The Attitudes and Responses of Trades Unions to Technical Change: A Case Study of Maintenance Workers in the North West of England

This paper examines the development of machine maintenance work in eight plants in Cumbria. It assesses both the arguments from the ‘flexibility’ literature concerning multi-skilling, and the ‘labour process’ debate about the deskilling of modern manual work. The eight case studies reveal complex patterns of occupational change, but overall there is little support for either the notion of multi-skilling or of deskilling. Rather, the evidence suggests a general continuity in the broad structure of occupational differentiation within this sphere of modern production.