Notoriously Militant: The Story of a Union Branch at Ford Dagenham Sheila Cohen Merlin Press, 2013, pp xii + 225, ISBN 978‐0‐85036‐645‐7

• Date: 01 May 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12138
• Author: Gregor Gall
• Published date: 01 May 2016

Book Review

Notoriously Militant: The Story of a Union Branch at Ford Dagenham

Sheila Cohen

Merlin Press, 2013, pp xii + 225, ISBN 978-0-85036-645-7

Taking its title from a tabloid journalist’s verdict of the branch in late 1980s,

Notoriously Militant provides a very detailed account of the once largest union

branch at one of Britain’s key factories, Ford Dagenham. The project to research

the history of Transport and General Workers’Union (TGWU) branch 1107 resulted

from a commission from the branch itself, thus, facilitating unique wide-ranging and

deep-seated access to interviewees and documentation. The ‘story’starts in 1946,

when after a series of stormy strikes and a mass occupation of the plant, thousands

of workers came together in this new branch of the TGWU. Through a wave of

actions such as sit-ins, strike and riots, the workers within the branch contested the

regime of management control they were expected to work under. But in order to

do so, they had to at times contest the leadership of their own union branch. The

‘story’ends in 2012 when the branch was subsumed into another within the Unite

union (formed from a merger of Amicus and the TGWU in 2007). Subsumption

indicated not just the declining constituency of the branch but also the loss of its

distinctive militant industrial and political stance and associated influence. Along

the way, the story is most often one of an insurgent branch seeking to humanise factory

production and democratise union organisation through battles with management and

union leaderships. For a considerable period of time, 1107 branch made significant

advances through the great endeavours of its officers, activists and members.

The first substantive chapter introduces the Ford Company and its style of

industrial relations. It recounts that union recognition and collective bargaining were

fiercely resisted by Ford, indicating that it was only through determination and

collective resistance that we associated Ford from the 1960s onwards as a heartland

of labour unionism. Throughout Notoriously Militant, the oppressive form of the

exploitation is prominent so that prima facie, the reader has a good sense of what

workers were reacting against in terms of their lived experience of work. Hence, many

battles are fought over the determination of the line speed and job security. Cohen

does not paint a portrait of ever increasing militancy, victories or advances. She

charts the ebbs and flows of branch 1107 and their unevenness as well as various

turning points, tipping points and compromises by recounting the branch’s internal

movements, power struggles, contending forms of participative practices, its

distinctive feature of steward representation and tensions with other branches of the

same union at Dagenham. In particular, the story of the branch compels her to focus

upon the struggle for shop steward accreditation in the face of hostility from

management and ambivalence from the union as well as the capture of the branch

by a reform movement to end its policy of moderation. This brings out very strongly

the sense in which there were far more divisions on horizontal and vertical bases

within the TGWU than there ever were amongst management. Again, she necessarily

Industrial Relations Journal 47:3, 300–301

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd