a milling machine. Freda stopped working as a miller when she discovered she had breast cancer. She is now stewardess at the Endcliffe Liberal Club on Saturday nights when women are admitted to the club, and works parttime at the milling machine of a local firm when Teddy’s income shrinks and the family faces serious financial hardship. Freda reconciles her parttime jobs with the tasks of cleaning, washing, child-care, food preparation and clothes mending for the members of the household. Freda also contributes to the complex network of exchanges of stolen durables (televisions, dishwashers, cars, washing machines, and bicycles) in the neighbourhood. She collects orders from her friends and places them with Billy, the owner of the local ‘swap-shop’. When the required ‘second-hand goods’ arrive she gathers them from Billy and distributes them to her friends, making small profits. Teddy’s daughter and son live with Teddy and Freda, together with their partners and children. They bring into the household money from their welfare cheques and incomes derived from

Working-class Homes |

75

part-time jobs. They also provide free labour for household provisions (painting, roof-repairing, building) and are employed in several business enterprises controlled by Teddy (landscaping, catering, metal-working, drug dealing, prostitution). For instance, Bill – Teddy’s grandson – works in a local forge, as builder for Brian (Teddy’s best mate) and at Khaled’s as a drug pusher. Fred (Teddy’s son) is a pusher and heroin addict and often disappears from the parental home in search of drugs or to avoid raids by the police. Clare (Teddy’s daughter) works as general manager at the Elysium brothel and unwillingly contributes her income to the household finances. Clare’s partner is a Yemeni contract worker for a steel factory near Scunthorpe, where he lives during the weekdays. Teddy’s house is a threebedroom terraced house with a small garden and a parking space for his 1950s ‘Highlander’ caravan. The caravan is set up with an en suite shower and a small heater and provides two extra beds for the temporary members of the family. When Freda and Teddy are going through a bad patch, Teddy moves to his cousin’s ‘Traveller’ pub where several rooms above the pub are available for family members and friends. Clare often sleeps there too, especially during the holidays when the pub is crowded and extra help is needed. Teddy’s household is an example of a patriarchal extended family consisting of couples of different generations that cohabit in the parental home. Freda and Claire constitute the symbolic and economic centre of the home, whereas men maintain loose connections with it and concentrate their economic and social activities in the neighbourhood instead. Teddy sees himself as a family patriarch, akin to the ancient cutlers of Endcliffe. For instance, he legitimates appropriation of Claire’s income by saying that the family is like a factory. It needs teamwork and scientific management. At the time of the cutlers, women and young lads worked for the household-head who was also the boss. These young lasses today are selfish and greedy. They don’t value the family and don’t feel any moral obligation to contribute to the family’s common pot.

With short-term and underpaid salaries in the service sector women are now struggling to reconcile their traditional domestic role and their role of economic providers; Freda, for example, combines heavy reproductive tasks and casual labour. In fact, as it happened during early capitalism, women are today the main workforce of flexible capitalism. But if early patriarchal capitalism defied the logic of local industrialists, today domestic labour reproduces the interests of global capitalism. When Teddy supervises the domestic economy and optimizes the productivity of his family, he is only ensuring a cheap cost for his reproduction to Mr Greed and sustaining the profits of a long chain of invisible capitalists.

Steve Steve is a lodger at Milly’s Black Sparrow, where he recently moved after having slept in a broken storage container by the Endcliffe cemetery for

76 |

Made in Sheffield

three years. Steve comes from a truly proletarian family. His grandfather worked for a few years as a ‘clinger’ (unskilled labourer) in a rolling mill in Brightside Lane, and after redundancy became long-term unemployed. During the post-war years Steve’s father worked as helper in a melting shop in Endcliffe, where the family lived. In the 1960s the family moved to Gleadless Valley, a working-class complex recently developed on a green suburban area overlooking the Don Valley. When the family purchased its first dishwasher, Steve, who was only 16 years old at the time, thought they ‘weren’t working class no more’. Steve started to work in 1966, as a second-hand smelter at the melting shop at Brown Bayleys. Unlike his father, he was ambitious and aimed at becoming a smelter before his thirties. At the time, the walls of Brown Bayleys bordered with the backyard of the Black Sparrow. Steve remembers the pub’s landlord serving beef sandwiches and ale to factory workers through the hole in the wall of the pub’s backyard. In 1974, when he was only 23 years old, he married Jackie and they moved to Woodhouse, East Sheffield. Steve worked hard towards the prospect of becoming first smelter, but in 1982 Brown Bayleys closed down and he lost his job. The smelters’ job prospects were shattered by the invention of continuous casting production. Steve applied for several other jobs, but given that he did not have any informal connections with local smelters, he found none. Steve’s dad had already died, and his mum lived on a spare pension and in a small house so she could not help them. Jackie’s family also could not be of much help because they lived on the other side of Sheffield and they had no money to spare of their own. Steve and Jackie eventually split up. Jackie kept custody of the child and the house and released Steve from any financial obligations. With the boom in the housing market, the council houses in the suburban areas where Steve rented were sold, and he was pushed further away. Spending all his dole money on alcohol and drugs he could not afford to pay the bills of the council home, so he moved to Endcliffe where he started to sleep rough. In Endcliffe, he had a few temporary jobs that allowed him to drink more, and to meet a few people like ‘Shot-Hand’ Billy and Milly, who had become the new landlord of the Black Sparrow. For almost twenty years now he has lodged at the Black Sparrow living on benefits and odd jobs. He says that he drinks to forget the past, but forgetting is difficult at the Black Sparrow, where he used to come as a factory worker. Steve’s history shows how badly proletarian families were affected by the closure of the steel factories in the 1980s. The wage-workers who, like Steve, moved to working-class suburbs in the 1960s, lacked a security net – constituted by friends, kin and relatives – to access factory employment and informal labour when the steel industry collapsed. Industrial closures pushed many of them into poverty and long-term unemployment. Steve’s history also shows the interconnections between kinship and political economy. The flexible and extended kinship networks of Endcliffe provide economic and emotional support to the redundant proletarians of the

Working-class Homes |

77

steel industry, but exploit them as casual labourers in the local tool industry.

Conclusion Anthropology, with a few exceptions, ignored the play of politics and economics on kinship and family ideologies. In this chapter I have rescued notions of nuclear and extended families from the oblivion of the ‘postkinship’ trend and have suggested that they can be used fruitfully to reveal long-term political and economic dynamics. In contrast to Laslett’s emphasis on the historical invariance of nuclear household types in England, I have claimed that ‘nuclear’ and ‘extended’ families are two structural types that vary according to economic factors and personal circumstances. Labour deregulation, job insecurity and de-industrialization encourage family fission whereas customized and individualized welfare and housing policies, illness and old age foster the regrouping of different ‘lone persons’ into extended families. These alternate movements make the separation of members of the same family from the parental home more transitory and the grouping of members of different families into the same home more lasting than one would expect. In Endcliffe loose social interactions consolidate into family relations, whereas nuclear families struggle to accommodate the contradictory needs for independence and mutual help. Kin are divided between the individualism that gives them economic independence – through casual labour or state benefits – and the relatedness that also reveals their co-dependence. Over a longer temporal frame, industrialization and the consolidation of the welfare state mechanized, feminized, individualized, sanitized and nuclearized working-class families and separated them from the realm of work and from broader networks of relatedness. Inverting this trend, deindustrialization and welfare deregulation turned working-class families into hybrid networks of friends, kin and parents fluidly moving between the spaces of ‘home’ and the spaces of the ’neighbourhood’. Under the current regime of flexible production job insecurity is reflected in the precariousness of kinship relations and in the difficult balance that working-class people have to strike between individual freedom and mutual dependency. In their flexibility the artisan families of Endcliffe differ from the proletarian families which I describe in Chapter Six. These proletarian families are centred on the conjugal couple and lack larger social networks – of kin, step-parents, biological fathers, relatives and friends – on which to rely in times of crisis or unemployment. I started the chapter emphasizing how the state produces kinship ideologies and social entanglements through statistics, housing and welfare policies and urban planning. Indeed, kinship imagination is central to the construction of modern political subjects because it bridges economic policies and subjectivity, ideology and biology and the

78 |

Made in Sheffield

conflicting experiences of dependency and freedom. In the previous chapter I have described how neo-conservative welfare and labour policies have domesticated workplaces and embedded capitalist relations in the informal economy of the neighbourhood. In this chapter I have shown the parallel process of atomization and commodification of family relations and the blurring between family and external social relations. Following Bott’s (1957) suggestion that working-class families have always been embedded in wider external social networks, their current extension might be read as a shift of boundaries, rather than as social fragmentation. But, as Frankenberg (1982) pointed out, Western families have difficulties in reconciling the members’ external social bonds and interests with internal bonds of conjugality, love and affection. Indeed, the emotional connections amongst the lodgers of the Black Sparrow or the members of Teddy’s households conflict with the ‘natural’ fact of their unrelatedness, and the values of independence and personal autonomy of the families that I have described here contrast with their mutual economic dependency.

Notes 1. Physicist Holland conducted an accurate study of residential patters in Sheffield’s East End (1841, 1865). 2. See also historian Robert Gray (1987). 3. The Sheffield Distress Committee describes the deserving unemployed as ‘workmen resident in Sheffield out of employment through no fault of their own. These men have to be householders men with families or single men having dependents on them.’ 4. George Holland in his Enquiry in the Manufacture of Sheffield (1860) claims that ‘the vice among the Sheffield children, especially between childhood and manhood, is aggravated by the system of letting out children to individual workmen, and rending them independent from parental control … the practice of allowing them to work by the piece, paying them for extra-work force them to work for long hours and to imbibe continued dust and grime. The habits of putting them to board and lodge in houses where no control is exercised over them induce them to imbibe errors agreeable to the passions’. 5. Firth (1956, 1964 and 1969). 6. Strathern (1992). 7. Sheffield First Website (2000). 8. In the past the master-cutlers were also the landlords of their apprentices, who lived with them. Today the role of tenant landlord is played by illegal gang masters exploiting migrant labour.

Chapter Four

WELCOME TO POLITICAL LIMBO


On 6 November 2002, after two days of torrential rain, the River Don broke its banks and flooded Endcliffe. Woken-up at 3 a.m. in the morning by the company manager, the workers of Morris rushed to the workplace, broke the safety seals put there by the firefighters, and entered the shop floor half-submerged with water, in an attempt to rescue the machines from the rising tide, risking being electrocuted or injured by the sliding machines. The firefighters who were piling bags of sand along the bank saw the workers breaking the seals and tried to remove them from the shop floor. A scuffle broke out and the police were alerted. The manager was interrogated first. The policeman was surprised to find out that the place was a shop floor and not a second-hand machine deposit. ‘How can people work with this Victorian machinery? Are the workers insured?’ he asked. ‘Does the place conform to health and safety regulations?’ he continued, looking at the electric wires floating in the water. Then he interrogated the workers. What were they doing there in the early hours of the morning? Why did they break the seals? Were they looters? ‘We are all unemployed’, Teddy said, ‘we were just helping Johnny [the manager] out. He is an old friend of our’. The policemen contacted the central station asking whether the individuals had to be questioned. It was 6 A.M. The workers sat outside the shop floor in dejection. A tide of dark greasy water halfsubmerged the shop floor and gently pushed chairs, tools, shoes, overalls, fans, photos and calendars into the River Don where they floated like dead fish. They were looking at the flooded workshop, fearing the arrival of Health and Safety, Tax, or Welfare inspectors and the prospect of yet another short time and another year without Christmas presents. Suspended between water and land, between work and unemployment, between legality and illegality, between day and night, they looked like ghosts waiting in limbo.

In this chapter I discuss how the residents of Endcliffe were affected by and reacted to ‘de-industrialization’, labour deregulation and changes in welfare policies made by the central government. I have already described how the process of de-industrialization ‘from below’ empowered local environmental agencies and planning departments, channelled Lottery and European money from R&D and industrial training to the voluntary and community sectors, facilitated neighbourhood-based social enterprises and created a new legal framework for private, large-scale urban developments. Economically these policies boosted the leisure, voluntary

80 |

Made in Sheffield

and housing sectors at the expense of the manufacturing industry and diverted welfare entitlements from the working class to ethnic, faith or leisure-based ‘communities’. Politically, the closure of local factories, the re-landscaping of industrial sites, the demolition of plants and their transformation into shopping malls and the relocation of the old residents made the local working class invisible. I have called the local workers ‘artisans’ because they do not conform to the traditional image of working-class ‘proletarians’. Unlike proletarians they are working-class individuals without a common economic and social background. Their politics is not ‘institutional’, in that it takes place outside the institutional context of the Party and the trade union, or ‘formal’, in that it is collective without being organized, or ‘ideological’, in that it consists of practical actions that are not crystallized into political theories. Besides, their political history is antagonistic to mainstream working-class history. For artisans never were revolutionaries and hence were never co-opted into the task of rebuilding society. The condition of the artisans resembles the condition of ‘political limbo’ described by Giorgio Agamben in The Coming of Community (1993). For Agamben the limbo symbolizes the contemporary human condition of individuals who no longer belong to any class or struggle to defeat or control the state, but rather they ‘co-belong without any respectable condition of belonging’ (ibid.: 86). Similarly, Paolo Virno (2004) describes the precarious condition of post-wage-labourers through the concept of ‘multitude’. Industrial capitalism relied on the ‘modern’ notion of citizens – set by Hobbes and Locke – as homogenous categories of ‘people’ and ‘labourers’. The collapse of industrial capitalism and the emergence of post-Fordism transformed ‘the people’ into a ‘multitude’, that is, a heterogeneous, precarious and sparse network of ‘individualities’. According to Virno post-Fordism was a reaction against the organized working class of industrial capitalism, which turned the collective consciousness of industrial proletarians into opportunistic, precarious and atomized labour individualities. According to Agamben, this condition of classless individualities joining into communities without claiming a common identity is potentially revolutionary. It breaks with the homogenizing tendencies of identity politics and leads to dynamic communities in constant self-renewal because of being opened to the flow of ‘the political’. In the semi-obscurity of that early morning, the workers of Morris really conformed to Agamben’s description of individualities in limbo, who ‘co-belonged without a common identity’. The proletarian steelworkers who experienced the ‘blessings’ of full employment, stable families and high lifestyle under the Keynesian state are experiencing the ‘damnation’ of unemployment, family breakdowns and poverty today. But these artisans of Endcliffe never had the ‘vision of God’ and hence never ‘precipitated into Hell’. But is the ghostly Victorian vision of the workers of Morris representative of the human condition in

Welcome to Political Limbo |

81

contemporary – post-industrial and classless – society? Are the fragile, insecure and uncertain lives of the workers of Morris potentially revolutionary, as Agamben suggests?

Local History of Working-class Politics During the nineteenth century Endcliffe lacked a clear-cut distinction between the ‘working class’ and ‘the capitalists’ and the ‘modern’ working class coexisted with a variety of subaltern classes. If some of the skilled tool-makers, cutlers, blacksmiths, rollers and forgers were fervent Chartists and Liberals and participated in anti-capitalist demonstrations and trade combinations, others shared the political views of the Tory Party and opposed mass-production, industrialization and the intrusion of the state into the economy. Many radical groups and revolutionary movements that emerged after the economic slump of the 1870s shared the craft consciousness and anti-industrialism of artisans and Tory capitalists. For instance, John Ruskin, the founder of the Arts and Craft movement, was a radical Chartist who believed that ‘the craft’ of the artisans of Sheffield challenged the deskilling and alienating work of modern industry. Ruskin had a romantic view of the tool-makers of Sheffield as pre-industrial ‘folks’ embedded in the beautiful landscape of the Yorkshire moors and engaged in a self-sufficient economy and strongly disliked the ‘modern’ crowd of steel proletarians whose prosthetic bodies had been corrupted by market ideology and urban decay. His fascination with these rural artisans was shared by the anarchist Prince Kropotkin, who believed that Sheffield’s cooperative capitalism – with its combination of farming and industry, patriarchal and domestic labour, urban and rural cultures – challenged the inhuman system of factory production.1 If the artisans symbolized the political ideals of Tory MPs, philanthropists and radical anarchists, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) supported instead industrialization and the proletarianization of craftsmen. But the Labour Party was itself internally fragmented between Communists and Liberals. The former held a revolutionary vision of a society liberated from wage-labour; the latter had a protestant ethic of workers’ improvement through hard labour and class organization. The steel trade unions were also internally fragmented along the same political lines. The small-scale manufacturers and skilled artisans were affiliated to the Sheffield Federated Trades Council, a confederation of light trades attached to the Liberal Party. Steelworkers from the Labour Party and the British Socialist Party were attached to the Sheffield Trade and Labour Council which later split into the Amalgamated Engineers Union (AEU) and the Iron and Steel Trade Confederation (ISTC). The AEU consisted of skilled workers and engineers with radical views, including women’s rights, pacifism, internationalism, collectivism and

82 |

Made in Sheffield

the abolition of the bourgeois state. The ISTC had militarist and nationalist views, supported male employment, industrialization and a strong state. The ISTC supported wage-bargaining, trade amalgamation and collaboration with the capitalists, whereas the AEU rejected them and liaised with the more radical and sectionalist skilled artisans. Thus, the radical politics of Endcliffe mixed revolutionary and reactionary forces, with the communists looking forward towards the liberation of society from work, the proletarians pushing for their integration into bourgeois society and the skilled artisans struggling to preserve the status quo. The local working class at the end of the nineteenth century was fragmented into three social formations: engineers, proletarians and artisans with different political languages, horizons of working-class action and positions in the capitalist labour process. The skilled engineers who controlled the production process and had high wages and good working conditions ‘performed politics’ in trade union offices, the public square and the city council. The proletarians who lacked control over the production process and who had precarious and hazardous jobs focused their political activities on bargaining wages and working conditions on the shop floor. The artisans who had been expelled from modern factories escaped formal politics and built social connections and loyalties at the level of the neighbourhood. Skilled workers talked the language of communism and internationalism, which they learned from newspapers, political pamphlets and popular books. Proletarians talked the language of the shop-stewards, trade union leaders and local politicians. Artisans discussed politics in pubs and private houses through the language of friendship, kinship and patronage. Thus a ‘modern’ political consciousness emerged mainly among the privileged working classes. Unskilled and illiterate artisans divided their working time between the workshop and the workhouses and remained dependent on the patronage of agrarian capitalists, Tory entrepreneurs and philanthropists and were coopted in their anti-modernist struggles. A united working-class front emerged after the great depression of 1920 with the founding of the Sheffield National Unemployment Workers Movement (NUWM) by George Fletcher, Leonard Doyle and Billy Woodhead. The baker George Fletcher was a charismatic member of the Sheffield Communist and Labour Parties with powerful friends among the aristocratic and political elite. When he met Lenin in Moscow as member of the national committee of the Communist party, his bakery employed more than fifty people and was organized according the latest American principles of scientific management. Billy Woodhead was a Cliff lad later expelled from the communist party for storing explosives, guns and steel bars in his pub’s cellar. The NUWM consisted of engineers, proletarians, artisans, outworkers and permanent unemployed. Blurring the interests of the ‘respectable’ working class and the undeserving poor, it demanded trade union rates of wages, state-sponsored workshops, occupational training and affordable housing for the unemployed. The

Welcome to Political Limbo |

83

NUWM also blurred the boundaries between parliamentary politics and grassroots activism. The workers, affiliated to the AEU and the Communist Party, pushed the NUWM demands through demonstrations, strike actions and industrial stoppages; the long-term unemployed and casual labourers through squatting, industrial sabotage, occupations of the Labour Exchange, the refusal of task-work from the Board of Guardians or of paying rent to the council. The council responded by imprisoning them and forcing them into hard labour. In the year of the national strike in 1926, when the Soviet revolution in Sheffield was believed to be about to happen, illegal gangs were said to be recruited among the ‘Civic Army’ of the Communist Party. The Labour party and the ISTC opposed the NUWM and pushed towards wage homogenization, trade amalgamation and the institutionalization of ‘wage work’ and ‘unemployment’ as permanent categories of the political economy. The Communist Party and the Labour Party split over the issue of war. Communist engineers and shop-stewards opposed British imperial ambitions in Europe through blockages, stoppages and strikes, whereas proletarians subscribed to the nationalist discourse which put industry and the workers at the centre of British expansionist strategy in Europe. With the ‘Trade and Dispute Act’ (1927), which made general strikes illegal and banned Communist Party members, and the Means Test legislation (1935) the Labour Party in power broke definitively with the Communist Party and with marginal class formations, such as the unemployed, casual labourers and artisans. Artisans rejected the modernist political rhetoric of the Labour Party centred on political centralization, mass-urbanization and industrialization and the Wesleyan morality of self-improvement and civic involvement of early trade union leaders. In exchange, the Labour Party targeted them through means test legislations, urbanization, labour standardization, taxes, health and safety regulations, red tape, compulsory education and working-class relocations. With nationalization in 1951 and 1967 and the creation of the BSC started the era of hegemonic capitalism based on harmonious industrial relations and working-class amalgamation. The centralization of wage negotiations under the supervision of national trade unions and employers’ associations brought together the interests of communist engineers and of steel proletarians whose holidays, child-care, pensions and superannuation were fixed through national agreements. Following pressures from industrial unions, national contracts established minimum earning levels for subcontracted employees thus co-opting the artisans and outworkers into the sphere of governmental labour policy. But in 1979 the 11,000 redundancies at BSC shattered the dreams of a united working class under nationalization. Under the direction of MacGregor the BSC bypassed national negotiation through lump-sum bonus schemes and suppressed central bargaining, developing multi-union negotiations. Following the dismantling of trade union rights under the Thatcher government, the AEU and the ISTC were forced, in different degrees, to

84 |

Made in Sheffield

subscribe to the ‘partnership model’ of industrial relations which entailed the collaboration with the capitalists on Human Resource Management (HRM). The privatization of the steel industry, the decline of the manufacturing base and of trade union membership, re-polarized workingclass politics. As I show in Chapter Seven, the ISTC focused on pension funds, industrial compensation, retraining and urban regeneration and shifted its militancy from the shop floor to the community. The AEU insisted on shop floor negotiation, national bargaining and strike actions. The artisans, who had been shortly before incorporated into workingclass politics under nationalization, resorted to their ancient forms of politics performed outside the trade union and party politics.

Folk Models of Class Contemporary politics reproduces this history of class fragmentation through the folk categories of artisans and proletarians. In Chapter One I argued that the workers of Morris reproduce these folk models of class along generational lines. Artisans have a hierarchic view of society and connect people’s class position to their ‘manual skills’ (defined as the relationship between humans and machines) and location in the labour process. At the top of their moral hierarchy are the skilled fitters, blacksmiths and forgers who are in charge of the labour process and of their machines. Skilled workers ‘do and undo’ the machines, ‘mend’ them, ‘look inside’ them, ‘listen to them’ and ‘read their book’ (instruction manuals). Like their machines, skilled artisans have ‘a mechanical attitude’ and are ‘precise’, ‘consistent’, ‘efficient’ and ‘reliable’. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the unskilled labourers and proletarians, whose labour is both antagonistic to and dependent on the work of the machines. Unskilled proletarians ‘cut corners’, waste material, vary labour intensity and ‘rush ahead’ of the machines in the pursuit of bonuses and personal enrichment. An undefined and blurred middle class surrounds this working-class area. Owners, capitalists, intellectuals, bureaucrats, traders, middlemen, managers and politicians belong to this blurred middle-class world made up of people with no manual skills and with transient, intangible, invisible and immaterial jobs. Unlike the manual workers whose political actions cannot be detached from their productive actions, middle-class people perform politics in dedicated institutions, such as the party, the trade union and the local council. The proletarians’ political spectrum is polarized between the ‘people above’, or ‘the middle-class’, and ‘the people below’, or ‘the poor’.2 Unlike the artisans, for whom class is an ascriptive and personal quality, the proletarians believe in meritocratic individualism and highly value money and wealth-producing activities. Unskilled and with precarious jobs, the core of their political identity is not located in production but in the realm of consumption and the family. Besides, their class position is

Welcome to Political Limbo |

85

not fixed, but follows the fluctuations of the market: when bonuses are high, their consumption styles rise to the level of the lower-middle classes; when orders decline they slide towards the lower-working class. During the working day, proletarians talk openly about politics on the shop floor and interrupt political discussions with jokes, collective singing and the making of political graffiti, whereas the artisans keep their political ideas to themselves. Artisans are ‘anti-political’ in their explicit refusal to take part in what they believe are corrupted politics; whereas proletarians are ‘apolitical’ in their pragmatic support of New Labour, whose policies of labour deregulation are beneficial to them. These ‘artisan’ and ‘proletarian’ folk models resemble the ‘traditional’ and ‘instrumental’ ‘working-class images of society’ found by Lockwood (1966) among the manual workers of Luton. According to Lockwood, ‘instrumental’ workers value their work in terms of income, have low emotional involvement in the firm and sharply separate the domestic realm from the realm of work whereas ‘traditional’ workers have a hierarchical view of society, a strong moral understanding of their jobs and consider the workplace as an extension of the domestic realm. Lockwood’s study importantly highlights the cultural fragmentation within the working class and related this to structural and historical factors located outside the shop floor. It shows that ‘instrumental’ workers are generally young migrants with dependent children, great financial pressures and a family background of unemployment and that solidarity develops mainly in industrial contexts with a history of high employment, residential stability and extended kinship. But the study overlooks how relations of production shape the workers’ folk political models. For instance, Lupton (1965) considers the workers’ instrumental behaviour – fiddles, marking out and theft – as a form of resistance against exploitative employers. He also suggests that the workers’ ‘instrumentality’ increased in high-tech and highly competitive sectors. Similarly, Michael Burawoy, drawing on a series of comparative studies of British, American, Eastern European and African workers, links the workers’ attitudes to the organization of the labour process – that affect the relations in production – and to governmental policies that regulate the conditions of reproduction of labour. In line with these contributions, in Chapter One I have linked the folk political models of the workers of Morris to the labour process and to wider structural factors. On the one hand, I have claimed that the opposition between ‘artisans’ and ‘proletarians’ is the outcome of their fragmented experiences of the labour process and of capitalist relations in production. On the other hand, I have claimed that these oppositional models reflect wider policies of labour and capital deregulation. But in this chapter I follow up on Lockwood’s suggestion that traditional workers have a political view which is respectful of social hierarchies, is based on connections between the realm of family and the realm of work and on ties of patronage and leadership

86 |

Made in Sheffield

between the employers and the local community. In Part Two, I will discuss in detail the political attitudes of the proletarians of UNSOR.

From Steel Town to Leisure Centre More than a consequence of industrial decline, the closure of the steel factories in Sheffield was the result of a power shift from the steel industrialists to a new elite of global developers, urban speculators and public bureaucrats. With the creation of the Sheffield Economic Regeneration Committee (SERC), a partnership between private businesses and the Planning Department of the City Council, the central government moved away from national policies of industrial regeneration and focused on local urban and environmental regeneration instead. Established in 1993, the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) was another form of re-scaling politics from the national to the urban level.3 The SRB assembles twenty different budgets (from Employment, Education, Home Office, DTI) under the local Environmental and Planning Departments and acts as a transmission belt for central economic and social policies.4 Secondly, in 1997 the government established the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) for tackling poverty in targeted ‘difficult’ areas and neighbourhoods through developing social entrepreneurship. For instance, the scheme ‘New Deal for the Community’ set £900 million apart for developing NGOs, housing associations, non-profit organizations and community enterprises in poor neighbourhoods. The central government also used European structural funds aimed at regenerating ex-industrial regions and accelerating the dismissal of the steel industry.5 Through this collaboration between estate agents, engineers, planners, eco-friendly councillors, global developers and European bureaucrats, Endcliffe was transformed from a ‘steel city’ into a ‘leisure paradise’. In its official documents the Planning Department described the industrial restructuring of Sheffield as ‘environmental improvement’. The 1981 city plan discussed the demolition of houses, metal workshops, scrapyards, labour-intensive steel factories and other ‘bad neighbour uses’ in Endcliffe as a way of ‘upgrading the Valley’s environmental needs’.6 According to the planners the closure and re-landscaping of industrial sites and redundant properties would attract inwards investments by ‘ameliorating the visual landscape open to visitors to the City arriving from the Motorway’ (1981: 20). The council promised to rebuild houses for the 800 relocated working-class families but it was prevented from meeting its promises by the Environmental Agency, which forbade residential developments in Endclfife on the grounds of land pollution. The new city plan gave life to the old dream of Patrick Abercrombie of clearing the city’s industrial heartland and relocating its industrial working class to the suburbs and like the Abercrombie plan it legitimated working-class relocation through the medical discourse of pollution. The

Welcome to Political Limbo |

87

SERC sold the industrial land previously compulsorily purchased to Paul Sykes, a Yorkshire businessman who with other venture capitalists transformed the Lower Don Valley into an extensive leisure area including the Don Valley Stadium, the ‘Centertainment’, MacDonalds, Meadowhall, and several retail centres. The transaction between the SERC and the developers included the agreement to relocate more residents from Endcliffe and to cut existing educational facilities in the area.7 The delocalization and ‘tertiarization’ of the economy through largescale urban development plans reflect a global economic trend but also a shift in mentality by the local political elite.8 Local politicians were often of working-class background and opposed the big corporations and the centralizing attitude of the New Labour government through ecologically-oriented and community-based politics. For instance, many members of the Sheffield Planning Department had a family history of unskilled labour and industrial accidents and participated in the restructuring of the local economy in the 1980s believing that the service, leisure and the community sectors were more environmentally friendly and empowering for the working class than the dirty and wearing jobs in the steel industry. But they overlooked the fact that the marinas, fishing clubs and hotels built in Sheffield’s East End ended up employing mainly non-residents and were built by bulldozing industrial firms controlled by the local community. The naturalization of Sheffield’s East End was accompanied by the historicization of the steel industry through policies of industrial heritage. ‘The machinery of industrial heritage’ consists of urban regulations,9 rezoning, compulsory purchases, new labour market and funding schemes for local communities which shift employment and value creation from the manufacturing industry to the estate and leisure sectors. A typical instance of this machinery is the compulsory purchase by the council of dilapidated – but still in use – industrial buildings and pubs and their conversion into listed buildings for luxury developments. Through the ‘machinery of industrial heritage’ the new political elite turned the fixed capital used by local artisans and petty capitalists – in the frozen form of derelict factories, old machinery, empty pubs – into new value as ‘urban rent’ for developers and leisure capitalists. Secondly, local authorities channelled Lottery and structural funds towards the creation of industrial museums, community centres, history societies, industrial archaeology societies, cultural heritage societies and natural history societies for the conservation of Sheffield’s industrial and ecological heritage. Accompanying the dismantling of small industrial units, job centres and the local council pressured ex-steelworkers to accept training and short-term jobs in the heritage sector. These policies of historicization of Sheffield’s industrial areas attracted new investors and boosted urban rents, with contradictory consequences for the artisans of Endcliffe. One the one hand, as old working-class residents, they became the living symbols of

88 |

Made in Sheffield

Sheffield’s ‘indigenousness’ and of its industrial heritage and the main recipients of public funding. On the other hand, as casual labourers in the metal sector, they became symptomatic of the city’s backwardness. Suspended between preservation and exploitation they took advantage of history to counteract the impact of de-industrialization. I focus on two contexts of artisans politics: the re-appropriation of spaces and the reappropriation of bodies.

Cutlers versus Developers The city council, private developers and leisure capitalists are interested in ‘local history’ in ways which generally conflict with the interests of the local working class. For instance, in 2003 the Neespend Forum – a group of businessmen and planning officials supported by local archaeologists and environmental groups – lobbied in favour of a £40 million project by a London-based group for converting the Neepsend Rolling Mill along the River Don into ‘wharf-style’ homes, offices and design studio spaces. According to a member of the Forum the project would bring ‘a renaissance for people in Neepsend and in the neighbouring area. We want some of the history to come back to the area, and for it be somewhere where people want to live.’10 Archaeologists from Sheffield University also supported the housing project claiming that it would revitalize the industrial history of the Don Valley, restoring the 1860 rolling mill and the site’s original cobbles. Darnall is another workingclass area which is under historical and financial re-evaluation. A consortium of developers and local businesses are constructing residential homes and 60,000 square feet of commercial space on the industrial site of Darnall Works with the help of English Heritage and European Regional Development Funds. The English Heritage chairman launching the new initiative claimed that the Darnall Works was a superb example of heritage-led regeneration in an area that made a crucial contribution to Britain’s industrial revolution. But he failed to mention that the redevelopment would benefit venture capitalists and relocate the Darnall residents. But working-class residents challenge these policies of industrial heritage, aimed at boosting urban rents and attracting venture capitalists, through history societies, conservationist groups, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) and wildlife societies. For instance, the Hallamshire Historic Buildings Society fought against the gentrification of the old city centre and helped local residents to challenge the decision of the City Council to demolish a 1930s villa in Ranmoor and replace it with twelve flats. An environmental group stopped plans for the conversion of a derelict industrial site in Deepcar into an estate with more than 400 new homes and the construction of a new three-storey block of flats, claiming that the site was populated by protected wildlife species. The struggle over the redevelopment of the

Welcome to Political Limbo |

89

Loxley Valley is another successful case of re-appropriation of workingclass history. Loxley was originally a stone-built village made up of farm buildings and cutlers’ cottages. The village is now part of Sheffield’s suburbs and yet separated from the city through the green belt of the Loxley Valley nature reserve. Dams, ponds, grinders’ wheels and disused rolling mills stand half-hidden in the woodlands, heaths, moors and pastures of the valley. Since the closure of the local brick factory, in the 1980s, the local valley has undergone depopulation and the closure of educational and health facilities. Developers and city planners made several attempts to build retirement homes, luxury apartments and exclusive fishing clubs in the area, but these failed due to the opposition of local residents. In 2004 the Loxley Design Project was set up by the council Policy Unit and the Peak District National Authority in order to redevelop the valley following a process of widespread consultation of parish and city councillors, architects, historians, environmental groups and local residents. Against the complaints by local ‘stakeholders’, which emerged during the consultation process, the Policy Unit decided to sell the greenfield land to developers for the construction of 500 luxury buildings. This decision was halted by a wave of mass-demonstrations jointly organized by local residents, the CPRE, the Ramblers Association, the Loxley Valley Protection Society and parish councillors. Tony, one of the workers of Morris, was an active member of the Loxley Preservation Society involved in lobbying against the council’s plan for transforming Little Matlock, a nineteenth-century mill in the valley, into a luxury hotel. Tony rents one of the company houses of the ex-brick factory located near Little Matlock. The photos of the guardian of the factory and his wife, who had rented the house until their recent deaths, still hang on the walls of his living room. Tony discusses his opposition to the council by recalling and idealizing the history of the cutlers who previously lived in the valley: the cutlers and artisans who owned this valley lived in harmony with each other and never exploited themselves or their natural resources. … This valley offered them iron ore for melting steel, sandstone for making bricks and waterpower for powering the wheels and they in turn respected the valley’s wildlife and nature. … It was only with modern factories and the spread of mass production and consumerism that the relationship between the men and the valley got worse. …Small producers were pushed out of the market and big factories overexploited natural resources.

