Workers occupied to save their redundancy pay and pensions when the factory, one of three component plants hived off from Ford, closed with no notice.

On Tuesday March 31st workers at Visteon factories – making car parts for Ford brands – across the UK were told that Visteon Corp could no longer prop up the UK branch, and so they would all lose their jobs with immediate effect. That night a hundred workers at a plant in west Belfast occupied their workplaces, and the next day were followed by their colleagues in Enfield (north London) and Basildon in Essex. We spoke to a number of the workers involved in the sit-in at Enfield, and have gathered some of the occupiers’ comments below.“I’ve been working here for nineteen years. I’ve always been working for Ford and we were Ford workers, but in 2000 this place was farmed out to Visteon. At the time the union signed a deal with the chairman of Ford Motor Company to guarantee all Ford workers the same terms and conditions under Visteon. We had a contract with Ford. They’ve broken it. It’s disgusting. Can’t they see that we had a contract and we need them to stick to it? It was signed by the union – I was at first in the AEU, but now it’s Unite – and what we’re demanding is that Ford sticks by their side of the agreement. We don’t want any trouble – there’s been lots of redundancies before, down from around 1100 when I started to around 220 today – and it was always voluntary redundancies. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to say yes sir, thank you sir, and lie down and let them walk all over us. We’re staying until they honour their side of the deal”.

“This has been handled very, very badly. I’ve been here a long time, a lot of us have worked here a long time: one guy’s been here 41 years. Can you imagine, working here as a young boy, working your whole life and then being told ‘you’ve got no job tomorrow, mate’? Very bad. People have families, they’ve got mortgages, kids to pay for… I can’t just sign on – but I got a letter today for my redundancy claim, but you only get five days to fill it in, and I can’t take the risk I’ll lose any money. They’re giving us nothing, a few hundred quid’s worth, it’s nothing… But it’s not just us and our jobs, this is for everyone. It’s a small seed, but you have to start doing something.”

“Some of us were in the T and G and some in Amicus before it became Unite, but it wasn’t the union running it. The convenor, Kevin Nolan, we’ve not seen him here the last couple of days. I guess you could say it was the Irish factory which gave us the idea. On Tuesday afternoon some of the girls signing on at 2 were told don’t sign in, just go to the training room. Visteon management had a meeting and were told about the company situation and that we were out of a job. Just like that – ‘you’re out’. We were allowed to come back at 10 the next day to come and pick up our things. I was so shocked, and we all were, so we didn’t do anything. So we saw on the news what they’d done up in Northern Ireland and when we went back the next day to get our stuff, we just refused to leave again. It was a spur of the moment thing. Some of the security guards were worried by the number of people and tried to stop people going in, but we said we’re not leaving ’til we get some answers and someone from Ford comes to speak to us. The union is going out to get a meeting, and they’ll tell us what’s going on with Ford and what they’re prepared to offer us and what to do. We need to get the money from Ford even if they close this place down. We had an agreement, so we want Ford to step in.”

“We have three meetings, one on the roof, one inside and one by the steps, as there’s seventy or eighty of us inside, some come and go. It’s informal though, the convenor sends texts around and we chat about what we’re doing. We’ll see what happens, [on Thursday] the bailiffs came round but their notice was all wrong. They’d got it all messed up. The address on the notice to get us out wasn’t for here, it was for a pile of rubble, so we said fine, take it! And it was on behalf of a judge, not from a judge, so it was all wrong. They’ll have to come back. The police haven’t been a problem. We keep an eye out over these steps, and some people are in charge of getting food in and looking after stuff like phone chargers. We’ll see. We’re staying here until Ford gives us an answer. We’re waiting to be told what to do.”

“Three carloads went up to Dagenham. Charlie Kimber [an SWP member] organised it. It was great, they were very well received and it’s good to get the solidarity. Down in Southampton – that’s Transit vans – the union says they won’t handle Visteon stuff.”

The Enfield occupation continues. The workers also need to be supplied with food, drink, sleeping bags, etc. The plant is near to Ponders End station, three stops from Liverpool Street – email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com if you would like to visit the occupation with us.

In times of recession and restructuring, the occupation or sit-in tactic is potentially a powerful tool when workers are faced with redundancy because it provides leverage that strikes often cannot. Yet, since late 2007 when the global downturn began, we have witnessed very few examples of occupation – certainly far fewer than might have been expected given the depth and extent of recession.
So to date the numerical roll call of occupations has been: Australia (2), Britain (7), Canada (4), Eire (7), France (28) and the US (1). It is worth bearing in mind the relative context of the size of the labour forces of each of these countries. Respectively, these are 11m, 31m, 18m, 2m, 28m, and 153m.

