Class and Industrial Relations in Britain: The 'Long' Mid-century and the Case of Port Transport, c. 1920-70

Abstract

This article highlights important continuities in Britain's ‘longer’ mid-twentieth-century history, chiefly in industrial relations and social class divisions, which outweigh the discontinuities of the 1940s and 1950s that were emphasized in literature from the 1960s until perhaps the mid-1990s. The post-1950 ‘golden age’ advances by manual workers were located largely in pre-Second World War industrial relations, but class relations inherited from the 1920s and 1930s constrained the extent of manual working class advances after 1945. The focus here is chiefly on port transport, where developments substantially qualify Ross McKibbin's suggestion that the 1940s and 1950s witnessed a ‘redistribution of esteem’ in favour of manual workers.

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