Fighting Deindustrialisation

Andy Clark examines a stretch of modern Scottish labour history that has received little scholarly attention. Over fourteen months in 1981 and 1982, while Scotland's economy was losing industry at an accelerated pace, three groups of workers refused to accept the loss of their jobs.

The protests took place at three factories: Lee Jeans in Greenock, Lovable Bra in Cumbernauld, and Plessey Capacitors in Bathgate. The assembly workers at these plants were predominantly women. Their multinational employers had decided to close the sites, and the workers responded by occupying their buildings and staying put until their demands were met and the closures were averted. Each struggle was set against the movement of capital, corporate profit-seeking, and unjust job losses. In every case the workers achieved their aim, and none of the factories was entirely closed after the occupations.

Clark is the first to analyse these three occupations together, drawing on oral history, memory studies, industrial relations scholarship, and the study of deindustrialisation. He contends that the events of 1981 and 1982 deserve recognition as among the most significant episodes in Scotland's deindustrialisation. Yet public memory of this period is fragile. The book sets out to place women's militant resistance within both academic and popular accounts of working-class activism in later twentieth-century Scotland.