The Ghosts of Fleet Street: What Did Not Working Mean in the British Printing Industry, C.1950–80?

In the second half of the twentieth century, the British printing industry seemed to epitomise the United Kingdom’s status as the sick man of Europe, worn down by changing patterns of consumption, lagging technological modernisation and all-powerful trade unions. Especially the latter were more often than not seen as the problem, not the solution to the industry’s problems. An extravagant set of so-called restrictive practices, critics alleged, was used to hide that print workers were not putting in the work they were paid for while giving them undeserved bonuses that were choking corporate profitability. Print workers and their representatives offered a very different reading, in which the incriminated practices reflected a thoroughly earned privilege to define and distribute waged work. By looking at shop floor practices and conflicts, the article argues that print workers’ defence of non-working intervals articulated a broader vision of their own place in capitalist production.