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

Introduction

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.

There has been some research into the occupations, individually, but the project that contributed to this article was the first that assessed them collectively, and the first to analyze the action at Lovable at all.³ Their submersion within the popular and academic narrative directly impacted my awareness of the period when beginning the research. I was born and raised in Greenock, and I was aware of the Lee Jeans occupation due to local and familial connections.⁴ I had conducted a small study for my undergraduate dissertation in 2010–2011, interviewing some of those involved and analyzing newspaper reports, but did not extend this beyond the specific dispute. I examined secondary literature that discussed Lee Jeans, as well as the broader context of the deindustrialization of the early 1980s. Despite this research, I had no inclination that the Lee's action was the first of three occupations launched by women workers against closure in Scotland at the time, as this was not discussed in the literature, in popular culture, nor by the women that I interviewed. Once I began revisiting the topic for a PhD application in 2012, I came across a court report by Kenny Miller in the Industrial Law Journal from 1982, where he discussed a case brought by Plessey, Bathgate, against their workers. In this piece, Miller wrote:

Successful sit-ins seem a particularly Scottish phenomenon… In the last year there has been a successful sit-in at the Lee Jeans factory in Greenock; one at the Lovable Bra factory in Cumbernauld; and, most notorious of all from a legal perspective, the sit-in at Plessey Capacitors in Bathgate.⁵

This excerpt was the starting point for the research that culminates in this article, as I was then able to build a project around the period of occupation in Scotland. Between 2014 and 2016, I conducted oral history interviews with twenty-nine of the women involved in the three disputes, to both reconstruct the occupations and to interpret their narratives through the lens of memory and identity formation. In this article, I intersect these narratives with public representations of deindustrialization in Britain and Scotland to assess the influence of popular memory on individual reflection. I begin by outlining theoretical perspectives on the relationships between individual and popular memory, before providing an overview of the three occupations. I then examine the public sites of memory and cultural representation of the period, and demonstrate the ways in which the popular telling and retelling of deindustrialization—through memorialization and cultural outputs on TV and film—has led to a notably gendered story of the deindustrialized past in Scotland and across the United Kingdom (and likely applicable in other contexts). I argue that there is minimal space in this popular narrative to recount and memorialize the experience of women workers, and this has led to their experiences becoming fundamentally marginalized in the history of deindustrialization and working-class resistance. This marginalization permeates individual memory, and the reflections of the interviewees I spoke with have been influenced in several ways. In this paper, I argue that this is one of the most significant periods in the Scottish experience of deindustrialization, but that these disputes—and the experiences of the workers—have not been sufficiently incorporated within academic and popular representations of the period. The masculine dominated public memory of deindustrialization has meant that the women involved downplay their roles, and have undergone a process of forgetting the broader, national significance of the actions that they took. With no sites of memory where the collective importance of these occupations is memorialized, these narratives and memories are increasingly precarious.⁶

Theoretical perspectives on memory

Memory is crucial in oral history research and analysis. Since the turn to memory in the later twentiethcentury, oral historians have been increasingly interested in the ways that narratives are filtered through multiple individual and social lenses. Many oral historians and memory scholars have demonstrated the impacts of the social and the collective on individual remembering. As Abrams asserts, “memory is not just about the individual; it is also about the community, the collective, the nation.”⁷ The social influences on remembering, forgetting, and misremembering have been demonstrated across a range of geographies, events, and time periods. Alistair Thomson's work on the mythology around Australian experiences of WWI has been seminal in the development of this literature. Through his interviews with veterans, Thomson demonstrates how “we compose our memories so that they will fit with what is publicly acceptable,” and asserts that the role of memorialization and popular outputs is crucial.⁸ A key aspect in understanding the relationships between social and individual memory is the existence, or absence, of “sites of memory,” spaces where they are commemorated, memorialized or celebrated. In her fascinating work on popular memory and the individual process of remembering and forgetting, Paula Hamilton contends that for “events to live on [in memory] there must be sites for their nourishment… that, if possible, intrude into the everyday.”⁹ In her examination of a 1938 Sydney ferry disaster, Hamilton sought to understand “why some [memories] slip from public consciousness and others persist.” She argued that public representation and reinforcement of memory is crucial in explaining how events are remembered and forgotten.¹⁰ Without spaces of commemoration, to retell stories, and explain past events, individual memories can become subsumed to align with dominant narratives.

