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Globalisation compelled the UK economy into a phase of rapid restructuring, turning away from the old industries in manufacturing and mining and towards a knowledge economy based around services. This new work replaced mainly male full-time jobs with part-time female work. This reconfiguration brought with it a new welfare state paradigm that began to replace the Beveridge model with a ‘competition state’, a workfare system geared towards supporting directly efficient economic performance. A new social geography emerged with the services economy, which was located in suburbs and small towns, leaving behind declining inner cities in the heartlands of the ‘old’ economy. Two-earner households underpinned a new wave of suburban home ownership. There were thus significant complementarities between economic restructuring, welfare state reconfiguration and the further embedding of the home-owning society. Meanwhile, council housing began a rapid descent as manufacturing industries closed down. Home ownership began to play a prominent part in shaping people's welfare choices, especially after the mortgage market was reinvented, providing access to housing equity on a massive scale.

This introductory chapter first establishes the disciplinary spectrum within which Hot Metal operates. It outlines how recent studies of design and material culture have focused less on production and labour, and more on consumption, interpretation and professional design, and examines the place of material culture in labour history. The Introduction opens the path to demonstrating a more effective way to interweave studies of working life, labour and design, while retaining the voices of the workers (through oral history), without aestheticising or sentimentalising labour experience. The chapter also introduces Sydney’s Government Printing Office as a rich and revealing case study that holds valuable lessons for those examining the cultural and social impacts of deindustrialisation in late capitalist economies. Finally, the Introduction sets the economic and political scene in Sydney between the 1960s and the 1980s: important background for understanding the changes that the print-workers experienced.

A ‘foreign order’ is an industrial colloquialism referring to a practice whereby workers produce objects at work – using factory materials and work time – without authorisation. This is an under-explored but global phenomenon that many names, including homers, side productions, government jobs, and la perruque. There are silences about these clandestine acts of creative production in English-language studies. This chapter considers this practice from the interdisciplinary perspective of labour history and material culture studies. Using oral and archival sources, the chapter traces the ancestry of foreign orders to seventeenth century English customary practices of the Commons. It provides an account of a playful and creative culture of pranks and making in a printing factory, and identifies the workers’ motivations for creating foreign orders. Finally, the chapter explains how the making of foreign orders became more overt and politicised over time, as workers sensed their insecurity. This practice of making ‘on the side’ enabled print-workers a degree of agency and the ability to narrativise their own plight.

This conclusion foregrounds the closure of Sydney’s Government Printing Office, revealing the emotive and powerful significance of material culture when an institution is extinguished. In re-telling the story of the factory closure, this chapter highlights the importance of material culture in industrial histories. Here was an unruly abundance of things, difficult and cumbersome relics of an industrial past. Workers took whatever they could smuggle out, as a way of compensating themselves for the betrayal of trust by their employers. Objects were at the centre of this story of decline and industrial closure. It is not simply that objects became connected to memory. Material culture both stirred feelings and consoled people who felt they had not been respected by the institution to which they had been loyal. Thus we return to the central message of this book: history is not merely the movement of people through time, it is bound up with the ever-changing physical and spatial world. A bringing-together of labour history with design and material culture, therefore, seems not only appropriate but entirely necessary.

Scottish miners were heterogeneous in their politics and culture. A distinct Scottish mining identity accommodated social conservatives and religious sectarians with class-conscious trade unionists and international socialists. This identity developed through political campaigning from the 1950s to the 1980s and drew upon the claimed values of the Scottish Nation as well as solidarity with working class people across Britain and the world. It emphasised the value of gender equality, and gradually undermined coalfield male chauvinism. Mining leaders related security explicitly to questions of class and nation. Solidarities of class were pursued with trade unionists across Britain, but miners in Scotland tended to see deindustrialisation as an acute and even distinctly Scottish problem. The unreformed constitutional-political structures of the UK were criticised as an obstacle to coalfield security, with policy-makers remote from the communities affected by accelerating job loss. Scotland’s national right to self-determination was asserted, and the miners persuaded the Scottish Trades Union Congress to adopt Home Rule as official policy by the early 1970s.