We can presuppose the foundations for occupation are aspects of consciousness, primarily, anger and organisation. Anger at being at the end of the line with nowhere to go and wanting to do something about this: union organisation allowing something collectively to be done about this. This contrasts with other facets of worker consciousness such as fatalism and resignation that nothing can be done, and that the workers themselves have no power of remedy (even with union organisation).

But this is insufficient to explain the action compared to the inaction. To flesh out the issues, we need to look at the main characteristics of the stimulus to the occupations. These are:

- Redundancy of a high percentage of workers (often with closure)

- Timing of closure announcement: immediate notice of immediate redundancy and closure

- No severance pay and loss of pension rights as a result of bankruptcy

- Unionised workforces

- Previous high profile examples of occupation in recent times.

Taking these in turn, the fully collectivised nature of the redundancy helps create a critical mass while the immediacy of redundancy provides for no period of consultation or dialogue with the employer and, thus, a greater shock to the system. This grave sense of procedural injustice is heightened by the substantial justice of no compensation and loss of deferred wages.

But this explanation provides only limited illumination. First, not all occupations had all these features. The only common one was the first. Indeed, in some cases workers became unionised in the process of an occupation. Furthermore, where occupation in both absolute and relative has been sparsest – the US – the absence of any preceding occupations may help account for this. By contrast, in the other countries the precedent of occupation in the last five or so years existed. And, there were many cases where all the features were present but no occupation was engaged in. This suggests that other factors were at play.

So the key material factors are the labour market situation and terms of redundancy. Some workers will believe that they have better or worse chances of finding other employment depending on the state of the local labour market. Across the six economies, unemployment levels vary widely, with Australia being just 5.7%. However, it is not as simple as saying that workers with no sense of alternative employment are more likely to think of occupation than those that do for other factors have a bearing.

Nonetheless, it can be suggested that this sense of no alternative employment is a necessary – without being sufficient – factor. That said, the terms of redundancy have an important bearing on this calculation for payoffs of certain sizes can blunt or delay the impact of redundancy. But again, there are still cases where reasonable redundancy terms have not provided a bulwark against occupation.

The article has sought to explore explanation for the phenomenon of occupation. In doing so, it has gone beyond the ultra-left tendency of some to shout from the sidelines, ‘Such and such workers have occupied their workplace – you should do it too, you can do it too’. This approach is mistaken because it fails to appreciate the complexity of social processes involving worker agency as well as the material foundations of concrete circumstances. This complexity relates to workers’ assessments of their situation and their expectations about whether occupation will bring useful leverage in terms of a cost/benefit calculation.

The starkest examples of our lack of understanding of why some workers occupy and other do not can be found in the cases of Visteon and Thomas Cook. In both cases, it appears that the crucial spur was that one workplace was occupied first, so setting a precedent for the others. Yet we do not know why the occupations happened in particular workplaces first and not in others.

We need to put our thinking caps on here if we are to be able to understand and then assist workers in struggling against redundancy and recession.

See also:
Gall, G. 2010, 'Resisting Recession and Redundancy: Contemporary Worker Occupation in Britain', WorkingUSA, vol. 13, no. 1 March, pp. 107-132.
Gall, G. 2011, 'Contemporary workplace occupations in Britain: Motivations, stimuli, dynamics and outcomes', Employee Relations, vol. 33, no. 6.
 

The occupation of the Bathgate plant of Plessey Capacitors in 1982 provides an interesting example of collective action taken by a mainly female workforce against their multinational employer. This particular dispute has important implications both for the involvement of women in industrial action, and for the debate about the most effective strategies to counter the power of multinational corporations, particularly in the case of plant closure.

The material presented here is based on a series of interviews carried out in the period August to November 1983. Time constraints prevented interviewing the workforce on a large scale. However, attempts were made to interview one or more representatives of the various categories of workers involved in the dispute. Thus, the three most prominent shop stewards (two female and one male) were interviewed, as were 12 ordinary workers involved in the occupation. This group included workers who had been re-employed after the occupation, as well as workers who had been made redundant. One full-time union official closely involved in the occupation was interviewed, as were two members of a group which acted as a support to the Plessey workers. Attempts were made to interview a representative of the Plessey management and a representative of the Engineering Employers' Federation, of which Plessey is a member, but both refused to be interviewed.