There are many public arenas that can act as sites of memory. Alison Atkinson-Phillips has demonstrated the role of memorials in influencing memories and narratives around the stolen generations in Australia, arguing that even the simplest memorial illustrates the importance of an event, and designates it as something worthy of commemoration.¹¹ Television and film is also key and can shape individual narratives in fascinating ways. Penny Summerfield and Corinna Penniston-Bind illustrated the effect of television in their analysis of the British Home Guard in WWII. Their interviews revealed that the hugely popular TV program Dad's Army, a comedic dramatization of life on the Home Front, was pervasive in influencing memories of the Home Guard, and limited the possibilities for individual reminiscence among their respondents.¹² Hamilton argues that the relationship between popular culture and memory are crucial in understanding the narratives collected in oral history interviews, asserting that “what people remember depends on who they have talked with [and] what they have watched on television.”¹³

Experiences of factory closure and the wider process of deindustrialization are fascinating in attempting to understand the relationships between the popular and the individual in memory. Deindustrialization was experienced through many different layers during the period of shutdown and subsequent decades. Closure impacted the individual worker, the immediate shopfloor relationships, the collective workgroup, workers’ families, and their deindustrializing neighborhoods, communities, and nations. Individual reflections on “what it means and how it feels to live in a deindustrializing society” are filtered through these different relationships and identities.¹⁴ My aim in the sections that follow is to interrogate how the memories of women workers at the three Scottish factories where closure was resisted in the early 1980s have been mediated through popular representations of deindustrialization and resistance. In this next section, these disputes are briefly outlined and assessed.

The occupation of the factories, 1981–1982

The early 1980s was a period of accelerated deindustrialization across central Scotland. Throughout the first half of the decade, 613 Scottish manufacturing sites closed and resulted in the loss of 164,000 jobs.¹⁵ In 1980, registered unemployment in the women-dominated clothing industry rose by 18,000 across Britain, including 5,000 job losses in Scotland.¹⁶ Scottish female unemployment was 9.6 percent in 1981, and overall unemployment increased from 9.4 percent to 13 percent from August 1980–1981.¹⁷ It was during this period of irreversible decline that three Scottish workforces refused to accept the closure of their factories and launched militant campaigns of resistance.

The first occupation in the period was conducted by workers at the Lee Jeans factory in the town of Greenock, twenty-five miles downriver from Glasgow, Scotland's largest and most populous city. In January 1981—with female unemployment in the town running at fifty percent higher than in Scotland—shop steward Helen Monaghan was informed that the US-based center firm (VF Corporation) had decided that the factory would close and production would move to existing sites in Northern Ireland. The plant had only operated in Greenock for ten years and, despite consistently meeting productivity targets and outperforming VF's Irish sites, the decision had been made to shut down, making the 240 mostly women workers redundant. The workers contended that the reasons for closure were driven by profit and state subsidy, rather than unproductivity or economic downturn as VF claimed. They offered a range of proposals to keep the factory open, including short-time working and job-sharing. As Helen reflected, “We had tae put aw’ these things in, because eh, ye wurnae gonnae gie up, and obviously it wis tryin’ (testing) them.”¹⁸ On February 5, local management informed Helen that VF had rejected the proposals, and the factory would close as planned at the end of April. Immediately following the confirmation of closure, the workers met in the canteen to discuss the options available. Despite the severity of the situation, machinist Tricia Arkley recalled that “ye could feel the atmosphere with excitement” at the prospect of defying management.¹⁹ The workers voted immediately to occupy the plant, beginning a seven-month dispute that grabbed the attention of the nation and garment workers internationally.

As it progressed, the Lee Jeans sit-in became a cause celebre in the British labor movement. The story of the “Jeans Girls” refusing to acquiesce to the demands of a massive multinational employer dominated the press and TV news. Leading figures of the trade union movement, including Labour leader Michael Foot and Tony Benn MP, visited the plant to meet the workers and offer support. Lee workers traveled the length and breadth of the United Kingdom to address rallies, discuss the dispute, and seek solidarity. Mass demonstrations were held at the site, with shop stewards from local industries visiting to offer support, including against potential forced eviction. The dispute also became an important battle between grassroots worker action and conservative trade union officialdom. The workers’ union—the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers (NUTGW)—refused to officially sanction the dispute for six weeks, and then withdrew their support six weeks before its conclusion, leading to a bitter, public falling out between the workers and their representatives.²⁰ Despite these obstacles, the determination of the workers paid off. In August 1981, the factory was taken over through a local management buyout, the site and machinery were saved, and the workers victoriously returned to their machines to produce denims for “Inverwear Ltd.” Their victory was huge news across Britain, featuring prominently in the local and national media. The Lee workers demonstrated—in the most practical way—that organized working-class resistance could successfully resist the plans of multinational corporations to move capital and relocate production in pursuit of lower costs.

On October 8, 1981, just forty-five days after the Lee Jeans occupation ended, the female sewing machinists at the Lovable Bra factory in Cumbernauld were informed that the future of the site was under threat. Cumbernauld is a purpose-built new town, approximately thirteen miles from Glasgow, and was established in 1956 as an antidote to the structural issues facing Scotland's traditional manufacturing economy. The aim of urban planners was to relocate people away from overcrowded urban centers, and establish a manufacturing economy based, not on traditional industries of shipbuilding and mining, but modern modes of manufacturing. Lovable—a lingerie company based in Atlanta, Georgia—established their base in the town in 1965. By 1981, they were the second largest employer in Cumbernauld with 480 workers, the vast majority of whom were female sewing machinists. Importantly, the workers were also organized by the NUTGW, the union that had “abandoned” the Lee Jeans workers during their dispute.²¹ Despite the crisis in British clothing manufacturing, there was no sign for those on the shopfloor in Cumbernauld that their future employment was in doubt as orders continued to come in and the factory remained busy. However, in October, they were informed that the outlook was bleak and the firm had been placed in receivership.