Tony organizes meetings with environmentalists, local historians and parish councillors at his home to discuss the future of the valley. In one of these meetings ‘historical tour operator’ Jack Stack lectured the sparse audience on the industrial history of the valley. He claimed that the ancient cutlers represent the ‘true identity’ of Sheffield and suggested that Little Matlock should become an industrial museum in their memory. The museum, according to him, should employ local residents and artisans

90 |

Made in Sheffield

who work in small tool firms, like Tony. Tony’s political commitment to the Valley contrasts with his submissive attitude in the workplace, where he accepts overtime, short-times and wage cuts. He claims that ‘the problem is not the owner of Morris … he is a little mester, an artisan like us. The problem is the big multinationals which teamed up with the City Council to push us artisans out of our valley’. Tony believes that the luxury hotel in Little Matlock would push away working-class residents without creating jobs or infrastructures for local people. Casting themselves in the role of modern-day cutlers, re-enhancing the historical struggle between ‘little mesters’ and big capitalists and taking advantage of public community associations and public money, Tony and the other residents of the Loxley Valley mobilize public opinion against the city council and reclaim the valley against the interests of speculators, leisure capitalists, bureaucrats and developers. ‘Walking’ is another form of political action through which the working class reclaims urban and natural spaces. During agrarian capitalism Levellers, Diggers and Chartists opposed land enclosure through trespassing, land occupation and the destruction of fences, hedges, walls and signposts. Throughout the Victorian period, temperance movements, rambling societies and workingmen’s associations opposed the enclosures of the Duke of Devonshire, the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), the Gamekeeper Society and the Landowners Association, claiming their ‘right to roam’ in the countryside along footpaths, walkways and public routes. During industrialization working-class rambling associations and communist branches of the British Workers’ Sport Federation (BWSF) organized mass trespassing and actions against gamekeepers and private landlords, to obtain the right to access the moorland of the Peak District, granted in 1932. Today, the workers still struggle for their right to free access to nature against landowners, gamekeepers and private corporations. When environmental minister Michael Meacher drew an access map of the Peak District in 2002, local landowners ploughed up 100 acres of moorland in retaliation and set up agricultural businesses to retain private access to their lands. Duke, one of the artisans at Morris, and his wife Rosy are active members of the Stonington Ramblers Association. The association organizes marches against landowners, puts pressure on the CPRE to extend the access to the moorland (currently only 12 per cent of it is accessible to ramblers) and demonstrates against the National Trust Rural and the Development Partnership. After work, Duke walks among the grinding wheels, dams and weirs of the Rivelin Valley, only a few hundreds meters from his house. He sees rambling as a way of reclaiming the property of the valley against the developments of B&Bs, holiday cottages, camping sites, and organic farms supported by The National Trust, the rural lobby and the RDP. ‘Walking’, he says, ‘is my way of saying to the Duke of Devonshire [still the bigger private landowner in the Peak District] and to the business people that this valley belongs to the

Welcome to Political Limbo |

91

cutlers, it’s our valley’. In 2002 Duke took part in the re-enactment of the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass with other ‘artisans’ and hundreds of activist groups, including rambling associations, green groups, travellers, anarchists and Socialist Worker campaigners. Normally apolitical and acquiescent on the shop floor, Duke told me of the ‘revolutionary day’ in 1932 when a group of ramblers confronted and neutralized four gamekeepers of the Duke of Norfolk and trespassed into the forbidden mountains of Kinder Scout.

Fish, Fishermen and Steelworkers Fishing is another form of working-class activism. Unlike rambling, which was incorporated into middle-class leisure, fishing is a central feature of working-class identity. In fact in Endcliffe the history of fish and fishermen is strictly interwoven with the history of steelworkers. During agrarian capitalism the Duke of Norfolk had the monopoly over the waterways and wharfs of the River Don. He opposed the construction of weirs, locks and navigation canals for industrial transport because they threatened the drainage system that he built for agricultural yields and his monopoly over commercial transportation. During early industrialization medical officers were concerned by the lack of infrastructures for the treating and disposing of human excrements, which were released into the streets, streams and rivers of Endcliffe. In 1830 this concern about water pollution and the sanitary conditions of the working classes led the town industrialists to form the Commission for Sewers and the Sheffield Waterworks Company, two governmental apparatuses for monitoring and regulating the flow of excrement, fish and goods along the rivers and reservoirs of the Lower Don Valley. The industrialists used this new regulatory power and environmental rhetoric to target the tool industry controlled by the landed aristocracy. In the 1860s the Commission for Sewers proposed the closure of the steelworks of the Duke of Norfolk on the grounds that they released coke, coal and industrial waste into the River Don thus, killing salmon, sturgeon and trout. Later, it ordered the construction of artificial reservoirs to power the steelworks of the industrialists located downstream and the destruction of the grinders’ weirs and dams, claiming that they upset the natural flow of the River Don and endangered migratory fish. In their journey upstream, salmon faced low flow, wooden boards across weir crests, bits of dry river and static pools in which they died slowly. These artisans’ dams and artificial ponds destroyed the population of migratory fish, but created the optimal conditions for sedentary species such as roach, bream and perch to feed and reproduce and, hence, increased the stock of coarse fish for their personal consumption. When the Water Company demolished the artisans’ impoundments and privatized fishing rights, it not only deprived the artisans of their waterpower for industrial purposes but also

92 |

Made in Sheffield

of their reserve of coarse fishing and, hence, of their economic selfsufficiency. Industrialization involved a progressive process of enclosure of fishermen and fish into the designed areas of fishing clubs, artificial ponds and urban canals and the transformation of fishing from a productive activity into a leisure pursuit. At the turn of the nineteenth century, fishing was considered a public right but it was nonetheless legally restricted to stretches of rivers or still-waters bought or leased by fishing clubs, syndicates and steel companies. Outside these designated private spaces, ‘poaching’ was punished with imprisonment and, if the poacher resisted arrest, the death penalty. At the beginning of the twentieth century angling became a leisure pursuit stratified along class lines. The middle classes practised fly-fishing, whereas the working class practiced coarse fishing. Middle-class clubs developed internal regulations, codes of conduct and specialist knowledge on how to monitor pollution levels of water and wildlife on their private land. Working-class angling clubs were based in pubs, workingmen’s clubs, steel companies and mutual associations and amalgamated in fishing confederations with wide memberships. During steel nationalization almost every steelworker was a dedicated angler and amalgamated fishing clubs rivalled the industrial trade unions for financial resources and political power. Memories of the Sheffield railway station packed with anglers with fishing baskets and rods on Sunday mornings are common among the ex-steelworkers of Sheffield. With de-industrialization and commercial fishing, working-class angling became an individualized and commodified ‘sport’. Angling clubs located in suburban Sheffield offered daily tickets for fishing in artificial ponds and reservoirs to workers who stopped there at the end of the working day. Today, the angling industry boosts the urban rents of local authorities, the incomes of petty capitalists and increases job opportunities for ex-manual workers. Politically, angling is part of the restructuring of the steel industry ‘from below’, which I discussed earlier. In the 1990s with the creation of the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB), Local Environmental Agencies (LEAs) were put in charge of economic regeneration policies. They developed angling and leisure facilities on previously industrial sites, pushed for tighter environmental restrictions on firms, engaged in aggressive legal confrontation against industries and adopted an ecological and technocratic style of communication which emphasized the ‘negative externalities’ associated with the metal industry. When the Orgreave Coal & Coking Plant closed in 1992, the LEA commented that ‘[w]hilst this was a blow to the employment prospects of many people, ending almost 150 years of coal-related industrial activity on the site, it helped eliminate yet anther source of chronic pollution’.11 The widely-read angling journal ‘Catch’, edited by the Sheffield EA, is an instance of this environmental campaign against industry. The goal of the journal is to involve anglers in fishery management, teaching them how

Welcome to Political Limbo |

93

to monitor water and wildlife pollution, fishing stocks and water temperature in the proximity of industrial plants. People involved in fishery management join in environmental groups which target local firms through lobbying and public campaigns. Thus, the EA can be seen as an institution of de-industrialization ‘from below’ because it opposes local firms through environmental legislation, boosts the angling industry at the expense of manufacturing and develops forms of ecological activism against local firms. The restocking of the River Don with roach, perch and bream by the National River Authority between 1993 and 1996 gave credibility to the council’s re-branding of Endcliffe as an anglers’ paradise and on 3 January 1996, the Sheffield Telegraph celebrated the catch of a 3 lb 11 oz salmon in Endcliffe by a local resident as a happy return to the ‘time of the cutlers’. But the return of the salmon to the River Don might reproduce ancient stratifications among fish and fishermen. Clean water attracts salmon but kills coarse fish, which live in dirty water. Besides, the high status of salmon attracts middle-class anglers and fosters the privatization of rivers by leisure capitalists, as happened on the River Thyme whose stretches owned by the Duke of Northumberland were privatized after the arrival of salmon. Thus the history of fish is linked to the political and economic history of Sheffield. Fish and fishermen went together through the transition from agrarian capitalism to de-industrialization and struggled against the enclosure and privatization of nature by feudal lords, industrialists, venture capitalists and the City Council. Today fish and fishermen are still stratified along class lines. For instance, middle-class anglers fly-fish in the exclusive clubs in the Peak District or in the West End of Sheffield. Fly-fishing entails an intimate and reciprocal communication between the hunter, the prey – wild salmon, trout, and pike – and the environment through the use of an artificial fly floated on the surface of the water. For the individualistic and nature-loving fly-fishers, coarse fishing is a debasing sport because it is practiced collectively in domesticated places (artificial ponds, urban canals and redeveloped ‘brownfields’) with domesticated fish. In fact, coarse fishing ponds, rivers and canals are important spaces of working-class socialization. For instance, after work, Alan, a worker of Morris, fishes almost every day at the Holly Farm Fishery, located a few hundred meters from the recently built estate where he now lives. For the construction of the estate, the council flattened three ex-mining villages, relocated its residents and built the Holly Farm Fishery, renting it to a local businessman. Intricate tunnels still connect the three pits underneath the fishery and are the only trace left of life on the ground. Ex-miners like Alan go to the Holly Farm to socialize and remember ‘the old times’. They talk to each other from their fishing stations around the pond, and exchange beer, tackle and tips on the underwater geography. Fishing ponds and rivers are not only spaces of leisure, they are also productive spaces. For instance, the workers of Morris fish in the River Don from a wooden platform situated at the back of the firm.

94 |

Made in Sheffield

Unemployed men gather by the platform for daily updates on vacancies, temporary jobs and informal income opportunities from the manager. Fishing on the River Don is also used as a cover for trading drugs, scrap, stolen goods or sex and for fly-tipping. Besides, fishing reproduces class relations. For instance at Holly Farm managers sit in sheltered spots, where the water is warm and the fish abundant. They arrange rows of rods with small bells on the top that ring when fish get hooked and gaze over the pond looking for absentees and sick workers. They dominate fishing matches due to their monopoly of the best fishing stations and their ownership of several rods. Fishing also reproduces the social relations of apprenticeship. Fishing, like forging, can be learnt only ‘by doing’ and with the help of a skilled master. Apprentices perform menial tasks for their masters – transporting bags, pitching tents and breaking the ice when ponds are frozen – and illegal activities. In return for the apprentices’ services, the masters disclose their precious knowledge of fish, whose psychology is more complex than is commonly believed. Fish are lazy during the winter, nervous when it is windy and slow at dawn. When they make love, they stay close to the surface, whilst they swim deep if left on their own. Like humans, greedy fish live dangerous lives and often die swallowing hooks too big for their mouths. Like humans, they develop their memory as they grow up. In fact, young fish have only a five second memory whereas older ones remember with precision the dangerous spots where they have been hooked during their long and troubled lives. As for human life, life in the pond is in the hands of capricious external agents. Each time the fishery manager releases a new fish into the pond, new patterns of predation, oxygen saturation and diseases disrupt the lives of the current population Pallson and Durrenberger (1982) suggest that discussions about fishing among Icelandic fishermen reflect class relations and the wider political economy. The Icelandic skippers develop unequal power relations with their crews by emphasizing their personal skills, fishing knowledge and expert ‘intuitions’. Their ‘skipper model’ of fishing, which emphasizes individual abilities rather than collective or environmental factors, reflects the decline of the subsistence economy and the commodification of fishing catches. As for the Icelandic fishermen, Alan’s discussions about fishing reflect wider class relations. He considers fishing as ‘a public right’ and is very critical of the privatization, licensing and regulation of fishing by the LEA and of the individualistic, competitive and elitist attitude of fly-fishers. With his friends he sometimes organizes poaching expeditions to the exclusive angling clubs of the Peak Districts to protest against the high costs of rod licences for salmon and trout. Alan is also very critical of the fishery management ‘mafia’. He argues that the Environmental Agency and the Council use fishery management for profit and speculation. For, instance, the Council justified the removal of large fish stocks from the Shire Brook Valley nature reserve in 2005 on the grounds of public safety but the restructuring of the reserve was, according to

Welcome to Political Limbo |

95

Alan, financially motivated. Besides, the Environmental Agency did not close stretches of the River Don due to a mysterious pollution incident which killed 1,000 prime roach, but in order to curb illegal trading and to prevent fly-tipping. The British Waterways claimed that it turned down the bid by a consortium of four local angling clubs for the running of a new fishery complex in Bexley Park on economic grounds, but according to Alan it did so in the interests of a venture capitalist. Alan is also very critical of company angling clubs which promote alienating, impersonal and competitive fishing and of commercial fisheries where bailiffs clear the ponds of dead fish every morning. In spite of his working-class background and his ‘sympathy’ for the fish, Alan’s politics is more in line with the rural middle classes of the Countryside Alliance than with the ecological consciousness of green MPs and the EA. He is an active campaigner for the anglers’ rights and with the Countryside Alliance he organizes petitions and marches against the New Labour and the Green parties which oppose fishing and hunting. Alan and other anglers are involved in frequent confrontations with the anarchists and anti-hunting activists who occupy the local fisheries, releasing the fish into the rivers and sabotaging the anglers’ vehicles. In this section I have suggested that fishing is a political activity. First, fishing is used by the city council and local authorities to foster deindustrialization and to curb small-scale enterprises and the illegal economy among steelworkers. Second, fishing articulates working-class politics and reproduces class relations. Finally, fishing is an act of working-class re-appropriation of nature and of urban spaces against speculations, relocations, diversions and enclosures by capitalists, aristocrats, bureaucrats and middle-class environmentalists. More generally, fish can be thought of as political entities which mediate between the realm of work and the realm of leisure (or unemployment), between humans and nature, between the city and the countryside and between the present and the past. When Alan fishes at Holly Farm he reconnects with his fellow miners and with the invisible landscape underneath the pond, where memories of miners and memories of fish blur together.

Reclaiming the Body: Sickness Benefit Another form of working-class politics consists in reclaiming the body through industrial compensation and disability benefits. According to the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act (HASAW), which sets the base of health and safety law in Britain, employers have a duty to protect the health and safety and welfare at work of all employees ‘so far as is reasonably practicable’. This duty is further broken down by the law into: (1) providing safe plants and systems of work; (2) providing safe methods for the use and transport of substances;

96 |

Made in Sheffield

(3) providing a safe and well-maintained workplace; and (4) providing a safe working environment with adequate welfare facilities. The law places these duties on the generic ‘employer’, that is on companies, and not on company directors. Because companies have separate legal identities from the directors who manage them, company directors cannot be prosecuted for breaches of law. But sections 3 and 7 of the law impose statutory duties on the self-employed, manufacturers and even on employees. As a consequence, limited companies (i.e., multinationals) are rarely prosecuted for breaches in the health and safety law, whereas small companies are. Indeed, only twelve prosecutions for corporate manslaughter have been brought since 1965 in the UK and most of these for small companies.12 If the law de facto guarantees legal impunity, it nevertheless sets fines from a minimum of £5,000 to an unlimited maximum for industrial hazards deriving from the employers’ lack of care of duty. Paradoxically, accidents and work-related hazards lead to fines and compensations, but death at work is rarely prosecuted or subject to legal compensation in the UK so that for employers industrial deaths are less financially burdening than occupational hazards. Sociologist Viviana Zelizer (1997) highlights the historical interplay between ‘morality’ and ‘market’ in the field of compensation for children’s deaths. She suggests that industrial capitalism sacralized childhood and considered compensation for their death as immoral, and that this sacralization of child death led to the emergence of the current market for child adoption. Similarly, it can be argued that the sacralization of manual labour during Keynesianism led to the current legal system which sets compensation for industrial accidents but not for industrial deaths. The ‘Occupational Health and Safety Act’ (1985) fails to consider the directors and chief executives liable for manslaughter in case of industrial death but sets clear standards of industrial compensation and pushed further towards the de-penalization of industrial deaths and the commodification of industrial health. Industrial compensations also increased as a consequence of the tackling and commodification of unemployment benefits by the DWP.13 Under the Welfare-to-Work regime, benefits are not given ‘freely’ to citizens, but are conditional on their contribution, in terms of work, to society.14 This criminalization of unemployment benefit led to more people claiming disability.15 The increase of disability claims vis-à-vis unemployment benefit was also actively encouraged by the government because it disguised the real extent of industrial unemployment and supported the government’s medical view that industry is hazardous for the working class.16 This new occupational legislation which promotes and commodifies the issue of workers’ health and safety has ambiguous consequences for the workers. As I show in Chapter Six, the embracing of health activism by the ISTC legitimizes redundancies and plant closures.

Welcome to Political Limbo |

97

But this legislation also empowers the employees of small firms in Endcliffe who claim disability benefits as a form of political activism against the state and the local capitalists. Thus, paraphrasing Zelizer, it can be argued that the sacralization of the manual workers in the past led to the commodification of their body parts in the present. As industrial jobs disappeared and rolling mills, furnaces and forges were disassembled to be sold in the scrap market, steelworkers commodified their own bodies selling their body parts in the market for industrial compensation. In the past the steelworkers feared, disguised and stigmatized illness, whereas today they talk about it, display it, discuss it and quantify it. In fact, discussions among the Cliff lads at the pub often focused on industrial compensation. For instance, they endlessly talked about the children in the Northamptonshire area born fingerless or with webbed hands due to toxic waste dumped by local steel factories and of the legal struggle of their families for compensation; they celebrated the compensation of £10,000 given to a steelworker of a company in Hackenthorpe whose legs were disintegrated by molten metal and the £15,000 ‘won’ by a metal joiner who was permanently disfigured by an explosion of flammable liquid; and they all supported the £20,000 claim of the fishermen left paralyzed after being crushed by a broken dishwasher falling from a scrapyard into the River Don. In the pub, Teddy the Gardener and Mad Jack, who pioneered industrial compensation when he lost his finger in the Brightside pit in 1975, updated the workers on the market of body parts and on the equivalences between money and body parts. Up to £6,000 could be ‘earned’ for the loss of a finger; £26 per week for vibration syndrome; £53.80 per week for partial skeletal paralysis; and £57.65 per week plus child allowance for total paralysis. The local steelworkers highly value manual labour and consider jobs in the service sector as ‘disabling’ as illness or unemployment, thus, they claim disability benefits as a form grievance against both deindustrialization and the increase in the means tests of unemployment benefit. In the pub information on how to best fill in the disability questionnaire is exchanged. How long can they walk without getting exhausted? Can they bath themselves without the help of a carer? Do they collapse when they shop? DWP GPs are rated according to their background, track-record of failed patients and recurrent questions, and suggestions on how to ‘beat’ the machine that measures finger neural diseases or how to ‘perform well’ at medical assessments are exchanged. Nurses and GPs working in ‘area surgeries’ and in health-related NGOs help the local workers with their claims. Paradoxically, these NGOs and health centres were funded by the New Deal scheme with the objective of local regeneration and of developing social entrepreneurship in ‘exindustrial communities’. But they have become counter-hegemonic institutions where militant doctors and nurses voice their dissent against ‘the state’ helping the workers to maximize compensations and disabilityrelated allowances. In spite of the fact that most Cliff lads who claim

98 |

Made in Sheffield

disability benefit are truly affected by deafness, herniated discs, lung diseases, cancers, nervous diseases and depression, they nevertheless have informal jobs in local firms. By combining disability benefits and informal labour they escape the tertiarization of the local economy, the gruelling interviews at the Job Centre and, most importantly, preserve their manual jobs and class-consciousness.

Conclusion The so-called ‘post-industrial’ sociological paradigm suggests that deindustrialization in the North was part of a third technological revolution. This revolution was based on the transformation of the ‘old’ factors and technologies of production of industrial capitalism (land, manual labour and fixed capital) into the new factors and technologies of production of the service, leisure and cultural industries (information, knowledge and immaterial labour). The core political argument of this post-industrial theory is that the industrial working class was technologically dislocated by a new class of immaterial labourers. This argument is technologically fetishist because it assumes that technology is the motor of society and that class relations are the consequence of technology, instead of being their determinants. This post-industrial argument is shared by both Conservative and some neo-Marxist labour theorists. On the conservative side of the postindustrial spectrum, Daniel Bell (1973) claims that the knowledge economy challenges the property relations and the class distinctions characteristic of industrial capitalism and fosters autonomy, egalitarian social relations of production and diffused entrepreneurship as envisaged by liberal economists Joseph Schumpeter, Friederick Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises. Other post-industrial theories similarly stress the ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘creativity’ and ‘autonomy’ generated in the high-tech, service and creative industries. For instance, Richard Florida (2002) describes how the ‘creative class’ working in finance, technology, entertainment, journalism, high-end manufacturing and arts, is reshaping the future of corporate America. Unlike them, neo-Marxist scholars claim that the post-industrial economy entails new forms of class exploitation rather than the end of class struggle. They re-elaborate Harry Braverman’s argument of the standardization of intellectual labour under monopoly capitalism in the post-industrial context and highlight the alienation of ‘post-industrial proletarians’, ‘immaterial labourers’, and the ‘cybertariat’ who work on repetitive and wearing computer-based technology and with precarious, part-time and flexible contracts. To most observers, Sheffield fits into the stereotypical picture of a city which underwent a technological transition towards the post-industrial age. Its industrial shop floors and factories were replaced by high-tech offices and shopping centres; jobs in the service, culture and public sectors

Welcome to Political Limbo |

99

supplanted manual labour and the industrial working class was dislocated by a ‘virtual’ mass of immaterial labourers. This technologically fetishist view underplays two factors. First, that deindustrialization was not a mere technological process, but the result of compulsory relocations, plant closures, architectural conversions, labour deregulation, speculative land purchases, public–private developments, New Deal policies, European regulations and the means testing of unemployment benefit. These policies by the central and the local governments made wage-labour more precarious and invisible, rather than dissolving it. Second, that de-industrialization in the steel industry wiped out the proletarians. However, it also revitalized small-scale productive networks, putting-out, subcontracted labour and new forms of informal politics, including environmental activism, income redistributions, thefts, frauds and community activism. Paradoxically, the channelling of European and Lottery funds towards local communities, the fostering of social enterprises through the New Deal programme, the consultation of ‘stockholders’ and their involvement in public–private development projects, the co-opting of local residents into fishery, housing and health management and the valorization of Sheffield’s historical heritage, fostered new counter-hegemonic movements based on housing associations, history societies, wildlife groups, angling clubs, NGOs, community surgeries, Citizens Advice Bureaus, and social enterprises which oppose the very institutions which fund them. Unlike orthodox forms of working-class activism – such as strikes, trade union meetings, petitions and mass-demonstrations – these artisans’ political actions are counter-hegemonic but do not have a specific political affiliation. Their activism often blurs, in contradictory ways, with the radicalism of the middle classes who are engaged in similar civic struggles.17 For instance, in the meetings of the Loxley Valley Design Project, Tony and other working-class residents opposed the new development because they wanted to bring new jobs to the area, whereas the local bourgeoisie opposed it because they feared a drop in the value of their properties. Similarly, Duke felt uncomfortable with the radical green activism of some middle-class members of Stonington Ramblers Association. In other instances, artisan politics overlapped with radical activism. For instance, ramblers demonstrated together with Gypsy leaders, travellers, squatters and DIY activists for the right of travelling and of free access to moors and commons; and working-class anglers and members of the Countryside Alliance jointly targeted and violently confronted anti-hunt activists and environmentalists. These heterogeneous forms of working-class politics – incorporating middle-class environmentalism, anarchism, rural activism, direct action and traditional labour activism – seem to match the heterogeneity of class relations under post-Fordism as discussed by post-industrial scholars. For instance, it fits with Virno’s notion of ‘multitude’, with Agamben’s suggestion of the emergence of a single heterogeneous ‘planetary petty bourgeoisie’ and

100 |

Made in Sheffield

with Beck’s (2000) claim of the blurring of the boundaries between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the current ‘risk society’. But rather than reflecting a general trend in society artisans are a marginal social formation. They were marginal to the rise of the industrial working class during the age of Keynesian capitalism, and are unaffected by its fall under contemporary post-Fordism. Marginally located in-between the realm of work and the realm of unemployment, home and the factory, the market and the community and the world of politics and the world of ‘the political’ they resist the policies of de-industrialization, relocation, retraining and re-socialization that have so heavily affected the industrial working class. But focusing their struggles against global developers and the city council in the realm of leisure and consumption, artisans are more compliant in the realm of factory production and are sympathetic towards the capitalists whom they consider to be marginal, like themselves.

Notes 1. See, respectively, Ruskin (1898) and Kropotkin (1902). 2. Lamont (2000) shows that half of the white blue-collar workers interviewed identify themselves with the people above – middle-class professional and service workers – rather than within their same class category. 3. Brenner argues that the emergence of new forms of urban governance comes from state restructuring through ‘the politics of scale’ (1999). 4. According to Ward (1997), the SRB entails greater control from the central government, rather than greater local financial autonomy. 5. The European Objective I and IV frameworks also funded the reconversion of the Belgian mining industry. See also Swyngedouw (1996). 6. ‘Lower Don District Plan’, Planning Department, Sheffield City Council (1981: 34). 7. ’Lower Valley Supplementary Report on Land and Property’, Planning Department, Sheffield City Council (1981). 8. For other cases of large scale urban development, see Erik Swyngedouw et al. (2000). 9. On the ideology of heritage, see also Selim and Bazin (2006). 10. ‘Pressing ahead with the city regeneration’, The Star, 18 April 2003. 11. ‘Doomsday to the Dawn of the New Millennium’, Sheffield, Environmental Agency (1997). 12. www.tgwu.org.uk 13. See the Department of Social Security (DSS), New Ambitions for Our Country: A New Contract for Welfare (1998). DSS (cm 3805) and the Social Security Act (1989) 14. Guy Standing (2002) shows the conditions or tests under which benefits are granted, including the ‘age test’; ‘the employment record test’; ‘the job departure test’; the job-seeking test’; ‘the available for work test’; and ‘the job refusal test’.

Welcome to Political Limbo |

101

15. The study of Beatty and Fothergill (2005) argues that 40% of disability claimants in Britain are, in fact, able bodied unemployed who would work if they were offered the right job opportunity. 16. Meek (2001) suggests that the current government tolerates high disability claims to deter the statistical evidence of mass unemployment. 17. Elder (1993).

PART II

PROLETARIANS

Chapter Five

UNSOR LTD


Martin Seligman and associates carried out a series of experiments on dogs, these experiments provided evidence that a state of learned helplessness could be instilled. The outcome of the trial that is of interest to myself is that no opposition was apparent from the dogs, which were experimented on; in effect they had became passive. They had the inability to assert themselves. Although the means of escape were obvious they were unable to declare their intentions of escape. Lastly, they appeared defenceless to their surroundings; in effect helplessness had been induced from an exterior source, in this case the experimenters. It is my belief that this state of helplessness exists amongst the Unsor workers. Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. Marx, as cited in Sociology in Perspective, page 27. N.B. Underlining added. Charley Moody, UNSOR worker, coursework for the Sociology Course, Rotherham College

This chapter discusses the organizational change taking place in the UNSOR steel mini-mill following the merger of British Steel and the Dutch Hoogovens into Corus, the fifth-largest world steel producer. Shareholders and banks were preoccupied by the competitive position of UNSOR following the merger and pressed the employers to increase profits. In response, the employers reorganized the plant shifting to low quality production and flexible working patterns. This chapter focuses on two main themes. First, I explore the relations between the workers’ informal culture and their labour consciousness. On the one hand, a strong ‘shop floor culture’ increased productivity by smoothing conflicts and dissatisfactions within the workforce and by obscuring relationship of exploitation between the workers and the management. On the other hand, this culture created a class narrative through which they opposed reorganization. Secondly, I discuss how the health and safety activism of some of the workers unintentionally legitimated the closure of the firm,

106 |

Made in Sheffield

reflecting a broader trend of de-industrialization through the ‘medicalization’ of manual labour in Britain.

The Place UNSOR is located between the A57 and the M1 south-east of Sheffield in Bexley Park, an ex-mining village of about 9,000 inhabitants. With no fence or gate, it is surrounded by the Welbeck Estate and crossed by a public footpath leading to the Chesterfield canal, which runs by the company’s acid treatment pond. The white minimalist architecture of the company’s offices on the top of the hill contrasts with the Victorian red bricks and aluminium roof of the shop floor down the hill. On night shifts the cold northern wind and corn-flies, rabbits, ravens and the dogs of the estate’s gamekeepers pass through the breaks in the wall of the shop floor slowing down the operations of the workers for a short while. From the gatehouse Mr Garrett, the Health and Safety manager, monitors the CCTV images of the workers walking in the company yards. UNSOR was formed in 1994 by the electrician and marketing director of the English branch of the engineering division of an American multinational corporation operating in the aerospace and engineering sectors and supplying, among others, the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA), the American Ministry of Defence and Ford. Like all ‘mini-mills’ UNSOR combines ‘steel-making’ and ‘steel-finishing’ into an integrated production process. Integrated production gives UNSOR greater organizational and technological flexibility vis-à-vis the steel conglomerates. For instance, thanks to its in-house production of steel UNSOR is untouched by the aggressive pricing policies of the main steel producers. Besides, the small dimensions of its Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) allow just-in-time, small-batch production of both high-quality and lower quality steel and, hence, diversification between the aerospace, mining, automotive and building sectors. Unlike steel conglomerates operating on a continuous base, UNSOR is able to discontinue the smelting operations whenever the ‘buy’ option is more attractive than the ‘make’ one and thanks to the versatility of the workers and the machines of the finishing department in dealing with different customers’ specifications.

The Production Process and Formal Organization The production process of UNSOR is as follows. In the melting shop, steel scrap is gathered on the ramp by the lorry driver and loaded into the furnace by the crane driver during the day. During the night shift, the eleven workers of the melting shop melt 348 ingots of steel in three heats and during the day the fourteen workers of the rolling mill roll the ingots into billets on two shifts. The billets are left in the cooling bank for at least

Unsor Ltd |

107

four hours, checked and rough-ground by the six workers at billet conditioning. After another quality check, the twenty workers of the rod mill turn the billets into rods and harden them in the furnace. Some rods are cleaned in the nitrogen tank then coated and packed. Other rods are transformed into wires by the six wire-workers of Bay 2, then coated and stored in the warehouse. Finally, most of the rods are strengthened into bars and ground by the thirteen young grinders working on three shifts in Bay 3. After a final quality check, they are packed and loaded by the fork-lift drivers, weighed and registered at the gatehouse and driven away by the lorry driver. In addition to the line workers there are twentysix auxiliary workers and eighteen employees covering managers, staff and supervisors. From the technical point of view, the activities of the hot department – comprising the furnace, rolling mill and billet mill – are strictly sequential and linearly interdependent, that is, the tasks performed at the bottom of the production process can start only when the tasks performed at the top are completed. The speed of these activities is determined by the technical system, that is by the ‘heating times’ of the furnace and the set sequences of the rolling mills. Whereas in the cold department – comprising the three grinding bays – the finishing operations are mutually independent and the individual speed of the grinders is dictated by ‘the market’, that is by the orders and the bonus system. The company reorganization following the creation of Corus in 1999 emphasized this fragmentation between the hot and the cold departments. Due to investors’ pressures to increase the company’s cash flow, the owners concentrated on two business areas: the production of low-quality steel and the finishing of high-quality steel bought from outside. This decision entailed the under-utilization of the billet mills and rod mills, the intensification of production in the finishing department and the use of the furnace on night shift only and as an independent business area. The company made sixty redundancies, mostly in the hot department and re-trained the workers of the cold department to work in teams, extending their working hours. The decision of positioning the company on the low-quality market segment was detrimental because it brought UNSOR into direct competition with big steel-makers like Corus and destroyed the company’s competitive advantage that consisted in the in-house smelting of high-quality steel. This new strategy was implemented through wage, recruitment and organizational policies which intensified labour in the cold department and underutilized it in the hot department. As a result, the two departments had become, in the words of one of the managers, ‘two radically different organizational cultures’. The company’s Organizational Chart shows that the hot department has a pyramidal authority structure, with four supervisors and two managers located between the workers and the general managers. The cold department has a decentralized system of authority, with more experienced workers supervising and reporting directly to the general

108 |

Made in Sheffield

Figure 5.1 UNSOR Ltd organizational chart

manager. The even distribution of nominal wages conflicts with the polarized structure of the wages that emerges when the bonus system is considered. The average weekly bonus of the workers of the two rolling mills, which are constantly under-utilized, is £90. Whereas the weekly bonuses are £180 in Bay 2 and £225 among the grinders of Bay 3 who benefit from paid overtime. Besides, maintenance cuts in the hot department force the workers into prolonged daily breaks and extended – and unremunerated – working hours to catch up on production. Thus, the company’s real income distribution does not reflect the traditional industrial polarization between managers and owners, on the one side, and workers, on the other, but rather a fragmentation between the ‘hot’ and the ‘cold’ departments. The grinders of the cold department earn almost twice as much as the workers of the hot department and as much as some managers, supervisors and general staff. The fitters’ high wages can be related to their role as the ‘transmission belts’ of the employers’ policies on the shop floor through their manipulation of the technical system. Following the company reorganization they retreated from the hot department so that continuous breakdowns of the rolling mill forced the workers into a mixture of under-production and self-exploitation. The recruitment policy of the company attracts young and literate workers in the cold department and unskilled workers willing to work flexibly and on night shifts in the hot department. The job description of the ‘hot’ workers only highlights ‘mechanical skills’ as the minimum

Unsor Ltd |

109

Figure 5.2 Nominal and real wages at UNSOR Ltd

requirement, whereas the grinders must have four GCSEs, ‘engineering experience’, ‘good literacy and numeracy’ and an age of below forty. The language of the job description also suggests a different ethos of work. Cold workers must be ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘flexible’ and ‘market oriented’ whereas the hot workers must be ‘team workers’, ‘loyal’ and ‘reliable’. Real wages reflect the workforce’s educational and generational divide with grinders below thirty years of age earning almost double the amount earned by the labourers in the smelting shop where the average age is forty-five. Unlike the hot workers, who all live locally and are recruited through informal and familial networks, the cold workers are recruited through the ISTC or through advertisements in the local paper and live in the ex-mining villages between Sheffield and Rotherham. Specialist training was provided in the smelting shop and the grinding bay in order to replace the auxiliary workers made redundant with the company reorganization in 1999. This included the training of grinders on the forklift truck and of two labourers of the smelting shop on travelling cranes. Some workers of Bay 2 were also trained to set up the wire-machines without the help of the supervisor and the fitter. Non-specialist training involved the implementation of teamwork practices in the rolling mill and the coil mill, where most of the redundancies had been concentrated in the previous year. Enforced by the department supervisor, ‘teamworking’ meant that fifty workers had to perform the same amount of work that was performed by almost one hundred workers before the reorganization. Teamworking increased the ‘functional’ and ‘numerical’ flexibility of the workforce.1 But it also consolidated the workers’ informal culture and created unintended resistance, inertia and inefficiencies for the company. The company’s training policy was aimed at cutting labour costs in both departments. But in the hot department these cuts slowed

110 |

Made in Sheffield

down production and deskilled the workforce, whereas in the cold one they intensified it and upgraded the workers’ skills. Besides, health and safety management – which included the layout of the machines, safety standards and regulation, training, maintenance, manning levels and general production schedules – was used as a tool of plant reorganization. Health and safety policies were discussed between the Health and Safety manager (also the company’s General Manager), the owners, the Personnel manager and the trade union health and safety representatives in the meetings of the Health and Safety Committee. Thus, the political and collective issue of shop floor organization was debated in private Committee meetings and depoliticized through the medial language of employees’ ‘risk’, ‘obsolescence’ and ‘well-being’. The company’s organization policy (that I have sketched above) implemented the decision of the owners to over-produce in the finishing department and under-utilize the hot department and to split the workforce into two distinctive labour markets: the peripheral labour market of the older, unskilled smelters and rollers and the primary labour market of the younger, more literate and skilled grinders. The workers did not share the management’s view of the factory as divided between the secondary and capital-intensive labour of the hot department and the primary and labour-intensive labour process of the cold department, but saw themselves as clustered around distinctive ‘organizational cultures’. Below, I show how the naturalization of the workers’ ‘cultural differences’ into the firm’s formal organization through the tool of ‘Human Resource Management’ (HRM) contributed to their political fragmentation. When the company went into receivership Lady Bowen blamed the ‘rigid’, ‘stubborn’ and ‘old fashioned’ mentality of the hot workers (‘a tribe of its own’) rather than the owners’ myopic business plans.