The workers of the Plessey plant chose to occupy their factory in response to its proposed closure, rather than to negotiate with the company over the closure through official trade union channels. Why was such a tactic chosen? This can be considered in terms of three main conditions which the form of industrial action chosen had to satisfy.

Firstly, the action had to generate the support and active involvement of the majority of workers threatened with redundancy.
Secondly, it had to take account of the rationale behind the operation of multinational corporations like Plessey, and therefore had to have the potential of challenging directly that rationale. Thirdly, the form of action chosen had to be able to overcome the usual limitations of official trade union action with respect to closure. The Plessey workers' assessment of the sit-in as a strategy which could fulfil these three conditions will be looked at in more detail. Some evaluation will be made of the potential gains for workers in choosing direct action rather than negotiation in response to the policies of multinational corporations, as well as any limitations in doing so. Before this, however, the dispute must be set in cbntext by looking at the main activities of the Plessey Company worldwide, particularly at their changing corporate strategies in recent years, as well as the setting up of the Plessey plant in Bathgate, the characteristics of its workforce and its industrial relations.

THE PLESSEY COMPANY
Plessey began as a small jig and tool-making firm in East London in 1917. The company expanded steadily in the years up to World War II, and after the war a series of mergers diversified the company into such areas as machine tool control, hydraulics and consumer electricals. Further mergers took place in the 1960s, bringing Plessey into the areas of telecommunications, numerical control, radar and semiconductors. Today, Plessey's business activity is made up of three main divisions: telecommunications and office systems, electronics systems and engineering. The company operates in 130 countries, having research and development establishments in 13 countries. However, this does not put Plessey in the top league of multinational corporations by the standards of its international competitors like IBM. Plessey is the fourth largest UK electronics company (TURU Report, 1982), and ranks 27th in the league table of leading British manufacturing multinationals (Labour Research, 1978). Sales in the United Kingdom account for 51 per cent of Plessey's turnover, with its next largest market being the USA, with 14 per cent of sales. Continental Europe and Asia follow closely behind. The group also has sales and subsidiaries in Africa, including South Africa, Australia and Latin America.
Plessey's sales figures in the UK are largely made up of state contracts — such contracts provided Plessey with 76.4 per cent of its profits on 72.4 per cent of sales in 1981-82. These contracts had become increasingly important to the company since 1971 (excluding the years 1977-79, when cuts in Post Office expenditure detrimentally affected Plessey's sales to the state). Government departments and British Telecom (formerly the Post Office) are Plessey's primary customers of electronic systems and equipment and telecommunications respectively. Many of the state's purchases from the Plessey Company are defence-related.
In 1975 Plessey employed approximately 55 180 workers in the UK. By 1981 the Plessey workforce had fallen to 39 922, a fall of around 35 per cent. The reasons behind such a massive fall in employment levels will be looked at in some depth later.