The situation at Lovable was less clear-cut than in many other closures where occupations developed. It was not confirmed that the factory would close, but that the receiver would examine the viability of the business. This stilted the response of the workers, who did not have a clear sense of what they were opposing. As a result, the workers and their union representatives agreed to an initial round of 123 redundancies in January 1982, as it was hoped that this could prevent full closure.²² Interestingly, it was not confirmation that the plant would close that led to an occupation; rather, it was the news in January 1982 that the factory was to be sold to Lovable Spa of Italy and Berlei UK that prompted the workers to act. They asserted that these firms had a long track record of purchasing sites, stripping their assets, and shutting them down. Former worker Kathy Lawn reflects that “we did not want Lovable Italy to get it as that would have meant closure.”²³ Shop steward Sadie Lang told The Herald that the receiver had refused to give any assurances about the future of the factory or the warehouse, insisting that “if Cumbernauld was not part of the plans, we would hang onto the machinery.”²⁴

The Lovable dispute differs significantly from what we traditionally understand as a worker occupation. When they began their action, they continued to work as normal during the day, before groups of workers remained in the plant at night to prevent it being emptied under the cover of darkness. Thus, worker control was always temporary, and relinquished back to management at the start of each working day.²⁵ This lack of control and limited organization meant that once it was confirmed that the factory would close on February 17, the workers felt unable to maintain a presence inside the plant, and shifted to a twenty-four-hour picket of the warehouse to prevent the removal of stock. Despite these challenges, the outcome at Lovable was the same as in Greenock; local management bought the factory and the machinists returned to work for “Modewear Ltd.” This ended what The Herald later referred to as a “most unpleasant bankruptcy and sit-in.”²⁶

Around the same time as the Lovable action, women workers in the town of Bathgate, West Lothian, launched an occupation to prevent the closure of their workplace, the Plessey Capacitor plant. Bathgate—located twenty miles from Edinburgh, Scotland, the capital—was historically dominated by mining, but in the early 1960s there were hopes that the town would spearhead Scotland's “second industrial revolution,” following the surprise opening of a British Motor Company (BMC) plant, and the inward investment by Plessey in taking over the Telegraph Condenser Company (TCC). The Provost of West Lothian stated that this heralded a period of “undreamed of prosperity” for the county.²⁷ The West Lothian Courier stated proudly that “West Lothian is now the hub of Scotland's Industrial Revolution.”²⁸ This remarkable optimism was short-lived, with both Plessey and the auto plant closing in the 1980s and, by 1992, the excitement of the period was described as a “false start” in the area's economic development.²⁹

Unlike Lee and Lovable, Plessey Bathgate had been significantly downsized throughout the 1970s, part of a global rationalization program to increase profit levels that had stagnated despite huge growth in turnover during the previous decade. This resulted in an overall cull of 25,000 jobs as the firm sought to “eliminate the loss leaders which no longer had a place in the industrial logic of Plessey.”³⁰ These cuts had a devastating impact on Bathgate. Between 1973 and 1981, employment declined by 86 percent, from 2,400 to 330.³¹ The final blow for the workers came in December 1981. Despite the drastic downsizing of the previous decade, the announcement that the plant would shut completely stunned the remaining workers.³² However, they did not immediately resist. It took over a month before the Plessey workers decided to occupy and, interestingly, their action was directly influenced by developments at the nearby auto plant, by this time British Leyland (BL). The workers at Leyland launched an occupation in opposition to rationalization plans that would lead to the closure of tractor production. Jim Swan, convenor of the BL Joint Shop Stewards Committee, recalls that the day after their occupation began, he received a phone call from Plessey shop steward Ina Scott, who sang down the line that “‘anything you can do, I can do better.’”³³ The workers at Plessey also decided that they would occupy their factory to protest against closure and the perceived unfairness of the decision-making process. They embedded themselves in the plant and quickly organized shift patterns, assigned roles, and sought external support.