A Normal Day at the Smelting Shop The smelting shop is detached from the rest of the company and is surrounded by corn fields and poppy fields. The activities of the smelting shop start in the morning when Mr Heaps collects the orders from the quality department and writes the list of alloys and scrap required for the night’s heating on the blackboard of his office. The crane driver loads the scrap basket with a big magnet, releasing a metallic rain of silver dust, razor blades and copper into the atmosphere. At the end of the afternoon shift (4 P.M.), the scrap basket and the alloys to be used during the night are ready by the furnace. The night shift starts at 8 P.M. when the three labourers prepare the moulds inside the pit and Phil, the smelter, switches on the furnace. The other labourers work on the pit, which is about fifteen metres long, three metres wide and two metres deep. Armstrong and Ian lay heavy steel plates at the bottom of the pit and fit hollow-squared refractory tiles into long pipes around the four runs of the bottom plates

Unsor Ltd |

111

by hand. With the help of the crane driver, moulds are stood up in the pit, narrow end down, and fitted onto the clay pipe. The labourers seal the joints of the moulds with wet clay climbing into and out of the pit hole while Ferrell and the crane driver strip the other half of the pit hole. Phil starts his job by checking the condition of the refractory bricks inside the furnace and the functioning of the furnace roof. Then he directs the work of the crane driver and makes sure that scrap is not charged too quickly, thus damaging the furnace. After the first loading of scrap he checks the furnace’s temperature and empties the slag cabin by lifting the steel plate at the bottom of the furnace with the help of the crane driver. When the plate is lifted he is suspended over a red mountain of liquid steel. At 10 P.M. Phil and Dave, the second-hand smelter, inject oxygen into the furnace with a long pump that they move from behind a mobile protective screen. The injected oxygen purifies the steel thus releasing thick yellow clouds of silicon in the atmosphere and creating solid crusts of impurities – slag – floating on the top of the melting steel inside the furnace. As the carbon content of the steel rises, the movements of the steel inside the furnace become unpredictable, violent and abrupt, with sparks and drops of liquid steel overwhelming Phil and Dave’s bodies. They shovel limestone into the furnace in order to increase the slag ‘like a sponge’ and when it is ‘dirty white’ and ‘crusty’, they break its surface with a pointed bar and direct the flow of slag into the cabin below. With no screen between them and the open door of the furnace, they alternate in front of it until the strong heat pushes them back aside. Now the ‘shovel dance’ starts. They load the shovel, weigh the alloys and throw them inside the furnace, disappearing in turn under a rain of liquid steel and following circular trajectories in order to avoid each other. The quantity of each load, the level of the bath and the ‘holes’ inside the boiling steel where the alloys have to land are constant worries during the ‘shovel dance’ that overlap with the worries about the trajectories of the furnace’s spits and with the activities of the crane drivers from above. After the second loading, Dave and Phil start their close observation of the surface and colour of the bath, the boiling steel and the height and density of the smoke gathering around the furnace in order to assess the carbon content of the heat. They trust more their sensory knowledge than the electricity absorption parameter used by Mr Heaps – the manager of the smelting shop – or the supervisor’s sample analysis in the polivac machine. As the night shift unfolds Phil and Dave monitor the colour, density and movements of the steel inside the furnace and make small adjustments to the level and composition of the bath with further shovelling of alloys and lime. When the steel moves inside the furnace in long horizontal waves, making a low and rhythmical noise and looking ‘milky’ it means that it ‘is killed’ and ready to tap. Its temperature is now 1,600°C. The readings of the sample analysis by the supervisor appear on the laptop on the small desk of the smelters room, generally confirming the smelters’ informal assessment. At around midnight Phil activates the

112 |

Made in Sheffield

alarm, the crane driver lowers the ladle into the furnace pit and Dave tilts over the furnace so that the molten steel runs out into the ladle. The labourers look at the molten steel running into the ladle in silence. For a few seconds, the whole workforce stands still. After the tapping, the crane driver carries the ladle over the first cluster of four moulds. The pitman operates the handle that fills the moulds from the bottom. The labourers load bags of sand and clay on their shoulders and throw them into the bottom of the pit to prevent the moulds sticking to the pit ground. For every bag thrown into the pit a small explosion covers them with sparks. They wear T-shirts only and move awkwardly back and forth, bumping into each other, laughing and swearing at the flying sparks. The second tapping takes place at 3 A.M. and the last one at 6 A.M. when orange rays of sun and a cold wind sweep into the smelting shop from the big holes of the corrugated aluminium walls.

‘Every Furnace is like a Good-looking Woman’ Apprentices start at the furnace with sweeping the steel pavement at the end of each heating. Apprenticeship at the furnace revolves around learning ‘the skills of vision’ and developing a sensory knowledge. For instance the high carbon content of special steel can be ‘seen’ in its yellow colour, light consistency, unpredictable and capricious waves, and ‘heard’ in its high peak and irregular noises whereas heavy and reliable movements, low and rhythmical noises and dark clouds of smoke in the atmosphere ‘signify’ the production of low quality steel. Vision facilitates the understanding of technical tasks in the production process. The first loading of the furnace starts when the steel is ‘blood’ and ‘cherry’ (700°C); the second when it is ‘orange’ and ‘yellow’ (1000°C); and the steel is tapped only when ‘dirty white’ (1600°C). Besides, a ‘skilled vision’ turns objects into mnemonic devices and gives them meanings that go beyond their practical function. For instance the order of the thermometer, shovel, gloves and slag bars by the furnace reflects the correct sequence of tasks to be performed in the melting process. Like work at the forge in Morris, smelting is learned non-linguistically or metaphorically. Phil teaches the apprentices to remove the impurities from the surface of the steel by directing their arms in front of the furnace and explaining that ‘furnaces are like capricious women: they are unpredictable, unconsistent and timeconsuming’. The skilled smelters must be patient, firm, self-confident and unimpressed by the furnace’s ‘mood swings’. They must never turn their back on upset furnaces as this increases their uncontrollable violence and ultimately leads to violent explosions. Through Phil’s metaphors, the apprentices memorize complex tasks, become aware of their bodily knowledge and develop a ‘smooth hand’ to ‘kill the fire’ in the furnace. The smelters’ continuous communication with the furnace through colours, noises, tools, metaphors and gestures and their ‘visual,

Unsor Ltd |

113

sensorimotor and aural’ knowledge (Keller and Keller 1996) of the production process contrast with the way the rest of the hot department perform and value labour. First, it contrasts with Mr Heaps’ pressures to reduce electricity costs and cut production times by overloading the scrap basket. Such cost-saving measures damage the furnace’s electrodes and refractory bricks and alter the steel bath.2 Besides, Phil and Dave’s metallurgical understandings of the ‘inner structure’ of the steel, in terms of ‘graininess’, ‘hardness’ and ‘tension’ conflicts with the ‘chemical’ assessment of the steel by the quality manager and with the standard specifications of the production department. According to the smelters work at the furnace cannot be standardized and ‘each heat is unique and unreproducible’. Finally, Phil and Dave have different ‘views’ from the furnace labourers. The smelters cannot see them behind the big steel screen that separates the furnace from the pit and from where their magnified shades are cast. But the labourers are constantly aware of the electric lights and violent explosions of the furnace whose heating time dictates their work at the pit.

Stories of ‘Gods’ and ‘Donkeys’ during Break-times The smelters have their breaks in an empty room that overlooks the furnace through two big windowpanes protected by a steel grate. A panel near the side window displays the levers to tilt the furnace and to open the roof and the electricity switches and indicators. From the panel, the smelters look at the back of the furnace through a lorry window mirror. By the desk, there are three chairs for Phil, Dave and the supervisor who rarely stops with the smelters. Mr Heaps sits on that chair in slippers and with tousled hair when he visits the ‘guys’ from his nearby home in the evening. Heaps and the guys share the same memories of the past glories of the steel industry, ‘when smelters where gods’. Trained a metallurgists he believes that ‘the work of the guys on the shop floor is more important than the work of the managers’. As a young manager he was mesmerised by the smelters when they arrived on the shop floor dressed in white scarves and bowler hats. He also admired their sense of hierarchy. ‘When smelters were gods they negotiated directly with the manager the price of each heat, planned their breaks and tasks, distributed the labourers’ wages discretionally at the end of the week and fined them when they showed up late, unshaven or drunk by the pit hole.’ Phil agreed with Mr Heaps. When he was a young smelter he was the ‘gaffer’ and earned the respect both of the guys and of the capitalists. Phil enjoys a very high status in the company because he is one the few smelters left in Sheffield who ‘hand produces’ steel. Phil, Dave and Heaps agree that the owners of UNSOR lack a ‘skilled vision’. Their strategy of abandoning the smelting of special steel increases short-term profits but destroys the company’s

114 |

Made in Sheffield

competitive advantage (the in-house steel production) and jeopardizes its future. They also believe that the furnace labourers are similar to the owners in their short-term vision and ‘market mentality’. But unlike the owners, who are motivated by greed and personal ambition, labourers are ‘like donkeys’ and are satisfied with repetitive and boring tasks as long as they ‘get food in their bowls’ at the end of the day. Mr Heaps and the smelters also share the same views on the company’s managers, who are trapped in partial and theoretical views and do not understand the overall logic of the production process. For instance, Ken Ashwell, the quality controller, has ‘an engineering mind’, Keith Williams is a ‘marketing man’ and Lady Bowen has an excessively ‘qualitative’ mind. Like the smelters, Heaps is critical of the way the other managers cultivate their status through expensive company cars, lunches in the canteen and bonuses and he takes his lunch breaks with ‘the guys’ instead. The labourers have their breaks in a dark room overlooking the field where the owners play golf during the day and the dog of the security guard chases rabbits and foxes at night. With red and tired eyes framed with grey-brownish faces they joke and listen to loud music in a room that smells of beans, fags, eggs and tomato soup. Middle-aged, married and with children, they are the only labourers of the firm to work at night and the only ‘semi-skilled’ employees. Most of them have worked in the steel industry for more than thirty years as unskilled labourers and still combine night shifts at the smelting shop with a second job during the day. During their break-times Armstrong often stresses that smelters and labourers have different ‘philosophies of work’. We have an instrumental and pragmatic attitude to work. We look for money and not for self-gratification … we are like donkeys. We avoid danger, risks and responsibilities and prefer a boring job rather than the risky business of the smelters … they have a hierarchical mentality, a conservative attitude and behave like gods in front of the furnace

he often complains during the night-shifts. The furnace labourers highly value social mobility and meritocracy and despise the smelters and the managers who reproduce differences based on status. They see the future of their jobs as linked to external and unpredictable economic forces and support the owners’ pragmatic focus on short-term profit and low-quality steel production. The company low-quality strategy allows them to save labour effort by reducing the clay on the moulds, economizing on alloys and overloading the scrap basket. The labourers and smelters’ reciprocal hostility originates from their conflicting positions in the labour process. The smelters control the labour process by maximizing the production of high-quality steel, whereas the labourer does so by maximizing the production of low-quality steel. The making of low-quality steel jeopardizes the knowledge of the smelters, whereas the production of high-quality steel intensifies the labour of the labourers. But instead of framing this conflict as a consequence of their fragmentation in the labour process they read it as a

Unsor Ltd |

115

sign of their different organizational cultures. The work of ‘the gods’ revolves around the technology of the fire and the womanly shape of the furnace. It is hierarchical and backward-looking and emerges from close communication between humans and machines and is valorized through public heroic performances. The work of the donkeys is utilitarian and ‘anti-social’. It involves stubborn resistance against the furnace, docility towards the masters, risk-avoidance and a selfish market orientation.

The Rolling Mill The rolling mill is located at the far right-hand side of the smelting shop. Every morning the wind blowing from the furnace covers the mill with ash, aluminium and black soot. Every morning Toby wipes the mill, chops off the extremities of the billets with a ten-kilo hammer and helps Alan to load them into the gas-fired furnace. At the end of the long furnace, a heavy door opens automatically, pushing out the heated ingot. In the panel room, Ash controls the two pincers that move the ingot sideways towards the first set of rollers on the mill. Between the ‘heats’, he sweeps the steelplated floor at the bottom of the furnace to gather the scale fallen from the ingots and spreads water and lime to prevent the ingots from sticking to the floor. The 1950s rolling mill is a mechanical bricolage of rollers, levers, teeth, bars and arms that the fitters put together during the mill’s long and troubled life. Cooling water and liquid mud fall into the cabin below with a pleasant waterfall noise. Illuminated from below, the cabin looks like a natural underground pool of dark water. From the lorry seat fixed to the wall the pool can be quietly observed. Charlie controls the rolling mill from the panel room above the bridge. With one lever he controls the vertical motion of the bridge and with the other he moves the tipplers of the small arms that turn the ingot over. One of the two electric motors of the bridge is broken so that ingots can be rolled only from the left to the right. Charlie sits on a lorry seat that has been welded onto a round steel base. He is surrounded by a stereo, a mug, an ashtray filled with halfsmoked cigarettes, a small desk to accommodate his sociology manuals, a small wooden cabinet filled with half-drunk bottles of whisky and an oil barrel for additional guests. As the red ingot passes through the rollers, it draws out and accelerates its movements on the bridge. Each time the ingot is pushed back by the vertical motion of the bridge Roger (the cogger) turns it with diamond-shaped tongs keeping his legs open above the red ingot. When the ingot is rolled into billets about four metres long, a conveyor belt transports it into Jack’s panel, where he saws its split end off with a laser flame. Classical music from Jack’s radio and the noise of the laser flame often blend together with a dramatic effect. Every ten billets, he loads a split end on a smaller conveyor belt that leads into the quality controller’s test room. The main conveyor belt stocks the red billets onto a mechanical ladder that releases the billets into the company yard every

116 |

Made in Sheffield

half hour. From here, Ian loads them on the fork-lift truck and drives them to the billet-conditioning department where they are checked and ground with pneumatic hammer tools by Trevor, John and David. From the conditioning department, Ian loads them back on the fork-lift truck and unloads them in the company yard, where they slowly cool down. Since the company reorganization the rolling mill has the marginal role of linking the smelting and the finishing processes when special steel is produced in-house. With a weekly production of 348 ingots, the mill is heavily under-utilized and cuts in investments and maintenance create continuous breakdowns that force the rollers into prolonged pauses in the break-room and extra unpaid labour at the end of the day. They supplement their weekly salary of £270 with contracted jobs for the company outside the working hours. Due to the liminal status of both workers and contractors, their marginal role in the production process and their peripheral location they enjoy a peaceful isolation from the rest of the workforce. Formally the department is organized through the simple supervision of Alan, the most senior worker. But Alan, due to retire soon and affected by high blood pressure, informally delegates the supervision of the department to Charlie, a many-times-divorced ex-army policeman in the Falklands recently turned Christian. Charlie motivates the workforce with charisma and dedication. He supervises the shop floor, controls the equipment, keeps the production records, negotiates the manning levels with the fitters and distributes overtimes and contract work equally among the workers making them rotate on different machines in order to minimize boredom. In his attempts to push up production levels, he constantly urges the fitters to change the rollers of the mill and repair the motor of the bridge, and Mr Garrett to substitute the chain of the crane and the faulty door of the furnace. With their hazardous working practices and extreme political visions, the workers of the rolling mill are considered ‘the dangerous class’ of UNSOR. Unlike the breaks at the smelting shop, which highlight divisions between the smelters and the labourers, the breaks at the rolling mill reveal the social cohesion of the group of rollers. All divorced or unmarried, the rollers criticize the ‘bourgeois’ mentality of the younger workers who ‘opted out’ to pay for their home mortgages and family expenses.3 For instance, Charlie often repeats the story of ‘the young chap who got a five quid increase of salary and started to come to work with a briefcase’. During the breaks the rollers animatedly discuss the politics of the shop floor, with Charlie using terms – such as ‘alienation’, ‘global division of labour’, and ‘class-consciousness’ – which he learned at the a sociology course at Rotherham College. They are critical of the ‘formal politics’ taking place outside the factory and controlled by the ‘Thatcherite’ New Labour government and the industrial trade unions. They believe that the ISTC is concerned mainly with saving the jobs of the grinders and wire-workers and describe the local divisional officer as ‘a state bureaucrat’.4 They also make fun of the ISTC health and safety

Unsor Ltd |

117

Figure 5.3 Contractor at UNSOR Ltd (author)

representatives, who collaborate with the management in the hope of becoming ‘one of them’. The loud explosions of the billets against the rolls; the flying fragments of steel; the thick smoke and vapours surrounding the mill; the dark pool of grease and water illuminated from below; and the ghostly faces of the workers blackened by smoke give to the rolling mill a dark, obsolete and dangerous appearance. The rollers contribute to this dangerous working atmosphere performing risky games. For instance, when ingots get stuck inside the furnace, they cluster like a rugby team around a heavy bar loaded on a chain fixed to the crane and join forces to make the ingot swing towards the blocked furnace, running in separate directions, swearing and laughing, to escape the swing back of the ingot. For fun, they challenge each other to runs through the red ingots on the bridge of the rolling mill, hide in the water cabin, and destabilize the cogger using the pinch of the panel control. These dangerous games are interesting variants of the games of production played by the workers of Allied described by Michael Burawoy. In Allied production games are centred on labour-saving practices, whereas the workers of the rolling mill consent to produce through dangerous and wearing production practices.

The Grinding Bay Unlike the work in the smelting shop and rolling mill, the labour process in Bay 3 of the cold department is not organized around one dominant machine but around several machines which have different functions. The

118 |

Made in Sheffield

work process is less tightly coupled because the machines are designed to be operated by single workers and the length of individual production runs varies with the size of customer orders, whereas in the smelting shop it is determined by the furnace capacity and the physical processes through which the steel is transformed. Because of the owner’s strategy of expanding the finishing operation, the working day has no beginning and end. Production is continuous in three shifts, punctuated only by the break-times and the handovers between different shifts. In the grinding bay the rhythm of work is intense and there is very little social interaction. Four ‘men’, as the grinding bay’s older workers are known, repetitively pack bars of finished steel and move them with cranes along the shop floor. Like small mechanical extensions of the crane, they move sideways, never talking to one another or releasing their bodies into unplanned movement. The three grinders and their supervisor in Bay 3, known collectively as ‘the boys’, move back and forth between the two Windsor machines that are used to straighten rods into bars and the three grinding machines with which they give the bars their special surfaces and tensile strength. They work at the grinding machines at a frantic pace with ear-muffs that isolate them from the noise surrounding them and are deeply immersed in the grinding tasks. In the cold department the contrast between the steady rhythm of work of the men and the frenzied activity of the boys reflects the fact that, unlike the men, the boys are paid bonuses based on their production output. They lift bars onto the grinding machines, sometimes with the aid of the men and a crane, tighten the various hand wheels and set about making adjustment to improve the accuracy of their work piece. When completed, the bars are stacked next to the grinding machines. Fork-lift trucks take them and speed towards the next control station beeping at the workers all around. The boys are distinguished by their formal engineering qualifications. They are multi-skilled on their grinding machines and possess specialist training in the use of ground-operated and travelling cranes and fork-lift trucks, which increases their independence from the auxiliary workers. Their greater technical autonomy is reflected in the lack of a dedicated shop floor manager in the grinding bay. Working in shifts of four operators, one of whom also acts as supervisor, the boys are effectively operating in self-managing teams. Ultimate responsibility for the management of the grinding bay lies with the quality control manager, Ken Ashwhell. He is often seen walking around the grinding bay, the earmuffs on his helmet sticking out laterally like insect antennae, discussing the hardness, flexibility, and tensile ratios of the bars with the bay’s shift supervisor and the quality control supervisor. The boys are the highest paid workers in the company. They earn between £7 and £9 per hour, and the men between £6 and £7 per hour. The company classes their operations as skilled whereas the packing operations of the men are classified as unskilled. Boys work between fifty and fifty-five hours per week

Unsor Ltd |

119

without complaint or absence; men average forty-eight hours a week. With more than half of their income made up of bonus payments, the boys have strong incentives to contribute to UNSOR’s sales success. They are keenly aware of the market values of the different batches on which they work. Timely production of quality output with a minimum of wasted labour time and material is an important priority for them. Their efforts at self-management are supported by the detailed accounting information and general management information that they, unlike any other group of workers within UNSOR, receive through their supervisors. During the day they deal with a variety of quantitative information: production schedules for the week ahead, financial targets, profit margins, short-term financial performances, cash flows, trends in customer specifications, sales forecasts and forecasts for overtime work. Boys and men have totally different attitudes to work. Boys are all married, apolitical, well-educated, moderate in their views and balanced in their judgements. They refute class opposition towards the owners and the management and none of them is member of any union. According to Sean (25 years old) almost all of his friends outside UNSOR are ‘managers or self-employed’. For Sean ‘the problem in UNSOR is that there are too many old men with old ideas about work, rights, and socializing on the shop floor. I don’t come to work to socialize but to work! And to work fast because I don’t know if this place will be open tomorrow.’ The boys endorse the managerial jargon of the owners and like to think about themselves as ‘creators of value’, ‘market gatekeepers’ and ‘profit makers’ and not just simple manual workers. They reject the men’s philosophy of work based on seniority and friendship and their mixing of leisure and work on the shop floor. The men keep a steady rhythm of work that strongly contrasts with the frantic rhythm of the boys. They are all ISTC members and have strong political opinions. For Tom, one of the men, ‘they [the boys] are like the owners. They see this place only as a place where they can make money and not a place where they can improve as persons.’ He has a low opinion of the boys, saying that ‘all the boys care for is their mortgages and their nice cars to show off at the weekends’. Men and boys are not only distant on the shop floor, but also during break-time. The boys spend their break-times in isolation from one another. They sit behind the cardboard screens and wooden cupboards that they build around their machines and decorate with postcards, drawings, letters and calendars. They drink tea and use their mobile phones to speak with their friends and family and do not socialize with their workmates, neither during break-times, nor outside the factory. Meanwhile the men spend their breaks in the break-room, accusing the boys of being co-opted in the firms’ strategy of maximizing the firms’ profit at the expense of the workforce and of being ‘young capitalists.’ The boys, by contrast, see themselves not as capitalists but, to the contrary, as the hardest working labourers in the company. In the grinding department two distinctive organizational cultures emerge along generational

120 |

Made in Sheffield

lines. ‘Boys’ are skilled, market-oriented, individualistic, apolitical, and detached; whereas the unskilled ‘men’ are politically engaged, collectivistic and oppose labour mechanization and commodification. As for the smelting shop, the fragmentation of the labour process in Bay 3 is experienced as a conflict within the workforce, but in the grinding bay this fragmentation takes the form of generational conflict.

Health and Safety Politics in Bay 2 During the reorganization of 1999 the wire-workers of Bay 2 were trained in changing the set up of the machines according to different customers’ specifications without having to rely on the fitter and on Lind, the supervisor. Instead of filing the production schedule, waiting for the schedule to be approved by the quality control department and collecting the die at the tool room, the workers walk into the die shop and make their own die when the size needed is not on the shelves. Specialist training in Bay 2 weakened the authority of Lind, intensified production and, according to Lind, ‘[it] taught to the guys the language of the market’. In the past the guys avoided ‘market discussions’ with the manager and the quality controllers, whereas today, according to Lind, they are as obsessed with production standards, profit margins and ‘just-in-time’ as the management. The specialist training increased their bonuses, shift and overtime allowances, but also their status connected to their access to the tool room. Decorated in stylish green, covered with calendars displaying female nudes and with a small radio tuned to soft jazz, the tool room was previously the exclusive domain of Mel, a skilled tool-maker who divided his working time between making dies and setting up fishing rods. The room is isolated from the unbearable noise of the wire-machines and from Lind’s supervision and contains skilled tools, machines and instruction manuals whose access was previously forbidden to unskilled workers. But the intensification of labour that followed the reorganization in 1999 caused several industrial accidents in Bay 2 and, more worryingly for Lind, increased the noise level close to the pain threshold. Since he went on a self-financed course on industrial noise-control Lind perceives the shop floor of the finishing department as ‘a web of sounds’. He claims that the guys are unaware of the real level of sound in Bay 2 and of the fact that the sound that they hear by their machines is only a small part of the overall sound stimulation to which their brain is exposed. According to Lind, ‘sounds are like ripples on a pond spread into three dimensions. Waves of sound radiate in the air, reflect and reverberate on surfaces, join into higher sounds when they meet’. There is an invisible politics of sound in the finishing department. Sound filters protect the grinders and reflect noise towards Bay 2 and the workers are subliminally drawn into intensified production by the rhythmical sounds of the wire-machine. But the younger workers of Bay 2 are not ‘sound conscious’ and are unaware

Unsor Ltd |

121

that a damaged hearing system causes vertigo, headaches, tinnitus and nervous breakdown. They tolerate high noise levels and labour intensification as long as their bonuses increase. As health and safety representative,5 Lind opposed several attempts at labour reorganizations in the past. For instance, increased manning levels were avoided when Lind produced for the Committee an ‘Octave-Band analysis’ that showed that the sound level of the bay was already close to the pain threshold. But his activism was not always enough to protect the guys from the painful consequences of the intensification of production. Two years ago one of his guys hanged himself after prolonged periods of overtime and, according to Lind, due to the unbearable noise of the wire-machine. Lind’s health activism faces several obstacles. First, the ISTC regional officer is not keen on confrontations with the management on safety issues on the shop floor focusing, as I show later, mainly on industrial compensations. Second, the Health and Safety Committee turns the health and safety legislation to its advantage. For instance, it used the Environmental Protection Act to shut down the furnace due to ‘warnings of refractory ceramic fibre in the furnace lining being categorised as carcinogen 2 substance’ and introduced overhead cranes and standardized and intensified the packing operations of the men due to ‘unsafe handling practices’ and following the rules of the Manual Handling Operations Regulations. Lind is also pressed by the general manager to resign as union representative and stigmatized by his mates for his opposition to overtimes. Lind and the boys appear to have radically different health and safety consciousnesses and attitudes towards noise. ‘Boys’ are unaware of the sound politics of the shop floor and prone to self-exploitation, whereas Lind resists labour intensification and the introduction of market mechanisms in Bay 2 by struggling against the intensification of sound levels. But Lind’s active role in the Health and Safety Committee and his struggle for better working conditions proved detrimental to the workforce, as I show below.

Farewell to Manual Labour In February 2001, Sir Brian Moffat, the new chairman of Corus who restructured the steel industry in the 1980s, announced 6,000 redundancies. On the following day the shares of Corus almost doubled in value and the business community announced the miraculous recovery of the Anglo-Dutch steel giant and forecast £25m profit by the year 2003. This appreciation by the business community and the shareholders prompted Corus to double the price of domestic steel and cut the price of special steel sold in the European market. UNSOR concentrated on the smelting of low-quality steel and on finishing as two separate business areas and reorganized the furnace and the rolling mill. In the rolling mill teamworking practices were introduced which broke the workers’ informal

122 |

Made in Sheffield

control over the production process, following a well documented path of capitalist restructuring.6 But flexible working patterns increased the ‘rigidity’ and bureaucratic behaviour of the workers of the rolling mill and reduced the department’s productivity. The workers refused to rotate on different jobs. They quarrelled over the meaning of the detailed production schedules compiled at the end of the shifts. Fearing Alan’s supervision, they performed their tasks as they appeared in the company’s job descriptions and ceased to improve productivity through their informal labour practices. They refused to fix small breakdowns as they did before, to make up for their lost production and to work longer hours. Tension and social fragmentation in the break-room followed the dissolution of the informal organization on the shop floor. Charlie accused the rest of the workers of ‘escapism’ and of having got used to the managers’ ‘electric shocks’ ‘like the Seligman dogs’. Ash dismissed Charlie’s plans to create a Working Committee to discuss production issues as ‘collaborationist’ and accused Alan of being unfair in his overtime allocations. Tom, Toby and Jack read Charlie’s involvement in healthy and safety issues as a sign of ‘managerial ambition’. They stopped their political discussions and read The Sun or porno magazines in separate corners of the room. In a further negative loop, the breakdown of their informal political culture atomized and fragmented their working behaviour. The door of the oven broke, the chain of the crane snapped and ingots from the furnace piled up by the oven due to the workers’ refusal to extend their working hours. In the rolling mill the workers’ informal culture based on political consciousness boosted the employers’ profits, whereas the repression of the workers’ social cohesion through reorganization, depressed their productivity. Paradoxically, sharing common political values and a class view of shop floor relations the rollers were willing to put up with unremunerated work and wearing working conditions, whereas their political fragmentation also led to their challenging of the formal organization of the rolling mill. As part of the new reorganization, the owners introduced a 5-metrehigh aluminium machine in the EAF, which replaced the smelters’ manual shovelling by injecting alloy powder into the furnace through a pipe. Mr Heaps designed the machine following a conversation he had one night with Phil on ways of cutting costs in the smelting process. He believed that the machine would reduce alloys, electricity and labour costs by 30 per cent and allow for an extra ‘heat’ per shift and, more importantly, it ‘will make the work of the guys less dangerous’. Called by the labourers ‘Phil’s big brother’ the machine stood in front of the furnace, making it impossible for Phil to communicate with the crane driver and with Dave. The smelters were increasingly frustrated by the presence of the machine that broke their sensory knowledge, disrupted their ‘skilled vision’ and made their work more unpredictable and dangerous. If Mr Heaps saw the machine as a revolutionary invention that would ‘change the way steel is produced in this country’, Phil saw it as ‘the end of the manual era’.

Unsor Ltd |

123

Conclusion In March 2001 UNSOR pension schemes were frozen and the firm went into receivership and in April 2001 the smelting shop, billet and rolling mill of UNSOR were closed and the company reduced its operations to grinding and coating coils purchased from the small wire-making factory opposite UNSOR. The new buyers turned out to be the old owners who, thanks to help from the ISTC and to a special aid package from the government, gave a £4,000 redundancy package to each worker and £15,000 to each manager and focused on the grinding business with thirty young grinders. The closure of UNSOR can be read at several levels. At the macroeconomic level it shows the fragility of British industrial structure. Minimills and middle-sized firms are central to Asian, Korean and American steel industries.7 These countries have flexible and advanced technologies, regulated labour markets and active industrial policies which allow middle-sized companies to adapt to cyclical downturns in the steel industry without reverting to job cuts and financial restructuring. Unlike these, British monetarist and deregulatory labour policies penalize highquality and integrated production processes and polarize the steel industry between capital-intensive TNCs and small and labour-intensive engineering shop floors and subcontractors like Morris. At the microeconomic level the chapter shows how these policies force the employers of mini-mills like UNSOR to adopt self-defeating high-quantity, lowvalue, capital-intensive and labour-saving processes in direct competition with conglomerates like Corus, dismissing their competitive advantage based on flexible and integrated technologies, high-quality production and a skilled workforce. It shows how these myopic business strategies lead to bankruptcy, unemployment and industrial decline. At the level of the shop floor, the case shows how the departments of UNSOR developed idiosyncratic ‘subcultures’ with internal dialectics between capital and labour that prevented the formation of common political consciousness and understanding of the production process. For instance, in the smelting shops the labourers considered the smelters to be the capitalists due to their control over the furnace, the company’s most precious asset; the smelters believed that the labourers were ‘the capitalists’ because of their ‘market mentality’. The ‘men’ of the packing operations thought that the real capitalists were the ‘boys’ because of their high bonuses and formal autonomy, whereas the boys thought about themselves as being ‘genuinely’ working class because of their hard labour. Besides it shows the central role of management in coupling the company’s formal structure and the workers’ informal culture and to use the workers’ subjectivity to increase the capitalists’ profits. In particular, Lady Bowen, the softly spoken Human Relations manager, encouraged the grinders’ ‘market mentality’ through decentralized authority and distributed cost information, supported the smelters’ knowledge through

124 |

Made in Sheffield

paternalism and informal apprenticeship and prevented over-production in the rolling mill through direct supervision. Indeed, the manager’s only direct attempt to adapt the workers’ informal culture to the principles of flexible production through formal reorganization of the rolling mill and the smelting shop failed, creating organizational inertia and resistance. As for Morris, the workers of UNSOR develop an informal organization through which relations of production are disguised as generational conflicts. But the informal culture of Morris celebrates the skills of the older workers, whereas in UNSOR seniority is associated with unskilled, labour-intensive and dangerous labour. In UNSOR an overarching ‘medical metaphor’ framed the company as split between a decaying, obsolescent and dangerous hot body and a healthy, clean and safe cold one. The smelters, rollers and labourers of the hot department were considered ‘dangerous’ types of workers. Outside the shop floor they were divorced, unmarried, uneducated, moonlighters, contractors, night workers, body builders, clubbers and heavy drinkers. On the shop floor danger could be ‘seen’ in their black faces, in broken mechanical bodies, in the blinding electric light of the furnace and ‘heard’ in violent explosions, crushing noises and underworld echoes. Danger also dominated their clothing and working style. The smelters wore heavy protective clothes, asbestos gloves, dark glasses and long tools and dealt with danger heroically; the rollers disclosed their bodies under broken Tshirts and embraced danger irresponsibly; the labourers at the furnace escaped it cowardly. By contrast the grinders, ancillary workers and wireworkers of the cold department performed repetitive and healthy jobs in clean, sanitized and impersonal shop floors.8 The geometrical layout of the machines made their bodies invisible, standard overalls made them interchangeable and the bright neon light made them appear weightless. Cold workers were family men, breadwinners, creditworthy, welleducated and politically moderate. Their jokes were innocuous, their behaviour predictable and their beliefs conventional. This medical metaphor, which associated manual and labour-intensive tasks with human decay and danger, was orchestrated by Mr Garrett, an ex-communist BSC shop-steward converted to Christianity by an Irish workmate on the day his father died in a car accident. Outside the company he was an active member of the Doncaster Citizens Advice Bureau, the Knights of Saint Columbus and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. He claimed that on the day he became Christian he realized that freedom was ‘an individual state of mind, which has nothing to do with collective consciousness’. He opposed unionization in UNSOR and in the Committee meeting he put pressure on Lind to resign as union representative. Mr Garrett considered manual labour as morally debasing and medically unhealthy and dangerous and used his medical knowledge and his role as Health and Safety manager to cut manual jobs in UNSOR through the Health and Safety Committee. The Committee legitimated the employers’ restructuring of the company by emphasizing

Unsor Ltd |

125

the medical hazards of the current labour organization. For instance, it presented the introduction of the alloy-injecting machine in the smelting shop as a measure of risk reduction, it enforced long shutdowns of the furnace ‘due to the detection of cancerous substances in the furnace’, justified the reduction of manning levels at the rolling mill with the ‘mechanical exhaustions’ of the bridge of the mill and painted the mechanisation of the handling operations of the grinding bay as an attempt ‘to reduce tendonitis, dupuytren’s contracture, swelling joint capsules and strained ligaments’ amongst the ‘men’. Most strikingly, Garrett’s reorganization of the company through health and safety regulations met with the quiescence of the workers who subscribed to his medical view of manual tasks as unhealthy and dangerous. Internalizing the company’s medical view, the workers saw the reorganization of the shop floor as a metaphor of their physical states and experienced the closure of the hot department and the mechanization of the cold department as pleasant personal transformations. The ‘men’ perceived the increased capital investments in the grinding bay as alleviation of their muscular pains, the grinders experienced intensification of production as an empowerment of their physical strength and the smelters saw capital intensification as a sign of the weakness of their ageing bodies. Some skilled workers of the hot department were offered jobs in the cold department, but with the reorganization they had suddenly become aware of their worn-out bodies and of the fact that they were close to retirement age. They accepted early retirement or ‘moved on’ into precarious employment in the service or leisure industries. Today, the fields of the Welbeck estate have reclaimed the company yard and part of the rolling mill whose corrugated aluminium roof disappeared in the northerly wind. Inside the Victorian building of the ex-finishing department thirty sanitized bodies perform standardized grinding and packing operations and cranes and conveyor belts push boxes of finished bars into the courtyard by the ‘dog-house’ where Mr Garrett weighs them and gets them dispatched to the wire company on the other side of the street. Recent industrial ethnographies have documented how transnational capitalists use ‘medical metaphors’ to exploit industrial workers, especially women. For instance, Ong (1988) suggests that the managers of a Japanese semiconductor factory located in Kuala Langat, Malaysia, incorporate the Islamic medical view of young women as physically weak and spiritual polluted into the factory organization. The managers exploit the medical belief that these weak women are possessed by angry spirits and fall ill when they venture into forbidden places, to force them into intensive labour and to sack them at their convenience. Similarly, Pung Ngai (2005) describes how young migrant female workers assembling semiconductors in a transnational toy factory in Shengzen develop dizziness, headaches, vertigo, stress and menstrual pains handling toxic substances, working lengthy hours with microscopes and being exposed

126 |

Made in Sheffield

to controlled room temperature. For these young migrants the process of becoming dangomei (factory labourers) involves physical and mental illness. These authors show the link between the medicalization of work and labour exploitation, but also instances in which the workers use these medical metaphors to their own advantage. Against the capitalists the Malay women stage collective possession performances and the Chinese female workers ‘act out’ menstrual pain to slow down the production process. Unlike these instances of workers’ resistance to labour medicalization, the workers of UNSOR have internalized the company’s medical metaphors through the Health and Safety Committee and the ISTC, ending up subscribing to the owners’ decision of closing the hot department. They shared the employers’ medical link between their wellbeing and capital intensification and experienced reorganization as process of self-improvement, seeing labour more empowering where productive capacity was cut and less wearing where it was intensified. Health and safety is a central issue in the struggle between capital and labour. On the one hand, health and safety regulations allow the workers to challenge hazardous working practices and prevent industrial accidents associated with the employers’ cost-cutting strategies. On the other hand, they legitimate labour mechanization, plant restructuring and closures by taking advantage of the peculiar fears, anxieties and dystopian visions associated with manual labour. As it happened in the nineteenth century, concerns about working-class health and safety inform debates on political economy. In the past medical assumptions about the dangers of manual labour legitimized the consolidation of the factory system, whereas they legitimate its dissolution, or ‘flexibilization’, today.

