The Affluent worker

The affluent workers studied in this book, originally published in 1968, were employees of three major industrial concerns sited in Luton at the time. The three firms were selected as being amongst Luton's best-paying employers and also on account of their advanced personnel and labour relations policies. This choice enabled comparisons to be made between workers engaged in very different types of production system. On the basis of material from interviews and other data, the authors examine in detail workers' experience of their industrial jobs, their relations with workmates, and the nature of their attachment both to the organizations which employ them and to their trade unions. This study forms part of a larger project which was aimed at testing empirically the thesis, which was most prevalent 1968, that of the progressive assimilation of manual workers and their families into the pattern of middle class social life.