This Day in Labor History: January 23, 1976

On January 23, 1976, The Guardian ran a story about a group of aerospace workers at the Lucas Aerospace Corporation actively fighting their company’s restructuring plans that would layoff thousands of workers by challenging the corporation’s right to do so and challenging it to allow them to make socially useful products. The Lucas Plan, as it would be known, did not work in stopping the massive layoffs of the early deindustrialization and globalization era, but it is an important moment in challenging the right of the capitalist class to destroy the lives of working class people for profit.

Lucas Aerospace was a defense contractor. The company itself was founded in 1875 as a pressed metal firm. It moved into making automotive components in 1902 and that propelled it into a new era as a leading British car parts company. Building on that, it expanded into airplanes. It was the site of several key moments in British labor history, including playing a big role in the 1926 General Strike and the 1931 women’s strike of Lucas workers connected with the Communist Party, which is probably the most important foundational moment of labor feminism in the UK.

But the rise of the Lucas Plan was not really connected with some kind of political radicalism connected to the CP. Rather, it was more an outlet of the Appropriate Technology (AT) movement connected to environmentalism and personified by Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog. Its primary mover at Lucas was a man named Mike Cooley (not the guitarist and co-frontman for Drive By Truckers). Cooley was an Irish engineer who had worked as a design engineer at Lucas since 1962 and by 1976 was in a senior design position. He was very into AT ideas. Lucas went through the same problems of competition in the early years of modern globalization that older companies around the industrialized world faced. So when it announced its layoffs, Cooley led a group of workers to think about an alternative future for the company.

Cooley’s position was that Lucas had tremendous machinery and tremendous workers. So what if it couldn’t create machines to kill anymore. What if all that labor skill was used to instead make solar panels and create clean energy? Or what about artificial organs? What about better public transportation? Cooley and his colleagues believed that workers had the skills to create a better life for the world, if they were empowered to do so. Moreover, they believed that workers should make the decisions about what to do with their labor. The 1970s was a period when the rise of deindustrialization made a lot of workers and labor-intellectuals think about the future of work. Like with the Lordstown strike in the United States in 1972, for a lot of workers, the idea of a lifetime of drudgery work on the assembly line just didn’t have any appeal. So what would the future be? Could workers run factories themselves? Buoyed what was assumed to be a permanently robust welfare state, the hope is that indeed it could be possible and that workers should be given the tools to make it happen.

Cooley and his colleagues took this really seriously. They spent the next year putting out six volumes of study about what was possible, with technical designs on how it could happen. Now, to say the least, it did not lead to the workers taking over the Lucas plant and running it on democratic lines to produce AT. But it did lead to a major conversation around workplaces and in labor intellectual circles not only in the UK but through western Europe and the United States. Lucas eventually got sick of Cooley’s problem causing. After all, its executives basically wanted to cut these jobs and make a lot of money for themselves. So he was fired in 1981. He then got named Technology Director of the Greater London Enterprise Board, so he did just fine.

In fact, the Lucas Plan was taken so seriously that in 1979, it was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Said The New Statesman in 1977, “The philosophical and technical implications of the plan are now being discussed on average of twenty five times a week in international media.” The whole idea still gets occasional attention from the media. For example, The Guardian ran a long piece on it in 2014. There are people calling for a “New Lucas Plan” today.

In the present, workers are facing the early days of another enormous threat–artificial intelligence. I don’t know what AI will really lead to. Right now, it seems to be primarily useful for students cheating in class and people being too lazy to write emails for themselves. But the question we have to ask ourselves is what the future of work is in this world. This is especially true given that for all these lazy intellectual types who hate working and thus dream of a “post-work” society, the idea of work is as central to effectively every society in the world as ideas of gender and religion and anything else that is common to human existence. So to just tell people “stop caring about work” is like telling people to stop caring about the afterlife. It’s not going to work. You can redefine work, but you aren’t going to get rid of it and the future of “post-work” will not–sit down for this!–replicate the personal desires of the labor intellectual.

But let’s be clear too–everything for the working classes of the industrialized nations has gotten a lot worse since 1976. Nigel Farage’s base in English politics are these furious deindustrialized towns. So we have to figure it out or the future of politics will be even more open to workers filled with hate looking for someone to blame that it is now. That anger has to be channeled. Traditions of work must be respected and honored, not handwaved away. It’s not easy. We have to figure it out. The Lucas Plan was at least an initial attempt to do so and as such, deserves our attention today.

This is the 589th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.