'If We Depart from These Conditions…': Trade Union Reactions to European Immigrant Workers in the Textile Industry C. 1946–1952

Abstract

Trade union attitudes towards European immigrants have rarely been studied in a post-war context. As a response to this, this article focuses on trade union reactions to European workers in the Lancashire cotton industry between 1946 and 1951. Highlighting the merits of local case studies of labour relations, the focus is predominantly on the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners and Twiners. Evidence is presented of a defensive attitude on the part of the Association that limited the number of European workers in individual mills, as well as acting as a barrier to such workers advancing into the echelons of skilled labour. The paper recognises, however, the complexities of the period, characterised as much by the consequences of capitalism and the decline of the cotton industry, as trade union jingoism. It also alludes to the conflicts that existed between individual districts and Executive Committees, between negotiated agreements and circumstances at individual mills and between employers and labour.

The rise and fall of independent immigrant worker unionism: A case study of the Migrants Trade Union in South Korea

“…Deterritorialization and cross-border labor mobility have become increasingly important, along with the expansionist logic of a world capitalist economy (Phillips et al., 2007). Capitalist industrialization tends to create a growing demand for labor imported from overseas because immigrant labor offers several significant advantages: it helps solve labor scarcities found in the economies of host countries, and supplies cheaper and more flexible ‘guest’ labor in terms of social expenditures and repatriation (Sassen-Knob, 1981).…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2007

“…Their insightful article charts the ways in which the destruction of the entrenched power of craft unions by the employers at once Balkanized the industry and, ironically, weakened its market power. Union attitudes towards European immigrants have rarely been studied in a postwar context and Phillips et al. address this in their study of the Lancashire cotton industry between 1946 and 1951. Likewise, the political significance of legislation in the 1960s and 1970s giving greater rights to workers has been little explored.…”