Notes 1. Pollert (1991) and Kelly (1995). 2. The smelters are responsible for the state of the furnace. 3. The agreement to opt out of the working time regulation of 1988 allows the employers to extend the average working time beyond 48 hours per week. 4. The Wire Workers Union was recently incorporated into the ISTC. 5. The ‘Health and Safety at Work Act’ allows health and safety representatives to oppose those changes in labour organization which constitute a potential danger to the safety of the employees. 6. Pollert (1991) and Stephenson (1995). 7. On the role of mini-mills in global steel industry, see D’Costa (1999) and Mac Shane (1996). 8. The medical evidence shows instead that grinding and wire-work are more hazardous than work in the smelting shop and rolling mill. See, ‘Health and Safety in the Steel Industry. A Workers’ Handbook’, International Metalworkers Federation (1999).

Chapter Six

A DIVIDED PROLETARIAT


In this chapter, I discuss the issue of working-class ‘bourgeoisification’ by looking at the lives of Charlie Moody and Toni Masso, two workers of UNSOR. Toni and Charlie resemble the ‘instrumental workers’ of Luton described by Lockwood and Goldthorpe (1967) in their ‘affluent workers project’. The authors found that the job satisfaction of the manual workers of the industrial town of Luton was unrelated to their position in the labour process, as sociologists suggested at the time, but depended on their personal expectations. For instance, the machinists and workers on the line of Vauxhall were more satisfied with their unskilled jobs than the more skilled craft workers because it met their first priority of high pay. The research challenged the idea that this ‘instrumental’ working class was apolitical and suggested that its politics consisted in the refusal of the bourgeois work ethic altogether and in their symmetrical view of the wage contract. Following up on this study Lockwood (1966) individuated three different ‘working-class images of society’. ‘Proletarian traditionalism’ emerges in close-knit and solidary communities associated with mining, docking and other traditional industries; a ‘deferential’ mentality develops in communities dominated by small single and traditional employers; and ‘instrumentalism’ is characteristic of high-tech and capital-intensive industries, like engineering and automotive factories, with diffuse ownership and impersonal, individualistic and standardized working relations. In traditional proletarian communities people construct ties of kinship and friendship as ‘extensions’ of work relationships and develop oppositional political models based on a clear-cut opposition between the workers, on the one hand, and bosses, managers and whitecollar workers, on the other hand. In ‘deferential communities’ ties of patronage and leadership develop between the employers and the local community as does a political view respectful of social hierarchies. Finally, the working classes of capital-intensive and newly developed industries have an instrumental mentality for which work is not central to the life of individuals and it is only a means to achieve happiness in the realm of the family. The instrumental workers live in residential areas

128 |

Made in Sheffield

together with ‘a population of strangers’ and ‘lack both ascriptive ties of kinship, neighbourliness and shared work experience of the traditional proletariat and of the facilities for creating middle-class patterns of sociability’ (ibid.: 257). Lacking social networks both inside and outside the factory these workers are house-centred and construct their social hierarchies in the realm of consumption. Lockwood importantly suggests that the rise of conspicuous consumption among the ‘new’ working classes and their bourgeoisification and domestication are not only ‘economically’ driven – that is, related to their high wages and spending power – but also politically motivated, that is, linked to their alienated social relations on the shop floor. His description of the instrumental workers fits well with the profile of the workers of Sheffield who are employed in the steel and engineering industries and who live in residential areas outside Sheffield. These workers are employed in the primary labour markets and have higher incomes than the artisans of Endcliffe, but their lives are precarious because they lack local networks of kinship, work and friendship which provide them with a safety net in times of de-industrialization and downturns in the labour market. The first theme of this chapter is the centrality of consumption in contemporary working-class lives. Marx famously discussed the link between consumption and alienation in The Capital. The capitalist labour process creates the illusionary perception of human labour as a commodity and of commodities as autonomous beings with a value subjectively constructed in the realm of consumption. Like Marx, Benjamin (1935) related the rise of mass-consumption to the modern capitalist imagination. Benjamin vividly showed that urban arcades, shopping malls and Industrial Exhibitions are capitalist spaces of objectification and class reproduction through collective imagination and phantasmagoria. He stressed the role of ‘vision’ as a mechanism of unconscious ideological reproduction and suggested that the architectures of shopping malls and urban arcades created optical illusions and visual spectacles through which the urban crowd is socialized into capitalist values. Benjamin’s suggested link between industrial capitalism and visual imagination was also discussed by film critic Krakauer (1930) who showed that in Weimar Germany the white-collar ‘salaried masses’ sought to escape from the alienating bureaucracy and the impersonal and competitive working relations of corporate capitalism through their identification with the role models provided by the American film industry. The author suggested a link between the anonymous and depersonalizing relations in capitalist corporations and the cult of individualism cultivated by the Hollywood industry. The centrality of the culture industry in industrial capitalism was famously discussed by the Frankfurt School. Adorno and Horkheimer (1944) described the process of aesthetic objectification, homogenization and ‘mass deception’ taking place under industrial capitalism through the leisure and culture industries. By controlling the film, television, arts and entertainment industries, industrial capitalists

A Divided Proletariat |

129

crafted ideological profiles of the ideal citizens which the working class incorporated. Films, advertising and mass-marketing were particularly powerful techniques of social construction of citizenship, because they created positive stereotypes of American citizens – financial tycoons, cowboys, gangsters and mythical heroes – which ‘the salaried classes’ identified with. The Frankfurt School linked the amusement produced in the cultural industry and the boredom experienced by the employees working at the assembly lines and offices of modern corporations and suggested that the leisure industry was a mechanism of deception of the alienation of work under monopoly capitalism. The second theme of this chapter is the role of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in reproducing class relations. Attracted by the nationalization and expansion of the steel industry in the post-war years, Yemeni, Caribbean and Bangladeshi workers were the first to be made redundant in the privatizations of the 1980s. Today, ethnic workers are employed mainly in the informal economy and when in formal employment, they are often discriminated on pay, working conditions and tasks. The debate on race and class first emerged in the industrial ethnographies of the Chicago School of anthropology in the 1930s.1 The Chicago ethnographers assessed the impact of industrialization in the inter-war and post-war periods on the social relations between ethnic and American workers in urban communities and on factory shop floors. For instance, Donald Roy, Orvis Collins and Melville Dalton’s (1946) pioneering shop floor ethnography of three engineering firms located in the greater Chicago area, showed that workers with rural and mixed ethnic backgrounds did not conform to the informal strategies of output restrictions of the white American working class. Keesing and Hammond (1957), of the school of Applied Anthropology,2 described how the Milpitas, a mixed Mexican and Spanish community living in the Bay Area around San Francisco, refused to be assimilated into the army of industrial workers employed in the new West Assembly Ford plant. The resistance of ethnic communities to exogenous forces of industrialization and proletarianization was famously discussed by Max Gluckman in his paper of 1961 on ‘Anthropological Problems Arising from the African Industrial Revolution’. The paper challenged the colonial myth of ‘modernization’, showing the persistence of ‘tribalism’ and ‘ethnicity’ among African miners in the Zambian Copperbelt, in spite of the great changes produced by the African industrial revolution. Post-colonial migration in the 1960s prompted a renewed interest in the issue of class and race in industrial Europe. Ralph Grillo’s (1985) study of the perception of north-African workers in the heavy industry sector of Lyon in the 1970s highlighted two modes of representations of migrant factory workers. Middle-class people described them as etranger and emphasized their different ethnic, linguistic and racial backgrounds. Whereas trade union representatives and co-workers described them as immigre and emphasized their common experience of displacement,

130 |

Made in Sheffield

exploitation and discrimination, assimilating them into their own class background. Linhard highlighted the ethnic discrimination against migrant workers at the assembly line of the Citroen 2CV near Paris. Managers classified migrant workers as ‘unskilled’ and forced them into precarious jobs, ‘with the Arabs and Blacks always at the bottom of the ladder (1985: 126). Lamont (2000) discussed the intersection of class and race in two different working-class contexts. American blue-collar worker constructed similarities and differences between themselves and other groups along lines of race, whereas French blue-collar workers constructed them on the grounds of class. Yelvington (1995) showed how ‘race talks’ reinforced class fragmentation in a tool factory in post-colonial Trinidad. Contemporary Chinese labour ethnographies also emphasize how ‘ethnicity’,3 ‘localism’ and ‘regionalism’ reproduce gender and class inequalities under Hu Jintao’s market socialism. For instance, Pung Ngai (2005) shows that the division of labour at the Meteor reflects gender and ethnic differences, with male workers from Hong Kong at the top of the hierarchy and female migrants from the Guangdong Province at the bottom. Factory girls become dangomei – ‘factory labourers’ – by denying their rural roots and embracing Western fashion, Cantonese dialect and the competitive and individualist manners of market socialism. In this chapter, I follow James Carrier’s (1995) discussion of the separation between the workers’ private and public selves as a form of ‘alienation’ and his correlation between their experiences of production and their experiences of leisure and consumption. Unlike the workers of Morris, for whom the realm of home and the realm of work are spatially and conceptually interwoven, Charlie and Toni create a sharp separation between their private and their professional lives. In the case of Charlie this separation takes the form of ‘class’, whereas in the case of Toni it takes the form of ‘ethnicity’. For instance, Charlie’s attempts to construct a middle-class identity through conspicuous consumption at the Meadowhall Shopping Centre reflects his impersonal and alienating work experience at UNSOR. In a similar way, Toni’s entrenchment in his ‘gentry’ Victorian house and ritualistic reproduction of the Italian family in Worksop reflects his lack of integration among the British working class of UNSOR. Drawing on Carrier’s notion of alienation as ‘separation’, I discuss the experience of Charlie and Toni as symptomatic of the alienation of the manual workers in Sheffield who live in a precarious balance between a factory world made of unrelated, sanitized and impersonal objects, spaces and social relations, and a domestic world made of personal attachments, meaningful objects and domesticated places. ‘Ethnicity’ and ‘consumption’ are two categories through which they escape alienating factory relations by making personal connections and attachments outside the realm of work. In Lockwood’s terms, Charlie and Toni have an instrumental attitude because they see work as instrumental to the fulfilment of their ‘real’ selves, located in the domestic realm. But unlike the instrumental workers described by Lockwood their

A Divided Proletariat |

131

political views are split between home and work. At UNSOR they display working-class values, language and consciousness and build class-based political affiliations. In their private lives they voice their dissent with the ‘traditional working class’ and try to break away from their class status. Besides, I relate the emergence of the ‘instrumental steelworker’ to the decline of the steel industry, whereas Lockwood and Carrier discuss alienation as an outcome of industrialization. This does not invalidate their suggested link between alienation and industrialization, but shows how job insecurity and precariousness heightens people’s experience of alienation.

Charlie Moody: from Working-class to Nursing Charlie, the charismatic leader of the rolling mill, is split between a public self associated with the factory and a private self associated with the realm of home. In the realm of work, he is the charismatic leader of the rolling mill, militant, working class, socialist, Stakhanovite and collectivist. In the realm of home, he is a nurturing and private person, with poetic inclinations, consumerist habits and ambitions of upwardmobility to be achieved through a career in nursing. Charlie lives in Bexley Park, in a pebble-dashed council home in Wales Street, a busy road connecting the A57 road and the M1 highway. Like many ex-mining villages around Sheffield, Bexley Park attracted wageworkers from Sheffield and Rotherham, when the council homes of the ex-miners were privatized and put on the market. The closure of the local mines emptied Bexley of its younger residents, shops and schools and transformed it into a residential area. Bexley Park consists of two perpendicular roads and of six shops: a Post Office; a hairdresser; a newsagent; an estate agent; a chemist and a corner shop. At the beginning and the end of each road, CCTV cameras monitor the movements of its inhabitants, especially of the young boys, when they gather to smoke by the miners’ wheel, a commemorative reproduction of the real one, which once stood there. Along Wales Road, people walk their dogs or go to the local Post Office amidst the loud noise of cars and lorries that speed up towards the M1. The miners’ workingmen’s club, a modernist 1960s building of steel and red bricks is visited by elderly ex-miners during the weekends but not by the youngsters who prefer to drive to the pubs located on the outskirts. Along with UNSOR the two other main employers in the area are a wire factory and a food-processing factory. The former is located opposite UNSOR by the Bexley Park railway station and the latter twenty miles from Bexley. In the previous chapter I discussed how Charlie galvanized the working group of the rolling mill through his charismatic personality and political engagement. He used the sociological and psychological notions that he learnt in the access course in nursing to frame the events taking

132 |

Made in Sheffield

place on the shop floor through an explicit political narrative and to educate his workmates. For instance, he used Seligman’s notion of ‘learned hopelessness’ to interpret the political inertia through which the workforce reacted to worsening working conditions. Drawing parallels between the electrical stimuli given to the caged dogs in the Seligman experiment and the wearing conditions of production – high levels of noise, dusty atmosphere and bad illumination – at the rolling mill, he believed that his workmates had developed ‘learned helplessness’ like the dogs of Seligman’s experiments. Believing that the working environment affected the workers’ consciousness he tried to improve the working conditions at UNSOR so that his workmates could feel more dignified at work. In the break-room, Charlie discussed sociological theories. He believed that Bernstein’s theory was not ‘Marxist enough’ and that ‘the workers’ speech code was not restricted but it followed their work and practical actions, whereas the bosses’ language was abstract because they were never on the shop floor’.4 In the break-room, he preached against the ‘MacDonaldization’ of people’s lives, consumerism, globalization, corporate capitalism and insisted that his mates read The Guardian instead of The Sun or pornographic magazines. He circulated a questionnaire in the plant to assess the fragmentation between the management and the workers as part of his sociology assignment and discovered that the ‘great divide’ between the workers and owners was reproduced through a ‘lesser divide’ within the workforce. He circulated his findings among his workmates, but his call for a public debate was scorned by both workers and managers alike. Charlie was also an authoritative supervisor who did not tolerate his commands to be ignored and his opinions discounted. Together with political commitment, Charlie also publicly displayed his working-class manners. For instance, talking about his past as community policeman in the Royal Marines in the Falklands, he emphasized his adventures with ‘the local women’ with crude sexual details. He also boasted of his past as a heavy drinker which led to epileptic attacks and his expulsion from the Marine Corps. In the break-room he was often drunk, sleeping on the bench of the locker room or eating microwaved marmalade on turkey, tins of ravioli and baked beans with a silver spoon with the Queen’s head printed on the handle. Sometime he got drunk in the panel room of the billet mill and inadvertently let the billets run free on the shop floor, creating havoc and panic among his workmates. Most of all, Charlie was respected for his hard labour as contractor during the factory shutdowns, when he worked twelve hours per day for seven days a week in order to save money to pay for his nursing degree. Dressed in white overalls, wooden clogs and round dark glasses he worked at the roof of the furnace, dug the pits and cleaned the pools of grease and scale that accumulated in the long tunnels running underneath the mill. Thus, inside the factory Charlie appeared a devoted worker, a brave man, a dangerous character and a political leader with ‘typical’ working-class manners.

A Divided Proletariat |

133

This image strongly contrasted with his behaviour outside the factory as nurturing father and committed nurse. In addition to the access course, Charlie had worked three nights per week at the Toddick nursing home for the last five years. He saw nursing as an alternative to steelwork and often wished for UNSOR to be closed so that he could start a new life in nursing. Being the only male nurse, Charlie performed manual tasks and heavy duties, such as toileting, lifting patients and looking after the terminally ill during the night shifts. Charlie thought of himself as a ‘militant nurse’ and performed heavy manual tasks in order to help the elderly people whom he believed to be neglected in society. Given the amount of manual work that he performed in the nursing home, he disagreed with Goldthorpe’s ‘Marxist’ suggestion that nursing was a middle-class occupation. In the realm of the nursing home, Charlie’s politics were anti-Marxist. He claimed that with its focus on class Marxism neglected the elderly, the disabled and the marginal people who, being out of work, ‘have no class and yet have a right to a decent life’. He spent time with the elderly sufferers of dementia, unlike his colleagues who avoided them. He saw nursing as a means of social mobility and of improving his working-class background. For instance, he was attracted by the high salary of his wife, Vicky, who worked as a nurse at the Chesterfield Hospital and by the idea of becoming a manager at the nursing home. After the access course, he hoped to take a nursing degree and later to get a managerial or administrative post in a private nursing home or in the NHS. But he also conceptualized this shift from steelworking to nursing as a strategy of resistance against the employers’ restructuring of UNSOR and a reaction against ‘learned helplessness’. Charlie cultivated his intellectual and professional ambitions in the domestic realm. For instance, in his free time he read sociology, management and popular psychology and, with the hope of becoming a manager at Toddick Nursing Home, he attended training sessions on how to improve his ‘emic’ skills and ‘verbal communication’. In the sitting room his computer and library were half-hidden behind a big plasma-screen television constantly switched-on and watched by his daughters, Georgina and Rebecca. Charlie believed that given their gender and their low educational achievements they had slim chances of social mobility but was less worried about his son who, in spite of having ‘some behavioural difficulties’ at school, worked at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Georgina and Rebecca’s rooms were painted in bright pink and inhabited by a crowd of small dolls, fairies, gnomes and animals. They were filled with stickers, photos and posters and furnished with an elegant dressing table, heart-shaped pillows and bright coloured curtains hiding the view from the window of a dilapidated mechanical workshop. Charlie spent almost all his income on his daughters. He worked overtime in order to enrol Georgina on a horse-riding course and to buy a new Play Station for Rebecca and spent most of his weekends shopping with them at the Meadowhall Shopping Centre.

134 |

Made in Sheffield

Meadowhall is one of the largest shopping malls in Europe, built on the site of the old Hadfields East Hecla Works in the late 1980s as part of the Urban Development Corporation’s strategy of the economic conversion of Sheffield from the steel to the leisure industry. In line with the philosophy of architect Victor Gruen, a Viennese émigré who planned the first shopping mall in Minnesota in 1956, Meadowhall combines the architecture of the nineteenth-century arcade with the multi-storeyed central open space of the department store. Like earlier spaces of commodity fetishism – World Exhibitions, urban arcades, and department stores – shopping malls were designed to transform objects into enchanting, autonomous and desirable entities and to lure customers into conspicuous consumption. Like other shopping malls, Meadowhall is a ‘commercial machine’ which erases differences between its working-class, unemployed or middle-class customers and turns them into an anonymous crowd engaged in a collective shopping ‘journey’. It creates optical illusions and visual spectacles through which people experience leisure and consumption as a process of self-transformation and imagine themselves as accomplished capitalist subjects. It displays, circulates and exhibits objects and people through a hidden mechanical apparatus made up of elevators, generators, water pumps, bodyguards and supervisors. Travelling through the phantasmagorical and timeless spaces of Meadowhall – theme parks, Mediterranean cafes, Egyptian pyramids, artificial rainforests and multiplex cinemas – shoppers become wandering tourists on a collective pilgrimage in the world of capitalist goods. Charlie was fascinated by shopping malls and attracted by the commodities – technological gadgets, dolls and fashion items – which he bought for his daughters. On Saturdays, he, Georgina and Rebecca regularly lunched at La Tasca, a ‘typical Spanish tapas bar’ located in the western end of the mall, and then they strolled through the Red Sector towards the Oasis, where the ‘Coca-cola Cupola’ was located. The Cupola is the focal point of the mall, and with its imposing vault resembling the Sistine Chapel and its giant ‘Videowall’ screen broadcasting music clips, adverts and popular TV, spectacularly combined ‘sacrality’ and ‘virtuality’ in the eyes of the customers. Charlie, Rebecca and Georgina also satisfied their visual pleasure by watching movies at the centre’s multiplex cinema on Sundays. The Sheffield Ski Village – the largest artificial ski resort in Europe – was another surreal destination for Charlie on the weekends. The Village was developed along with the Arena and the Don Valley Stadium in 1988 when Sheffield re-branded itself as a ‘Sport City’. The village consisted of five artificial slopes, a Swiss-style chalet, bars, shops, adventure trail pistes, and a freestyle ski arena. Charlie liked ‘the surreal contrast’ that he experienced when he looked down from the Swiss chalet to the disused factories and council flats of Stannington. Similarly, the workers of UNSOR who travelled to Disneyland, MGM or Wonderful World in America were mesmerized by the landscapes, characters and special effects of these giant leisure centres. These artificial and surreal

A Divided Proletariat | 135

‘visions’ crafted in these spaces of leisure and consumption seemed to distract and disengage them from their precarious working existences. But with de-industrialization shopping malls have became important sources of employment as well as spaces of leisure. For instance, Ash described in amazement the fact that ‘Sea World’ in Los Angeles employed about 5,000 people and emphasized the scientific labour organization of the centre and the professionalism of its workers, such as the dolphin trainer, the barracuda expert and the fish vet. He learned from ‘Hercules’, a former blue-collar worker now employed there as ‘the strongest man in the world’, that the company had two hundred administrative staff and eighty managers who planned the visitors’ movements, standardized the workers’ routines and shifts and enforced health and safety protocols. Hercules dressed in ancient Greek robes and held a big plastic globe on the edge of the shark tank. He said that the job was simple, but it paid overtime, a good pension and it was unionized. Thus steelworkers struggling with precarious jobs see leisure parks and amusement centres also as powerful employers.5

The Strange Disappearance of Charlie Moody Charlie disappeared from his home in July 2002. For him, things went from bad to worse after the closure of UNSOR. First, his relationship with his wife deteriorated due to his heavy drinking and to overworking at Toddick Nursing Home. Already during my fieldwork Vicky seldom took part in the family’s shopping expeditions at weekends and was critical of Charlie’s ambitions for a career in nursing. Her only hope was that ‘Charlie will stick to his actual job without getting into troubles’. But following UNSOR’s closure Charlie started drinking heavily again and lost his job at the nursing home. Vicky moved out with the three children and put the house on sale. Then Charlie mysteriously disappeared. When I last visited Bexley his brother-in-law and the other workmates at the rolling mill did not know where he had disappeared to and voices circulated at Kiveton that he had been seen busking in Sheffield’s city centre. Without relatives, personal savings and informal work in Bexley, and in spite of his ambitious plans for the future, Charlie’s life was disrupted by redundancy.

Being Italian in Worksop: Antonio Masso Antonio Masso, the electrical fitter in the hot department of UNSOR, was the son of a stonemason and of a pasta factory worker in Corigliano D’Otranto, southern Italy. In 1959, when he was seventeen, he travelled to Worksop to visit his uncle, a miner at Worksop colliery. He moved permanently to London in 1971 where he worked in restaurants, hotels

136 |

Made in Sheffield

and for London Underground. In the same year Toni’s brother also moved to London – where he now works in a prestigious tailors shop in Saville Row – and their two sisters moved to Switzerland, where they worked in car factories until their retirement. Toni and his wife Helen worked as waiters at the same restaurant until they moved to Worksop in 1976 when he got the job at UNSOR through his uncle. Like Charlie, Toni was split between a public persona, associated with the realm of the factory, and a private one, associated with the realm of home. Toni and Jim, the other fitter in the hot department, had a privileged position in the production process vis-à-vis the rest of the workforce. As I highlighted in the previous chapter, the fitters mediated between the workers and the employers. On the one hand, they implemented the employers’ decisions to slow down production and to under-utilize labour in the hot department by avoiding maintenance works and delaying repairs. On the other hand, they shared the workers’ ‘politics of production’ based on maximizing paid overtime, minimizing effort, working in a safe environment and keeping the furnace going in order to avoid the closure of the plant. Thus, Toni and Jim mediated between the interests of capital and the interests of labour through their control of the technical system. But as gatekeepers they were also under pressure from the workers and the managers, which they avoided by hiding in segregated areas (the electric cabin in the field, the pool by the canal, the oxygen tank) or in their office, which was sheltered from the gaze of curious passers-by by a thick layer of soot on the window glass. The office was filled with mechanical parts, tools, cutting machines, motor engines and bits of a Ford kit car, which Jim was assembling. There was a small kitchen area with a fridge and a gas hob where they cooked eggs and bacon at the beginning of the night shift and a bed and a small telly hidden behind a pile of scrap. A cutting of a 1980s articles from The Guardian entitled ‘UNSOR breaks all productivity records’ showing Jim and Toni smiling and displaying their muscles was posted on the wall. ‘We were very naïve in the old times. We accepted to halve our breaktimes in order to increase the pockets of those bastards’, was Jim’s comment about the photo. Jim and Toni were very confrontational towards the management, the owners and the union, who they described as ‘scroungers’. In fact, the owners did not pay Jim for his professional advice and services, for instance for the servicing of their Jaguars. Engineers and managers refused to draw maintenance plans and forced them to deal with mechanical breakdowns, dangerous last-minute repairs and ad hoc fixes. They also criticized the corporatism and narrow economic focus of the unions, for instance the fire workers’ union who were at the time striking on wages in spite of their very favourable pension scheme. Toni and Jim were disillusioned by the demise of the working class promoted by the Labour Party, which they claimed to be ‘the same as the Tory Party’ and were upset by the spread of the service economy at the expense of the manufacturing industry in Britain.

A Divided Proletariat |

137

Thinking about the current waves of plant closures and de-industrialization, they often pondered: ‘if the economy is becoming immaterial, how come that retail shops and goods are multiplying?’ Toni and Jim often stole mechanical parts and precious alloys from the warehouse during the night shifts, when they could not be recognized by the CCTV cameras and when they had the complicity of the security guard. Toni would open the warehouse, load the material on the fork-lift truck, and drive it backwards to the car park, where Jim waited with the boot of his 4-WD open. Gypsies living in a settlement close by were normally blamed for these mysterious thefts. Jim saw their theft as an act of social redistribution telling me that ‘they steal to us and we steal to them but with the difference that they steal labour and we only steal metal’. When Toni and I met at work his behaviour was volatile and inconsistent. In Jim’s presence he spoke with a strong Yorkshire accent; in his absence he addressed me in soft-spoken Italian. With Jim his conversation was dry, political and sexually charged; without him it was elliptical, prolix and puritanical. At work Toni displayed a strong class-consciousness and appreciation for the British class system. He liked the British class system because ‘in it everybody knows where their place is’. In Britain, people had ‘duties’, ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’ according to their position and ‘you can say “this is mine” and nobody can come and steal it from you’. He contrasted the modern class system of Britain to the backward and underdeveloped social system of Corigliano d’Otranto, revolving around the powerful owner of the local pasta factory who kept the workers in a state of dependency and fear, like the aristocracy used to do in the past. For instance, his mum was eighty-five and she still worked by the piece at the pasta factory. She earned £20 per day and she relied on her sons’ remittances and on the produce of the small plot of land and animals grazing in the home backyard to survive. Comparing the working experience of his mother with his experience at UNSOR, Toni thought that in Britain ‘the working class is highly valued whereas in the Italian social system workers are peasants’. One day, whispering so that Jim could not hear us, Toni invited me and my wife for lunch at his home in Worksop, where his identification with the British social system and working class disappeared.

Peperoni, Lampascioni and Vino Rosso: A Food Journey from the South of Italy to South Yorkshire Toni and Helen lived in a four bedroom Victorian home previously owned by a local aristocratic family. The home retained its original features – the fireplace, the leather armchairs, the conservatory, and the stained-glass windows – and an English gentry character. From the entrance a long dark corridor displaying black and white photos of Corigliano led to the dining room, brightly illuminated by a golden

138 |

Made in Sheffield

chandelier and with a view onto a big garden shed submerged in wisteria. Graduation photos of their three sons hang on the walls. Vincenzo – ‘after Toni’s dad’ – graduated in Law at Nottingham University. Unsatisfied with a salary of £1,500 per month as apprentice solicitor, he moved to a law firm in London. Pietro – ‘after Helen’s dad’ – worked as an electronic engineer in a multinational corporation and earned £2,500 per month. Giuseppe – ‘after women’ – was a mechanical engineer doing an apprenticeship in a local firm. Toni brought up his sons ‘in the Italian way’. They did not drink, swear or ‘bring friends at home’. In exchange, he paid for their university fees, house rent and subsistence during the university years and provided them ‘with the best possible future’. But, sadly for Toni, in spite of having GCSEs in Italian they never spoke Italian at home and refused to visit Italy. Helen migrated from Dublin to London when she was only seventeen leaving behind her parents, five brothers and two sisters who still live there. She once dreamed of becoming a nun, but now worked as secretary in a law firm. While Helen cooked Italian food ‘the way she learned from Toni’s mum’, Toni pleasantly entertained us with Italian television, witty conversation and opera singing. After having spent one hour in the kitchen Helen reappeared and laid the table with a beautifully embroidered table cloth from the south of Italy and with several rural Italian dishes – soup of lampascioni, roasted red peppers in oil, ‘local’ goat’s cheese, beans in vinegar, hand-made pasta, aubergine pie – whose recipes were passed to her by Toni’s mum. Commenting on my ‘research on capitalism’ Helen showed great political awareness. She compared the tense work atmosphere of her law firm – which forced her to take sick-leave for a stress-related illness – to the precarious working conditions at UNSOR and concluded that ‘insecurity is the condition of modern capitalism’. But, around the table, Toni’s political conversations revolved around ethnicity rather than class. In the break-room with Jim he would blame the employers for the poor state of the company, whereas at home he blamed the nationalism and racism of the working class for the worsening of the British economy. In the past, the ethnic workers at UNSOR were marginalized and made redundant and his workmates at UNSOR still considered him a foreigner and an outsider. Besides, today England did not offer the same opportunities to foreigners as it did in the past and he wished that his sons would return to Italy in the future. Indeed, managers often discriminated against him with unpaid overtime, frequent night shifts and dangerous assignments. The workers called him ‘pizza-man’, ‘the Italian’ or ‘spaghetti western’ and made fun of his frequent visits to his mum in Italy, of the awkwardness of his son Pietro when he worked at the furnace in the summer and of the long woollen pants he wore under his overalls. When he was put on night shift on the day of the European Championship final between Italy and France the workers sabotaged his telly so that he missed the final. But most importantly, the workers accused him of having other jobs and incomes in addition to his wage from UNSOR. Toni was said to own a restaurant in

A Divided Proletariat |

139

Sheffield and several properties in Nottingham, which he rented to students. His workmates saw his entrepreneurship and aspirational lifestyle as a typical instance of the ‘individualism’, ‘egoism’ and ‘selfishness’ of Italian (and Asian) people. They accused Toni of holding lavish dinners with supervisors and managers and using his luxury home for social mobility. Toni complained that on the few occasions he invited his workmates for lunch, they spent the whole time ‘spying’ on his home and making nosy questions about its value. At 5 P.M., whilst we were sipping limoncello made in Corigliano, Toni’s uncle showed up asking him to translate a letter from the NHS in a hybrid Italian-English dialect. He disappeared after a drink of limoncello ‘alla nostra salute’. At the end of lunch Toni talked worriedly of his mum Rita who insisted on taking fresh flowers to his father’s tomb every day and he asked me to give her £30 next time I went to the south of Italy.6

Returning ‘Home’ On the day I visited Rita, Corigliano looked different from how I remembered it. The strong heat seemed to slow down the movements of people and animals and to compress the baroque silhouettes of the castle, fountain and palms in the town’s central square. Rita’s home was in the old city centre, part of a dense network of derelict dwellings carved in local stone below street level in order to avoid the heat and the lord’s taxmen in the seventeenth century. In her home’s backyard there was a small plot of land with a few goats and chickens looked after by Toni’s brother at the weekends. The central room was dark and lit by a big telly (a present from Toni) and several small candles below effigies of saints and madonnas. Black-and-white photos of Toni also adorned the empty room. On the day of the meeting Rita was wearing a black dress, in memory of her husband deceased twenty years before. When I introduced myself as a friend of Toni from England and gave her Toni’s £30 for the flowers, she welcomed me with a bright smile and invited me in with a strong southern accent. Having revealed that my father was born in a nearby town, she offered me a coffee and made me sit under the image of Saint Peter. After a short desultory discussion she asked me if I knew why Toni had left ‘his country’ and married a ‘foreigner’. She had heard worrying stories about the ‘filthiness’ of English industrial towns and the bad habits of ‘the women from the North’ and she was worried that Toni, her ‘most beloved son’, had embraced such an amoral lifestyle. She often visited her two daughters in Switzerland – ‘where everything is clean’ – but refused to go to the ‘dirty’ and ‘polluted’ North of England. Acknowledging the cold behaviour of Toni’s sons towards her, tears crossed her face and I realized that Rita’s black mourning dress expressed her desperation for Toni’s departure, more than for her husband’s death. According to Rita, Toni was ‘forgetting’ his culture and losing touch with

140 |

Made in Sheffield

his old social networks and thus he was becoming a ‘foreigner’. Beyond her superficial condemnation of Toni’s lifestyle, Rita was lucidly aware, in fact more aware than Toni, that like many other poor migrants who left home he would never return. Migration studies emphasize the ‘diasporic’ condition of contemporary transnational migrants who lack stable ‘homes’ and identities, belong to multiple and conflicting locations and are exposed to global flows of people, objects and ideas. Some of these studies emphasize the empowering aspects of the diasporic experience. For instance, Sallie Westwood (2000) claims that the commodification of Latino culture in telenovelas, salsa dance, fiction and language in the U.S. creates hybrid urban spaces of migrants’ radical politics. Puerto Ricans transformed the landscape of the South Bronx with their casitas, small homes revolving around a central veranda, and developed common strategies of resistance together with the Black American community, such as graffiti, rap, hiphop and urban guerrilla. Similarly, Werbner (1999) describes the ‘transnational subjectivity’ of working-class Pakistanis in Britain who rely on their ceremonial objects, food, clothing, cosmetics and jewellery to construct new global ethnic identities and escape the kinship and religious rules which oppress the high-caste community. Less optimistically, Kalra (2000) shows the illusory nature of the sense of agency and selfentrepreneurship experienced by Pakistani kakas (second generation migrants) in Oldham. With more than 30 per cent of the Pakistani community unemployed following the decline of the textile industry, kakas set up small businesses – take-aways or taxi-driving – which rely on the labour of kin and on self-exploitation. Kalra shows that the community’s sense of self-improvement and entrepreneurship hides its social fragmentation, generational conflicts and poverty. Superficially, Toni seemed to have an empowering diasporic existence. He considered ‘home’ to be both his mum’s derelict dwelling in Cutrofiano and his Victorian mansion in Worksop; he belonged both to the British working class and to the Italian community; and he was exposed to a global flow of ideas and artefacts, ranging from Italian opera, embroidery, British garden sheds, pasta al pomodoro, greasy eggs and bacon, photos of suffering Italian saints and his sons’ graduation photos. He also flexibly shifted between Italian and British socio-economic networks and acted as gatekeeper between the opposite flows of petty cash, new ideas and high-tech goods towards the south of Italy, and olive oil, parmesan and tablecloths into England. But like the Pakistanis described by Kalra, Helen and Toni in accomplishing their dream of ownership of a ‘gentry English home’ endured hard labour, social exclusion and family fragmentation. With the deterioration of the economic position of UNSOR Toni’s divided selves – the British worker and the Italian husband – were increasingly difficult to reconcile, as his workmates accused him of individualism and his superiors held him responsible for mechanical breakdowns and losses of production time. In

A Divided Proletariat |

141

the private realm of the family, their Italian status was also fragile, especially since they were marginalized by the Italian community in Worksop, which grew suspicious of their high lifestyle, and their sons refusal to endorse ‘the Italian way of life’. According to Helen the boys were shocked to realize that the frail woman who spoke to them in a foreign dialect and lived in a dark home filled with religious images was their grandmother. In fact, Helen and Toni’s aspirations of social mobility clashed with their class and ethnic marginality and this structural conflict became evident from their sons’ painful experience of the hiatus between their background and their aspirations. With their Italian and Irish peasant roots and their working-class parents will Vincenzo, Pietro and Giuseppe fulfil their middle-class aspirations?

