ABSTRACT
In the United Kingdom until recently workers in the shipbuilding industry exhibited very little interest in industrial democracy and the workers’ control movement. The literature of industrial democracy deals hardly at all with shipbuilding, and the speeches at and delegates to the large conferences of the Institute of Workers Control did not come from shipbuilding workers. Quietude on this issue—which was attracting increasing attention from workers and unions in many other industries in the 1960s—had not always been a feature of shipbuilding. In one of the very few writings specifically on industrial democracy in shipbuilding (though coupled with engineering) G. D. H. Cole had singled the industry out, along with engineering, the mines, the railways 1 and the Post Office, as one in which the demand for control was most vigorous. The vigour was a by-product of the growth of the shop-steward movement in shipbuilding during the First World War, and the interest in control fairly quickly found its way back into the more limited objectives of the unions.
