ABSTRACT
This chapter considers more developments in industrial relations in steel during the five year period between 1967 and 1973. It argues that serious instabilities in the system of work control have been created in the process of re-organisation together with the deterioration in average earnings differentials of the steelworker, are likely to lead to fundamental changes in the performance of work control itself. The concentration of new capacity in these areas accorded with the stringent economic and technological criteria adopted by other international producers for low-cost modern steelmaking. Undoubtedly traditional emergent pattern of direct worker involvement in protest arising from the steel strategy owed much to the successful campaign waged by workers in the Special Steels Division at the River Don Works in Sheffield during 1971. The chapter examines the reaction of labour in steel to the constraints and opportunities arising from the changing systems organisation of the industry.