Epilogue With the closure of the hot department, Helen and Toni moved back to London where, with the help of the Italian community and with the money from the sale of their home in Worksop, they bought a twobedroom flat near Tower Bridge and a licence for managing a local Italian restaurant. Their sons currently work in Leeds and Nottingham.

Conclusion The experiences of Charlie and Toni reflect the alienated and precarious lives of many proletarians in Sheffield, who are split between the experience of impersonal, flexible and transient working relations and their desire for personal, intimate and permanent social ties. These proletarians share the same class condition and experience of work in the volatile steel industry, but they read this condition as one of isolation rather than one of communality and challenge their sense of isolation by constructing alternative ‘ethnic’ or ‘class’ identities in the domestic realm. These domestic spaces are spaces of alienation because they hide the conditions of reproduction of class inequality, like the bright curtains in the room of Georgina and Rebecca that hide the neighbouring dilapidated workshop or the Italian television channels at Toni’s which none of the other family members can understand. Some anthropologists have emphasized the positive aspects of constructing multiple identities which transcend and encompass the realm of work, and claim that the hiatus between peoples’ ‘selves’ (which they call hybridity and I call alienation) can enhance personal strategies and chances of social mobility. But the cases of Toni and Charlie show instead that their building of ‘different’ identities outside the factory reproduces their alienation inside it by displacing and individualizing their common class experience. The chapter also shows that capitalism works through contradictory

142 |

Made in Sheffield

perceptions, opaque experiences and unrealistic expectations which force the working class into marginal life-trajectories. For both Charlie and Toni, UNSOR seemed to play a very limited role in their lives, with Charlie embarked on an alternative career in nursing and Toni in property investment. But, in fact, the closure of UNSOR made clear their common proletarian condition. Toni’s Italian identity and his private investments were not enough to provide him with an alternative means of subsistence in Worksop. Charlie’s job at Toddick Nursing Home proved more exploitative and precarious than his job at UNSOR. Forced to work on night shifts, with difficult patients and heavy manual tasks, with no rights to welfare contribution and labour representation, he was made redundant as soon as he manifested his intention of becoming a full-time employee using the excuse that he had started drinking again. Like Steve – ‘the Cliff lad’ now living at Bettie’s ‘Black Sparrow’ – Charlie experienced the painful personal transformation from being a steelworker to being unemployed and homeless. But, unlike Steve, he lacked the social and economic networks outside the factory through which to make a transition into nursing or find temporary employment and accommodation. Finally, the chapter shows the inextricable links between production and consumption in working-class alienation. Following Carrier, I have discussed alienation as the workers’ experience of separation between ‘home’ and ‘work’ and I have shown how ‘ethnicity’, ‘leisure’ and ‘consumption’ reproduce this separation by making invisible the workers’ common class condition. But unlike Carrier, who relates alienation to industrialization, I have shown that the precariousness of factory work under current economic conditions increases the workers’ sense of alienation or separation. Apart from this and in conflict with recent postmodern theories of labour which discuss de-industrialization as a process of ‘liberation from work’,7 the chapter shows that the end of manual labour for Charlie and Toni signalled the end of their dignified existence.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Park and Burgess (1925). Chapple was the first to discuss the field of Applied Anthropology (1953). Rofel (1999), Ching Kwan Lee (1998), Pung Ngai (2005). Bernstein’s ‘Speech Code’ theory (1971) suggests that people of working-class background have ‘restricted’ speech codes compared to the elaborate speech codes of middle-class speakers and that this linguistic gap reproduces class distinctions. 5. At the time of my research Meadowhall employed around 7,000 people. 6. My family originates from a town close to Corigliano d’Otranto 7. For an extensive discussion of the ‘liberation from work’ thesis, see Gorz (1999).

Chapter Seven

COMMUNITY UNIONISM, BUSINESS UNIONISM Two Strategies, the Same Phoenix


Although the terms ‘community unionism’ and ‘social unionism’ are not synonymous, the emergence of community unionism is part of the broader process of the ‘socialization’ of industrial trade unions that took place in America and Britain during the 1980s. The chapter firstly discusses the theoretical and political context in which ‘social unionism’ emerged in Britain. Secondly, it provides an ethnographic description of ‘community unionism’, a trade union model introduced in Britain by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) under the social economy agenda of New Labour. Community unionism was implemented by the ISTC steel union (now ‘Community’) and rejected by the AEU steel union (now ‘Amicus’), who subscribed to the model of economic unionism instead. Finally, it provides an ethnography of the experience of trade union politics for the workers of UNSOR and of another steel factory studied during my fieldwork. The chapter does not provide a critical evaluation of the social unionism model but shows the assumptions underpinning both social unionism and economic unionism and the gap existing between these theoretical assumptions and the reality of everyday labour politics. The 1980s have been crucial years for the global labour movement. The radical macro-economic changes of the 1970s – labour and capital deregulation and the informalization and flexibilization of production – and the consolidation of transnational capitalism pushed industrial unions to the brick of extinction and prompted a debate on labour movement renewal. For many labour scholars ‘social unionism’ promised to revitalize the labour movement by addressing these socio-economic changes. Unlike traditional unionism, focused on factory politics, social unionism mobilizes labour among public officials, community groups, religious leaders and human rights activists. Social unionism also rejects bureaucratic and formalistic approaches to labour mobilization and relies on alternative forms of political activism such as media pressure, corporate campaigns and community organizations. Thirdly, social

144 |

Made in Sheffield

unionism extends labour representation to women, minorities, migrants and informal sector workers, thus, rejecting the male, working-class ethos of traditional labour movements. Fourthly, it forges transnational advocacy networks (TAN) to counteract the spatial mobility of global capitalism. Finally, social unionism relies on new leaders able to create new language and values and to reconstruct working-class solidarity not from narrow economic interests but on the base of an all-encompassing social perspective. There is a growing body of literature on social unionism. Some scholars see social unionism as a response to post-industrial capitalism. They claim that post-industrial capitalism – based on subcontracting, flexible production, immaterial capital, transnational workplaces and precarious and flexible labour – creates fluid and mobile class relations which expand outside the factory gates into the realm of society. If the workers of industrial capitalism were subsumed to capital inside factories, postindustrial workers are subsumed to capital in society, hence they are ‘socialized workers’. Drawing on the neo-Gramscian theories of Laclau and Mouffe and on their discussion of the contingent and open nature of contemporary political identities, Ronaldo Munck (2004) suggests an antiproductivist radical politics, which moves away from class-based and factory-bound notions of labour and activism and articulates new democratic political identities across society. In line with the socialized nature of contemporary capitalism, politics must articulate a ‘multitude’ of subjects, such as NGOs, church-based organizations, fair trade shops, women’s associations and consumer groups. Similarly, André Gorz (1999) claims that traditional industrial trade unions and their capitalist counterparts share the same ideology of commodified labour. He criticizes the trade unions’ defensive strategies of regularization and formalization of work in the current regime of precarious labour and suggests that unions should fight for the workers’ liberation from work, rather than for their right to work. If post-industrial theorists emphasize how class struggle moved from the factory into society, a second strand of new trade union studies proposes to discard class struggle altogether in favour of identity politics based on issues of national, ethnic and gender activism. These studies criticize the narrow economic and redistributive focus of the traditional labour movement – based on class struggle, wage-bargaining and the control of the labour process – and discuss labour mobilization as a process of cultural recognition and symbolical production.1 According to this view the new trade union leaders must expand politics beyond the realm of ‘the economic’ and provide symbolic and cultural understandings of class struggle in tune with the imagination of the whole of society, rather than from the narrow perspective of the working class. Rick Fantasia, in Cultures of Solidarity (1989), suggests that the successful renewal of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)2 under the leadership of John Sweeny was

Community Unionism, Business Unionism |

145

linked to his strategy of incorporating different cultural identities – black, indigenous, gay, feminist – within the traditionally white working-class movement. Kim Scipes criticizes the ‘business unions’ which ‘accommodate themselves to and are absorbed by the industrial relations system of their particular countries’ (1992: 24) and suggests that unions engaged in political activities only for the immediate interests of their members end up serving the interests of corporate capitalism. Scipes describes how the Filipino trade union Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) remained autonomous from capital, the state and from party politics and set up an agenda from its own particular cultural perspective. The KMU rapidly established itself thanks to the work of symbolical production and cultural experimentation by its charismatic, educated and militant leaders. Scipes draws parallels between the Philippines and the Brazilian Central Workers Union (CUT) discussed by Seidman (1994) which rapidly rose to power in the 1980s because it was supported by social forces outside the traditional labour movement including church organizations, women, squatters, intellectuals and human rights activists protesting against military rule.3 A third strand of new unionism studies adopts a world-historical perspective centred on the uneven geographies of capitalism and the interdependence between labour relations in the North and the South. David Harvey (2003) describes the campaign of the Rover workers against the closure of their plant at Cowley (UK) as an instance of ‘militant particularism’. Engaged in partial and pragmatic struggles at the plant level, they were unable to develop an abstract socialist theory, which included the views of the workers in the South. Silver (2003) focuses on the structural conditions of labour internationalism and argues that the de-socialization of the state in the North and the relocation of industrial production to the South have increased fragmentation between labour movements in these two areas. Similarly, Hensman (2001) shows how this fragmentation between labour movements in the North and the South increased following the inclusion of workers’ rights in World Trade Organization (WTO) trade agreements. More optimistically, Huw Beynon (2003) and Peter Evans (2000) present examples of counter-hegemonic globalization based on the transnational alliances of trade unions and social movements against TNCs, international agencies and the state, and Anner (2003) discusses the collaboration between the German and the Brazilian autoworkers unions that followed various production relocations by Mercedes-Benz. Some authors questioned the ‘historical necessity’ of monolithic structures and ideologies of labour militancy. For instance, Burawoy (2003b) discusses the double movement of labour commodification and class mobilization in early capitalism in Britain and suggests that the early working-class movement was embedded in civil society and that its ‘modern’ class politics mixed with pre-existing communitarian, Chartist, cooperative and Owenite doctrines. Similarly, Craig Calhoun (1995)

146 |

Made in Sheffield

suggests that nineteenth-century labour movements in Europe and America had many characteristics of the ‘new’ social movements of the twenty-first century, including concerns about religion, lifestyle, gender and culture, and argues that the emergence of productivist and bureaucratic labour movements was as much the product of modernist historiography as of state ideology under communism and socialism. These contributions rightly stress the political nature of the boundaries between ‘the social’ and ‘the economical’ in labour history, a theme to which I will return later. Traditionally anthropologists have not studied trade unions, a subject which they believe belongs to ‘the sociological tradition’ and which was further dismissed in the 1980s when anthropology shifted its focus from production and labour to exchange, money and consumption. But new anthropological work on trade unions is currently emerging which critically combines the Gramscian and Polanyian views of labour relations. For instance, Jonathan Parry (2006) discusses the rise of the charismatic union Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM) in the Indian steel industry. Parry suggests that the main steel trade unions in India – the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) and the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) – are ‘hegemonic’ because they reproduce structural divisions within the industrial working class created through labour legislation, industrial policies and the ideology of commodified labour by the post-colonial state. Unlike these unions, the counterhegemonic CMM articulated the interests of the under-privileged segments of the Bhilai working class together with the interests of other political coalitions, for instance the Naxalite movement, tribal and environmental groups and high profile civil society organizations. The author describes the charismatic leader of the CMM as an organic intellectual able to combine and articulate local cultural symbols taken from different political registers – communist, tribal, environmental – into a new revolutionary discourse. Parry suggests that the role of the ‘organic’ leaders is to challenge the ideology of labour commodification by extending political consciousness outside the narrow boundaries of class relations and ‘to forge alliances with other classes on issues that are not “purely economical” and have to do, for instance, with civil liberties or national liberation’ (ibid.: 18). The trade union leader is a cultural bricoleur who articulates a revolutionary discourse by stepping outside narrow economic boundaries and class relations. Similarly, anthropologist Christena Turner (1995) documents the process through which some Japanese workers develop a common political consciousness by ‘learning to protest’ – through demonstrations, meetings, educational and leisure activities and campaigning. Turner looks at trade unions as spaces of labour socialization, which develop a revolutionary consciousness among industrial workers, but also co-opt them into the capitalist project of industrialization in Japan. Taking an historical perspective, Susana Narotsky (2006) shows the structural articulation of class, gender and

Community Unionism, Business Unionism |

147

migration in the experiences of labour activism of different women in Vega Baja del Segura, Spain. Like Seidman, Leslie Gill (2007) looks at the link between dictatorship and labour mobilization and shows the beneficial consequences of combining traditional factory-based labour activism, human rights activism and anti-corporate campaigns by international lawyers and pressure groups in Colombia, where the Coca Cola management uses paramilitary forces to repress local trade unions. Sian Lazar (2006) shows the resurgence of class politics among Bolivian cocaleros and street vendors and the increased power of their trade unions vis-à-vis the historically militant miners’ unions. Following these recent strands of trade union studies, the chapter compares the class activism of the business union AEU and the identity politics of the ‘community’ union ISTC, both operating in the steel industry. It focuses on the practices and institutions through which trade union leaders construct and maintain political consciousness among steelworkers and on their experience of labour mobilization. It looks at labour as both a site of consciousness and commodification – of ‘freedom’ and ‘regulation’– and combines a view of trade unions as institutions of labour market regulation and agents of revolutionary change. Community unionism first emerged in America in the 1990s when the Amalgamated Federation of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO) reacted to membership decline and internal fragmentation with a new platform for the labour movement. Under the conservative industrial relations legislation of the cold war, American trade unions had a narrow corporate focus, hierarchical and bureaucratic structures, formalized career and recruitment strategies and sectional and individualistic practices of mobilization and representation centred on the male, white industrial worker. In the 1990s, thanks to the help of a new breed of union activists – anti-productivists, egalitarians, anti-imperialists, with a background in civil rights and anti-war activism and experience in community organizing – the AFL-CIO shifted its political focus from the factory to the community, reaching out to peripheral workers, ethic minorities and marginal social categories traditionally excluded from the struggles of wage-workers. The AFL-CIO won important struggles, for instance for the hotel and restaurant workers, janitors, street vendors, and service workers. Faced with the spatial mobility of corporate capital the AFL-CIO also re-scaled its political scope and developed transnational alliances and strategies. For instance it developed a complex network of NGOs, human rights activists, maquiladoras and textile workers unions and corporate campaigners between North America, Mexico and Canada to oppose the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The most radical move of the AFL-CIO was to shift focus from political representation to service-providing, offering a wide range of financial, legal, health and educational services to its members. The TUC imported community unionism into Britain during the crisis of the labour movement under the Thatcher government. Since the post-war years British

148 |

Made in Sheffield

Keynesian capitalism had relied on a reciprocal exchange between industrial workers and the state. The former were guaranteed legal rights and welfare provisions in exchange for wage restraints and economic collaboration. But in the 1980s the new dogma of economic monetarism – based on the control of inflation through labour and capital deregulation – replaced the Keynesian formula based on public spending and social partnership. Keynesian capitalists saw industrial relations as the solution to labour market rigidity, whereas post-Keynesian ones saw them as its cause. The monetarist dogma inspired the anti-labour legislation of the Thatcher government, which lead to the defeat, retreat and decline of labour militancy in Britain. It was in this context of attacks on the rights of labour that the TUC pragmatically retreated from shop floor militancy and got involved in a new social partnership and in ‘community politics’. The TUC document ‘New Unionism: Organizing for Growth’ (1996) highlights two directions of trade union renewal: organizational change and social partnership. Unlike American community unionism, which insisted on leadership and cultural change, the TUC stressed organizational change in union renewal. It claimed that current trade unions were bureaucratic, sectional and hierarchic and advocated their return to the spirit of nineteenth-century trade unions, based on grassroots movements and greater involvement of peripheral and marginal sections of the working class. The document advocated the creation of horizontal and participative organizational structures in order to optimize membership recruitment and retention in unorganized areas of employment, particularly among part-time workers, women and young workers. The ‘New Unionism Task’ and the ‘New Organizing Academy’ – a training body sponsored by sixteen unions for the recruiting, mentoring and training of young and dedicated union organizers – were put in charge of reforming the TUC organizational structure. Secondly, in 2001 the TUC funded the Partnership Institute to provide training, information and best practices on social partnerships. Partnership agreements were made between the TUC and businesses – Ford, Rover, Tesco, Summerfield, and British Telecom – based on greater involvement of the unions in managerial decisions and on the creation of best employers’ practices. Finally, in line with New Labour’s shift towards the third economy, the TUC advocated a union shift towards the provision of social services to the workers, especially on pensions, health and education. Some political commentators saw the TUC’s new strategy as an attempt to import the European model of social partnership into the British context (MartinezLucio and Steward 2002). Some highlighted the limitations of transplanting American social unionism into the British context (Carter et al. 2003). Others saw it as a return to neo-corporatist labour politics in fundamental conflict with organizational decentralization and grassroots mobilization (Fairbrother and Stuart 2003; Willis 2001). Mostly, they agreed that the TUC was forced to adopt the model of community union by the policies of de-industrialization and of privatization of welfare

Community Unionism, Business Unionism |

149

pursued by the New Labour government. In other terms, ‘community unionism’ was seen as a return to the ‘realism’ found in the labour politics of the 1980s.

Transmutations of Labour Representation In 1999, after ten years of decline in militancy and a 30 per cent decline in membership, the ISTC started its mutation into a community union, of the kind of the American AFL-CIO. Organizational restructuring was central in the new ISTC political manifesto. The new ISTC moved away from traditional hierarchical relationships between the factory branch and the regional and national offices and constructed horizontal networks between regional and divisional levels and with voluntary groups, churches, local councils, human rights groups, the local media and employers’ associations. In addition, it transferred political power from the branch officer to the divisional officer and shifted the focus of political action from the shop floor to ‘the community’, re-branding itself ‘the community union’. Finally, it expanded political representation from its traditional working-class base to different segments of civil society, including women, the disabled and ethnic minorities. As part of this movement of reconnection with civil society the ISTC merged with the National League for the Blind and Disabled (NLBD), the National Society for the Prevention of Children Cruelty (NSPCC) and other small unions in the plastics, electronic and food sectors. This strategy of concentration increased trade union membership of non-steel and metal-workers in traditional industrial regions by 15 per cent. Side by side with these organizational goals, the ISTC also became a provider of legal, educational and health and safety services to steelworkers. For instance, the Steel Training Partnership (STP) promotes lifelong learning within the steel communities displaced by plant closures and unemployment through partnerships between employers, colleges and other training providers. Drawing on European and UK funds, the STP has multiple objectives: it gives to redundant steelworkers skills transferable to other sectors; it provides life-long learning to redundant workers with no re-employment prospects and re-trains the workers within the existing workplace. Unlike ‘corporate learning’, which is controlled by employers and coordinated by the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI), the STP is under the umbrella of the union and of the Department for Education (DfES). Some labour scholars believe that the STP legitimates labour deskilling and factory reorganization;4 others have supported the scheme, claiming that it allows the trade unions to control the educational development and the training of steelworkers outside the hegemonic spaces of ‘corporate learning’. Secondly, the ISTC committed itself to fight for greater safety at work, following the new legislation on health and safety. The Health and Safety at Work Act (1974) provided a

150 |

Made in Sheffield

legal framework for the regulation of health and safety at work and the Safety Representatives and Safety Committee Regulation (1978) established the role of union health and safety representatives at work. The law de facto provided an additional mechanism of labour representation, giving to union representatives the power to challenge managerial decisions on shop floor organization on the grounds of health and safety. In this context the ISTC promoted ‘health and safety management’ and supported health and safety activism as a new form of labour representation, which also included the representation of marginal categories of labour, such as the disabled, unemployed or casual labourers. As I show below, these organizational changes gave greater power to the divisional officers but weakened political activism on the shop floor where ‘health and safety representation’ became the only political tool left to trade union representatives to challenge company reorganization. As I have shown in the previous chapter ‘health and safety’ activism and the medicalization of manual labour often legitimated company closures and redundancies.

The Phoenix Flies on the ISTC Divisional Office The ISTC divisional office is situated in Phoenix House, a modernist building located between the A61 road and council blocks. In the 1980s Phoenix was the name given by the Conservative government to a series of joint ventures between the British Steel Corporation and the private sector for the restructuring of the steel industry. Phoenix House was built when New Labour rose to power to celebrate the new community unionism of the ISTC. Today, inside the glass building of Phoenix House the offices are silent, calm and inhabited by three secretaries and Bernard Bates, the political officer. Following the transformations of the steel industry in the Phoenix years Bates also underwent a personal transformation. The migrant son of an Irish Catholic farmer he started working at the BSC coke cavern in Port Talbot when he was sixteen years old. At the time coke cavern workers had low occupational status in the plant due to their renowned political docility. Given that stoppages of the coke cavern paralyzed not only the plant but also the entire region, the management selected non-unionized workers – migrants, ethnic minorities and Catholics – to work in the coke cavern department. But, unlike his workmates, Bates was politically militant. He led two legal actions against the company and organized a plant strike on health and safety grounds and became a shop-steward when he was thirty five years old. Shortly after, pulmonary emphysema due to the inhalation of fumes forced him to retire and he embarked on the career of trade union officer. At the time the BSC had made 56,000 redundancies and cut its productive capacity by one million tons per annum. Trade union membership was sharply declining and the ISTC decided to cooperate with the

Community Unionism, Business Unionism |

151

management on organizational restructuring whist stepping up its political pressure on matters of industrial compensation, redundancy packages and health and safety. Bates’ campaigning on safety at work was in tune with this broader political context and he soon became divisional officer. With the rise to power of New Labour, Bates was put in charge of developing a new community strategy for South Yorkshire. Elegantly dressed in black suits and flamboyant cufflinks, good humoured, flirting with the female secretaries, Bates was the living symbol of the transformative power of the new trade unionism and of New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ popularized by sociologist Anthony Giddens, whose books were on display in Bates’ library between Shakespeare and the biography of Nelson Mandela.

The ISTC in UNSOR I have already discussed how the creation of Corus forced the employers of UNSOR to cut costs and reorganize the workforce. The reorganization was negotiated between the owners and the ISTC divisional offices and entailed sixty compulsory redundancies in the furnace and rolling mill, the introduction of a single night-shift at the furnace and of teamwork in the finishing department. The reorganization was economically wrong for the company but the ISTC did not oppose it because it did not threaten its members in the cold department. Indeed, the younger workers welcomed the prospect of intensifying production and increasing their bonuses. But not all the ISTC workers of the cold department were happy with the change. The reorganization intensified the labour of the wire-workers of Bay 2 without increasing their wages. Lind, the shop-steward and union rep for Bay 2, opposed the introduction of teamwork for two reasons: first, because teamwork reduced his authority over the rest of the workers; and, secondly, because labour intensification forced the workers of Bay 2 into dangerous working practices. Wire-workers are an unskilled section of the working class. They struggled to have their unions recognized and were badly affected by their recent amalgamation into the ISTC. According to Lind, the ISTC agreed with the management unpaid intensified labour for the wire-workers, whilst negotiating paid overtime for the grinders and the other skilled workers of the cold department. In agreeing with the reorganization of Bay 2, which entailed greater occupational hazards for the wire-workers, the ISTC showed a lack of safety consciousness, in spite of its formal commitment to health and safety. In conflict with the ISTC’s only formal commitment to health and safety, Lind considered his role of health and safety representative a key form of political activism. The fear of industrial deaths was a central feature of his family background. His grandfather, father-in-law and uncle died in industrial accidents in mines and his father witnessed the

152 |

Made in Sheffield

deaths of several of his workmates as miners’ rescuer in Aston. When he applied for a job at Aston colliery the personnel manager told him: ‘Lind you are a nice lad and I wouldn’t mind giving you the job, but if I did your father would never forgive me’. Thus, he became a wire-worker instead. He had been a member of the ISTC for twenty-five years and totally subscribed to the ISTC’s shift towards community unionism and the union’s emphasis on safety at work. Lind reads the lack of concern for safety at work among the traditional working class as lack of labour consciousness. Most manual workers did not realize that dangerous working practices originated from the capitalists’ drive to increase profits and cut labour costs and unduly exposed themselves to work hazards for higher bonuses. Lind had a painful memory of this split within the working class on matters of safety at work. During the 1984 miners’ strike his father broke the NUM picket line saying that ‘danger never goes on strike’ and as a consequence his family was stigmatized by the miners’ community and forced to move to a nearby village. He was critical of the ‘materialism’ of the traditional labour movement, which failed to struggle against ‘health’ inequalities and narrowly focused on tackling inequalities of ‘wealth’ and ‘money’. Besides, many manual workers had a ‘macho’ attitude and were ashamed to admit to being afraid or tired at work. Lind believed that ‘illness’ was a real taboo among working people. For instance, he never told his workmates of his son’s mental disability. ‘They would not understand and would not know how to cope with me’, he once whispered to me. I have shown in Chapter Five that Lind’s health and safety activism pre-empted attempts at reorganization by the management but was largely ineffectual due to the lack of real support by the ISTC. First, the ISTC regional officer was not keen on confrontations with the management on safety issues related to labour reorganizations. Second, the ISTC did not agree to pay for Lind’s National Examination Board in Occupational Safety & Health (NEBOSH) diploma. Without this qualification he could not compete with the ‘expert’ authority of Mr Garrett who, with a degree in engineering and a NEBOSH diploma, monopolized the Health and Safety Committee and used it to legitimize organizational restructuring. For instance, the Committee used the Environmental Protection Act to shutdown the furnace due to ‘warnings of refractory ceramic fibre in the furnace lining being categorized as carcinogen 2 substance’ and introduced overhead cranes and standardized and intensified the packing operations of the men due to ‘unsafe handling practices’, following the rules of the Manual Handling Operations Regulations. It can be argued that both Lind and Garrett used the Health and Safety Committee for political purposes. But Lind saw it as a space of labour representation, whereas Garrett saw it as a tool of managerial reorganization. One day in March 2001 I found the shop floor silent and the workers standing still by their machines. ‘Don’t worry’, I said to Lind, ‘we will go to the ISTC’.

Community Unionism, Business Unionism |

153

Political Meeting at the ISTC or Community Unionism in Action Having attended several political meetings at Phoenix House, I had realized that the divisional office acted as mediator between the national and the factory levels. Mr Bates was very skilled in bridging these two levels in his daily activities, but the political meetings at Phoenix House always showed how ‘the national’ and ‘the local’ were disjointed. When national officers or MPs went to Phoenix House, they mesmerized the audience with Soviet-style bureaucratic language and spellbinding political visions. For instance, the national political officers minutely debated the bureaucratic mechanisms required to implement the platform of the ISTC National Seminar at local level. Social movement scholars and visionary MPs spoke of basic human rights, workers’ control over the means of production and global working-class-consciousness. In the wake of the 2001 general election, Labour MPs talked of ‘New Labour values’ and screened propaganda videos with engaging titles, such as ‘Holding Back the Years’ and ‘Let’s Work Together’. The abstraction of the propaganda of national politicians and union leaders strikingly contrasted with the immediacy of the problems – redundancies, illnesses, bankruptcies – affecting the local members who attended the meetings. But Bates was able to switch between these two perspectives and to combine political vision, local activism and party loyalty. At the local level, he organized raffles to raise money for local charities, spoke at local schools and children’s hospices, shook hands with junior football talents, ate sausages at the ISTC-sponsored stalls at the local farmers’ markets and attended graduations of long-life learners. In the office he arranged industrial compensations, discussed financial returns on workers’ pensions and lobbied against companies in breach of environmental regulations. Bates also had broad political vision. For instance, he told me of the difficulties he encountered in integrating contractors into the labour movement due to their stigmatization by the traditional working class. He felt uncomfortable with the hierarchical way in which the decision had been taken by the general secretariat to bid for the buy-out of the Llanwern steel plant in Wales (part of Corus) and puzzled about how, if the bid succeeded, workers’ money would be used to finance a private business. He was also aware of the contradictions and shortcomings of ‘community unionism’. For instance, the ISTC’s in-house training to health and safety representatives was inadequate compared to the one given by private providers; redundancy packages and industrial compensations increased the likelihood of company closures and its focus on paid-leave and compensations neglected the members’ need for legal advice and protection on the shop floor.5 Bates was also worried about the impact of de-industrialization on the working-class community. ‘Community unionism is about reconstructing communities but where are these communities?’, he told me one day. ‘People with redundancy packages

154 |

Made in Sheffield

think that they have become middle class but where they live there are not even shops where they can spend their money. They have no community.’ Thus, I was very hopeful when Mr Bates agreed to put on the agenda of the divisional meeting the issue of UNSOR’s receivership. The topic of the divisional meeting was ‘What is a community union?’ With the prospect of 180 redundancies at UNSOR the title was timely. An MP, a Corus Research and Development (R&D) manager, a Steel Training Partnership officer and a union representative of a plastic factory in Rotherham sat around the table together with Bates, myself and Lind, who was wearing a grey shirt, red tie and black leather jacket. The ISTC member responsible for the negotiation with UNSOR was on holiday. At the start of the propaganda video, a voiceover claimed authoritatively: ‘We created one million jobs’. ‘And we bloody lost another million’, was Lind’s not so subtle comment. During the meeting it became clear that each of us had a different idea of community unionism. The R&D manager lamented the fact that his department was split between Britain and Holland and was controlled by the Dutch partners. He said that he had become ‘a foreigner’ in his own company and suggested that community unionism was about reconstructing a British industrial community in an increasingly globalized steel industry. For the STP officer the ‘community’ consisted of part-timers, women and ethnic workers, the unemployed and the disabled who attended his ‘return to learn’ classes where they read and discussed texts and exchanged their personal experiences. His community of learners was located outside the traditional working-class community, which ‘does not like to look clever’ and prides itself on being illiterate. The MP objected to these partial and local views of political communities and sketched an outline of a global and transnational community of workers against transnational capitalism. Maggie, the union representative of a plastic factory, expressed her concerns about the deaths of five of her co-workers who had come in contact with Acrolein, a poisonous chemical substance. The plastic factory was developed twenty years ago on an ex-mining village near Doncaster and employed mainly women. According to Maggie, the village was still under the strong influence of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and still thought about itself as a mining community. Whilst the NUM was active on matters of miners’ pensions or industrial compensations, it was unwilling to mobilize itself on these industrial deaths. According to Maggie the ISTC had also underplayed the exploitation and unsafe working practices taking place in her factory and was ‘in denial’ about the fact that the ‘plastic sector is the new steel industry’ and the new arena of working-class struggle. Maggie silenced the audience with her clarity, charisma and anger. She claimed that the ISTC’s idea of community unionism revolved around ‘a small group of Oxford college boys and of retired male manual workers’ and proposed an all-encompassing vision of political community including women, foreigners and informal workers. Encouraged by Maggie’s suggestion

Community Unionism, Business Unionism |

155

that foreigners should be allowed to have a political voice, I raised the matter of UNSOR’s receivership and of its imminent closure. I stressed that the ISTC had failed to inform the workers of the employers’ intention of putting the firm into receivership and had wrongly supported the company’s reorganization in 1999. I reminded the MP that he had enthusiastically endorsed the American and Japanese mini-mill organizations in a recently published book, but he was now endorsing the closure of UNSOR in the interests of old-fashioned corporate capitalism. I suggested that the imminent closure of UNSOR was a demonstration of how community unionism weakened factory militancy and workplace democracy. The MP accused me of narrow political vision but nonetheless agreed to meet the management of UNSOR. Lind stepped in and said that Corus and UNSOR were direct competitors and that the ISTC had decided to side with the interests of the workers of Corus, with a bigger ISTC constituency, and against the interests of the workers of UNSOR. Deep down, according to Lind, this was ‘a political decision and not an economic one’. Bates resisted these objections and said that he was protecting the interests of the ISTC members of the cold department and making sure that redundancies were limited to the hot department. Lind seemed satisfied with this commitment, but I pointed out that some workers of the rolling mill threatened with redundancy had recently switched from the GMB to the ISTC. Bates explained that job losses in capital-intensive departments – such as furnaces, smelting shops and rolling mills – were the inevitable consequence of ‘productivity increases’ and ‘technological innovation’ echoing the point of view of the management. He argued that capital-intensive jobs were precarious for economic and technological reasons and that politics had nothing to do with it. Besides, he considered the manual jobs in capital-intensive departments – furnaces, mills, coke caverns – dangerous, unhealthy and humiliating. His personal commitment to cut these manual jobs became evident on our visit to the coke cavern in Scunthorpe. Getting dressed at the security gate, his body – previously disguised under a black suit – emerged through the tight fit of the protective overall, suddenly revealing its sturdy silhouette. At the coke cavern he talked with the workers about wages, working conditions and trade union representation with excitement and nostalgia. But descending once again in the black metallic lift towards the company quarters, he whispered bitterly: ‘nothing is changed at the coke caverns. It is still a bloody Victorian job’. Bates’ commitment to community unionism could be seen as being in tune with the Wesleyan morality of the early ISTC, which fought against wearing manual labour and promoted cleanliness at work as a form of personal transformation and moral improvement. But it also mirrored the ‘pragmatics’ of modern politics. He only opposed the redundancies of the ISTC-affiliated workers at UNSOR and supported the owners’ myopic restructuring. Besides, by acting as transmission belt between the national direction and local constituencies, he bypassed the

156 |

Made in Sheffield

factory level of labour mobilization and ultimately blocked the formation of horizontal political networks within the local working-class community which could have prevented the closure of the plant.