After only a week, the dispute became a key marker in the legal history of occupation in Scotland. In contrast to English law, in which an application for an order of possession could be invoked, in Scotland, a company would require an interdict served to every member of an occupation to prevent the continuation of their “unlawful” behavior.³⁴ The cumbersome and legally complicated manner of this process meant that it had not been used by any organization in Scotland to force an end to a workforce occupation, and was never threatened at Lee or Lovable. However, in 1982, there were two interdicts sought—at British Leyland, Bathgate, and Plessey Capacitors, Bathgate. Both injunctions sought were granted, with the Leyland workers ending their occupation. The workers at Plessey, however, defied the court ruling and remained in the factory. Plessey continued their countermobilization, and interdicts were served to the occupying workforce and they were summoned to appear at the Court of Session in Edinburgh. They were offered support by law firm Levy and McRae, who utilized Section 13 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1974, to argue that the occupation was legal as it was being “carried out in furtherance of a trade dispute.” At the hearing on February 26, Lord Kincaid agreed with this interpretation and was of the view that “the balance of convenience lay with recall of the interdict.”³⁵ The workers’ victory was celebrated as not only significant for the Plessey occupation but for the broader labor movement, with local Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, stating in jubilation that “Boardrooms throughout the city of London will have to take cognisance of this decision.”³⁶ It was huge news across Scotland and dominated the front pages of national newspapers including The Scotsman, The Herald, and the UK-wide Morning Star.³⁷ The occupation continued for a short period after the court victory, before the plant was sold to Arcotronics. While the workers rejected the first offer, an improvement that would safeguard eighty jobs for one year was accepted by a two-to-one vote on March 15, 1982.

The significance of these occupations in the Scottish, British, and international experience of deindustrialization must be emphasized. That there were three factory occupations launched against closure in opposition to the relocation of large multinational corporations across a small geographic area over a fourteen month period led by women workers that were all successful (to some extent) is unprecedented.³⁸ One occupation would have been significant; Tuckman and others have demonstrated that resistance to closure has been the response of a tiny proportion of British workers faced with capital mobility.³⁹ Other authors have detailed the process of plant and mill closings internationally, demonstrating the anger and despondency of the redundant workers—but very rarely do we see the type of militant resistance witnessed in central Scotland over 1981 and 1982.⁴⁰ It must also be stressed that these occupations were widely known about at the time they were conducted. The disputes at Lee, Lovable, and Plessey dominated local and national news reporting. These were not instances of women's activism being ignored in mainstream reporting, as has historically been common.⁴¹ Rather, they were presented as a fundamental part of the “battle to save precious jobs” in deindustrializing Scotland.⁴² Over the remaining sections of this article, I consider how deindustrialization and worker resistance has been represented and commemorated in the formulation of a public memory, before analyzing the impact of this on the workers involved in the three factory occupations.

Deindustrialization in popular culture

There are many representations that contribute to the establishment of popular memory, and can subsequently influence individual remembering and forgetting. I have identified two of these to discuss in the context of deindustrialization in Scotland and Britain: public statues and memorials; and representations on TV and film. As outlined earlier, oral historians have demonstrated the impact of TV programs and films on what people remember, how they compose their narratives of periods and events, and “why some [memories] slip from public consciousness.”⁴³ The impacts of deindustrialization have been widely conveyed through TV and film in Britain. The initial effects of industrial closure and the resulting hardships of unemployment formed the basis of the BBC series Boys from the Blackstuff, broadcast in 1982. The program focused on a group of workers from Liverpool who were left unemployed as recession and deindustrialization ravaged the North of England. The series follows the characters as crippling poverty and the lack of state support impacted their lives. The catch-phrase of Yosser Hughes (Bernard Hill): “Gizza job. Go on, gizza job. I can do that” encapsulated the desperation of the period, and it “passed almost overnight into the language under the first Thatcher government.”⁴⁴ A similar program shaped by the immediate effects of male manufacturing unemployment—and the attempts to escape it—is Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, first broadcast on ITV in 1983. The series focused on construction workers who traveled to West Germany to work on a building site. The show reflected reality; around thirty thousand British builders were working cash-in-hand in Germany during the early 1980s.⁴⁵ The program was a huge success, becoming one of Britain's most popular shows with audiences of almost twenty million.

Boys from the Blackstuff and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet were, and remain, important markers in the cultural portrayal of deindustrialization, unemployment, and poverty in 1980s Britain. As the longer-term legacies of industrial contraction shaped lives in former industrial communities in different ways, cultural representations also changed to capture these experiences. Throughout the 1990s, British film increasingly focused on the impacts of job loss and redundancy on those left behind, shifting from the immediate impacts of the scarcity of work. Two films demonstrate this most clearly. Firstly, Brassed Off (1996) illustrates the problems faced by a mining area ten years after the Miners’ Strike. The plot revolves around miner's daughter Gloria (Tara Fitzgerald) coming back to her hometown to assess the future viability of the local pit. The storyline focuses on the efforts by conductor Danny Ormondroyd (Peter Postlethwaite) to maintain the commitment of the local colliery brass band in the face of impending closure. A number of themes are explored in the film, including poverty, debt, depression, and suicide, as members of the band come to terms with the end of industrial work. Despite these issues, the band wins the National Brass Band Championships in London. Conductor Danny refuses to accept the trophy, and instead uses the national platform to make the audience listen to their suffering, launching a scathing attack on the effects of closure and hopelessness within Britain's mining communities.⁴⁶

