The Anglo-American Council on Productivity

Abstract

Both the export of technical assistance and the proselytization of the values of economic growth and productivity became central aspects of the Marshall Plan. Established in 1948, the Anglo-American Council on Productivity (AACP) played an important part in this, becoming a model for similar organizations across Europe. Involving cooperation between unions and management, its main aim was to promote productivity in Britain, though it also provided useful Marshall Plan publicity. The AACP is an institution that has aroused a considerable amount of interest in contemporary labour and economic historians. However, while the AACP has been assessed in terms of its impact on the developing debate about productivity in Britain,¹ and in relation to the positive propaganda it created for the Marshall Plan,² less has been said about why the AACP held so much resonance for the 1945 Labour government and trade union movement. Tomlinson points out that the Attlee government was the first to initiate a productivity drive,³ and Cairncross that ‘Few governments have proclaimed more insistently the need for higher productivity’,⁴ but neither account fully explains the reasons for this priority. It is argued here that the AACP and the productivity agenda can be seen as a type of modernization programme that was compatible with the form of socialism envisioned by the leadership of the Attlee government, and backed up by the trade union leadership. Underpinning this was the perceived need to modernize British industry, both labour and capital, in terms of providing a basis for the construction of a mass production economy and a mass consumption society.