The Same Phoenix, Different Trajectories The Sheffield Engineering Company (SEC) was one of the main UK producers of crankshafts for the automotive industry. When it was founded in 1869 by the skilled grinder Andrew Marlowe the company consisted of a small workforce of highly skilled engineers making grinding machines, oil and gas engines and performing plant repairs for factories in Sheffield. The company expanded and mechanized rapidly as it moved into crankshaft production, becoming a limited company with more than one hundred employees in 1900. SEC was renowned for the great skills and political consciousness of its workers. It had the biggest communist branch in Sheffield and led the ‘shop-steward movement’ in 1919, a series of blockades and strikes to protest against the First World War. Indeed, looking at the reports of the meetings of the company Communist party branch, skills and politics seemed to go hand in hand so that the most skilled engineers were also the most charismatic trade union leaders. These shop-stewards were modernist and productivist leaders who believed that labour mechanization and standardization increased the workers’ wealth and collective consciousness. When in 1917 the Communist branch union agreed with the management the introduction of American machinery and principles of scientific management for the production of the crankshaft for the legendary Ford T, Fordism and Communism seemed to go hand in hand. Under the paternalistic management of the Marlowe family, the company enjoyed state-of-the-art welfare facilities – exclusive sports grounds, nurseries and company clubs – and harmonious industrial relations. For instance, in the context of wage deregulation in the 1950s, the AEU and the management agreed on a ‘pool system’ to moderate the wage inequalities linked to the piecework system. In 1985, under the Phoenix plan of privatization, Marlowe was incorporated into a public forging group under the control of the British Steel Corporation. For Marlowe, whose main business was precision machining, the incorporation into a debt-ridden public steel-making group was detrimental. In 1997, due to the decline of the forging division, Marlowe was sold to the venture capitalists Prudent.

Reorganization The new venture capitalists made several voluntary redundancies, closed the forge and created two separate divisions, one for the aerospace and the other for the automotive industry. With the prospect of a joint venture

Community Unionism, Business Unionism |

157

with the Italian car manufacturer IVECO, the new consultants reorganized the production process into a ‘general area’ – where all the crankshafts were ‘roughed’ and ground – and a dedicated ‘product area’ where Bentley, Ford, and IVECO crankshafts were fitted, balanced, ground and set up according to the manufacturers’ specifications. One of the aims of the new system was to cut labour costs by training the workers of the general area to operate on two different crankshafts and two different machines at a time. The new Total Production Management (TPM) ‘philosophy’ was based on two principles: the introduction of ‘the market’ into the production line and teamwork. The introduction of the market principle on the shop floor gave greater powers of labour supervision to the firm’s customers. For instance, Rolls Royce (RR) kept the workers of the Bentley line under constant pressure with sudden changes of standard specifications communicated through computer terminals located on the line, unannounced visits from its engineers and time-consuming quality checks to be performed with complex tools designed by RR for the purpose. Ford forced the workers of the line to operate with a zero-stock policy, thus breaking their informal control of the production process based on stock accumulation. Under the new production regime the line workers were fully exposed to the pressures of the market and had become, in the word of the quality manager, ‘the first communication point with the customers’. Teamworking decentralized the managerial functions of planning, accounting, control and training onto the line under the supervision of ‘team coordinators’. These team coordinators broke the power of the AEU in three ways. First, they controlled the communications between the production managers and the line, which was previously controlled by the AEU. Secondly, they controlled the training of the line workers, which was previously informally controlled by the union, and changed the very notion of skill. If the AEU-affiliated skilled workers trained their workmates in the ‘hard’ skills of turning, fitting and grinding, the team coordinators focused on changing their ‘mindsets’ and improving their ‘soft’ skills of communication, sociability, flexibility and mobility. Thirdly, it weakened the control of the production process by the politically militant fitters and empowered the engineers of the machines’ manufacturers.6 Formally educated, militant and in control of the labour process, the fitters were the ‘aristocracy of labour’ in SEC before the reorganization. In their quiet and private offices on the shop floor, fitters drew sketches, made small patterns and trained their young apprentices on the mechanics of the labour process. But with the computerization of the production process and the externalization of servicing their mechanical knowledge and roles became suddenly obsolete. Besides, multi-skilling de facto deskilled the production workers, forcing them to perform different operations simultaneously (for instance, grinding and turning) and mechanizing some of their operation through Computer Numeric Machines (CNM).

158 |

Made in Sheffield

The introduction of the principle of the market into the line depoliticized the line workers. Forced to update Process Control Charts (PCC) and to meet production targets for their manufacturers, production workers developed separate informal cultures based on their manufacturers’ profiles, ‘values’ and goals. For instance, the Bentley workers were aware of producing an ‘elite’ crankshaft, valued at £300 on the market and targeted at the sophisticated male, young City workers and their blond, elegant female partners displayed in the promotional posters in the communication area. The workers at the Ford line developed an informal culture based on ‘hitting the targets’, ‘risk-taking’ and ‘price-setting’. They started to associate the short-times, voluntary retirements and wage reductions taking place on the shop floor with external and abstract economic forces and agents – such as ‘globalization’, ‘inflation’ and ‘competition’ – rather than with the profit-seeking strategies of their new employers. Teamwork also fragmented the workforce along generational lines. The younger workers, more open to changes and less politically motivated, were allocated to prestigious lines; the elder workers and ‘troublemakers’ were put on peripheral lines. One of these was the European Engine Alliance (EEA) line which produced crankshafts for a European car which was said to be a joint venture between Fiat, Ford and Rover, but which nobody knew what actually looked like. The European line was the lowest ranking in the factory, constantly under the shadow of the uncertain future of the economic partnership and of the low status of the European Union.

The AEU Factory Branch We tried hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be re-organised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organising and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation. Note posted on the AEU company office by Gaius Petronius Arbiter (Nero’s administrators)

The union room was located on the first floor, opposite the offices of the logistics and production managers and overlooking the company garden that was said to have been planted by the founder himself. Ancient wooden desks, chairs and cabinets filled the room. High on a wooden shelf a bust of Lenin loomed over a pile of company records, trade union journals and photographic albums. The fifteen albums preserved the visual history of the products, machines and places that had connected the company, its workers and families for more than a century. Grinding machines, the swimming team, the women’s turning section, children ready for a summer trip, bowling at the Evergreen Association, the workers demonstrating outside Sheffield City Council, the old boss

Community Unionism, Business Unionism |

159

cycling to work, different generations of trade union representatives, the forging of the last crankshafts, a ‘political trip’ to Rimini, the closure of the turning section, the new consultants and the union branch officer shaking hands with tense smiles on the shop floor. Another folder contained local and national newspaper cuttings, some of them from the early nineteenth century. History was also visually represented in the banners on the walls, whose people, symbols and colours reflected the history of labour amalgamation, conflict and mass-mobilization in the UK. Through these banners, photos, newspaper cuttings and archival resources young trade unions members learned to make connections between the history of the shop floor – of its managers, bosses, workers and families – and the history of the British steel industry, the trade union movement and the nation. Steve (the Branch Officer) and Gary (the Deputy Officer) had different styles and philosophies of labour representation. Gary was a traditional AEU communist leader, with a productivist, hierarchical and collectivist mentality. Traditionally, the communist AEU viewed production as the site of working-class struggle and saw ‘efficiency’ and mechanization of production as a path towards of class-consciousness. Developed at the time of Fordism, productivism was a central ideology of communism and capitalism. From the communist perspective, greater mechanization entailed greater control over the capitalist process by skilled workers and, hence, greater workers’ power. From the capitalist perspective, mechanization and efficiency increased industrial democracy. These two opposite and interlocking perspectives shaped industrial relations in the engineering sector in post-war Britain, based on the collaboration between the human relations management and the trade unions. The structure of the AEU was hierarchical, with the national direction in charge of collective agreements and factory politics. Under business unionism the national direction supported only ‘economic’ strikes and slowdowns. For instance, when the car manufacturer Rover was sold to venture capitalists and six hundred workers made redundant in 2000, the workers of SEC did not strike in support of the TGWU because Rover was not a SEC customer. Similarly, under business unionism, factory union officers were expected to act as facilitators for reorganizations, re-training and voluntary redundancies and to oppose only those changes that entailed compulsory redundancies. Thus, business unionism held a vision of labour mobilization centred on the economic interests of the plant, rather than of the workers, and on the collaboration between labour and capital. In Marlowe AEU representatives and human relations managers were equally involved in the pursuit of profit and efficiency so that their roles and careers often blurred. For instance, Jack Darling, in 1961 a young secretary of the Communist party branch and trade union convener, was made Human Relations manager in 1975. Darling was a mythical figure in the company, equally revered and criticized. In the 1960s when he was AEU convener, he fought against the introduction of the ‘maximonster’, a

160 |

Made in Sheffield

big grinding machine that threatened to mechanize and deskill the production of heavy engines. When he was Human Relations manager he passed the ‘average earning’ system and abolished the piecework system in order to prevent wage-gaps between skilled and semi-skilled workers. Nonetheless, according to many, he betrayed the Communist cause by raising his salary and power well above his fellow workers. Gary helped the team coordinators to implement lean production and to multi-skill the line workers. He thought that that by learning cost accounting, production control and marketing, the workers would control the line and replace the middle-management. Thus, he saw teamworking as a tool of skills re-composition and workers’ empowerment. Younger than Gary, Steve had less faith in lean production and saw teamworking as a tool of social fragmentation. Being enrolled in a management course at the Open University, he knew that Toyotism transplants in Britain had been used to curb trade union militancy in the past. But he also shared the pragmatic business ethos of the AEU of collaborating with the management on production increases and, at the same time, opposing wage cuts and compulsory redundancies. Under pressure from the general manager, he increased the workers’ productivity by 10 per cent following their suggestions of cutting transport times between the general area and the lines and of improving coordination between shifts. But it was the poor management of the company and the ‘irrationalities’ of the lean production system that convinced Steve and other workers to collaborate in the reorganization. For instance, there was a lack of coordination between the workers of the general line and the product-specific teams and between night and day shifts; the kanban system was a total waste of money;7 and the general line needed a new automatic grinding machine in order to keep up with the product lines. Thus, some workers saw the trade union as a means to take control and rationalize the production process against the poor management of speculative owners, inexperienced managers and technocratic consultants. But Steve was conscious of the dangers for the workers of thinking in ‘pure economic’ and efficiency terms and often reminded them that productive issues were also political matters. For instance, were not the grinders aware that their suggestion of investing in a new automated grinding machine would deskill their own labour? And what were the boundaries between productivity and exploitation? The AEU officers also reassured the workers on worrying rumours and gossip about anonymous players and forces located outside the shop floor. Was it true that Airbus, one of the prospective clients of SEC, was going bust? Was the steel industry entering a new recession? Did not the company make a loss of £1 million last year? Were redundancies discussed in the last company meeting? And was it true that an Italian firm was buying the place? In these times of reorganization the AEU factory branch generated trust by distributing strategic information among the worried workers and guaranteeing against their compulsory redundancy. Steve and Gary

Community Unionism, Business Unionism |

161

also cultivated the sense of trust and cohesion among the workers through political events, demonstrations and workshops taking place outside Marlowe. For instance, they organized a day-trip to London to demonstrate against the pension fund crisis. In these demonstrations the workers learned the hierarchies, informal rules and internal tensions within the national trade union movement. Sharing drowsiness early in the morning, political excitement among the crowd, friendly euphoria in the pub and desultory comments on the bus returning to Sheffield at night, the workers felt happy to belong to the union and looked positively at the changes taking place in the factory. These social events were photographed by Steve, archived in the union’s photo album and discussed with the other workers during the break-times. Thus, as guarantor of the workers’ employment, catalyst of their political commitment, facilitator of their social cohesion, gatekeeper between the factory and the community outside it, insurer against the risks of change and expert in labour organization, the AEU created trust and consensus about the reorganization amongst the workers.8 Steve was conscious that he was facilitating the company reorganization and was troubled by the possible social consequences of his business pragmatism. More importantly he was aware that the ‘TQM philosophy’ undermined his very authority on the shop floor mostly among younger workers who identified more with the exclusive lifestyle symbolized by the luxury cars on the posters of the communication areas than with AEU’s sober anticapitalist and anti-consumerist ethic.

Business Unionism in Times of Reorganization In February 1999 IVECO invested £9 million in a new line and the employers’ anti-union stance intensified. Even if the union was endorsing reorganization and securing the workers’ collaboration, the management believed that that ‘the old Marlowe labour mentality’ scared investors and clients off. In order to break the association between Marlowe and its militant trade union, it renamed the company as the Sheffield Engineers Company. It also painted the shop floor orange instead of red, used the panels of the communication areas to mark divisions between different lines and built a small gazebo on the line for the display of crankshafts and promotional videos. The production and logistical managers were made redundant and Steve’s office was relocated from the first floor onto the shop floor where, according to the new general manager, ‘it belonged’. On the day of the move, the general manager told Steve to clean up ‘the rubbish’ in the office and Steve replied: ‘this is not rubbish this is our history’. Apart from these aesthetic changes, the overall production process remained unchanged. Recession in the automotive industry and the lack of middle-managers put the line workers under increased strain because of aggressive customers. In December 1999 Equitable Life, which

162 |

Made in Sheffield

managed the workers’ pension funds, declared insolvency and cut the policy-holders’ payouts to stay afloat. The workers panicked about their pensions and rumours of company bankruptcy spread on the shop floor. Steve kept the company together in the midst of financial losses, anarchy and fear on the shop floor and successive buy-out bids by two venture capitalists, one Indian and one German. He gathered information from national and international trade union representatives, MEPs, journalists and the Web about the two groups and provided the employers with enough evidence of the speculative intention of the two groups to reverse their decision to go along with the Indian bid. He also lobbied local and national politicians in favour of a counter-bid by a consortium of steelmakers led by Corus. The counter-bid was also supported by some managers and workers, but opposed by the venture capitalists and the AEU general secretariat and it did not succeed. Having protected the firm from speculative take-overs, Steve organized a meeting with some of the miners who had successfully bought-out the Tower Colliery in South Wales in 1995 to explore the possibility of a workers’ buy-out of SEC. MPs, SEC workers, miners, NUM and AEU trade union representatives attended a secretive meeting in a rural location outside Sheffield. Sheffield has a painful history of attempted workers’ buy-outs in the steel industry. Production collectives failed following similar patterns, with enthusiastic workers living on a fraction of their salaries for months while being overtaken by middle-management and private businessmen who stepped in ‘to help with the administration’. At the meeting the workers of SEC reacted coldly to the suggestions of the miners and refused to get involved ‘personally’ in managerial and strategic tasks. Some of them refused because they lacked political drive. Those politically committed refused because they saw the idea of ‘workers’ ownership’ as a political contradiction and believed that ‘a workers’ company in a capitalist world’ would not last a week. Following the failure of the two attempted bids, the management communicated to Steve their intention to put the company into receivership. In response, Steve organized a demonstration together with community groups and the Caribbean councillor of the area where SEC was located and most of the workers lived. The demonstration took place outside Sheffield City Council and brought to the public’s attention the threat of closure of SEC and the problems of unemployment and social exclusion of the local black community. Besides this, he organized a trip to London together with non-manufacturing and private unions, legal activists and anti-corporate groups to demonstrate against a court ruling stating that Equitable Life had acted lawfully in cutting policy-holders’ bonuses and which threatened the SEC workers’ pensions. Thus, in spite of his formal subscription to the ethic of business unionism, Steve was constantly expanding labour mobilization outside the boundaries of the factory, connecting class politics with community, ethnic and legal activism and translating local economic issues into broader political

Community Unionism, Business Unionism |

163

alliances between workers of different companies, sectors and countries. Unlike most of trade union leaders who do not use the Web for political activism, Steve campaigned, researched, networked and mobilized through the Web. He also drew on informal political networks outside the traditional labour movement with MPs, journalists, lawyers, intellectuals and progressive businessmen. It was through one of these networks that the current Italian owner was found and closure avoided. In the company Steve constantly challenged the mere economic logic of the managers and looked at the social consequences of reorganization. For instance, when the logistics manager was sacked and left without support by his colleagues, Steve found him a job on the line. He also fought to keep the disabled son of Jack Darling in employment and challenged the company’s proposal of closing the Evergreen Club. The Club was located in a neo-classical building with a billiard room, a small theatre, a dance hall, a kitchen and a big dining area with a view over two bowling greens and the Yorkshire moors. In the meetings of the Club past and present workers, clerical staff and trade union representatives played snooker and bingo and lunched together at monthly meetings and at the company’s Christmas parties. Most of the Evergreen members had retired after having spent their whole working lives at Marlowe. They remembered the time of mass-production, war, nationalization and the transformation of people, pay-scales and production that followed the arrival of the mythical Phoenix, when most of them ‘voluntarily’ retired. Those retired male and female workers displayed a style of confrontational political language and a confidence in the manufacturing industry that both amused and galvanized the current workers. Their faces were hardly recognizable from the company’s photo albums but they embodied Marlowe’s political past and gave hopes in the troubling times of the present. Steve used the Evergreen Club to increase social cohesion among the workers of SEC and to perpetuate the paternalistic view of the company ‘like a big family’ of the previous management. He feared that its closure would undermine the social consensus that kept the company going in these difficult times. But it was not only for pragmatic resons that Steve described Marlowe as a big family. Having joined the company when he was fifteen he became a skilled worker and political activist through his apprenticeship in the trade union office and he saw the union as a pedagogic institution that reconciled professional, political and personal development in a ‘total way’, unlike other institutions such as friendship, school or his own family.

Conclusion The framing of economic unionism and community unionism as two opposite forms of labour mobilization reflects, on a broader level, two views of capitalism.9 Institutionalists and Polanyian scholars consider

164 |

Made in Sheffield

capitalism as a form of labour commodification, whereas Gramscian ones see it as a pattern of labour exploitation. At the macro-economic level, this split between the ‘market’ and the ‘production’ views of economic value is reflected, for instance, in the different agendas of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) – focused on trade regulation – and the International Labour Organization (ILO) – focused on labour standards – and in the perceived increasing hiatus between financial and industrial capitalism. Within the anti-globalization movement the same split exists between consumers’ activism and labour activism. The cases of UNSOR and SEC turn the opposition between ‘the pure economic’ vision of business unionism and ‘the social’ morality of community unionism upside down. A mixture of business pragmatism, technological determinism and monetarism inspired the community unionism of the ISTC. ISTC officers viewed redundancies and the closure of the electric furnace at UNSOR as the ‘natural’ outcome of the economic forces of mechanization and productivity increases in the steel industry. Besides, the ISTC subscribed to the monetarist logic of New Labour based on pension returns and ‘supply-side’ interventions to compensate for job losses in the manufacturing industry. There is increasing evidence that the workers pensions are tools for the cooptation of the labour movement,10 rather than for working-class emancipation, as it is often assumed. In fact, the ISTC considered redundancies as a pure economic matter and was satisfied with compensating the loss of wages of some of the workers at UNSOR with their increased pension returns, without considering the subjective and political loss they experienced. Besides, in the negotiation with the management the ISTC did not protect the furnace workers or the wire-workers, but the ‘narrow’ interests of its traditional members. One of the main principles of community unionism is to develop horizontal and non-hierarchical networks with members and other unions, but the ISTC consolidated its organizational structure instead, incorporating smaller unions and associations, performing welfare services previously performed by the state and forging one-way communication lines between the national and the divisional level. Although contrary to its business ethics, the AEU branch officers carefully assessed the social and experiential consequences of economic reorganization and pushed politics beyond the boundaries of class and the factory. Under the charismatic leadership of Steve, redundant managers were given a job on the shop floor; workers demonstrated together with black, community and anti-globalization activists, miners and steelworkers shared their political experiences and retired workers and their families spent time with the rest of the workforce. In conclusion, the material and the experiential, the social and the economic, and the double movement of commodification and socialization are two sides of labour under capitalism which cannot be separated. Trade unions and labour activists must recognize the dual nature of

Community Unionism, Business Unionism |

165

labour and look at the political as a movement in time and space between the contradictory forces of socialization and commoditization, rather than a uniform field of action. Unlike traditional industrial relations studies and class analyses, my ethnography of labour highlights its dialectical nature. The closure of UNSOR resulted from the medicalization of manual labour through public policies, managerial restructuring and the pragmatism of the ‘new’ trade union officials. On the shop floor this medical culture was reproduced by union representatives and the workers, who acquiesced to the firm’s closure. The current medicalization and ‘socialization’ of manual labour is dialectically related to its glorification and commodification under Keynesian capitalism. Failing to recognize the historical continuity between socialization and commoditization of manual labour the workers of Marlowe and the workers of UNSOR are locked into oppositional labour ideologies and partial class struggle. Today, as in the past, the trade union movement under capitalism is split into two divergent moralities of labour – one economic and one social – and a truly new social unionism must reconcile these two labour perspectives and forms of labour mobilization, rather than emphasizing their differences. For anthropologists familiar with the formalist/ substantivist debate of the 1960s and the ‘moral economy’ debate in peasant studies of the 1980s the opposition between ‘purely social’ and ‘purely economical’ is not new. Indeed Marilyn Strathern famously suggested that the invention of ‘society’ by social scientists is the flip side of the economists’ invention of ‘the economy’ under the neo-conservative regimes of Reagan and the Thatcher.11 In a similar vein, it can be argued that community unionism is the flip side of the monetarism and the technocratic capitalism of the New Democrats in America and of New Labour in Britain and of the privatization of the steel industry under successive Phoenixes which polarized the working class into opposite moralities of labour.

Notes 1. See Peter Waterman’s (2002) critique of the bureaucratic and productivist logic of the Socialist Worker Party directed against Chris Harman. 2. A voluntary federation of fifty six national and international labor unions. 3. Nonetheless Seidman suggests that these social movements articulated their demands in an explicit class framework. 4. Emma Wallis, Mark Stuart and Andrew Murray (2003). 5. Paul Kent (1999). 6. Under the new financial management, machines were not bought but taken on lease, which included free assistance from the manufacturers’ engineers. 7. The stocking of material on the line which replaces internal servicing. 8. My case does not suggest that the workers of SEC subscribed uncritically to the model of business unionism, although they did do so in times of

166 |

Made in Sheffield

reorganization and uncertainty. For an instance of oppositional consciousness of line workers against business unionism, see Kasmir (2005) and Lopez (2004). 9. Meiksin-Wood extensively discusses these two views on capitalism (2002). 10. Dumenil and Levil (2004). 11. Strathern (1992).

CONCLUSION


Farewell to the Working Class? In the 1980s two revisionist trends of labour studies pointed towards the terminal decline of the Western working class. The first, which has been described as ‘New True Socialism’ (NTS),1 suggests that organizational and technological improvements in industry create a category of ‘core’ wage-workers with salaries and working conditions comparable to those of the middle class. This ‘bourgeoisification’ of the working class nullifies the Marxist vision of class struggle based on the clear-cut opposition between ‘proletarians’ and ‘bourgeoisie’. NTS scholars suggest that the new revolutionary subjects are those non-class-based marginal or subaltern political formations dislocated by post-Fordism. The second tradition claims that Western neo-conservative governments following the Washington consensus directly and relentlessly attacked the working class, causing its near extinction.2 If the first ‘myth’ paints the working class as reactionary, the second describes it as powerless. In America there is growing awareness among scholars of increased class polarization and political militancy. For instance, Zweig (2000) argues against the myth of the disappearance of the working class in America showing that 62 per cent of the American labour force is controlled by a small group (less than 5 per cent) of powerful manufacturing corporations. Productivity increases in the industry profit a small percentage of the richest families, with workers experiencing income decline. Reminding us that ‘class in not about lifestyle but about economics’ (ibid.: 11) Zweig suggests that income inequality does not create underclasses, but pushes some sections of the working class into poverty when critical personal circumstances occur. Focusing on ‘new’ trade unionism, Fantasia (1989) shows the resurgence of militancy in the American AFL-CIO under the charismatic leadership of John Sweeney. In Britain, a similar pattern of wealth polarization and labour militancy is also occurring.3 But the political and academic community in the UK is still trapped in the intellectual tradition of communitarianism, post-

168 |

Made in Sheffield

modernism and the ‘retreat from class’ thesis laid out by Giddens in his Third Way (1998), the manifesto of the New Labour party. Current working-class studies are either framed within the multiculturalism debate,4 focusing on the relations between migrants and white working class in areas of social deprivation, or within the field of cultural studies, highlighting the disappearance of working-class ‘culture’ in the era of finance capitalism, hedge funds, and post-Fordism.5 In this book I have documented the resilience of the British working class against anti-labour policies by successive Conservative governments and extensive subcontracting in the steel industry. To be sure, my ethnography shows that the working class is no better off under the current Blair government than in the Thatcher years. New Labour continued to target the working class through state decentralization, welfare privatization, anti-union legislation and monetarist and antiindustrial policies based on the control of inflation through labour and capital deregulation. At the macro-economic level these policies polarized the steel industry between conglomerates mass-producing low-quality steel and small and labour-intensive machine shops like Morris. In this context, middle-sized, integrated and high-value producing mini-mills like UNSOR were closed down or transformed into small subcontractors like Morris. At the level of the shop floor de-industrialization was achieved through reorganizations based on the principles of flexible production, including teamwork, multi-skilling and Total Quality Management. In UNSOR flexible production and teamwork deskilled the craft workers who controlled the capital-intensive and ‘hot’ phases of the production process and empowered the labourers of the finishing and labour-intensive end of the production process. With regards to the ‘politics of the shop floor’, flexible production transformed the conflict between capital and labour into a conflict between different sections of the workforce and between different ‘images’ of labour: the young, flexible, ergonomic, modern and productive labour of the cold workers and the dangerous, wearing, hierarchical, obsolete and unproductive labour of the ageing workforce of the hot department. The same ‘medical ideology’ which legitimated mechanization and the system of massproduction in the past, legitimates its dismissal today. In fact, health and safety legislation and the transformation of shop-stewards into health and safety representatives depoliticized union activism and legitimated closures and redundancies. Outside the shop floor flexibilization was achieved by co-opting the ISTC into third sector policies and community activism, and moving away from wage-bargaining and factory politics. De-industrialization profited small subcontractors like Morris, but it nonetheless fragmented its workforce into older craft workers and younger labourers, as with UNSOR. But the case of Morris shows the emergence of new patterns of authority in industry under current ‘despotic capitalism’. If UNSOR was a traditional hegemonic institution where the employers co-opted the workers through its managerial

Conclusion |

169

apparatuses, in Morris the workers were self-disciplined by the fear of capital flights, the lack of labour rights and welfare provisions, and reproduced, in their own way, the authority and the functions of absent capitalists. The hot workers acted as ‘capitalists’ controlling the production process, performing some managerial functions (such as recruiting, training, and planning production and the piece-work system) and setting up independent businesses. The cold workers were ‘proletarians’ whose production was alienated, intensified and fragmented. The lives of the people that I describe in this book show that deindustrialization did not turn the working class into middle class or wipe it off the political map, but increased its fragmentation in ways that were difficult for the workers to comprehend and combat. Depending on the sale of their labour for survival, exploited and with salaries below the minimum wage, the workers that I encountered could hardly be described as middle class. The workers of Morris earned well below the minimum wage and had to complement their income with other informal incomes in order to survive. The workers of UNSOR were not much better off. With their spouses’ income they had an annual family income of £20,000, but given the volatility of both sources of income they often ended up below the poverty line. But these workers were often unaware and in denial of their class condition. For instance, Charlie and Toni hoped ‘to become middle class’ through property development, nursing, social networking, adult education and conspicuous consumption. Similarly, the illusion of entrepreneurship of the forgers of Morris, such as Teddy and Bobby, clashed with the fact that they were overworking, exploiting their kin and relatives, in constant fear of controls by policemen or tax inspectors and struggling to stay above the poverty line. These false expectations of entrepreneurship and middle-class status clashed with the workers’ marginal class position, which emerged only in critical moments, such as in the firms’ short-times, reorganizations and closures or in family conflicts and break-ups. But if my ethnography shows the existence of a ‘class-in-itself’, what does it say about classconsciousness?

Labour and Alienation as Relational Values James Carrier (1992), in his famous essay on ‘emerging alienation in relations of production’, unpacks ethnographically Marx’s notion of alienation. He suggests that modern workers are alienated when they are: split between two distinct aspects, a core and a periphery. The core is made of things that people believe to be internal to the individual or continuous with the individual as concrete being. This inalienable self is engaged in durable, inalienable identities and relationships. … The periphery, on the other hand, is made up of a set of less durable attributes and of relations among individuals entering into agreements to do certain things in accordance with certain

170 |

Made in Sheffield

standards or rules. In the context of these relations people experience each other not relationally, but autonomously, as independent individuals (ibid.: 552).

In my shop floor ethnographies of UNSOR and Morris I have argued that the workers’ consciousness varies according to their age, personal background and location in the production process. The older and more skilled workers of the forge, smelting shop and rolling mill experience their labour qualitatively, personally and subjectively for different reasons. First, due to the sensory, non-repetitive, ‘implicit’ and nonlinguistic knowledge associated with their capital-intensive tasks. This knowledge cannot be learnt, valued or communicated through monetary language, standards of production or objective measurements of effort, but is incorporated in the workers’ bodies and emerges in the act of production. Thus, these workers do not separate out their ‘knowledge’ and their ‘praxis’ and the formal and subjective aspects of their tasks. Apart from their position in the labour process their experience of work is also determined by their location in the labour market. Economist Akerloff (1982) suggests that workers located in different labour markets have different expectations of the wage-contract. If primary workers experience the wage-contract as an asymmetrical gift-exchange – giving an ‘excess of the minimum work standard’ and receiving from the capitalists wages above the market average – the workers of secondary labour markets experience it as a ‘pure’ symmetrical market exchange. Read through William Reddy’s critique of the ‘liberal illusion’,6 Akerloff’s insight suggests that the wage contract is asymmetrical between these two categories of workers. In fact, neither the skilled smelters of UNSOR nor the forgers of Morris are proletarians. The former have skills that are in high demand and the latter are not only wageearners but also petty entrepreneurs who combine wages and informal incomes, both personal and of their families. They see the wage-contract as an insurance against the volatility of their personal businesses rather than as a monetary income. Thirdly, the ‘hot workers’ experience their labour as ‘personal’ also because of its spatial proximity to home. Living close-by they walk to work and their workplaces are domesticated. For instance, their wives often appear on the shop floor carrying sandwiches, washing, tea, utility bills and telephone messages; relatives, friends and kin pay them visits; and they go home for quick naps, lunches or for urgent domestic repairs or work. The physical proximity of their homes and their workplaces also increases their visibility to employers and coworkers. Managers pop into the homes of absentees, or onto the shop floor after the evening tea and the workers of the finishing department gossip about their family members, friends or ‘the socials’ that they see circulating in the neighbourhood. Their households and the shop floor are physically, economically and socially interdependent so that the value of

Conclusion |

171

the labour inside the firm is complementary to the variety of transactions and personal interactions taking place outside it. Memory is the fourth dimension of labour value. Skilled knowledge is based on implicit memory, that is, memory expressed non-linguistically and incorporated into the workers’ praxis. For the skilled forgers of Morris and the smelters of UNSOR labour consists of a process of continuous ‘remembering’, that is, of retrieval of knowledge that is necessary for them to perform specific tasks. This implicit memory often blurs with their personal memories and the history of the steel industry. Most of these skilled workers are from the post-war generation and have a family background of skilled labour and left school without formal qualification to become apprentices in renowned local steel plants. Working on the same Ryder Hammers or furnace on which they worked fifty years ago they also recall their prestigious past, ‘when smelters were gods’ and forgers were ‘the aristocracy of labour’. Performing the movements that they learned as young apprentices, they pay tribute to their old ‘masters’ and to masters of their masters, making genealogies of labour through their performances of material tasks. The memory of the past also intrudes into their shop floors in the shape of timeless objects: ancient calendars and milk bottles, brooms without bristles, wooden handles, chairs and boxes eroded by time. Through these three kinds of personal memories – the embodied memory, the conscious recollection of the past and objectified memory – they value and reproduce labour. Labour value is also connected to the workers’ perception of the value of their bodies. In Sheffield in the early nineteenth century steel capitalists discovered that the workers’ bodies were valuable ‘assets’ and launched a medical campaign to preserve the health of the grinders by improving ventilation and sanitation in the workplace. The grinders resisted these medical improvements in the belief that the prolongation of their lives depressed the marginal value of their labour. The process of sanification of bodies and mechanization of shop floors intensified under monopoly capitalism, culminating in the era of steel nationalization, when skilled steelworkers were imagined with muscular, vigorous and oversized bodies by employers, health providers and in the popular imagination. With de-industrialization and the rise of the knowledge economy skilled labour was miniaturized and feminized and the big and muscular bodies of the steelworkers, like the machines of mass-production, underwent devaluation and medicalization through re-training, benefits and industrial compensations. Today, in capital-intensive departments the workers experience their bodies and their machines as idiosyncratic. The forgers of Morris model their postures on the movements of their hammers, the smelters develop a peculiar sense of vision, smell and temperature and the workers of the rolling mill undergo a physical deterioration which parallels the mechanical dissolution of the rolling mill. Kinship is another fundamental dimension of work. The workers of the forge in Morris and of the smelting shop in UNSOR recruit relatives

172 |

Made in Sheffield

and family friends, treat young apprentices as relatives and consider the domestic labour of their kin as part of their own labour. The younger workers of the labour-intensive departments of these two firms have totally different understanding of their labour in relation to these dimensions. First, their labour is incorporated into machines that quantify their efforts and translate them into productive and monetary outcomes related to the bonus system. They experience their work as impersonal and abstract because it is incorporated in the technical system and represented through numbers and quantitative equivalents. Secondly, they are proletarians – whose household reproduction depends entirely on their wages – with peripheral skills and labour markets. They have a monetary and instrumental attitude towards the wage-contract seeing it as a symmetrical exchange of cash for labour. Thirdly, they experience labour as impersonal also because of its spatial separation from home. Living at least twenty miles from their firms they commute to work in long car journeys along roads, bridges and roundabouts that cut across small villages and the rural countryside. The industrial areas surrounding the two factories have very few shops, cafes and entertainments and this makes them feel even more bounded to the workplace and distant from home. For them the value of labour is circumscribed on the shop floor and physically and mentally experienced in sharp opposition with the private realm of home. Of young age, they have only witnessed industrial decline and the bitterness and disillusionment of their parents who are either unemployed or employed in temporary and unskilled jobs. Thus, they consciously ‘forget’ their family histories and the broader history of the steel industry. They work by externalizing knowledge into external mnemonic supports: machines, graphics, statistics, numbers, chalk inscriptions, and other communicative devices. If skilled workers produce by remembering and locate labour value in the past, these unskilled workers produce by forgetting and locate labour value in the present. In the labour-intensive departments of UNSOR and Morris the workers rotate on different machines and perceive the technical system as impersonal and external to their bodies. Unlike the workers of the forges and the smelting shop who display their bodies wearing tight shirts and personalized clothes, these workers disguise them under standard oversized overalls. Pushed into intensive labour through tight production schedules and the bonus system, they suffer from stress-related diseases such as vertigo, dizziness, ear infections, white finger, and nervous breakdowns. Finally, with no kin or relatives in the business, married to insecure or part-time workers in the service industry and with young children in education, they experience their labour as unrelated and alien to their kinship relations. Expanding Carrier’s framework it can be suggested that labour has a relational value which emerges by constructing relations between people, objects and the environment at different temporal and spatial levels. At the level of the factory, the older and skilled workers of the capital-

