Abstract
Several industries in the UK displayed symptoms associated with falling demand long before the general recession produced mass redundancies throughout manufacturing industry. Most of the industries which had been shedding labour over a much longer period had faced increased international competition but in some cases the demand for labour fell much more sharply than output. This pattern has become more familiar since 1980, but in earlier years it received little attention, perhaps because the industries concerned were seen as ‘traditional’ and ‘declining’. They were to be allowed to disappear while new jobs would be provided by growth in other sectors. One such ‘traditional’ industry was wool textiles. Here postwar difficulties with markets led to substantial change. The industry was reorganized through takeovers and closures and there were changes in the labour process in most sectors.
I would like to thank the editors of this volume and Professor Michael Banton for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. However, the responsibility for any errors or ommissions rests with the author. The paper represents an amended version of a chapter in the author’s Cheap Labour and Racial Discrimination, published by Gower Press, 1984.
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Fevre, R. (1985). Racism and Cheap Labour in UK Wool Textiles. In: Newby, H., Bujra, J., Littlewood, P., Rees, G., Rees, T.L. (eds) Restructuring Capital. Explorations in Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18088-2_7
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