Energy Workers in Transition: The Skilled Manual Workers’ Structure of Feeling in Britain’s Electricity, Nuclear, and Oil and Gas Sectors

Worker reflections are central to understanding how energy transitions develop and what they feel like. This article uses lifestory testimonies from British energy workers to assess how they have narrated their working lives, which have been structured around transitions in fuel sources and technological change since the 1950s. They are drawn from power stations and the nuclear sector as well as North Sea oil and gas. Contrary to dominant contemporary political presentations, transitions are not a new challenge for energy workers, who have address prior experiences of fundamental change to energy system. Worker narratives nevertheless emphasise continuity in their industrial skills and societal demands for energy generation, challenging “just transition” perspectives centred on forms of disruptive change. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ cultural theory, the paper develops the concept of an energy worker structure of feeling. Williams explained that residual structures of feelings are ones that are still present in a given societal context but have foundations in an earlier, past, period. Energy workers are influenced by the major postwar expansion of electricity, the era of the British nuclear project and the birth of oil and gas as well as by powerful continuities that link coal mining pasts to these newer sectors. The analysis is broken into two sections, with the first exploring place-attachment centred on the dichotomy affective pairings of security and regimentation on the one hand and familiarity and novelty on the other. A second section is centred on workplace order and conflict through the affects of danger and safety and tension and pride. It finds strong continuities in perceived experiences of risk and hierarchies. Overall, this article demonstrates the centrality of labour to capital-intensive energy transitions and challenges empirical accounts of transition by underlining the inherently interpretive faculties of understanding human experience.