ABSTRACT
Communist engineers reacted to Britain’s declaration of war on Germany from at least two perspectives: their political view of the war and their vantage-point as shopfloor activists engaged in conducting economic conflict on their own factory terrain. In fact, the shift in the shopfloor balance of power produced by the war allowed shop stewards in many factories greater latitude to develop trade union organization. The economic struggle in engineering firms in London was intensifying as Ernest Bevin’s war economy machine gathered steam and built up its pressure on both workforce and management for maximum production. The total war economy reinforced the unions’ already strong position on the shopfloor. Most of the full-time hierarchy were concerned with the potential loss of power downwards to the new shopfloor institutions despite the specific restriction of their scope. The centralizing tendencies of the total war economy had drawn the separate sites of the increasingly concentrated heavy and aircraft engineering companies more closely together.
