Lee Jeans, Lovable Bra, Plesseys — these manufacturers suddenly found themselves notorious inside the Scottish labour movement during 1981 and early 1982. Not for the goods they produce, but because of the successful fightback led by the women workers against closures and redundancies. Ann Henderson spoke to the women who became the spokespeople for their disputes — Ellen Monaghan at Lee Jeans, Ina Scott at Plesseys and Sadie Lang at Lovable Bra.
This article aims to record the experiences of these women's struggles and to draw out some common features of the sit-ins whose impact has been far reaching. Any conclusions drawn are my own, and not necessarily those of all the women involved or those quoted here.
The backdrop to all these struggles is one of rising unemployment and factory closures. In Bathgate where Plesseys is situated unemployment is fast approaching 30 per cent. The overall figure for Scotland in 1981 shows that under three years of Tory misrule unemployment has risen from 8 to 13.6 per cent. There are regional variations of course, with Strathclyde reaching 16.9 per cent.
With the general decline in the heavy industries, particularly in the West of Scotland, 'men's jobs' are disappearing more rapidly, but jobs in those industries which traditionally employ women, now some 42 per cent of the Scottish workforce, are disappearing too — tobacco, food, clothing and textiles are all being run down. Multinationals invest in Scotland for a few years to reap the benefits of government development grants, and then take their business elsewhere. The industrial estates in the towns around Glasgow show the signs — factories and warehouses to let, factories not running to full capacity and so on.
So given the prospects faced by these workforces at Lee Jeans in Gourock near Greenock, at Lovable Bra in Cumbernauld, and at Plesseys in Bathgate, it is not surprising that they decided to put up a stand. Ellen Monaghan from Lee Jeans explains: 'Women's work, there was just nothing in Greenock. It was just one place closing after another. We knew that some of us might not have worked again for the next ten years. So it was a case of you had to fight for the right to work.'
Women's jobs are not something secondary, there was no question for any of the Lee Jeans women that they were working for pin money: 'Even when your husband is working, with the price of everything these days you are needing the two wages. Quite a lot of them in here, their fathers don't have jobs, and they are the breadwiners. There's widows too. You find a lot of hardship in here,' said Ellen Monaghan.
With such high stakes the predominantly women workforce at Lee Jeans went into occupation when the VF Corporation announced the factory was closing. Eleven years before, when Ellen Monaghan began to organise the union, management sacked her, only to reinstate her after the workers walked out forcing recognition of the National Union of Tailor and Garment Workers. This time too the bosses had underestimated the determination of the workforce, with an average age of around 20, to fight for their right to work. Again Ellen Monaghan led the workers' struggle, and seven months later under the new management of Inverwear, all 140 women who had stayed with the sit-in were back in full time employment at union-agreed rates of pay.
That commitment to fight for their right to work spurred on the women at Lovable Bra and at Plesseys. 'To me the days are gone by when women are out for the cream on the cake,' Sadie Lang insisted. When the receivership was announced at Lovable Bra the factory had full order books and the workers had been working overtime at weekends to keep up. So when the receivers came in the workers began a night time sit-in and picketing to make sure that £1.5m worth of stock as well as the equipment was not moved from the factory. Sadie Lang explained: 'The main thing to me was to get the factory opened.' Several weeks later the factory was reopened and 100 workers are now in full time employment.
At Plesseys the closure was announced at the same time as the Plesseys Group recorded another rise in profits, and as redundancies were going through at the nearby British Leyland Bathgate plant where many husbands of the Plesseys women worked. Some of the skilled male workers at Plesseys accepted their dismissal while most of the women fought back. After a 55 day sit-in a new multinational firm, Arcotronics, took over and 80 out of 220 jobs were saved. The women, some of whom wore 'Plesseys Suffragettes' badges during the dispute, were adamant that their fight was to save jobs not simply for themselves but for the community as a whole. Many of the women had been there over thirty years. Ina Scott explains: 'It was to keep the factory open, for jobs for people, so that there were jobs for the youngsters, everyone understood that in Bathgate. We had everyone's support, the shops and that. The butchers gave us stuff and Maise from the fruit shop sent stuff up here.' At Lee Jeans too there was considerable local support from the community, like the free bus rides for occupiers given by the local bus operator.