Economic security in the coalfields was strengthened after the closure of Scotland’s largest colliery, Michael in East Fife, in 1967. The moral economy was enforced vigorously by the New Mine generation. Mobilisation averted a significant erosion of employment. Increased coal burn at new power stations was secured. As the creation of jobs in new industries slowed, so did the rate of employment loss in coal. Pits closed only where the interests of mining localities were carefully protected. Security was also pursued through industrial action for improved wages. The New Mine generation in Scotland was instrumental in shifting union politics to the left, and Scottish miners were prominent in major unofficial strikes in 1969 and 1970. Miners across Britain won significant pay increases in 1972 and 1974. These struggles reflected ambitions for more trenchant resistance to deindustrialisation, but the trend to unity across the coalfields was countered by the NCB’s introduction of area incentive schemes. The prominence of territorial divisions reinforced the Scottish labour movement’s argument that deindustrialisation and economic security were phenomena with distinct national features in Scotland.

This examines the longer effects of the strike, including deindustrialisation, the economic and social loss of employment in the coalfields, and the limited but perceptible reconstruction of gender relations. The book's core conclusions are then detailed.

This chapter sets the stage of contemporary post-war British history and how that experience played out in Liverpool. It charts the rise of neoliberalism as a challenge to the post-war consensus as well as tracing the roots of deindustrialisation and the fragmentation of Britain’s once vital working class.

This chapter locates the research for the book methodologically and geographically. The chapter describes the particular place – Middlesbrough in North East England – where the research was conducted and the rapid and dramatic social and economic changes that have affected the place. In particular, the chapter charts the steep (and continuing) decline of relatively well paid, skilled, standard jobs in manufacturing industry partially off-set (in terms of total levels of employment) by a rapid increase of female participation in growing service and new manufacturing sectors of the economy. The chapter shows how these changes have simultaneously contributed to the lowering of wages and an increase in involuntary part-time and precarious work for men and women across employment sectors. In this context the local labour market is typically characterised by the prevalence of underemployment in non-standard, lower skilled, insecure and lower paid jobs. Unemployment is a commonly understood feature of deindustrialised labour markets, as is the potential for the degradation of employment. Less commonly understood is how unemployment and casualised, insecure poor work can combine together to create the low-pay, no-pay cycle which is the key focus of this book. The chapter also describes the research methodology which was employed in the study.

The chapter focuses on people's recurrent experiences of getting, doing, losing and leaving jobs. It shows how much of the work now available is typically low-skilled, low paid and insecure yet usually demand uncommonly high levels of personal commitment. These jobs were found to be typically physically and mentally demanding yet poorly valued in terms of remuneration and status. For a few interviewees better quality employment meant they escaped the poverty and churning of the low-pay, no-pay cycle. It is employment opportunities – the demand side of the labour market - which are most significant in shaping the low-pay, no-pay cycle and patterns of recurrent poverty. Intriguingly, although able to - sometimes graphically - describe the pain and unpleasantness of poor work, interviewees would simultaneously proclaim how they ‘loved’ working. This conundrum is explained by reference to the intrinsic social, psychological, moral and class cultural value of work to interviewees. The chapter also scrutinises how and why workers left jobs, which was often related to the pressures of work on personal health or because of wider crises in people's lives. Predominantly, the inherent insecurity of jobs, with employers who were as quick to fire as they were to hire, meant that jobs were lost.

This chapter examines the role of Chinese trade in the response to climate change. It begins with an overview of alternative emissions accounting methodologies and provides a framework for understanding the multiple effects of an expansion of emissions trading. It then considers the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in Chinese trade and national emissions on an alternative (consumption accounting) basis before turning to a discussion of how responsibility for these emissions might be efficiently and equitably re-assigned based on the merits of a consumption basis for emissions accounting. It shows that China was a net exporter of 1,660 mt of carbon dioxide in 2006, a figure that is growing rapidly. It also argues that complementary policies of deindustrialisation in developed countries, trade liberalisation, and the failure to harmonise international climate-change policy have contributed to the emissions surplus. The chapter concludes that, if Chinese production has merely substituted for production in developed countries, recent emissions reductions in developed countries may lack credibility.