ABSTRACT
Mechanisation involved a fundamental transformation of the labour process. Mechanisation was not introduced uniformly across the Scottish coalfields. In the decade after 1927, rationalisation of production through the closure of uneconomic mines in Ayrshire increased the proportion of mechanised collieries there; mechanisation also increased significantly in Mid and East Lothian. Mechanisation was not only a motivation towards greater managerial dominance, it was simultaneously seen as a means of achieving it. In his presidential address to the inaugural meeting of the Scottish branch in 1910, a Lanarkshire manager complained that organised labour had shifted its position in relation to capital over the previous fifteen years and stressed the strategic role which machinery could play in regaining control of the labour process. Despite the importance of mechanisation as an influence on underground work, historians of miners' unions in Britain have, as Daunton points out, almost completely ignored this dimension of the labour process.
