Shop Floor Citizens1994

Production, planning, participation! Around these three objectives an unlikely alliance of reformers came together during the 1940s to challenge long-established norms of industrial and political life in Britain. The institution of Joint Production Committees in British engineering factories during World War Two represented the most substantial experiment in worker participation ever undertaken in British industry. Shop Floor Citizens explores the politics of this experiment and assesses its impact on factory life. James Hinton's richly researched and engagingly written study rescues from obscurity the efforts of communist militants, trade union leaders, maverick industrialists and innovative civil servants to lay the foundations for a 'developmental state': dynamic, democratic, rooted in a productionist culture of shop floor citizenship. In relating the story of a neglected campaign for industrial democracy, this new book breaks new ground in the debate about where - and why - Britain's post-war settlement went wrong.