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The story of the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards alternative corporate plan

This film, The Story of the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Alternative Corporate Plan was made in 1978 for the Open University. It documents an unusual episode in British corporate history. Shop stewards from Lucas Aerospace, facing massive redundancies, developed their own plan to safeguard their jobs by moving the business into alternative technologies that would meet social needs, as well as new methods of production.

In doing so the workers at Lucas Aerospace posed a threat, not just to the ever controlling centres of capitalist power, but to the Labour government of the day. For they had promised the workers of Britain ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power‘, and, when they negated on that promise, the workers at Lucas Aerospace took up the cause themselves in what was to become a defiant battle against the very market forces that were to shape the future of working people across the world in the coming decade.

Their story is one of noble struggle, and of an inspiring cause, one which provides potential solutions for workers facing a loss of livelihood today and for the reconstruction of the economy in the interests of those who work in industry and the wider community.

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