PLESSEY CAPACITORS, BATHGATE
Bathgate, with its population of 14 000, lies in West Lothian, some 18 miles from Edinburgh. The town has undergone some major changes in recent years. From being a lively, prosperous town in the 1960s and early 1970s, it has become one of the major casualties of the recession in Scotland, with its present unemployment rate approaching 30 per cent.
The early post-war period from 1947-57 was a boom time for Bathgate in employment terms: its shale oil, coal, iron, steel and paper industries were prospering. Added to this, in 1947, the Telegraph Condenser Company set up in the town to manufacture condensers for electrical and electronic machinery. The company was the first major employer in the area not dependent on the exploitation of natural resources. Further, its establishment linked the local economy to one of the post-war boom industries, and brought increased employment opportunities for women, an important factor in an area dominated by traditional industries, where employment was almost wholly a male preserve. This was followed by the setting up of the British Motor Company (now British Leyland) in Bathgate in 1961, with a target labour force of 5600.
In 1965, however, TCC was taken over by Plessey Capacitors, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Plessey Ltd, in a spate of amalgamations within the British telecommunications industry. The takeover incorporated the Bathgate plant and its workforce into a major international manufacturing operation in the increasingly competitive electronics industry. Employment at the plant rose from 1400 in 1965 to around 2400 by 1973. Around 75 per cent of the employees at the plant were women involved in the production of capacitors. A capacitor is an electric or electronic device which stores an electric charge, and which is incorporated into all kinds of electric and electronic equipment, such as transistor radios, washing machines, electricity sub-stations and on high-speed electric trains. The Bathgate factory consisted of four plants producing four lines of capacitors and some related products.
In the years before the occupation, Plessey was considered by many of its workers at Bathgate to be a relatively good employer in terms of wages and conditions, comparing favourably with other plants in the area. In contrast to many of the electronics plants in Scotland, trade unions were accepted by the Plessey management at Bathgate, and the workforce was heavily unionised. The majority of assembly workers were members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, while the staff employees were represented by TASS, the white collar associate of AUEW. A small number of workers were represented by the Electrical, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union and the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff.
A distinction must be made here between official trade union representatives and shop stewards. Shop stewards in British industrial relations are generally elected representatives of a workgroup, who deal with union and work matters at a workplace level. These are unpaid representatives, who, in the AUEW, constitute the intermediate level between full-time, paid officials of the union, and the union's rank and file members. Many trade unions rely to a considerable extent on shop stewards, and have arrangements for granting them credentials. At Plessey, the 20 female and six male shop stewards at the plant prior to the occupation were granted full recognition and facilities by the company. In the remainder of this case study, shop steward refers to unpaid workplace representatives, while trade union officials refers to the full-time, paid officers of the union. The term 'convenor', which will be used later on, refers to the senior steward in a plant where a number of stewards exist.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Bathgate plant became the victim of Plessey's changing corporate strategies. In the post-war period Plessey followed a policy of mergers, expansion and diversification, such that between 1962 and 1971, the company's turnover grew fivefold. Nevertheless, Plessey's profitability record was poor, with earnings per share in 1971 the same as they had been in 1963. In response to this, Plessey began to pursue a policy of consolidation and 'strategic divestment' in the early 1970s, which involved the elimination of all those businesses considered to be outside the mainstream activities of the company, such as turntables, hydraulics, sheet metals and capacitors, in order to release resources for more lucrative areas of production, such as office systems and defence equipment. It was not considered important that in some cases these items were being produced profitably — as Elder (1982) points out, on the basis of an interview with a senior Plessey executive, the issue had to be looked at from a corporate standpoint, where the key issue was total corporate profit position, not individual plant profitability. Thus, the company appear to have based their decision to move into other areas of production on the expectation that a higher rate of profit for the company as a whole could be secured.1
As pointed out earlier, the employment consequences of the strategic divestment policy were immense, with UK employment falling by 35 per cent. The Bathgate plant did not escape rationalisation, and through both voluntary and compulsory redundancy, employment levels fell steadily from 1973, when 2400 workers were employed, until 1981, when only 330 workers were left at the plant. This was the size of the workforce at the time of the occupation.
There was little worker reaction against the redundancies, although many of the stewards argued that redundancies should be resisted. As one of the women interviewed told me:
There were big rows because we couldn't stop people volunteering for redundancy. The shop stewards wanted them to fight, and not sell their jobs, but they didn't take any notice. . . . people could get jobs in Edinburgh then. . . . it's different now.
It is interesting to speculate on why no worker action was taken in response to previous job losses. The women themselves argued that at the time of these redundancies, the surrounding labour market was less depressed, and thus the effects of redundancies may not have been so severe. Further, some of the women indicated that the closure announcement destroyed any hopes held previously that cutbacks in production and job losses could be reversed at a later date when the effects of world recession had lessened. It may also have been the case that the example of the Lee Jeans sit-in influenced the decision to resist closure.2 In December 1981 Plessey announced that the Bathgate capacitor division would close in March 1982: on the grounds that the capacitor market was flooded; that the plant itself was technologically obsolete; and that the factory was making losses of £0.5m per annum, despite a significant investment programme in recent years. This announcement set in motion an occupation by over 220 workers. The occupation lasted eight weeks, and ended with a takeover by Wedge International Holdings BV, the company to whom the entire capacitor division of Plessey, both in the UK and abroad, was sold. The takeover retained 62 jobs at the plant, while the rest of the workforce were made redundant.
The occupation is described in detail in Findlay (1984). What will be considered here is the rationale behind the decision to occupy the factory, and the way in which the strategy was put into operation. An assessment will also be made of the gains made by the women during their struggle, both in terms of job retention and in terms of the development of their own attitudes and beliefs.

THE DECISION TO OCCUPY

Some worker action to resist the closure was inevitable, given the strength of feeling amongst the Plessey workforce at the time of the closure announcement. The continual decline of Bathgate's traditional industries and its major manufacturing establishments, such as British Leyland, had led to a situation in 1981 in which 3350 men and 1635 women were unemployed in the Bathgate area. Taking Bathgate and the nearby towns of Broxburn and Livingston together, male unemployment stood at 21.2 per cent, while official female unemployment stood at 19.0 per cent. Unemployment was a likely prospect for many of the workers:
I was only forty-five, and I was thinking, where will I get another job at my age, with so many unemployed?
Bathgate and its surrounding areas are made up of relatively small, tightly knit communities, and concern for the future of those communities, particularly their youth, pervaded the views of all the women interviewed:
We had watched the place go down through the years and there wasn't any other employment in the area. . . . this was the major employer for women in the area. . . . so the women had said, enough is enough. We all thought the same — where are our kids going to work?