The workers' deep awareness of what was at stake in times of such high unemployment led to a definite attitude to redundancy payments, namely that despite often appearing as a short term solution, they really were not the answer. 'Redundancy money over the last few years ... people take it and don't realise what they've done. But I realised before it was done ... once a job is gone, it's forever. Once a working class man or woman realises that, I think they would all have the same attitude, but they don't stop to realise. Because it seems like an awful lot of money, but it isn't really if you look in front. It's like a carrot. You've always got the possibility at the back of your mind that no matter what you do you might not win, and you know when we took it on, we gave up the right to the redundancy money,' Ellen Monaghan reported.
For some women employees, the levels of redundancy payment may not be significant anyway, given the nature of the industries with low wages and high workforce turnover. But at Plesseys, as an engineering factory, some of its older workforce had been there for thirty years and was therefore entitled to larger sums. One of the demands of the workforce there, which the sit-in succeeded in achieving, was a commitment that management honoured the redundancy payments for those who did not get their jobs back. In all three cases the occupation tactic was the key to success and to the impact on the labour movement. Even the media took it up. After the Lee Jeans victory the Daily Record editorial praised the women's efforts and asked: 'Who now can say that sit-ins are a futile gesture?' Ellen Monaghan described the occupation as follows: 'It was the key. Because if you think about it these multinationals, if we had went out on strike they would just have emptied the factory and that would have been that. Even so we knew what was here was a drop in the ocean for them, but it was everything else. The publicity was killing them. They wanted us off their backs. Without the occupation it would never have been possible.'
And at Plesseys, Ina Scott said: 'Well I expected to cause them enough trouble and embarass them. I think sit-ins are the only way. At least you're in and they're out. It's because you've got something they want. They could leave you outside the gates and just let the weather take it course.' The workers found an additional benefit from sitting in during the cold Scottish winter months: 'We were in a good position because capacitators need to be heated, and so did we. We knew they couldn't switch off the heating in here, because if they did, it would spoil their products,' Ina explained.
Extensive organisation went into the sit-ins, which for the vast majority of the workers was their first experience of industrial action. Finance committees were established, to deal with donations and hardship cases, and the Action Committees ensured speakers were sent out to raise support. Regular shifts were organised to ensure the sit-ins were effective, also enabling the maximum participation of the workforce. Ellen Managhan summed it up in July 1981: 'The girls at the factory have imposed a discipline on themselves that's amazing.'
The Plesseys occupation had an important consequence too in the ruling from the Court of Session that the Plesseys workforce was within its rights to occupy the Bathgate factory in furtherance of an industrial dispute. Previously employers have always felt secure in the idea that the rule of law was on their side against the sit-in. In Scotland at least the women's action has changed all that.
While none of the women leaders was keen to draw particular differences between organising men or women in this sort of action it was obvious that more attention had been paid to child care arrangements than in other industrial disputes. At Lee Jeans for example, specific child care arrangements were made for a woman who had been on maternity leave at the start of the occupation to enable her to play a role in the dispute.
All three women, having achieved the difficult job of a large degree of unionisation in their workplaces of predominantly lower paid women workers, showed a strong commitment to the trade union movement in general, despite any problems they had encountered from the union leaderships in their own disputes. As Ellen Monaghan put it: 'Without the trade union movement we just couldn't have done it. We had the guts to sit here, but they made it possible.' In all the Lee Jeans workers recieved financial help from the labour movement to the tune of £100,000. Ellen Monaghan continues: 'We sat in here on the Thursday night and on the Friday morning the shop stewards from the local yards came in and handed in money and told us that we would want for nothing. That was from the first day, and they never stopped. For seven months the shipyard men, Upper Clyde and Lower Clyde, they sent us in more than £3000 a week. They helped to form our action committee, they helped us with ideas, they got us to the Scottish TUC, and from there we got onto the miners. You've got no idea ...'
The shipyard workers went so far as to insist that their order for two pairs of work jeans a year be transferred to the new Inverwear company. 'I'm pleased we've got that order, and the men's pleased too,' Ellen added. The UCS workers went on to organise a weekly levy for the Plesseys workers, and today they have a weekly commitment to the health workers.
It is clear that despite some severe defeats the traditional militancy in the West of Scotland founded on strong workplace organisation in the key industries continues to play a vital role. Indeed it was the network of industrial solidarity which forced the hand of the reluctant official trade union leaders. None of the women were enthusiastic about the performance of their union officials. But they are not keen to make a fuss about it. As Sadie Lang says: 'I never like to say too much against the unions. Any union is better than no union at all.' It should be pointed out however that the Tailor and Garment Workers Union withdrew official support from Lee Jeans before the occupation was over, and it never officially recognised the sit-in/picketing at Lovable Bra. The workers there are now tranferring their union membership to the Transport and General Workers Union.
