Still Working for Ford?
Saturday 12th November, 10.30am-4.30pm
LJMU School of Humanities and Social Sciences
68 Hope Street, Liverpool, L1 9BZ
Still Working for Ford? aims to bring together different perspectives on trade unionism in the car industry and explore the relationships between yesterday and today. Its starting point is in the struggles, and documenting of these - by shop stewards, workers and academics - at the Ford car plants in the late 1960s and 1970s. It also entails academic, popular and visual reflections on current working conditions, the state of labour-capital relations, and of trades unionism in particular, in the car industry. What have we learnt from the industry in the past forty years? And what lessons can be drawn for the current challenges faces the labour movement in that industry band beyond, both locally and globally?
The event is aimed at ex-workers and current workers or the industry as well as university teachers/students, Trades Councils, young people, Women's movement and activists.
The event is free but in order to meet catering requirements please register your attendance here
Sessions include:
* Working in Ford Youth Project Exhibition: A group of young people present their photographic work at the Halewood transmission plant.
* Screenings of Take Me to Your Leader, followed by Q&A with Eddie Roberts and Making the Grade
* From Ford to Halewood: Trade Unions & the car industry, with Huw Beynon, author of Working for Ford, Sheila Cohen on Halewood's Big Brother: How Strikes and Organisation Radicalised Dagenham Again, and Paul Stewart and Ken Murphy, co-authors of We Sell Our Time No More.
* Relevance of the Past for the Present: Reactions, Panel Discussion, and Q&A, chaired by Roger Philips
Participants include Prof Huw Beynon, recently retired from Cardiff University, author of Working For Ford (Penguin, 1973); Sheila Cohen, currently working on a history of TGWU/Unite 1/1107, the Ford Central Branch at Dagenham, Ken Murphy, who worked for General Motors for over twenty years, was joint convenor of the Automotive Workers' Research Network and co-authored We Sell Our Time No More (Pluto, 2009); Martyn Nightingale, former Principal lecturer at LJMU and editor of Merseyside in Crisis, (Manchester Free Press, 1981); Roger Phillips, presenter of BBC Radio Merseyside’s Lunchtime Phone-in programme; Eddie Roberts, convener for Ford Halewood workers before becoming Merseyside T&G divisional organiser; Paul Stewart, Professor of the Sociology of Work and Employment at Strathclyde University and a co-author of We Sell Our Time No More (Pluto, 2009).
