British politics from the late 1950s to the 1980s was dominated by a concern for Britain's relative economic decline. In the early 1960s, Labour under Harold Wilson blamed the Tories’ old-boy network and failure to plan for “thirteen wasted years,” promising to harness the power of science and the state to restore the British economy. In the 1970s, the Conservatives, first under Ted Heath and then under Margaret Thatcher, blamed the bloated state created by Labour and the erosion of individual competitiveness it ostensibly created. Although the Conservatives and Labour proposed diametrically opposed remedies, they did agree that economic decline was a real problem. And both also blamed, albeit in very different ways, the trade union movement for contributing to the problem by excessive sectionalism, opposition to new technologies, and general bloody-mindedness. Historians and other analysts, both at the time and since, have often embraced one or the other of these contemporary political views of British decline.

Managing the Modern Workplace consists of a series of case studies that call into question simplistic notions of British economic failure and, in particular, the role of trade unions in causing it. In his chapter on the British and American automobile industries, Joseph Melling challenges the view that industrial relations in the British auto industry were “fragmented and chaotic” (29) and that British management was less in control of the workplace than its American counterparts. Comparing the relatively expensive Swindon locomotive works to the less costly works at Crewe, Michael Anson shows how productivity could vary within a single industry. At Swindon a weakly supervised system of rate settings—over a hundred thousand piecework rates had to be negotiated—proved too convenient for both management and labor. “Here, the politics of production is seen as internally generated, even parochial” (73); in contrast, Crewe, with a different workplace organization, had far better productivity. Examining the nationalized gas industry in the 1950s and 1960s, Andrew Jenkins implicitly challenges the Thatcherite view of the inefficiencies of state enterprise. Productivity in the industry exceeded that of private manufacturing as the industry, responding to competitive pressures, accepted new fuels, first oil and then coal, and introduced new and more efficient technology, which labor accepted with little opposition and which government also supported. In the final case study, Alan Booth examines the impact of technological change and gender in British retail banks between 1945 and 1970, showing the impact that women had in shaping workplace practices in this white-collar industry. In spite of some initial difficulties, the banks successfully increased productivity by the introduction of online computing, a change that was largely accepted by staff because it improved working conditions, although women did not benefit as much as men.

These four case studies are linked by a long introductory chapter and a long conclusion, both written by Booth and Melling, that together draw out the implications of the various case studies and expand on them. In consequence, the book holds together well; it is more coherent than the usual edited volume. What emerges is a much more complex picture of labor relations in the postwar period than the view, popularized above all by Margaret Thatcher, that British productivity had lagged because trade unions used their strength on the shop floor to prevent the introduction of new methodologies. In fact, workers and managers could work together well, as Andrew Jenkins shows in his study of the gas industry. To be sure, sometimes work practices that restricted improved productivity persisted, but this was the result of particular workplace cultures and market forces, not some unique flaw in the trade union movement. More important, British trade union organization, even when it differed from what has often been presented as the more desirable form found in the United States, did not have a negative impact. As Melling and Booth conclude, “There is no evidence to suggest that either the more fragmented bargaining or the more intense dispute patterns resulted in significant rises in unit labour costs and adverse productivity effects” (16–17). In fact, the unions, far from being the retrograde force that they have often been accused of being, were willing to work with management and government to improve productivity, albeit on the assumption that workers would then capture some of the gains. As the authors write, “Rather than defensive sectionalism we have emphasized the readiness of organized industrial labour to participate in industrial reform and the pursuit of higher efficiency and competitiveness” (163).

On the one hand, Managing the Modern Workplace casts doubt on the whole notion of decline, since it makes clear that several industries, such as banking, were technological leaders and that the economy as a whole performed better than has often been allowed. On the other hand, this volume provides a corrective to those critics who have blamed the British trade union movement for Britain's economic problems. Above all, it moves beyond clichés that treat the trade union movement as a monolith to show the variations between industries and within unions and the logic of the workers’ response to the conditions in which they found themselves. It is a helpful work of historical revisionism that will be of interest to anyone concerned with postwar British history.