The Full Monty, released in 1997, similarly dealt with the impacts of long-term unemployment. Set in the historically steel-dominated city of Sheffield, the film focuses on six unemployed men who form an amateur male stripping group to make money. The Full Monty explores several issues affecting former industrial workers and their communities, including unemployment, urban degradation, depression, and toxic masculinity. The problems of male unemployment, and the notion of the redundant man being “scrap,” are discussed in a scene at the Job Centre when Gaz (Robert Carlyle) has an argument with their former foreman, telling him: “It says ‘Job Club’ up there. When was the last time you saw one of them fuckin’ walk in? You forget, Gerald, you're not our foreman anymore. You're just like the rest of us: scrap.”⁴⁷ The Full Monty was an “unexpected British triumph,” both domestically and internationally. It was the tenth highest grossing film of 1997, won an Academy Award (Best Original Musical or Comedy Score), and a 2017 survey by cinema chain Vue put it second in a poll of greatest British films.⁴⁸

In all of these popular cultural representations of deindustrialization, and the resulting hardships faced by those displaced by closure, the workers are men. The decline of industries like construction, steelwork, and mining form the context of the characters’ issues. The closure of women's manufacturing workplaces does not form a significant part of the narrative. The shutdown of textile plants, clothing and garment factories, and other female-dominated spaces do not appear in popular representations, despite these facing similar contraction during the period. While some attempts were made to incorporate these into cinema, the big budget, much promoted films and TV programs focused overwhelmingly on the male worker. The developing popular cultural story of deindustrialization was men's experiences of unemployment and the “scrapheap,” and the challenges posed to their concepts of “being a man.” It is this version of deindustrialization that has been consistently portrayed to the British public on television and film.

Similarly, in those cultural outputs that reflect working-class activism and resistance to closure, men's experiences dominate. In particular, the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike has formed the context and the background to a number of highly popular and successful TV series and films. In the 2000 film Billy Elliot, the story revolves around the main character growing up in County Durham during the strike. The battles between police and striking miners, the anger directed toward scabs, and the impacts of the strike on the communities, forms the context of Billy's growing interest in a ballet. Billy Elliot was a massive commercial and critical success, earning around £100 million at the box-office and was nominated for an Academy Award. Where women's activism is deployed in popular film, it is framed through the lens of women's rights rather than issues of work and class struggle. The clearest example of this is the 2010 film Made In Dagenham, based on the 1968 strike over skill classification at Ford's Dagenham plant. Rather than focusing on the central issue of the dispute—the demarcation of skill—the film framed the struggle as one of equal rights for women. The consciousness of the women as workers struggling against their employer was stripped from the narrative. Sheila Cohen argues that this retelling of the Dagenham action “conceals its importance as a protest against injustice and exploitation.”⁴⁹ The discussion of TV and film here illustrates how popular cultural representations of deindustrialization, the impacts of closure, and class resistance are told and retold through the lens of the displaced male industrial worker.

Another area where industry and the legacies of closure manifest in popular consciousness is through statues, memorials, and public sites of symbolic significance. Industrial history has played an important part in civic Scotland's efforts to memorialize and celebrate the recent past, and portray an idea of the future. In particular, efforts to improve the “place image” of former industrial communities have often involved artwork and sculptures to celebrate industrial histories. Deindustrialization scholars have debated the meanings, uses, and misuses of industrial heritage extensively.⁵⁰ My aim here is to consider what industries are promoted as “memorial-worthy,” who is absent, and examine what this can tell us about the public perception of deindustrialization's meanings in contemporary Scotland. A recent example of the commemoration to industry is the 33 ft. steel structure “Shipbuilders of Port Glasgow,” which was completed in March 2022. Located in the shipbuilding town of Port Glasgow—next to Greenock—the sculpture by artist John McKenna depicts two shipbuilders hammering a metal plate. Local councilor Michael McCormick stated that “these sculptures look to the past… by paying tribute to our illustrious shipbuilding heritage and the workers who contributed”—a curious aim given that it is sited beside the still-operating Ferguson Marine shipyard.⁵¹ The sculpture is also located close to “Endeavour,” a statue of a ship's hull that was unveiled in 2012, and these compliment a 1975 monument that celebrates the contribution of shipbuilders to the area, located in Greenock's Clyde Square. Evidently, community leaders in Inverclyde place great emphasis on celebrating the area's industrial past.

In North Lanarkshire, there were a number of initiatives in the early 2010s to improve a place's image through celebrating the area's industrial heritage, particularly in steelmaking and coalmining. One statue is the “Harthill Miner,” a steel representation of a miner with the text: “Harthill we remember the past. All things change and we change with them.” In Shotts, the “Shotts Giant” was unveiled in 2013, portraying a steel mixer at work, along with a plaque commemorating the area's coalmining history. North Lanarkshire Council hoped that public art would be “a focus for the town, a memorable landmark and recognition of the town's proud industrial heritage.”⁵² These commissioned statues are part of a series of sculptures across North Lanarkshire that commemorate industry, with others erected to memorialize those killed in mining disasters, such as the memorial to the Auchengeich disaster in Moodiesburn. As with the statues in Inverclyde, the representation of industrial pasts is male, the celebration of men's industrial work, and male workers. Regardless of critiques over the ways in which industrial rupture and working-class experiences have been erased through memorialization, it is evident is that all of these efforts portray industrial labor as the exclusive preserve of men.

