Resumen de Working for Ford: The Historical Context
Conceived and written as a sociological analysis of contemporary workplace relations, Huw Beynon’s Working for Ford remains a vivid and now historical account of workers’ contestation of the work–effort bargain and the construction of union organization at Ford’s Halewood factory. Two factors are discussed: the development and dissolution of the ethnic-sectarian fault line within Liverpool’s working class and the resulting ‘release of energy’ in the creation of union organization and the radical changes under way in the Transport and General Workers’ Union by the early 1960s. Given the material that became available after the publication of the first edition of Working for Ford in 1973 there is more to say on the TGWU. Workplace trade-unionism was built at Ford Halewood in the context of the shadow of Liverpool’s ethnic-sectarian divide, which was by then irrelevant as a motive force in workers’ lives, and the ongoing changes in the TGWU, which removed a major impediment to the autonomy of the joint shop stewards’ committee as the focus of workers’ collective power.
