Skilled manual workers in the labour process, 1856-19641

Abstract

This chapter will analyse the position of skilled manual workers in the labour process. It will be demonstrated that the collective control that workers managed to secure through trade unions enabled those workers to preserve both their skilled status and their wage differentials. Such control took the form of mechanisms of social exclusion, by which both management and other workers were exluded from the utilization and operation of machinery. These mechanisms were established in factories prior to automation, so that skilled status was maintained despite changes in the labour process. Where work groups were unable to establish control through social exclusion before the introduction of factory automation, no secure base existed from which to resist changes in the labour process and to establish skilled status. This was compounded by the fact that many of the work groups brought into already automated factories were composed of women.

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