“Successful sit-ins seem a particularly Scottish phenomenon”: Gender, Memory and Deindustrialization

Abstract

Memory has become increasingly important in the study of deindustrialization over the last decade. The ways in which those who witnessed drastic socio-economic change reflect on their experiences decades later are crucial in understanding the ramifications. In this paper, I am concerned with the relationships between individual and popular/public memory for women manufacturing workers who participated in militant industrial action to oppose closure. Over a fourteen-month period in 1981 and 1982, three Scottish workforces refused to accept the relocation of their factories and launched occupations in resistance. The workers at the multinational factories of Lee Jeans (Greenock), Lovable Bra (Cumbernauld), and Plessey Capacitors (Bathgate) launched action to oppose shutdowns, which were announced during a period of accelerated closure in Britain. This aspect makes these workers unique in the history of factory closings; as has been demonstrated extensively, militant resistance was very much the exception. The vast majority of industrial workers reluctantly accepted management decisions, with most energy from the labor movement spent on securing enhanced redundancy packages.1 These workers are therefore exceptional among those who experienced the brutality of deindustrialization. They are additionally unique as the workers involved were predominantly women, whose experiences have not been sufficiently incorporated in previous studies of manufacturing closure.2 The disputes were widely reported on at the time; the story of Scottish women fighting against multinational corporations’ “unfair” decisions during a period of rapidly increasing unemployment captured the attention of the labor movement, journalists, and politicians. And, whilst they were not part of a coordinated response to closure, there were clear links between the actions, and significant overlap among the workers involved.