Conclusion |

173

intensive departments of Morris and UNSOR are not alienated because they experience labour by constructing material and emotional networks between home and work, drawing temporal and spatial links between machines, bodies and kin, pooling incomes, revenues and investments and making enduring connections between people, practices, artefacts and knowledge circulating on the shop floor and those circulating in the neighborhood. Unlike them, the workers of the labour-intensive departments are alienated because they experience production as separation from kin, homes and spouses, temporal ruptures, externalization of knowledge and labour and disconnection between bodies, machines and products. Nonetheless, if the focus of analysis is broadened to the level of the sector, it is evident that in Morris the capital-intensive and labourintensive departments are part of the same ‘space of poverty’. In fact, their labour markets are structurally related, with unskilled young workers increasing the average wages and bonuses of the skilled elder workers and these providing in exchange training, recruitment, informal incomes and distribution networks. In UNSOR the workers of the smelting shop and the workers of the finishing department are structurally antagonistic, the former being progressively marginalized and the latter progressively empowered by the current reorganization of the industry. The progressive reorganization and transformation of UNSOR from integrated steelworks to engineering subcontractor created a clear-cut polarization of interests between young and older workers, between the employers and the ISTC on the one hand and the skilled workers on the other hand and between the workforce and the capitalists. However, the progressive increase of the scale of the operations in Morris also benefited the unskilled workers of the finishing department who experienced alienation but not classpolarization. Thus, expanding Carrier’s analysis at the level of the sector it can be argued that alienation ‘as separation’ exists in traditional sectors where industrial decline and reorganization trigger class-polarization. On the contrary, among deregulated and informal subcontractors a ‘double consciousness’ develops – involving both cuts and reconnections, junctures and re-composition and mixed ‘moralities’ of production – which prevents alienation from turning into class-polarization. In line with Parry’s suggestion (1986) that the ideologies of ‘pure gift’ and of ‘pure interest’ are more likely to emerge in societies with a strong state and advanced division of labour, it can be argued that the confusion of these two ideologies in the same institution of late capitalism is the product of de-industrialization and state privatization. But what are the consequences of the workers’ different moralities of production on their political struggles? In Morris the coexistence of hybrid ideologies of production and the absence of class-polarization neutralized the policies of deindustrialization of local authorities and trade unions and ultimately kept the firm open. In fact, the workers of Morris escaped re-training and

174 |

Made in Sheffield

insecure service sector jobs offered by the local council and the General Municipal Workers Union by developing informal training and recruitment systems,7 adapted to the volatility of the wage economy by diversifying their incomes, dodged labour regulations and health and safety inspectors, which in the past had closed the firm on health and safety grounds, and evaded taxes and fiscal regulations through informal incomes, illegal trades and fake depreciations. Non-unionized and not involved in factory politics they were nonetheless politically active outside the factory. They did not oppose their employers by appealing to their class identities or through wage-bargaining. Instead, they fought against the privatization of their means of reproduction – land, moors, ponds and housing – by developers and bureaucrats through housing associations, ramblers’ clubs and countryside activism. They did not claim their right to a decent job, but they claimed their right ‘not to work’ in precarious jobs instead and maximized their income benefits and industrial compensations, often with the help of Citizens Advice Bureaus and militant GPs. They refused the language of formal politics and turned the ‘discourse of heritage’ of the Sheffield City Council to their own advantage, monopolizing the land, houses, walks, ponds and small Victorian shop floors of Endcliffe against tourists, investors and local capitalists. Nonetheless, by shifting the focus of their activism from the factory into the community, the workers of Morris overlooked their exploitation at the point of production and how their life outside Morris was embedded within broader circuits of capital. In UNSOR class-polarization did not prevent the firm’s closure but, in fact, accelerated it. Charlie’s activism, political discussions and the framing of shop floor relations in terms of class in the rolling mill created an ‘informal culture’ of acquiescence to reorganization and unpaid work; Lind’s health and safety activism legitimated redundancies and mechanization and the smelters’ opposition to the introduction of the new alloy pump at the furnace ultimately legitimated the closure of the smelting shop. Apart from these instances of plant activism, most of the workers of UNSOR were ISTC members and accepted the union’s and the employers’ decision of closing down the firm. Older workers close to retirement subscribed to the ISTC’s medical vision of their manual jobs as dangerous and hazardous and welcomed the prospect of retiring or finding part-time jobs in the voluntary sector. The younger workers welcomed their wage increases linked to the reorganization of UNSOR. Thus, the workers of UNSOR were divided between those who opposed the employers and the union by emphasizing their working-class background and those who supported them by denying it. In both cases ‘class’ was a central mechanism for the reconciliation of political activism and political quiescence in the interests of the capitalists. Their uncritical acceptance (or refusal) of ‘class’ as a work-related issue ignored broader processes of labour commodification through leisure and consumption. In conclusion, the ‘artisans’ of Morris retreated from the language of class

Conclusion |

175

and from shop floor activism and framed their political actions in the premodern language of the ancient cutlers, fighting for the control over the means of reproduction. But, without a class understanding of their existence, they reproduced capitalist relations in the realm of their families. Unlike them, the ‘proletarians’ of UNSOR embraced the discourse of class but they were unable to reconcile their working-class identities in the factory and their middle-class aspirations at home, so that their class-polarization turned into political quiescence. Thus Carrier’s theoretical framework provides an explanation of alienation but not of class-consciousness because it does not discuss the political circumstances under which these two conflicting working-class ‘selves’ are recomposed. In fact, the alienation of the workers of Morris and of the workers of UNSOR consisted in their reciprocal denial that ‘proletarian’ and ‘artisan’ labour are two sides of the same capitalist coin. It follows that alienation can be defined as the lack of a relational labour consciousness.

Relational Consciousness as the Basis for Class Struggle Huw Beynon concludes his compelling ethnography Working for Ford (1973) with a quote from Marx’s speech at the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association in London in 1865. Discussing the relationship between working-class struggle, wages and shop floor organization Marx claimed that: trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachment of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as lever for the emancipation of the working-class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wage system.8

Beynon suggests that Marx’s notion of ‘guerrilla war’ applies to the AEU and TGWU shop-stewards of the Halewood Ford in Liverpool, who lost their political struggles because they narrowly focused on plant activism and wage-bargaining and lacked a broader political vision which included the ‘whole of society’. According to Beynon these shop-stewards were militant but in their ‘purely economic’ focus they were not revolutionaries. In my ethnography I have shown that the working-class perception of labour has radically changed since Beynon wrote his book. The alienation of the workers of Morris and UNSOR was due to their lack of vision of broader capitalist forces which reproduced them as social subjects on a temporal frame longer than their individual lives, as with the workers of Halewood. They ignored these broader structural forces and focused on partial struggles, bounded contexts, atomised relations, becoming aware of them only in traumatic personal moments, such as in

176 |

Made in Sheffield

redundancies, deaths or family break-ups. But the workers of Morris and UNSOR all believed – for different reasons – that money, wages and factory work had a minor impact on their livelihood and focused on controlling the means of their reproduction or on social mobility through education, intellectual labour or social networking. Unlike the workers of Halewood, they were alienated precisely in their denial of their dependency on industrial wages and of their class position and in their shift of political focus from the factory to ‘society’. Current criticism of the materialistic, class-based and economically motivated struggles – including the bargaining of wages, productivity increases and labour organization – of traditional business unions and endorsement of social unionism overlooks that the opposition between the ‘purely economic’ ideology of business unionism and the ‘purely social’ ideology of community unionism is a false one. In fact, under New Labour the supposedly socially-oriented community unionism of the ISTC relied on the same economic principles – monetarism, financial returns on pensions, labour-cost savings and anti-industrialism – which inspired the ‘materialism’ of the business unions during the Thatcher years. Indeed, Steve, the revolutionary AEU shop-steward of SEC, refused the opposition between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’. He connected issues of wages and profitability and issues of personal engagement and emotional attachment, the politics of the shop floor and the political economy of the steel industry, sectional class-consciousness and solidarity with miners, the black community and public sector workers and related contemporary political events to the long history of working-class struggle. The lives and work of the people that I have described suggest that labour has a relational value in three ways. First, it is both produced by and productive of social relations; secondly, it involves the inter-relation between material production and the reproduction of human beings; thirdly, it is relative to its location in space and time. Class-consciousness consists in the awareness of this relational value of labour and alienation emerges when one these three relational dimensions is obfuscated. In my shop floor ethnographies I have documented how capitalist factories obfuscate the relational value of labour through technologies, commodities, labour standards, job descriptions and divisions of labour which magnify objects, freeze time, separate people, things and places and break personal connections. But, following Gramsci, I have also suggested that labour is the ‘living part’ of capital and that ‘society’ is the mechanism through which ‘the economy’ is reproduced. Indeed, in my ethnography I have shown that the workers themselves deny the relational value of their labour through the informal economy, gender, generational and ethnic discrimination, consumerism and community relations. The closure of UNSOR and the resilience of Morris, in spite of its several short-times, temporary closures, mechanical breakdowns and

Conclusion |

177

absent capitalists, shows that capitalism today, as in the past, has ‘never been modern’ in its mixture of ‘artisans’ and ‘proletarians’, coercion and free labour, outsourcing and the wage-contract, financialization and informalization, journeymen and masters, Victorian workshop and modernist factories. The widespread belief that these derelict firms, frozen in Victorian times, will be wiped out by the forces of modernization, productivity and technological progress underestimates that these despotic shop floors are the other side of ‘modern’ Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Drawing on the work of Dore (2000), it can be argued that ‘Welfare capitalism’ has regulated labour and stock markets and formalized industrial relations and industrial policies which mediate between labour and capital in times of industrial decline. Unlike this, Anglo-Saxon capitalism is deregulated, speculative and informalized and with a dual industrial system based on the coupling of transnational and petty capitalism. This ‘dual’ industrial system surprised Marshall and Marx for its economic backwardness, but is celebrated by current ‘flexible production’ scholars. For it reproduces the skilled, flexible and informal labour of small subcontractors within the deskilled, mechanized and alienated labour processes of global corporations and combines the ‘economy of scope’ of the former and the ‘economy of scale’ of the latter.9 It can be argued that the interlocking of financialization and informalization is an idiosyncrasy of British capitalism, where industrialists have been subordinated to merchants, speculators, financial tycoons and the landed aristocracy since Victorian times. As in early Victorian capitalism, the fate of contemporary British industries is decided through global mergers, joint ventures and acquisitions, with the management of the shop floors being left to the workers’ own devices.10 But it could also be argued that this pattern of informalization and financialization of the economy, the despotic shop floors and the experience of labour that I describe in this book reflect a broader capitalist trend. It reflects a new despotic regime in which capital reproduces itself through the whole of people’s lives so that coercion and consent – dependency and entrepreneurship, freedom and self-discipline and working-class poverty and middle-class aspirations – are hardly distinguishable. In this new context anthropology is a central tool of class analysis. By showing the human forces animating the ‘laws’ of capital and combining a critique of ‘the capitalist subject’ with a celebration of the lives of labour, it can open new spaces of self-realization both at work and in society.

Notes 1. According to Meiksins Wood (1986), amongst the ‘NTS’ theorists are Andre Gorz, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Nico Poulantzas. 2. Zolberg (1995).

178 |

Made in Sheffield

3. The recent study of the Institute for Fiscal Studies on income polarization in the UK suggests that in 2005-06 income amongst the poorest fifth of Britain fell by 0.4% and the income of the richest fifth grew by 1.5%; that in 2005-06 half of the population in the UK had an income lower than £363 per week; and that income inequality in 2006 has reached its highest level since 2000 and that it is higher than that which the Labour government inherited in 1997. ‘Poverty and Inequality in the UK: 2007’ by Mike Brewer, Alissa Goodman, Alistair Murial and Luke Sibieta, IFS briefing note No73, March 2007. The report also suggests that there has been a sharp decline of real weekly wages in recent years following a similar trend in the US. The successful campaign of the Transport and General Workers’ Union against the HSBC and contract cleaner OCS’s to increase pay and conditions for its cleaners at Canary Wharf and the current campaign of Amicus, GMB and T&GW against private equity funds are examples of the resurgence of trade union activism in Britain. 4. See Dench, Gavron and Young (2005). 5. or a popular discussion of the current state of the British working class, see Mount (2005). 6. Reddy (1987) challenges the ‘liberal illusion’ of market egalitarianism and suggests that people with different class background are asymmetrically engaged in the exchange relation. 7. In the past, some cold workers of Morris were members of the GMB. 8. Beynon (1973: 317). 9. Economists call ‘economy of scope’ the reduction of unitary costs deriving from the diversification of the production process, in contrast to the ‘economy of scale’ effect based on the reduction of costs linked to mass-production. 10. The financial nature of British industrialism explains the historical weakness of British management discussed, among others, by Chandler (1990).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer. 1993 [1944]. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum. Agamben, G. 1993. The Coming Community. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press. Akerloff, G. 1982. ‘Labour Contract as Partial Gift Exchange’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 97: 4. Althusser, L. 2003. The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings. London: Verso. Althusser, L and E. Balibar. 1970. Reading Capital. London: New Left Books. Alvesson, M and J. Berg. 1992. Corporate Culture and Organizational Symbolism. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Anner, M. 2003. ‘Industrial Structure, the State, and Ideology: Shaping Labor Transnationalism in the Brazilian Auto Industry’, Social Science History 27(4): 603–34. Appadurai, A. 1986. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bagnasco, A. 1977. Tre Italie: la problematica territoriale dello sviluppo italiano. Bologna: Il Mulino. Barton, J. 1835. Observations on the Circumstances which Influence the Conditions of the Labouring Classes of Society. London: James Ridgway. Bazin, L. and M. Selim. 2006. ‘Ethnography, Culture and Globalisation’, Critique of Anthropology 26(4): 437–61. Beatty, C. and S. Fothergill. 2005. ‘The Diversion from ‘Unemployment’ to Sickness across British Regions and Districts’, Regional Studies 39: 837–54. Becattini, G. 1990. ‘The Marshallian District as a Socio-economic Notion’, in F. Pyke, F. Becattini and W. Sengenberger (eds), Industrial Districts and Inter-firm Co-operation in Italy. Geneva: I.I.L.S. Beck, U. 2000. The Brave New World of Work. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bell, D. 1973. The Coming of Post-industrial Society. New York: Basic Books. Benjamin, W. 2006 [1935]. Selected Writing. Volume Three. Harvard MA: Belknap Press. Berg, M. 1980. The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy. 1815–1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bernstein, B. 1971. Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Education. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

180 |

Made in Sheffield

Beynon, H. 1973. Working for Ford. Harmonsworth: Penguin Books. ______. 2003. ‘Globalisation, Trade Union Organisation and Workers’ Rights’, in P. Fairbrother and C. Yates (eds), Trade Union in Renewal. London: Continuum, pp. 263–80. Blim, M. 1990. Made in Italy: Small-scale Industrialisation and its Consequences. New York: Praeger. Bloch, M. 1989. ‘Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation’, in Ritual, History and Power. London: LSE monographs on Social Anthropology, pp. 19–45. Bott, E. 1957. Family and Social Network. London: Tavistock. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowman, H. 2001. Talking to Families in Leeds and Sheffield. CASEreport 19. London: London School of Economics. Braverman, H. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. Brenner, N. 1999. ‘Globalization as Reterritorialisation: The Re-scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union’, Urban Studies 36(3): 431–51. ______. 2004. New State Spaces. Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brewer, M., A. Goodman, A. Murial and L. Sibieta. 2007. ‘Poverty and Inequality in the UK’, Institute for Fiscal Studies, briefing note 73. Bringa, T. 1995. Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Burawoy, M. 1979a. Manufacturing Consent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. 1979b. ‘The Anthropology of Industrial Work’, Annual Review of Anthropology 8: 231–66. ______. 1985. The Politics of Production. London: Verso. ______. 2003a. ‘Revisits: An Outline of a Theory of Reflexive Ethnography’, American Sociological Review 68(10): 645–79. ______. 2003b. ‘For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi’, Politics and Society 31(1): 1–69. Burawoy, M. et al. 2000. Global Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Calhoun, C. 1995. ‘New Social Movements of the Early Nineteenth Century’, in M. Traugott (ed.), Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Actions. Durham: Duke University Press, pp.173–215. Carrier, J. 1992. ‘Emerging Alienation in Production: a Maussian History’, Man 27: 539–58. ______. 1995. Gifts and Commodities. Exchange and Western Capitalism Since 1700. London: Routledge. Carsten, J. 2000. Cultures of Relatedness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carter, B., P. Fairbrother, R. Sharman and K. Voss. 2003. ‘Made in USA: the TUC, the Organizing Model and the Limits of Transferability’, Research in the Sociology of Work Vol. 11. Amsterdam: JAI Press, pp. 23–64. Chandler, A.D. 1990. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chapple, E. 1953. ‘Applied Anthropology in Industry’, in A. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 819–31.

Bibliography |

181

Collier, L., M. Rosaldo and S. Yanagisako. 1992. ‘Is There a Family?’, in B. Thorne and M. Yalom (eds), Rethinking the Family. Boston: Norheastern University Press, pp.25–39. Day, S. 2006. On the Game. London: Pluto Press. D’Costa, A. 1999. The Global Restructuring of the Steel Industry: Innovations, Institutions and Industrial Change. London: Routledge. De Angelis, M. 2007. The Beginning of History. Value Struggles and Global Capital. London: Pluto. Dench, G., K. Gavron and M. Young. 2005. The New East End. Kinship, Race and Conflict. London: Profile Books. Department of Planning. 1981. Lower Don District Plan. Sheffield City Council. Department of Planning. 1986. Lower Valley Supplementary Report on Land and Property. Sheffield City Council. Department of Social Security. 1998. New Ambitions for Our Country: A New Contract for Welfare. DSS (cm 3805). Dore, R. 2000. Stock Market Capitalism: Welfare Capitalism. Japan and Germany Versus the Anglo-Saxons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drucker, P. 1996. The Pension Fund Revolution. New York: Harper and Row. Duménil, G. and D. Lévy. 2004. ‘Class and Income in the US’, New Left Review 30: 105–33. Edwards, J. 2000. Born and Bred. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elder, K. 1993. Social Movements and Cultural Dynamics in Advanced Society. London: Sage. Engels, F. 1972 [1884]. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Environmental Agency. 1997. Doomsday to the Dawn of the New Millennium. Sheffield. Evans, P. 2000. ‘Fighting Marginalisation with Transnational Networks: Counter Hegemonic Globalisation’, Contemporary Sociology 29(1) 230–41. Fairbrother, P. and P. Steward. 2003. ‘The Dilemmas of Social Partnership and Union Organisation: Questions for British Trade Unions’, in P. Fairbrother and C. Yates (eds), Trade Union in Renewal. London: Continuum, pp. 158–79. Fantasia, R. 1989. Cultures of Solidarity. Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fevre, R. 1987. ‘Subcontracting in Steel’, Work, Employment and Society (4): 509–27. Firth, R. 1956. Two Studies of Kinship in London. University of London Athlone Press. ______. 1964. Family and Kinship in Industrial Society. Keele: University of Keele. Firth, R., J. Hubert and A. Forge. 1969. Families and Their Relatives: Kinship in a Middle-class Sector of London: An Anthropological Study. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Florida, R. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Fortes, M. 1949. The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi: The Second Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe. London: Oxford University Press. ______. 1970. Time and Social Structure and Other Essays. London: The Athlone Press. Fortunati, L. 1995. The Arcane of Reproduction. Milan: Autonomedia. Foucault, M. 1991. ‘Governmentality’, in Burchell et al. (eds), The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality, with an Interview with M. Foucault. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 87–105.

182 |

Made in Sheffield

Frankenberger, R. (ed.) 1982. Custom and Conflict in British Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Friedman, J. 1974. ‘The Place of Fetishism and the Problem of Materialist Interpretation’, Critique of Anthropology 1: 26–62. Gell, A. 1992. ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in J. Coote and A. Shelton (eds), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetic. Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 40–66. Gershuny, J. I. and I.D. Miles. 1985. ‘Towards a New Social Economics’, in B. Roberts, R. Finnegan, and D. Gallie (eds), New Approaches to Economic Life. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 24–85. Ghezzi, S. 2007. Etnografia Storica dell’Imprenditorialità in Brianza. Milano: Franco Angeli. Giddens, A. 1998. The Third Way: Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge: Polity. Gill, L. 2007. ‘Right There with You’: Coca-Cola, Labor Restructuring, and Political Violence in Colombia’, Critique of Anthropology 27 (3): 235–60. Gluckman, M. 1961. ‘Anthropological Problems Arising from the African Industrial Revolution’, in A. Southall (ed.), Social Change in Modern Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 67–82. Goldthorpe, J. et al. 1967. The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gorz, A. 1999. ‘A New Task for Unions: The Liberation of Time from Work’, in R. Munck and P. Waterman (eds), Labour Worldwide in the Era of Globalisation. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 41–63. Gouldner, A. 1954. Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. New York: Free Press. Gray, R. 1987. ‘The Languages of Factory Reform in Britain, 1830–1860’, in P. Joyce (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 143–79. Gramsci, A. 1976. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Q. Hoare. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Grillo, R. 1985. Ideologies and Institutions in Urban France: The Representation of Immigrants. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gudeman, S. 2008. Economy’s Tension. The Dialectics of Community and Market. Oxford: Berghahn Press. Gudeman, S. and A. Rivera. 1990. Conversations in Colombia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guyer, J. 2007. ‘Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomics, Evangelical and Punctuated time’, American Ethnologist 34(3): 409–21. Hajnal, J. 1983. ‘Two Kinds of Pre-industrial Household Formation System’, in R. Wall, J. Robin and P. Laslett (eds), Family Forms in Historical Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 67–94. Hannerz, U. 1996. Transnational Connections. London: Routledge. Hart, K. 1973. ‘Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana’, Journal of Modern African Studies 1: 61–89. Harvey, D. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Hensman, R. 2001. ‘World Trade and Workers’ Rights: In Search of an Internationalist Position’, Antipode 33: 427–50. Hobsbawm, E. 1968. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin Books. Holland, G.C. 1840. The Grinders’ Asthma. LSL: Sheffield. ______.1841. Unoccupied Houses. LSL: Sheffield. ______. 1860. The Philosophy of Animated Nature. LSL: Sheffield.

Bibliography |

183

______. 1865. Enquiry into the Health of the Working-classes. LSL: Sheffield. Holmstrom, M. 1984. Industry and Inequality: The Social Anthropology of Indian Labour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holzberg, C. and M. Giovannini. 1981. ‘Anthropology and Industry: Reappraisal and New Directions’, Annual Review of Anthropology 10: 317–60. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. International Metalworkers Federation. 1999. Health and Safety in the Steel Industry A Workers’ Handbook. IMF: Geneva. Kalb, D. 1997. Expanding Class. Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, Netherlands, 1850–1950. Durham: Duke University Press. ______. 2000. The Ends of Globalisation: Bringing Society Back In. Landham: Rowman and Littlefield. Kalra, V. 2000. From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks: Experiences of Migration, Labour and Social Change. Aldershot: Ashgate. Karatani, K. 2003. Trancritique. On Kant and Marx. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kasmir, S. 2005. ‘Activism and Class Identity: The Saturn Auto Factory’, in J. Nash (ed.), Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 78–96. Keesing et al. 1955. ‘A Case Study of Industrial Resettlement, Milpitas, California’, Human Organisation 14(2):15–20. Keller, C. 2001. ‘Thought and Production: Insights of the Practitioner’, in M.B. Shiffer (ed.), Anthropological Perspectives in Technology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, pp. 33–47. Keller, C. and J. Keller. 1996. Cognition and Tool Use: The Blacksmith at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, J. 1995. ‘Union Militancy and Social Partnership’, in P. Ackers, C. Smith and P. Smith (eds), British Trade Unions in the New Workplace. London: Routledge, pp. 77–103. Kent, P. 1999. ‘ISTC in the Community: Questionnaire Results and Analysis’. ISTC/QMW project, Department of Geography, Queen Mary University. London. Kessler-Harriss, A. and K. Brodkin Sacks. 1987. ‘The Demise of Domesticity in America’, in L. Beneria and C. Stimpson (eds), Women, Households and the Economy. London: Rudgers University Press, pp. 65–84. Knorr-Cetina, K. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How Scientists Make Sense. Chicago, IL: Indiana University Press. Krakauer, S. 2005 [1930]. The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany. London: Verso. Kropotkin, P. 1902. Mutual Aid: A Factor for Evolution. London: The Penguin Press. Lamont, M. 2000. The Dignity of Working Men. New York: Sage Foundation. Lansing, S. 1991. Priest and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Laslett, P. 1988. ‘Family, Kinship and Collectivity Systems of Support in Preindustrial Europe: A Consideration of the “Nuclear-hardship Hypothesis”’, Continuity and Change 3(2): 153–75. Latour, B. 1984. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lazar, S. 2006. ‘The Informal Economy and Trade Unionism in Bolivia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century’. Paper presented at the ‘Rethinking

184 |

Made in Sheffield

Economies’ conference, Anthropology Department, Goldsmiths College, London. Lee, B. and E. Li Puma. 2002. ‘Cultures of Circulation: The Imagination of Modernity’, Public Culture 14(1): 191–213. Lee Ching, K. 1998. Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leonard, M. 1998. Invisible Work, Invisible Workers. London: Macmillan Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1983. The Way of the Masks. London: Jonathan Cape. Linhard, R. 1985. ‘Learning the Assembly Line’, in C.L. Littler (ed.), The Experience of Work. London: John Calder, pp. 117–27. Lockwood, D. 1966. ‘Sources of Variation in Working-class Images of Society’, Sociological Review 14(3): 249–67. Lopez, S. 2004. ‘Overcoming Legacies of Business Unionism’, in R. Milkman and K. Voss (eds), Rebuilding Labor. Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 114–32. Lupton, R. 2001. Places Apart. CASEreport 14. London: London School of Economics. Lupton, T. 1963. On the Shopfloor. London: Pergamon Press. Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge. March, C. and J. Olsen. 1972. ‘A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice’, Administrative Science Quarterly 17(1): 1–25. Martinez-Lucio, M. and M. Steward. 2002. ‘Assessing the Principles of Partnership Workplace Trade Union Representatives’, Employee Relations 24(3): 305–20. McCulloch, J. 1830. Labour Against Capital. London: Political Economy Club. Macfarlane, A. 1978. The Origin of British Individualism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. MacShane, D. 1996. Britain’s Steel Industry in the 21st Century. London: Epic Books. Mandel, E. 1975. Late Capitalism. London: Humanities Press. Marshall, A. 1949 [1890]. The Principles of Economics. London: Macmillan. Marx, K. 1963 [1844]. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Trans. T.B. Bottomore. New York: International Publishers. ______. 1965. Pre-capitalist Economic Formations. Trans. J. Cohen and J. Hobsbawm. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ______. 1973 [1857]. Grundisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ______. 1979 [1867]. The Capital. Vol. (I). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ______. 1988 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto. F. Benker (ed.). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Maurer, B. 2005. Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mauss, M. 1966 [1925]. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. I. Cunnison. London: Cohen & West. ______. 1979. Sociology and Psychology: Essays. London: Routledge. Meek, J. 2001. ‘Sickness Claims Mask Jobless Rate’, The Guardian, 5 September. Meiksins-Wood, E. 1986. The Retreat From Class. A New ‘True’ Socialism. London: Verso. ______. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism. A Longer View. London: Verso. Meillassoux, C. 1981. Maidens, Meals and Money. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography |

185

Mill, J.S. 1848. Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Application to Social Philosophy. London: Longman. Mingione, E. 1985. ‘Informalisation, Restructuring and the Survival Strategies of the Working-class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 7(3): 24–45. Misa, T. 1995. A Nation of Steel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mitchell, T. 1991. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Miyazaki, H. 2007. ‘Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and its Critiques’, Cultural Anthropology 21(2): 147–72. Mount, F. 2005. Mind the Gap: the New Class Divide in Britain. London: Short Books. Munck, R. 2004. ‘Introduction: Globalisation and Labour Transnationalism’, in R. Munck (ed.), Labour and Globalisation. Results and Prospects. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 1–15. Narotzky, S. 1997. New Directions in Economic Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. ______. 2006. ‘Class, Gender and History in Political Activism in Spain’. Paper presented at the Canadian Anthropological Society Conference (CASCA), Montreal. Negri, A. 1989. The Politics of Subversion. A Manifesto for 21st Century. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ong, A. 1988. ‘The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia’, American Ethnologist 15: 28–42. Ouchi, W. 1980. ‘Markets, Bureaucracies and Clans’, Administrative Science Quarterly 25: 129–41. Pahl, R.E. 1984. Divisions of Labour. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ______. 1990. ‘The Black Economy in the United Kingdom’, in R.E. Pahl (ed.), Underground Economy and Irregular Forms of Employment. Luxembourg: C.E.E, pp. 27–34. Pahl, R.E. and W. Wallace. 1985. ‘Household Work Strategies in Economic Recession’, in N. Redclift and E. Mingione (eds), Beyond Employment. Household, Gender and Subsistence. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 189–225. Pallson, G. and P. Durrenberger. 1982. ‘To Dream of Fish: The Causes of Icelandic Skippers’ Fishing’, JRAI 4(4): 797. Park, R. and E. Burgess. 1925. The City. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Parry, J. P. 1986. ‘The Gift, the Indian gift and ‘the Indian gift’, JRAI 21(3): 453–73. ______. 2006. ‘Sociological Marxism in Central India: Polanyi, Gramsci and the Case of the Unions’. Paper presented at the Anthropology Departmental Seminar, Goldsmiths, March 2005. Pfaffenberger, B. 1987. ‘Fetishised Objects and Humanised Nature. Towards an Anthropology of Technology’, Man (n.s.) 23: 236–52. ______. 1992. ‘Social Anthropology of Technology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 491–516. Pietz, W. 1985. ‘The Problem of the Fetish, I’, Res 9: 5–17. Pine, F. 1996. ‘Naming the House and Naming the Land: Kinship and Social Groups in Highland Poland’, JRAI 2(2): 443–59. Polanyi, K. 1944. The Great Transformation. New York: Rinehart. Pollard, S. 1959. A History of Labour in Sheffield. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Pollert, A. 1991. Farewell to Flexibility. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Portes, A. and J. Walton. 1981. Labour, Class and the International System. New York: Academic Press.

186 |

Made in Sheffield

Pun, N. 2005. Made in China. Durham: Duke University Press. Quijano, A. 1977. Imperialismo y Marginalidad en America Latina’. Lima: Mosca Azul. Redclift, N. 1985. ‘The Contested Domain: Gender, Accumulation and the Labour Process’, in N. Redclift and E. Mingione (eds), Beyond Employment. Household, Gender and Subsistence. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 92–125. Reddy, W. 1987. Money and Liberty in Modern Europe. A Critique of Historical Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricardo, D. 1951 [1817]. On The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. P. Sraffa (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, R. 1971. The Classic Slum. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Robotham, D. 2005. Culture, Society and the Economy: Bringing Production Back In. London: Sage. Roethlisberger, F. and W. Dickson. 1939. Management and the Workers. New York: Wiley. Rofel, L. 1999. Other Modernities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rothstein, F. 2005. ‘Flexibility for Whom? Small-Scale Garment Manufacturing in Rural Mexico’, in A. Smart and J. Smart (eds), Petty Capitalism and Globalisation. New York: SUNY Press, pp. 67–81. Roy, D. 1952. ‘Quota Restriction and Goldbricking in a Machine-shop’, American Journal of Sociology 57(3): 427–42. Roy, D., O. Collins and M. Dalton. 1946. ‘Restriction of Output and Social Cleavage in Industry’, Applied Anthropology (5): 1–14. Rowntree, B.S. 1901. Poverty: A Study of Town Life. London: Macmillan. Ruskin, J. 1985 [1898]. Unto This Last and Other Essays in Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sabel, C. 1982. Work and Politics. The Division of Labour in Industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scipes, K. 1992. ‘Understanding the New Labour Movement in the Third World. The Emergence of Social Movement Unionism’, Critical Sociology 19(2): 81–102. Schneider, D. 1980. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seidman, G. 1994. Manufacturing Militancy: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa. 1970–1985. Berkeley: University of California Press. Silver, B. 2003. Forces of Labor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simon, H. 1953. Administrative Behaviour. New York: Free Press. Smart, A. and J. Smart. 2005. Petty Capitalism and Globalisation. New York: SUNY Press. Smith, A. 2003. ‘Power Relations, Industrial Clusters and Regional Transformation: Pan-European Integration and Outward Processing in the Slovak Clothing Industry’, Economic Geography 79: 17–40. Smith, G. 1999. Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. ______. 2006. ‘When the Logic of Capital is the Real Which Lurks in the Background: Programme and Practice in European “Regional Economies”’, Current Anthropology 47(4): 621–39. Smith, G. and G. Narotsky. 2006. Immediate Struggles: People, Power and Place in Rural Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stacey, J. 1990. Brave New Families. New York: Basic Books. Stack, C. 1974. All Our Kin. New York: Harper and Row.

