This paper investigates the history of the labour process in New Zealand's state-owned railway workshops and questions the idea that large-scale industry inevitably destroyed whatever agency skilled workers had enjoyed. It also shows that relations of production vary with the political and cultural contexts. Craft control of the labour process survived in New Zealand's state-owned railway workshops and the union played only a minor role. Job control was more important in achieving bureaucratic instead of autocratic control over such matters as hiring and firing; the retention of apprentice-based crafts; the institutionalization of seniority; and in resisting both de-skilling and the "premium bonus". The strength and vitality of shop culture, based on craft control of the labour process, also survived and modified the Government's vigorous attempt to introduce "scientific management". In brief the article concludes that productive processes do not inevitably determine social relations of production, that capitalism has been neither homogeneous nor uniform, and that mechanization never inevitably results in de-skilling.In recent years historians in various countries have devoted considerable attention to the development of the labour process and the organization of work. These studies have aimed to explore the relation between social structure and the material production process and to ascertain the extent to which workers enjoyed agency in determining how work was done. Some of the empirical studies appeared to point in contradictory directions but a consensus has emerged among labour historians which suggests that the development of large-scale industry destroyed whatever agency the workers had enjoyed. The study of labour process, in short, has increasingly ended in pessimism about the capacity of workers to shape the labour contract on the job and has ignored the possibility that "relations of production will differ markedly from one political and cultural context to the next." 1 Railway Workshops, where locomotives, cars and wagons are ' The quotation is from William Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor