We Built the Golden Age
The culture of British trade union militancy in auto plants like Austin Longbridge wasn’t the “natural” result of a Golden Age of capitalism — it came from organizing.
In England’s second-largest city, Richard Albert “Dick” Etheridge was a legend in the trade union movement. There, Etheridge, a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, sat for nearly thirty years as the works convenor — the chief shop steward — at Birmingham’s biggest auto plant, Austin Longbridge, from which twenty thousand workers churned out thousands upon […]