Living with Capitalism: Class Relations and the Modern Factory

This book is about ChemCo - a giant multinational chemical producer. It is about the workers, the foremen and the managers employed to work on one of the company' many sites in the United Kingdom. On this site - Riverside - some 300 of these men work with millions of pounds worth of capital equipment; day in day out, around the clock, right throughout the year. Chemicals is big business: in the pages of Living with Capitalism these men talk about their jobs and their lives, about the conflicts they experience in producing chemicals for ChemCo. In this it questions many established notions about modern technology and affluent workers. Set in the early 1970s, it examines the strategies of an extremely sophisticated group of managers, outlining the way in which they deal with the workers, the union and each other. Focusing on the new working arrangements established in the company in an attempt to increase profitability by involving people in their work, the author highlight the managerial strategy and point to the nature and depth of the worker apathy which gave rise to it. All this - modernness, sophistication, boredom - is examined as an enduring contradiction of advanced capitalism in its highly bureaucratised, impersonal and rationalized form. Theoretically and in human terms the book is deeply concerned with the underlying malaise of modern class society and as a document it offers an important pointer to future developments- bot in industry and society generally.