The trade union bureaucrats see their role as negotiating on behalf of the working class, not educating and encouraging them to think and act for themselves. That much was obvious from talking to Ellen, Ina and Sadie about the Tebbit Bill. Says Sadie: 'You don't even hear anyone talk about it in the workforce. I don't understand why the unions don't put it forward more. It's only the management who I've heard talk about it.' This is echoed by Ellen: 'We were meant to be getting a course on the Tebbit Bill, to give you all the information about it, but it's not come up yet. Nobody's — well, we haven't anyway — been clued up about it.' And both women were talking after the TUC's much heralded 'Union Day' against Tebbit on 10 June!
The same was true of the Labour Party Women's Festival last month which the women had not heard about. That is not to say that the Labour Party and the LPYS were not important in generating solidarity during the disputes. At Plesseys the Labour Party organised three demonstrations of solidarity in Bathgate and printed all the publicity and stickers. As Ina Scott recalled: 'My MP, Tam Dalyell, was great, he was down here a lot. And we got telegrams from all over — Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Ron Brown, Gavin Strang.'
Small groups of workers determined to fight can often influence to a much wider degree the way the labour movement looks at itself and acts. Lee Jeans is a classic example in the way it inspired and helped to advance other struggles for jobs. As Ellen Monaghan put it, it's very much a question of 'getting it through to working class people that you'll not be alone if you take something on.'
Lee Jeans correctly showed that in the response it evoked. Without Lee Jeans, neither Lovable Bra nor Plesseys would have been so effective. As Ina Scott says: 'They really set us on the road ... we got all the pitfalls, what not to do.
'For a start they told us we had to get publicity out right away. They told us loads of wee things ... we didn't realise a lot of things that were going to happen to us, but they put us wise: who to avoid, where to ask for help, the struggle it would be. I would reckon they must have saved us about five weeks.' Ellen Monaghan has the same impression: 'Before Plessey took on their sit-in they came and met me one night. I think the help we gave them beforehand did help them a lot.' The same process of consultation and advice took place between Ellen Monaghan and Sadie Lang before Lovable Bra went into action.
The repercussions are still being felt because Lee Jeans not only fought, but they won and now they're still there, part of the trade union movement and involved in its continuing struggles. Says Ellen Monaghan: 'I've been asked to that many things since I came back to work, I've had to turn a lot of things down. I'm working 40 hours in here and overtime, and then there's home too.' The Plesseys workers too are spreading workers' solidarity. Ina Scott explained: 'We just want to help people who helped us. There's an occupation on in Ayr just now and I'll be approaching our finance committee with a view to sending them some money. Since the occupation, with some of the money we've got left, we've financed the Unemployment Centre, the new one opening in Bathgate. Since then we've sent money to finance eight students at the college, lots of things ...'
The continuing impact of these disputes is perhaps best summed up by Ellen Monaghan when she says: 'When you [illegible] them to shame. One of the yards had a meeting, there was talk of redundancies ... I remember it was put to the men that if the women could do it, then the men could [do] it. I heard the men say that if the lassies up there can [do] it, [we] can do it.'
'It made me realise that it can be done, and I really do think that if the women hadn't done it, well the men wouldn't have done it. Sometimes you get a wee bit shy about saying that, but I think it's true. Now they know it can be done, and [illegible] a lot of these women [the] courage. Because it is possible to fight for and save jobs.' They challenged the pattern of redundancies and factory closures which still continues in Scotland today. The issue was jobs, but Plesseys, Lee Jeans and Lovable Bra brought the question of women's jobs, of a woman's right to work, to the forefront of labour movement struggles. Yet this was not in a divisive way, it was always clear that a victory for these groups of workers, predominantly women, was a victory for the trade union movement as a whole. However, the very fact that it was women leading these struggles, despite all the traditional barriers, challenged many of the assumptions made [about women's place in the] labour movement. [illegible] Lee Jeans led the way in firmly rejecting any idea that women's jobs were secondary or that women were not active trade unionists, and the message from all the disputes was to say decisively that it is a woman's right to work.
ANN HENDERSON is a regular contributor to Socialist Challenge and a former member of the Executive of the National Union of Students.