Workers’ Cooperatives: The British experience in the 1970s.

The 1970s in Britain were a decade of contestation and polarisation. Following a leftward shift amongst the labour movement, groups such as the Institute for Workers’ Control (IWC) supported the concept of industrial democracy to suggest a new direction for a worker-oriented economy. In this guest post, Daniel Burridge reports on the formation of the so-called “Wedgwood Benn cooperatives” (Oakeshott 1978: 108), the purest expression of the industrial democratic ideal from the perspective of the IWC. These were located at the Triumph factory in Meriden, the Scottish Daily Express printing factory in Glasgow and the Fisher Bendix factory in Kirkby, near Liverpool. The new tactic involved buying out the factory sites and equipment of jaded private ownership and running production on the democratically-decided terms of the workers.