The representations of the industrial past, and the legacies of industrial contraction, are overwhelmingly presented as masculine, with male workers and the outputs of their labor central. These constitute crucial avenues where memories of the period are maintained and reinforced, contributing to the formulation of a popular understanding of the legacies of deindustrialization. Female-dominated industries, and women activists, are absent from these portrayals, and in other arenas where memories and legacies are discussed, celebrated, and remembered. Lopez argues persuasively that: “There are different layers of memory, one dominant and prevalent in the public domain and another submerged beneath the power and influence of those who have dictated the narrative.”⁵³ The experiences of those who occupied the factories in 1981 and 1982, and of women workers more generally, have not penetrated the public domain in the same way that men's have. The crucial question arising from this argument is what impact this has had on the memory of the women workers at Lee Jeans, Lovable, and Plessey.

In search of a collective memory

The absence of the occupations of 1981–1982, and women's experiences of deindustrialization more generally, in popular narratives has had distinct and important impacts on how the respondents reflected on their actions. The main area for analysis here is the impact on memory and forgetting, but it's important to highlight that there was also a significant degree of self-marginalization among many of those who participated—or declined to participate—in the oral history interviews. For many, they stressed that they were not “important enough” to contribute to a study of closure and worker activism, as they “only” barricaded themselves in their employer's premises. These discussions emerged in pre-interview conversations and within the interview interactions with at least ten of the women that I spoke to, and I argue that this downplaying of significance is another outcome of a male-dominated popular narrative of closure and class action.⁵⁴ For those who did participate in the interviews, a closer analysis of the recorded discussion—and the key silences therein—reveals that the broader context of the period, and the wider significance of the workers’ actions, have been forgotten in their individual memory.

The three occupations were distinct episodes of dispute, the specific response to the particular closures as they developed; they were not part of a coordinated labor movement campaign against deindustrialization in Scotland. However, it would be naïve to assume that there was no communication between the workers, or that they were unaware of each other's action. Contemporary reports demonstrate that they were discussed collectively. The New Statesman wrote in February 1982 that the occupation in Greenock set “a precedent” for the actions at Lovable and Plessey.⁵⁵ Miller discussed the occupations as being demonstrative of a “specific Scottish phenomenon.”⁵⁶ Given that the disputes occurred in a relatively small geographical area, so soon together, and were widely reported on, we can presume that there would have been a significant degree of awareness with what was happening at each site. For Lee and Lovable, they were in the same sector, and the same union—and regional office—was involved at both sites. Given that the Lee dispute became such a cause celebre throughout 1981, the workers at Lovable would have been aware of its success when they began their action in early 1982, and this would have fed into the conversations around their own decision-making processes.

At Plessey, there was a much more evident link between their action and that of the Lee workers the year before. Ina Scott frequently discussed the support of Helen and the workers in Greenock in supporting the Plessey action, with The Scotsman writing that:

Mrs Scott acknowledges her debt to Helen Monaghan's advice in organising the sit-in—which involved everything from printing pamphlets and touring other factories, to “getting squads cleaning the loos.”⁵⁷

The West Lothian Courier also reported that Ina had contacted Helen when beginning their occupation to seek advice on how to lead the dispute.⁵⁸ The Greenock workers—now employed by Inverwear—were following the occupation at Bathgate closely. After the Plessey court judgement, Helen told the Morning Star that “when we heard about the women at Plessey's winning in court, we did a dance in the canteen.”⁵⁹ Helen was also part of a demonstration in Bathgate to support the Plessey occupation, and walked alongside Ina at the front of the crowd:

Despite these links, and the occupations being discussed collectively through the language of precedence, there is no recollection or memory of the contemporaneous disputes among the oral history respondents. In every interview, I asked respondents if they knew of any similar actions that took place at the time of their own.⁶⁰ The interviewees from Lee Jeans do not discuss the subsequent disputes at Lovable and Plessey. The workers at Lovable and Plessey do not reference the precedence of Lee Jeans, nor their simultaneous actions. The silence within the interviews regarding the broader context of the occupations, and the concomitant actions by fellow women workers is remarkable. The individual occupations are remembered and narrated as single-plant responses to factory closure. When asked if she knew of any other similar disputes, Lee's worker Bridie said “Naw. Never heard anythin’ at aw” about any other occupations.⁶¹ In outlining her own memories of the occupations launched in Scotland in the period, Helen places her action in the context of the famous Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in, in Glasgow, 1971⁶²:

Andy: So when you started the sit-in at Lee's, had ye heard ae anythin’ like that bein’ done before?

