ABSTRACT
Traditionally, car workers have been portrayed as one of the first groups of operatives to exchange craft benefits for economic reward. Indeed, the piece work system, so prevalent in the motor industry until the 1960s, symbolised the birth of this 'new' worker since it appeared to give operatives the motivation to work harder and discourage solidarity amongst colleagues. In arguing this view, historians have drawn evidence from the activities of the trade unions which were sectional in their outlook, continually focused on piece rates, job classifications and relations with rival unions. However, since there has been a lack of serious research on the shop-floor experience of workers in the motor industry prior to 1939, our image of the typical car worker is largely derived from postwar sociological studies (Zweig, 1961; Beynon, 1973). Indeed, although historians have by no means neglected the motor industry, analysis of car workers has largely been institutional in approach. For some historians, the car worker represents an ideal case study of the development of trade unionism in the 'new' industries (Zeitlin, 1980); for others the structure of industrial relations within the motor industry have been incorporated into models explaining Britain's economic decline (Lewchuk, 1986). However, the institutional perspective has a tendency to impose the economistic and sectional demands of trade unions onto the car workers themselves. Furthermore, with fewer than 25 per cent of car workers unionised at anyone time prior to the Second World War, it is clear that an analysis of institutional structures neglects the vast majority of the workforce (Claydon, 1987, 304). These approaches are unsatisfactory if we are to determine the workers' experience of production rather than the trade unions' or employers' interpretation of the work place.
