ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to engage with the larger rhetoric on foremanship and masculinity in the middle decades of the twentieth century as well as the debates on post-war industrial performance. It explains the particular ways in which industrial supervision has been viewed within the context of labour relations within the automobile industry on both sides of the Atlantic. Historians of labour relations in American and British car plants have frequently noted the impact of distinctive workplace cultures in the evolution of ‘Fordism’, including gendered perceptions of authority on the floor of industry. The chapter discusses the arguments in regard to the growth of trade unionism among manufacturing supervisors in the vehicle-building plants the US and Britain after 1939. It addresses the debate on the post-war performance of British industry by considering an important but neglected component of automobile production: namely, the impact of trade unionism on employer-supervisory relations and the formation of management policies for the management of the workplace.