Helen: Naw. Only thing ah knew wis, and ah didn't, ah wis a bit younger then, don't suppose ah paid attention… wis the Upper Clyde, mind their, theirs wis a work-in. Aye, theirs. Ah mean, that wis aw.⁶³

In the interviews with the Lee Jeans workers, there is no discussion of how their actions influenced those at Lovable and Plessey. I directly asked about the significance of their action, if they were aware of similar disputes, and their reflections on the legacy of the sit-in, anticipating some discussion on how they inspired other Scottish women workers to resist the injustice of capital mobility. However, none of the respondents—including the occupation's leader—placed the dispute within the wider context of the actions launched soon after. The silence of Plessey in Helen's narrative is particularly intriguing. Her relationship with Ina Scott was widely reported at the time, she spoke to the press about the Plessey action, and she led a demonstration in Bathgate. Even for Helen, the shop steward at Lee's and figurehead of the occupation, her memory of the period is of a single dispute in one Scottish town.

The Lovable workers were first informed that the future of their factory was uncertain on October 8, 1981, forty-five days after the Lee Jeans occupation had successfully concluded and had been widely reported on by national media.⁶⁴ The Lee and Lovable plants were in the same industry, and the workforces were predominantly women, employed by a multinational clothing manufacturer. Both were organized by the NUTGW Scotland Region when they were informed that the future of their plants was in doubt, and ultimately opted to resist closure through occupation. As illustrated above, former Lee Jeans workers did not reflect on their action in the context of that ultimately launched in Cumbernauld four months later. During the interviews with Lovable workers, I again asked if they could remember other occupations in the period:

Betty Wallace: Naw. Naw, we just thought we were the first, ye know, apart fae Jimmy Reid (UCS leader), ye know… he wis the first ane ah think that had did the sit-ins.⁶⁵

Agnes Quinn: Nup. Nut, the only thing that ah ever knew, eh, growin’ up, wis like the miners’ strike, that's really all I can remember.⁶⁶

Irene Steel: Ah think some other sewin’ place done ane, didn't they? Ah don't know if that wis efter us or before us. Think it wis doon in England some place… Ah think there wis a kinda sit-in, the same kinda idea.⁶⁷

The silence of the Lee Jeans occupation in the memory of the Lovable workers illuminates the pervasiveness of the social in the development of individual memory. And it's not only Lee Jeans that is absent in the narrative of the Lovable workers. While those are the most similar in terms of the industrial context, the Lovable occupation occurred at around the same time as that at Plessey. Only nine days after the Lovable workers felt unable to continue their in-plant occupation and moved to an external picket, the national press carried front page stories about the Plessey occupiers winning their court case that confirmed the legality of occupation. But within the narratives of Lovable workers, there are no links made between their action and the concurrent disputes in Scotland.

We see a similar situation with the Plessey workers who I interviewed. Their memory of action is shaped by the contemporaneous occupation at the Leyland plant. The close proximity of the two disputes, the factories’ importance to the town's economy, and the interaction between the workgroups means that, when asked about similar events, the Plessey workers focused on Leyland. When asked if she had heard of other occupations by workers at the time, Esther reflected: “Never. Naw. Naw even wi’ British Leyland! [prior to 1982].”⁶⁸ For Cathy, Clare, Elizabeth, and Mamie, their point of reference in recalling disputes in the period is the occupation at British Leyland. There is no mention of the actions by the women Lee Jeans and Lovable in their reflections of Scottish occupations, working-class activism in the period, women's resistance to closure, nor the relationship between their shop steward and Helen in Greenock. For all of the workers interviewed, their actions are remembered as the individual response of a workgroup in one Scottish town to the unfairness of closure and job loss.

As outlined in the sections above, the construction of a male-dominated popular memory has had significant impacts on women with similar experiences. As discussed in the first section, I learned of the Plessey and Lovable disputes by chance, after conducting a small research project on Lee Jeans. Once I was aware of the interconnectedness of the disputes, and launched a comparative study, I expected the respondents to discuss the broader significance of their actions, in the context of those immediately before, after, or occurring simultaneously. I made the conscious decision not to ask directly about the other occupations, and not to name them, so as not to lead the respondents in a particular direction. I asked two broad questions: how they reflected on the significance of their action, and if they were aware of anything similar occurring at that time. There was unanimity in response; none of the women could remember the concomitant actions, nor place their own dispute in a wider context of Scottish women opposing capital mobility.