Bibliography |

187

Standing, G. 1989. ‘The British experiment: structural adjustment or accelerate decline?’, in A. Portes, M. Castell and L. Benton (eds), The Informal Economy. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 279–97. ______. 2002. Beyond the New Paternalism. London: Verso. Stephenson, C. 1995. ‘The Different Experience of Trade Unionism in Two Japanese Transplants’, in P. Ackers, C. Smith and P. Smith (eds), British Trade Unions in the New Workplace. London: Routledge, pp. 130–45. Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ______. 1992. After Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swyngedouw, E. 1996. ‘Reconstructing Citizenship, the Re-scaling of the State and the New Authoritarism: Closing Belgian Mines’, Urban Studies 13(8): 1499–521. Swyngedouw, E. et al. 2002. ‘The Neoliberal Urbanisation of Europe: Large-scale Urban Development Projects and the New Urban Policy’, in N. Brenner and N. Theodore (eds), Spaces of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 195–229. Taussig, M. 1977. ‘The Genesis of Capitalism among a South American Peasantry: Devil’s Labour and the Baptism of Money’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 19: 130–55. Thomas, N. 1991. Entangled Objects. Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trigilia, C. 1990. ‘Work and Politics in the Third Italy’s Industrial Districts’, in F. Pyke, G Becattini and W. Sengenberger (eds), Industrial Districts and Inter-firm Co-operation in Italy. Geneva: I.I.L.S., pp. 160–84. Tronti, M. 1966. Operai e Capitale. Torino: Einaudi. Trade Union Congress. 1996. New Unionism: Organising for Growth. London: TUC. Turner, C. 1995. Japanese Workers in Protest: An Ethnography of Consciousness and Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tweedale, G. 1995. Steel City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varian, H. 1997. Microeconomics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Virno, P. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Wallis, E., M. Stuart and A. Murray. 2003. Steel Partnership Training in UK. Paper presented at the HRD Conference in Toulouse, May 2003. Ward, G. 1997. ‘The Single Regeneration Budget and the Issue of Local Flexibility’, Regional Studies 32(8): 759–68. Waterman, P. 2002. ‘Harmonizing the Workers of the World’, in Zmagazine, http://www.zmag. Werbner, P. 1999. ‘Global pathways. Working class cosmopolitans and the creation of transnational ethnic worlds’, Social Anthropology 7(1): 17–35. Westegaard, J., I. Noble and A. Walker. 1989. After Redundancy. London: Routledge. Westwood, S. 1984. All Day Everyday: Factory and Family in the Making of Women’s Lives. London: Pluto Press. Westwood, S. and A. Pizacklea. 2000. Trans-nationalism and the Politics of Belonging. London: Routledge. Wills, J. 2001. ‘Community Unionism and Trade Union Renewal in the UK: Moving Beyond the Fragments at Last?’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26: 465–83. Yelvington, K. 1995. Producing Power, Ethnicity, Gender and Class in a Caribbean Workplace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

188 |

Made in Sheffield

Young, M. 1952. ‘Kinship and Family in East London’, Man 54: 137–39. Young, M. and M. Willmott. 1957. Family and Kinship in East London. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Young, M. and P. Willmott. 1973. The Symmetrical Family. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Zelizer, V. 1997. The Social Meaning of Money. New York: Basic Books. Zolberg, A. 1995. ‘Response: Working-class Dissolution’, International Labour and Working-class History 47: 28–38. Zweig, M. 2000. The Working-class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

INDEX


A Abercrombie, Patrick (and City Plan, 1924) 65, 86 about this book anthropological and sociological traditions, bridging of 1, 4–5 class relations 5–9 economic theories, engagement with 1–2 economics and economy, tensions between 1–2 factory production 4 family and work 12–13 fieldwork, notes on 13–15 history and class 5–9 industrial capitalism, labour subjectivity in 3–4 kinship and class 12–13 labour and capital, tensions between 2, 3–4, 6–8 labour consciousness and organizations 4 management theories, engagement with 1–2 ‘modernism’ of capital and labour 6–9 technological fetishism 9–12 transformations and permutations of labour 2 wage-earners, classification of 5 welfare capitalism 7 working-class consciousness, ethnography of 2, 9 Adorno, Theodor W. 128 AEU (Amalgamated Engineers Union) 81–2, 83–4, 143, 156, 157, 162, 164, 175, 176 as business union 147 factory branch activities 158–61 pragmatic business ethos of 160 see also business unionism

AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) 144–5, 147, 149, 167 Agamben, Giorgio 80, 99 air circulation, workplace demands on 24 AITUC (All-India Trades Union Congress) 146 Akerloff, George A. 170 alienation labour and, relational values 169–75 at Morris Ltd. 33, 34, 40, 42, 43 production, alienation in relations of 40–43 at UNSOR (United Steel Organization) 168–9, 170, 171, 172–3, 174–5 of working-class 141–2 Alvesson, M. and Berg, J. 44n4 American Kinship (Schneider, D.) 70 Amicus Union 143, 178n3 Anner, M. 145 anthropology perspectives on informal economy 47–8, 49–51 sociological traditions and 1, 4–5 trade union studies, attitudes to 146–7 apprenticeship at furnace in UNSOR 112–13 knowledge transmission through 34 lack of control over 30 Arbiter, Gaius Petronius 158 artisans as individuals 80 Ashwell, Ken 114, 118 authority structure in UNSOR 107–8 B back-to-back houses in Endcliffe 64–6 Bagnasco, Arnaldo 47

190 |

Index

Barton, John 11 Bates, Bernard 150–51 Beatty, C. and Fothergill, S. 101n15 Beccattini, Giacomo 47 Beck, Ulrich 100 Bell, Daniel 98 Benjamin, Walter 128 Bernstein, B. 132, 142n4 Beynon, Huw 145, 175 Blim, M. 49 Bloch, Maurice 10, 34, 44n10 bonus payments at Morris Ltd. 27–8 Bott, E. 78 Bourdieu, Pierre 63 bourgeoisie 45, 99–100 creative power of 3 industrial bourgeoisie 6–7, 66 labour and 3, 4 patterns of work and leisure of urban bourgeoisie 11 proletarians and 3–5, 100, 167 urban bourgeoisie, emergence of 5–6 working-class bourgeoisification 127–42 see also middle classes Bowman, Hilary 72 B&Q 24, 55 Braverman, Harry 3, 33, 98 Brazilian Central Workers Union (CUT) 145 break-room discussions at Morris Ltd. 37–40 at UNSOR 113–15 Brenner, Neil 48, 100n3 Brewer, Mike 178n3 Bringa, Tony 63 BSC (British Steel Corporation) 53, 83, 150, 156 building work (and ancillary jobs) 53–4 Burawoy, Michael 3–4, 15n1, 15n9, 28, 49, 85, 145 business unionism branch activities of AEU and 158–61 economic vision of 164–5 market principles, introduction of 157–8 productivism and 156, 159–60 reorganization at IVECO 161–3 social consequences of reorganization at IVECO 162–3 teamworking 157 trust, generation of 160–61

venture capitalism, IVECO and breaking AEU power in reorganization 156–8, 161–3 BWSF (British Workers’ Sport Federation) 90 C Calhoun, Craig 145–6 The Capital (Marx, K.) 10, 128 capitalism capitalist cosmology 33–4 capitalist development 4 capitalist restructuring at UNSOR 121–2 capitalist technologies and social relations at Morris Ltd. 42–3 deregulation of capital 143–4 despotic capitalism 3 fetishism and 10, 11, 12, 16n19 hegemonic capitalism 3 industrial capitalism and visual imagination, link between 128 labour movement and 145–6 leisure capitalism 88–91 local economies and capitalist socialization 60–61 post-industrial capitalism 144 socialization in late capitalism 4 spatial mobility of corporate capital 147 trade union movement under 165 venture capitalism 61, 87, 88, 93, 156–8, 161–3 wage-earners, classification of 5 welfare capitalism 7, 67 working knowledge, capitalist control of 41–2 Carrier, James 12, 40–41, 43, 130, 131, 169–70, 172–3, 175 Carsten, Janet 70 Carter, B. et al. 148 casual labour 9, 10, 12, 20, 73, 75, 77, 83, 150 backwardness and use of 88 capitalist opportunity and 20 informal production and 46–7, 48, 49, 53, 57 legalization of use of 61 ‘undeserving poor,’ use as 67 workforce organization at Morris Ltd. 29, 30 Chandler, Alfred 11, 178n10 Chapple, E. 142n2 Chartism 81, 90, 145 Chicago School 1, 15n1, 129 Churchill, Winston S. 7

Index |

CISCO (Cole International Steel Company) 19, 27, 28–9 civil society 12, 48, 49, 145–6, 149 class class-consciousness 2, 9, 98, 116, 137, 153, 159, 175–6 class relations 5–9 folk models of 84–6 history and 5–9 kinship and 12–13 see also bourgeoisie; middle classes; working-class cleanliness at Morris Ltd. 24 CMM (Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha) 146 CNM (computer numeric machines) 157 cohabitation 73–4, 75–6 collaborative unionism 145–6 The Coming of a Community (Agamben, G.) 80 commodity fetishism 134 Community see ISTC 14 community unionism 143 in action, political meeting at ISTC 153–6 British import of 147–8 emergence of 147–8 ISTC in UNSOR 151–2, 153–6 labour representation, transmutations of 149–50 ‘New Unionism: Organizing for Growth’ (TUC) 148 partnership agreements 148–9 social morality of 164–5 Comte, Auguste 10 Confronting the Present (Smith, G.) 60 consumption of middle classes 63–4 Corigliano d’Otranto 135, 137, 139, 142n6 Corus Steel 105, 107, 121, 123, 151, 153–5, 162 Countryside Alliance 95, 99 courtyard as focal point 64 CPRE (Campaign for the Protection of Rural England) 88–90 Cultures of Solidarity (Fantasia, R.) 144–5 D Darling, Jack 159–60, 163 D’Costa, A. 126n7 de-industrialization 168–9 counter-hegemonic institutionalization 97–8

191

disability benefits 95–6, 97–8 environmental agencies, empowerment of 79–80 green activism 99 individualities in limbo 80–81 industrial capitalism, collapse of 80 industrial compensation benefits 95–6, 97–8 legal impunity of companies 96 leisure centre, development of 86–8 local social enterprises, emergence of 79–80, 98 morality and market, interplay between 96 political activism of artisans 98–100 post-Fordism, emergence of 80 post-industrial sociological paradigm 98–9 post-wage labourers 80 sacralization of manual workers 96, 97 sickness benefit 95–8 ‘stockholders,’ consultation with 99 unemployment benefits, commodification of 96–7 voluntary sectors, empowerment of 79–80 Welfare-to-Work 96–7 dependency 68–9 despotic capitalism 3, 19–20, 21, 43 Devonshire, Duke of 90 DfES (Department for Education and Science) 149 diasporic existence 139–41 dirt and dust at Morris Ltd. 23–4 disability benefits 95–6, 97–8 domestic arrangements at ‘Black Sparrow’ 73–4, 75–6 Dore, R. 177 Doyle, Leonard 82 DSS (Department for Social Security) 68, 100n13 DTI (Department for Trade and Industry) 86, 149 DWP Department for Work and Pensions) 58, 73, 96, 97 E EAF (Electric Arc Furnace) 106, 122 ECCS (European Community for Coal and Steel) 62n6 economics business unionism, economic vision of 164–5

192 |

Index

decentralization of economic policies, effects of 48–9 deregulation of wage-labour 48–9 and economy, tensions between 1–2 ‘economy of scope’ 178n9 engagement with economic theories 1–2 formal and informal economies, distinction between 50 illegal economy 55 knowledge economy 98 local economies and capitalist socialization 60–61 moral economy of working-class 66–7 politico-economic circumstances, machines and 32–3 see also de-industrialization; informal economy Edwards, Jeanette 63, 70–71 EEA (European Engine Alliance) 158 Endcliffe 5, 7, 8–9, 13–14 back-to-back houses in 64–6 Elysium brothel in 22–3, 46, 55–6, 75 flooding in 79 informal economy in 45–61 informal exchanges 54–5 informal production 51–4 Khaled’s pub in 14, 29, 46, 54, 55, 56–9, 60, 73, 75 landscape of 46 Liberal Club in 14, 74 location of 45–6 metal trades of, unique form of 46 odd jobs and benefits in 76–7 postmodernity in 44 promiscuous nature of houses in 64 recycling space 51 unemployment 50–51 see also Morris Ltd.; Sheffield Engels, Friedrich 12, 62n9 Enquiry in the Manufacture of Sheffield (Holland G.C.) 78n4 entrepreneurship 109, 139, 140, 177 of artisans 6, 42, 53 entrepreneurial middle-class, emergence of 11, 12 entrepreneurial spirit in Sheffield 6 false expectations of 169 illusory 47, 169 informal 49 self-entrepreneurs 56, 140 social entrepreneurship 86, 97, 98 stimulation of 59–60, 61

utopian 11 environmental agencies, empowerment of 79–80 Environmental Agency (or Authority) 49, 86, 94, 95, 100n11 Environmental Protection Act (1990) 121, 152 environmental volatility at Morris Ltd. 24 Equitable Life 161–2 ethnicity and belonging 137–9 in class relations 129–30, 135–41 EURACOM (European Action for Mining Communities) 62n5 EUROGATEWAY 62n5 European Union (EU) 48, 158 Evans, Peter 145 F Fairbrother, P. and Stuart, P. 148 family extended families, re-emergence of 70–72, 72–3 familial relationships in production 41 governmental families 72–3 homes and social relations 63–78 membership of, centrifugal dispersal of 68 nuclear families 69–70 partiarchal extended family 74–5 poverty and working-class families 66–9 and work 12–13 see also de-industrialization; working-class Fantasia, Rick 144–5, 167 fetishism capitalism and 10, 11, 12, 16n19 of casual labourers in Colombia 10 commodity fetishism 134 exploitation and 10 machines and 11, 12, 21 Marx’s use of term 10 religion and 10 technological fetishism 9–12, 36, 98–9 Fevre, R. 53 fieldwork 13–15 Fiscal Studies, Institute of 178n3 fishing as activism 91–5 Fitzwilliam, Earl of 6, 21 Fletcher, George 82 flexible capitalism 48

Index |

193

flooding in Endcliffe 79 Florida, Richard 98 folk models of class 84–6 Fordism 1, 47, 156, 159 post-Fordism 80, 99, 100, 167–8 forge work at Morris Ltd. 31–2 Fortes, Meyer 69 Fortunati, L. 50 fragmentation and delineation between departments at UNSOR 108–9, 110 of workforce at Morris Ltd. 30–31 of working-class 169 Frankenberger, R. 78 Frankfurt School 128, 129 Friedman, J. 16n19 furnace skills at UNSOR 112–13

Hensman, R. 145 history class and 5–9 histories and homes of workingclass 63–4 of labour in Sheffield 5–9 of Morris Ltd. 21–2 A History of Labour in Sheffield (Pollard, S.) 5 Hobbes, Thomas 80 Hobsbawm, Eric 16n14 Holland, George C. 78n1, 78n4 Holly Farm Fishery 93, 94, 95 Hoogovens Steel 105 Horkheimer, Max 128 HRM (Human Resource Management) 84, 110 Hu Jintao 130

G Gell, Alfred 21, 44n6 Gershuny, J.I. and Miles, I.D. 50 Ghezzi, Simone 47–8 Giddens, Anthony 151, 168 Gill, Leslie 147 Gluckman, Max 129 GMB (Britain’s General Union) 155, 178n3, 178n7 GMWU (General Municipal Workers Union) 174 Goldthorpe, J. 133 Goodman, Alissa 178n3 Gorz, André 142n7, 144, 177n1 governmental families 72–3 Gramsci, Antonio 4, 60, 176 capitalism, perspective on 164 Gray, Robert 78n2 green activism 99 Grillo, Ralph 129 grinding bay at UNSOR 117–20 Gruen, Victor 134 The Guardian 132, 136 Gudeman, S. 15n5 Gudeman, S. and Rivera, A. 63

I identity politics 144–5 illegal economy 55 ILO (International Labor Organization) 164 ILP (Independent Labour Party) 81 immigrants in Sheffield 65–6 industrial accidents 120–21 industrial bourgeoisie 6–7, 66 industrial capitalism 6, 12–13, 65–6, 96, 98, 164 collapse of 80 labour subjectivity in 3–4 post-industrial capitalism 144 and visual imagination, link between 128–9 industrial clusters 46–7, 49 industrial compensation benefits 95–6, 97–8 industrial heritage, symbolization of 61 informal economy anthropological perspectives on 47–8, 49–51 building work (and ancillary jobs) 53–4 casual labour 53 civil society 48 decentralization of economic policies, effects of 48–9 deregulation of wage-labour 48–9 in Endcliffe 45–61 flexible capitalism 48 formal and, distinction between 50 illegal economy 55 industrial clusters 46–7, 49

H Haddon, A.C. 10 Hainal, I. 69 Harman, Chris 165n1 Hart, Keith 50 Harvey, David 60, 145 Hayek, Friederick von 98 Health and Safety at Work Act (1974) 95–6, 126n5, 149–50 hegemonic capitalism 3

194 |

Index

informal exchanges 54–5 informal production 51–4 informal subcontracting 52–3 kinship networks 52 local community employment 47 local economies and capitalist socialization 60–61 locality and 45–6 machines, versatility and longevity of 50–51 outsourced production, web of 52 outworking 53–4 pub as welfare institution 56, 57–8 regional economies 48–9 scrap economy 54–5 sex market 55–6 social cohesion 47 social hierarchies of pub life 56–7, 58–9 state power, geography of 48 steel, versatility and longevity of 50–51 subcontracting 51–2 sweatshops 52 technological versatility 47 unemployment 50–51 informal exchanges in Endcliffe 54–5 at Morris Ltd. 28, 29–30, 54–5 informal production in Endcliffe in 51–4 at Morris Ltd. 29–30, 51–3 informal subcontracting 52–3 Ingold, Tom 33 insolvency at Equitable Life 161–2 at Morris Ltd. 19 institutionalization, counterhegemonic 97–8 interdependence at Morris Ltd. 25–7 International Metalworkers Federation 126n8 INTUC (Indian National Trade Union Congress) 146 ISTC (Iron and Steel Trade Confederation) 14, 83–4, 96–7, 109, 119, 121, 123, 174, 176 as ‘community’ union 143, 147 labour representation, transmutations of 149 local and national perspectives, divisional office as mediator between 153–6

Phoenix House and community unionism of 81–2, 150–51, 164, 168, 173 in UNSOR 151–2 see also community unionism IVECO 156–8, 161–3 K Kalb, D. 15n8 Kalra, V. 140 Kasmir, S. 165–6n8 Keesing, F.M., Siegel, B.J. and Hammond, B. 129 Keller, C. 44n7 Keller, C. and Keller, J. 44n7, 113 Kessler-Harris, A. and Brodkin Sacks, K. 71 Keynes, John Maynard (and Keynesianism) 7, 61, 80, 100 capitalism of 48, 148, 165 socialism of 65 Khaled’s pub in Endcliffe 14, 29, 46, 54, 55, 56–9, 60, 73, 75 kinship class and 12–13 ideologies of 77–8 networks of 52, 69–71 quasi-kin relationships, development of 74, 77 KMU (Kilusang Mayo Uno) 145 knowledge 58, 73, 114, 173 bodily forms of 11, 40, 111–12 communication and 34 externalization of 157, 172 fishing knowledge 92, 94 knowledge economy 98 labour coordination through 11 memory and 171 reproduction of 14–15, 34 sensory knowledge 111, 112, 122, 170 shared knowledge and kinship networks 46–7 social distribution of 33–7 working knowledge, capitalist control of 41–2 Krakauer, S. 128 L labour alienation and, relational values 169–75 anthropology of 1–2 bourgeoisie and 3, 4

Index |

and capital, tensions between 2, 3–4, 6–8 consciousness, organizations and 4 divided proletariat, workers as examples of 130–31, 132–4, 135–6, 137, 138, 140, 142 divisions within working-class 127–42 labour mapping at Morris Ltd. 35 labour value 1, 4, 10, 171, 172 as organized movement, 1980s crucial years for 143–4 processes at Morris Ltd., conceptions of 35–7 representation of, transmutations of 149–50 work philosophies of labourers and smelters at UNSOR 114–15 Labour and Monopoly Capitalism (Braverman, H.) 3, 33 Laclau, Ernesto 144, 177n1 Lamont, M. 100n2, 130 Lansing, S. 10–11 Laslett, Peter 69, 77 Lazar, Sian 147 LEAs (Local Environmental Agencies) 92–3, 94 legal impunity of companies 96 leisure activities of middle classes 91–3 leisure capitalism 88–91 leisure capitalism and working-class 88–91 leisure centre, development of 86–8 Lenin, Vladimir I. 82 Leonard, M. 49–50 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 63 Liberal Club in Endcliffe 14, 74 light in workshop at Morris Ltd. 23 Linhard, R. 130 local community employment 47 economies and capitalist socialization 60–61 informal economy 45–6 and national perspectives, ISTC divisional office as mediator between 153–6 social enterprises, emergence of 79–80, 98 locations Endcliffe 45–6 UNSOR (United Steel Organization) 106 Locke, John 80

195

Lockwood, D. 85, 127–8, 131 Lockwood, D. and Goldthorpe, J. 127 Lopez, S. 165–6n8 Loxley Valley Design Project 99 Protection Society 89–90 Lupton, Tom 1, 85 M McCulloch, J. 11 MacFarlane, A. 69 McGregor, Sir Ian K. 7, 83 machines fetishism and 11, 12, 21 machine shop work at Morris Ltd. 31–2 manual skills and machines 35 social history of 31–3 versatility and longevity of 50–51 MacShane, D. 126n7 Malinowski, Bronislaw 69 Manchester School 1 Mandel, E. 9 Manual Handling Operations Regulations (1992) 121, 152 March, C. and Olsen, J. 44n5 markets housing market 60, 76 labour markets 7, 30, 43, 47, 51, 60–61, 65, 68, 87, 110, 123, 128, 147–8, 170, 172–3 local markets 5, 54 morality and market, interplay between 96 for Morris’ products 24–5 principles of, introduction of 157–8 scrap market 53–4, 97 sex market 55–6 short-termism and market mentality 114 steel market 6, 42 stock market 177 Marlowe, Andrew 156 Marshall, Alfred 45, 46, 59, 177 Martinez-Lucio, M. and Steward, M. 148 Marx, Karl 2, 3, 4, 10, 22, 46, 105, 128, 169, 175, 177 Marxism 71, 133, 167 neo-Marxism 98 Masso, Antonio (‘Toni’) 127, 130, 141–2, 169 diasporic existence 139–41 ethnicity and belonging 137–9

196 |

Index

public and private persona, split between 135–7 transnational migration, diasporic conditions and 140 Mauss, Marcel 2, 31 Meacher, Michael 90 Means Test legislation (1935) 67, 83 Meek, J. 101n16 Meiksins-Wood, E. 166n9, 177n1 Meillassoux, Claude 50 METREX (Metropolitan Regions) 62n5 middle classes 6, 43, 45, 49, 54, 133, 134, 169 aspirations of 141, 175, 177 consumption of 63–4 entrepreneurial middle-class, emergence of 11, 12 folk models of class 84–6 leisure activities of 91–3 migrant workers, attitude towards 129–30 radicalism of 99 rural middle classes 95 sociability of, patterns of 128 see also bourgeoisie Mingione, E. 49 migrant workers, middle-class attitude towards 129–30 militant particularism 145 Mill, John Stuart 11 milling machines at Morris Ltd. 35 Misa, T. 11 Mitchell, T. 72 modernism and modernity 6–9, 33, 39, 63, 168 Moffat, Sir Brian 121 Moody, Charlie 105, 116, 122, 127, 130, 131–4, 135, 141–2, 169 authoritativeness 132 bourgeois ambition of 131–5 nurturing aspect in life of 133 redundancy and disappearance of 135, 142 morality and market, interplay between 96 moral economy of working-class 66–7 at Morris Ltd. 34, 43 Morris Ltd. 13–14, 19–44, 74, 79, 80–81, 84–5, 90, 123–4 air circulation, hot and cold workers’ differing demands 24 alienation 33, 34, 40, 42, 43 apprenticeship, knowledge transmission through 34

apprenticeship, lack of control over 30 bonus payments 27–8 break-room discussions 37–40 capitalist technologies and social relations 42–3 cleanliness 24 communication and knowledge 34 despotic capitalism 19–20, 21, 43 dirt and dust 23–4 embedment of knowledge 34 entrances (and segregation of) 22–3 environmental volatility 24 flooding in 79 forge work 31–2 fragmentation of workforce 30–31 history of 21–2 hybrid moralities of work 42–3 individualities in limbo 80–81 informal exchanges 28, 29–30, 54–5 informal production 29–30, 51–3 insolvency 19 inter-generational redistribution of wages 43 interdependence 25–7 knowledge, reproduction of 34 knowledge, social distribution in 33–7 labour and alienation as relational values 168–9, 170, 172–3, 174–5 labour links to machines 35 labour mapping 35 labour processes, conceptions of 35–7 light 23 machine shop work 31–2 machines, social history of 31–3 manual skills and machines 35 market for products 24–5 milling machines 35 morality 34, 43 noise 23 output restriction 27–8 piecework rates 28 political economy 40–43 as ‘political machine’ 21, 44 politico-economic circumstances, machines and 32–3 postmodernity, materialization of 44 precarious labour 43 production, alienation in relations of 40–43 production process 25–7 quality control 27–8

Index |

recession 30 recruitment, lack of control over 30 redundancy 27, 30, 43 relational consciousness and class struggle 175–7 rhythms of production 25 sensuousness 24 shop floor 21–4 social capital 29–30 social fragmentation 37–40 social interconnections 30, 43–4 social tradition, machines and 31–2, 32–3 socio-technical space, factory as 20–21 speed and bonus, measures of 35–6 survival of 19 temperature 23 value, knowledge and social fragmentation 37–40 wage structures 27–9 wood-boring tools, production and marketing of 24–5 workforce 29–31 Mouffe, Chantal 144, 177n1 Mount, F. 178n5 multi-skilling at UNSOR 118–19 Munck, Ronaldo 144 Murial, Alistair 178n3 N NAFTA (North American Free Trade Area) 147 Narotsky, Susana 47, 146–7 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) 106 nationalization of steel in Sheffield 7–8 NEBOSH (National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health) 152 Neespend Forum 88 Negri, Antonio 4, 44 New Labour 65, 70, 85, 87, 95, 153, 168, 176 community unionism and 143, 148–9, 150, 164–5 Thatcherism of 116 third way of 148, 151 ‘New Unionism: Organizing for Growth’ (TUC) 148 NHS (National Health Service) 133, 139 NLBD (National League for the Blind and Disabled) 149

197

noise in workshop at Morris Ltd. 23 Norfolk, Duke of 6, 32, 91 Northumberland, Duke of 93 NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) 149 NTS (‘New True Socialism’) 167, 177n1 nuclear families 69–70 NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) 152, 154, 162 NUWM (National Unemployed Workers Movement) 82–3 O Occupational Health and Safety Act (1985) 96 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 164 Ong, A. 125 Operai e Capitale (Tronti, M.) 4 Organisational Symbolism, School of 20 organization structure and policy at UNSOR 107–10 Orgreave Coal and Coking Plant 92 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels, F.) 12 Ouchi, W. 62n12 output restriction at Morris Ltd. 27–8 outsourced production, web of 52 outworking in informal economy 53–4 overloading at UNSOR 113 Owen, Robert 11 P Pahl, R.E. 50, 59–60 Pahl, R.E. and Wallace, W. 50 Pallson, G. and Durrenberger, P. 93 Park Hill Estate, Sheffield 65 Parry, Jonathan P. 146, 173 partiarchal extended family 74–5 partnership agreements 148–9 PCC (process control charts) 158 Petty Capitalism and Globalization (Smart, A. and Smart, J.) 47 Pfaffemberger, B. 11 Phoenix House 150–51, 164, 168, 173 piecework rates at Morris Ltd. 28 Pietz, W. 10 Pine, Frances 63 Planning Dept., Sheffield 86, 87

198 |

Index

Polanyi, Michael 15n5, 41 capitalism, perspective on 163–4 political economy 11–12, 76–7, 83, 94, 126 at Morris Ltd. 40–43 politico-economic circumstances, machines and 32–3 of steel industry 63–4, 176 politics in action, political meeting at ISTC 153–6 activism of artisans 98–100 extremism in UNSOR rolling mill 115–17 health and safety politics at UNSOR 120–21 identity politics 144–5 Morris Ltd. as ‘political machine’ 21, 44 political consciousness 82, 122, 123, 146, 147, 156 working-class politics, local history of 81–4 Pollard, S. 5 Portes, A. and Walton, J. 49 post-colonial migration 129–30 post-Fordism 80, 99, 100, 167–8 post-industrial capitalism 144 post-industrial society (and theories) 81, 98–9, 144–6 post-industrial sociological paradigm 98–9 post-Keynesianism 2, 48, 69, 148 post-wage labourers 80 postmodernism 1, 9, 44, 46, 71, 142 Poulantzas, Nico 177n1 poverty and working-class families 66–9 precariousness alienation and 131 of female employment 72 of labour at Morris Ltd. 43 of working-class 141–2 Principles of Political Economy (Mill, J.S.) 11 Principles (Ricardo, D.) 11 production alienation in relations of 40–43 factory production 4, 19–44, 105–26 familial relationships in 41 flexibilization of 143–4 process at Morris Ltd. 25–7 process at UNSOR 106–10 rhythms at Morris Ltd. 25 productivism 156, 159–60

Prometheus 31–2 pub as welfare institution 56, 57–8 public and private persona, split between 135–7 selves, separation between 130–31, 131–5 Pung Ngai 125–6, 130 Q quality control at Morris Ltd. 27–8 Quijano, A. 50 R race in class relations 129–30 radicalism of middle classes 99 Ramblers Association 89, 90, 99 recession at Morris Ltd. 30 recruitment lack of control at Morris Ltd. 30 policy at UNSOR 108–9 Redclift, N. 50 Reddy, William 170, 178n6 redundancy 8, 19, 129, 135, 159–60 at BSC 83 legitimation of 96, 150 and long-term unemployment 76 money from, use of 57 at Morris Ltd. 27, 30, 43 at UNSOR 107, 109, 121, 123, 138, 142, 151, 153–5 regional economies 48–9 relational consciousness 175–7 Ricardo, David 11 rolling mill at UNSOR 115–17 Rolls Royce (RR) 157 Rothstein, F. 47 Rowntree, Seebohm 16n12 Roy, D. 15n1 Roy, D., Collins, O. and Dalton, M. 129 rural middle classes 95 Ruskin, John 81 S Sable, Charles 47 sacralization 96, 97 Safety Representative and Safety Committee Regulation (1978) 150 Schneider, David 70 Schumpeter, Joseph 98 Scipes, Kim 145 scrap economy 54–5 SEC (Sheffield Engineering Company) 156, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165–6n8, 176

Index |

Seidman, G. 145, 165n3 Seligman, Martin 105, 132 semi-skilled workers at UNSOR 114 SERC (Sheffield Economic Regeneration Committee) 86–7 SEU (Social Exclusion Unit) 86 sex market 55–6 Sheffield City Council 62n13, 72, 86, 87, 89, 100n6–7, 158–9, 162, 174 de-industrialization in 42 early factory production 41 entrepreneurial spirit in 6 familial relationships in production 41 history of labour in 5–9 hybrid moralities of work 42–3 immigrants in 65–6 industrial heritage, symbolization of 61 Loxley Valley Protection Society 89–90 nationalization of steel in 7–8 Park Hill Estate 65 proletarianization in 5–6 ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’ 65 steel industry development in 5–9 technological transition in 98–9 unemployment 50–51 unemployment, long-term 42 Waterworks Company 91 see also Endcliffe Sheffield Telegraph 93 shop-floor organization at Morris Ltd. 21–4 organization at UNSOR 109–10 Sibieta, Luke 178n3 sickness benefit 95–8 Silver, B. 145 Simon, H. 44n5 skilled vision 113–14 Smart, A. and Smart, J. 47 smelting shop at UNSOR 110–12 smelting skills at UNSOR 112–13 SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) 48 Smith, Adrian 48 Smith, Gavin 48, 60 sociability of middle-class, patterns of 128 social capital 29–30 social cohesion 47, 116, 122, 161, 163 social constructionism 10–11, 129 social entrepreneurship 86, 97

199

social fragmentation at Morris Ltd. 37–40 social hierarchies of pub life 56–7, 58–9 social interconnections at Morris Ltd. 30, 43–4 social morality of community unionism 164–5 Social Security Act (1989) 68 social tradition, machines and 31–2, 32–3 social unionism 143, 144 ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’ 65 Socialist Worker Party 165n1 socialization in late capitalism 4 socio-technical space, factory as 20–21 Sociology in Perspective (Kirby, M.) 105 spaces modern urban planning and working-class spaces 64–5 spatial mobility of corporate capital 147 SPZs (Simplified Planning Zones) 62n7 SRB (Single Regeneration Budget) 86, 92 Stacey, J. 71 Stack, Carole 71 Stack, Jack 89–90 Standing, Guy 49, 67, 100n14 state power, geography of 48 steel industry development in Sheffield 5–9 versatility and longevity of 50–51 see also Morris Ltd.; UNSOR Steel Lives (Massimiliano Mollona documentary film) 15 STP (Steel Training Partnership) 149, 154 Strathern, Marilyn 70, 165 subcontracting 51–2 The Sun 38, 122, 132 sweatshops 20, 52, 53 Sweeney, John 144–5, 167 Swyngedouw, Erik 48, 100n5, 100n8 T TAN (transnational advocacy networks) 144 Taussig, M. 10 Taylor, Frederick 16n15 team-working business unionism and 157 at UNSOR 109–10

200 |

Index

technological fetishism 9–12, 36, 98–9 T&GWU (Transport & General Workers Union) 159, 175, 178n3 Thatcher, Margaret (and Thatcherism) 7, 48, 147, 176 Third Way (Giddens, A.) 168 Thompson, E.P. 41 TNCs (Transnational Corporations) 47, 123, 145 TPM (Total Production Management) 157 TQM (Total Quality Management) 161, 168 Trade and Dispute Act (1927) 83 training policy at UNSOR 109 see also apprenticeship transnational migration, diasporic conditions and 140 Trigilia, Carlo 47 Tronti, Mario 4 trust, business unionism and generation of 160–61 TUC (Trades Union Congress) 143, 147–8 Turner, Christena 146 Tweedale, G. 16n16 Tylor, E.B. 10 U UDCs (Urban Development Corporations) 62n7 Unemployed Workers’ Act (1905) 66 unemployment 7, 9, 13, 30, 61, 66–7, 77, 80, 123, 149 informal economy and 50–51 institutionalization of 83 level of, unprecedented 67 long-term, in Sheffield 42, 76 social exclusion and 162 solidarity in 85 Unemployment Assistance Board 67 unemployment benefits 57, 96–7, 99 working-class 67–8, 76 Unemployment Insurance Act (1911) 67 UNSOR (United Steel Organization) 12, 14, 15, 50, 86, 105–26, 143, 154–5, 164–5 apprenticeship at furnace 112–13 authority structure 107–8 break-room discussions 113–15 capitalist restructuring 121–2

divided proletariat, workers as examples of 130–31, 132–4, 135–6, 137, 138, 140, 142 finishing operation, expansion of 118 fragmentation and delineation between departments 108–9, 110 furnace skills 112–13 grinding bay 117–20 health and safety politics 120–21 industrial accidents 120–21 ISTC in 151–2 labour and alienation as relational values 168–9, 170, 171, 172–3, 174–5 labourers and smelters, work philosophies of 114–15 location of 106 market mentality and short-termism 114 memories of past glories 113–14 multi-skilling 118–19 organization structure and policy 107–10 overloading 113 political extremism in rolling mill 115–17 production process 106–10 recruitment policy 108–9 relational consciousness as basis for class struggle 175–7 rolling mill 115–17 semi-skilled workers 114 shop-floor organization 109–10 ‘shovel dance’ in smelting shop 111–12 skilled vision 113–14 smelting shop 110–12 smelting skills 112–13 team-working 109–10 training policy 109 work attitudes of boys and men, differences in 119–20 work philosophies of labourers and smelters 114–15 work practices in rolling mill 115–17 V venture capitalism 61, 87, 88, 93, 156–8, 161–3 Virno, Paolo 80 voluntary sectors, empowerment of 79–80 Von Mises, Ludwig 98

Index |

W wage-earners, classification of 5 wage structures at Morris Ltd. 27–9 Ward, G. 100n4 Waterman, Peter 165n1 welfare capitalism 7, 67 Welfare-to-Work 96–7 Werbner, Pnina 140 Westwood, Sallie 140 Williams, Keith 114 Wills, J. 148 Woodhead, Billy 82 work attitudes of boys and men at UNSOR, differences in 119–20 hybrid moralities of 42–3 philosophies of labourers and smelters at UNSOR 114–15 practices in rolling mill at UNSOR 115–17 workforce at Morris Ltd. 29–31 working-class alienation 141–2 artisans as individuals 80 bourgeoisification of 127–42 cohabitation by tenants 73–4, 75–6 consciousness of, ethnography of 2, 9 courtyard as focal point 64 dependency 68–9 divisions within 127–42 domestic arrangements at ‘Black Sparrow’ 73–4, 75–6 ethnicity in class relations 129–30, 135–41 exploitation of, medical metaphor and 125–6 extended families, re-emergence of 70–72, 72–3 family members, centrifugal dispersal of 68 fishing as activism 91–5 folk models of class 84–6 fragmentation of 169 governmental families 72–3 histories and homes 63–4

201

homes and social relations 63–78 individualization of homes 65–6 kinship ideologies 77–8 kinship networks 69–71 leisure capitalism and 88–91 moral economy of 66–7 nuclear families 69–70 nursing, private ambitions in 131–5 odd jobs and benefits 76–7 partiarchal extended family 74–5 politics of, local history of 81–4 post-colonial migration, effect on 129–30 poverty and working-class families 66–9 precariousness of 141–2 private and public selves of workers, separation between 130–31, 131–5 quasi-kin relationships, development of 74, 77 race in class relations 129–30 reciprocity between state and 67 redundancy 76 resilience of 167–8 spaces, modern urban planning and 64–5 standardization of spaces for 64–5 unemployment 67–8, 76 welfare capitalism 67 well-being of, capital intensification and 125–6 see also Masso, Antonio; Moody, Charlie Working for Ford (Beynon, H.) 175 WTO (World Trade Organization) 145 Y Yelvington, K. 130 Young, M. and Wilmott, P. 70 Young, Michael 70 Z Zelizer, Viviana 96, 97 Zweig, Michael 167