These responses are fascinating in understanding the relationship between popular and individual memory, and the ways that memories of deindustrialization and class resistance have been gendered. In 1982, these occupations were clearly connected. They were discussed in the press through the prism of precedent; two of the workforces were organized by the same region of the same trade union; and there were links between Lee Jeans and Plessey, with the shop steward at the former leading a demonstration at the latter. By 2014–2016, when I conducted these interviews, these connections no longer exist in the memory of those involved. The most plausible explanation for this is the absence of any sites of memory, or any popular narrative that incorporates these disputes within representations of the period, which would reinforce their significance. As Hamilton argues, understanding how events are “subsequently remembered” tells us how experiences have been mediated, reinforced, and forgotten through the passage of time.⁶⁹ The workers recalled their own disputes clearly, and provided rich narrative data on the nuances of their occupations, as those “events and experiences deemed significant at the time they were experienced are the most likely to be recalled accurately.”⁷⁰ However, the workers are unable to place their narratives “within the larger historical context,” as this context has not been portrayed or reinforced in representations of the period. As a result, this no longer exists in individual remembering.⁷¹

The gendering of deindustrialization and class resistance is further demonstrated through the disputes and figures that were remembered and discussed by respondents. When asked about their memory of similar actions, or reflections on the period, it is those that are represented in popular memory that dominate, such as the miners’ strike, or the work-in at UCS led by Jimmy Reid. For the workers at Lee, Lovable, and Plessey, these are the references in memory through which they now frame their own action, because these are the events that have been reinforced through popular representations. Jimmy Reid, for instance, became a national celebrity after the work-in. Following his death, the Scottish government pledged that materials on Reid and the work-in would be “promoted to teachers of History and Modern Studies as being of great importance in understanding modern Scotland.”⁷² In 2012, a metal sculpture of Reid was unveiled in Glasgow as part of a series of public artworks funded by the National Lottery. The fiftieth anniversary of the work-in was commemorated extensively in 2021, with an event for young unionists organized to discuss “what the work-in means to… a younger generation of union activists.”⁷³ Conversely, the women of Lee Jeans, Lovable, and Plessey returned to work as normal following their disputes. The shop stewards—Helen Monaghan, Ina Scott, and Sadie Lang—did not remain national figures within the labor movement after the occupations, and have not been nationally recognized as important figures in Scotland's fight against capital mobility. The disputes are remembered locally, and their memory is transmitted through reminiscence and story-telling; however, they have been—and continue to be—omitted from national narratives.

Conclusion

The factory occupations launched by the workers in Scotland across 1981–1982 are atypical and extraordinary in the history of deindustrialization in Britain. Contrary to the vast majority of industrial workers facing attrition and shutdown, the workers at Lee, Lovable, and Plessey actively opposed closure through a campaign of militant industrial action. Not only did they launch resistance, but their actions were successful in opposing the full closure of the sites as initially planned by their employers. In a period of rapidly accelerating deindustrialization, these workplaces remained operating, with many of the pre-occupation workers returning to their machines. And crucially in understanding the intersectionality of experience, the workers and their leaders were overwhelmingly women, with minimal prior experience of formal trade unionism and industrial action. Evidently, these factories are not representative of the deindustrialization experience for workers in Scotland, Britain, and internationally, and it is this exceptionality that makes them ideal for assessing the relationships between gender and memories of the period.

Individual memories are shaped by a range of factors, throughout the period between the event being recalled and the interview recording. Oral historians have demonstrated the pervasiveness of the public and the social in influencing what remains alive in remembering, what is consciously forgotten, and what unconsciously slips from memory. This is not a limitation in using individual memory as a source, but a strength. Through in-depth analyses of what is remembered, forgotten, and the cultural circuits that influence these, we can gain a better understanding of our respondents’ reflections with an attention to their lives. Periods such as the 1980s in Britain have been subject to extensive commemoration, celebration, and mythology. The dominant narrative is a period of the closure of Britain's staple industries, and the irreversible defeat of the organized, male, white, industrial working-class. The telling and re-telling of the period emphasizes this narrative. One of the biggest films that focused on the impacts of deindustrialization—The Full Monty—was rebooted as a television series in 2023, following the same core characters as they become older in the age of austerity. Billy Elliot was reimagined for the stage with a musical score by Elton John, and continues to tour globally. And statues continue to be erected to commemorate industrial workers, such “Shipbuilders of Port Glasgow,” discussed earlier. As the period of accelerated industrial decline becomes increasingly distant, such cultural representations and memorializations are increasingly important in determining which experiences will be remembered.

In this paper, I have argued that the factory occupations led by Scottish women in 1981–1982 constitute one of the most significant periods in the modern history of Britain's working-class. They were widely known about when they occurred, as the stories of Scottish women fighting against large corporations to defend their jobs, livelihoods, and communities, captured the nation. They were connected; not as a coordinated response, but through precedence, awareness, knowledge, trade union organization, and—in the case of Plessey and Lee—direct communication between the workers’ leaders. Despite these contemporary links, and the national significance of the disputes as being more than individual plant actions, the broader contextual importance as a period of class resistance, worker victory, and the militant activism of women, has been reduced over time. There are no popular films, TV shows, statues, or memorials to celebrate or commemorate their action, as these do not conform to the accepted public memory of the period. The workers remember their own disputes, as these have been kept alive through local reminiscence and story-telling; however, the broader importance of the period, and of women's struggle against closure, is precarious. With few sites of memory that commemorate and recognize women workers and activists, they are becoming further marginalized over time, as their experiences are further removed from contemporary remembering, commemoration, and celebration.