This concern was especially strong among the older women, many of whom were approaching retirement age, having worked in the plant for more than 30 years. For these women, it would have been in their own self-interest to have taken their redundancy payments, but they decided to support the sit-in for the sake of maintaining employment in the area, thus risking the loss of their redundancy entitlement.

However, the reason put forward most strongly by the Plessey workforce to justify resisting plant closure was a belief in their own profitability. The workers were very scathing of Plessey's claims of heavy losses and technologically obsolete equipment, and were backed up in their assessment by a report on plant profitability by the Trade Union Research Unit of Glasgow College of Technology (TURU,1982). The report pointed out that while there were two other capacitor manufacturing operations in Scotland (Hughes Microelectronics in Glenrothes and Sprague Electrical in Galashiels, both foreign-owned), their product ranges were narrower than Bathgate's, and their combined sales only half of Bathgate's. Plessey Bathgate was therefore Scotland's major manufacturer of capacitors. The Report agreed with the workers' assessment that the machinery at Bathgate was not technologically obsolete. It was felt that the manufacturing equipment installed at Bathgate was comparable, in terms of efficiency, with that used by other manufacturers. Indeed, £200 000 worth of new machinery had been installed at Bathgate as recently as September 1981. The Report argued that Plessey's strategy of trying to build up defence contracts and communications systems and software, while at the same time phasing out its manufacture of microelectronics and components, including capacitors, was extremely risky. It also argued that to sell out the major British-owned capacitor operation into foreign control or cut back or close Bathgate, the major manufacturing base of that operation, made no sense for the electronics components industry or for the Scottish or UK economy.

At the time of the closure announcement the order books of the Bathgate plant were full and growing. The annual accounts of Plessey Capacitors, Bathgate, show sales in 1981 of £6 575 000 —an increase of £128 000 on the 1980 sales figures. The annual profit and loss statements for Plessey Capacitors do in fact show losses on sales for all three years that accounts exist (that is, 1979, 1980, 1981). However, the accompanying notes to the accounts suggest that these were paper losses produced by the way the accounting was done. For instance: in 1979, the Bathgate firm made provision for 'product rationalisation, including redundancy and evacuation of building costs' which effectively converted a profit on trade for that year into a substantial loss. To the workers, this indicated that the company was deliberately engineering the apparent lack of profitability of the plant.
The workers also argued that the annual accounts would not give a true picture of the profitability of the Bathgate plant because they believed that Bathgate's capacitors were being 'sold' to other Plessey plants at transfer prices which were set at levels detrimental to Bathgate, so that some of Bathgate's actual profits were being transferred to other plants. Furthermore, they felt that the company was deliberately diverting orders to other plants to the detriment of the Bathgate plant. Certain long-standing orders had ceased to be placed at Bathgate:
This didn't ring true in the capacitor world. In the capacitor industry you have to keep ahead with new designs, but old designs keep on going — they trickle out — they don't dry up at once. I just didn't believe them — there was a lot of our work going down to England, and Plessey were deliberately diverting orders.

An evaluation of the annual accounts was made by members of the Edinburgh group of the Conference of-Socialist Economists, taking into account possible transfer pricing. This suggests that a modest profit was actually being made at the Bathgate plant, even during a period of severe recession.
The Plessey workers totally disbelieved the reasons for closure given by the company, and this was a major contribution to the strength of feeling that the decision should be resisted. The workers believed, and were eventually proved right, that Plessey's aim was to move out of capacitor manufacture altogether. For the Plessey workers, then, it can be argued that a belief in their own profitability and efficiency played a greater part in bringing about resistance than did any conceptions of a natural right to employment.

One identifiable group of workers, however, was not convinced by the reasons put forward for resisting the closure of the plant. Out of a group of 80 skilled and semi-skilled men employed in the plant, only 12 agreed to stay and fight with the women workers. Two alternative views were put forward on why this should be the case. One steward argued that the skilled men at Plessey had 'a track record of weakness and lack of political clarity with respect to their situation. . . . with very little trade union principles'; another explained the refusal of the skilled men to support their action as being a response to previous hostilities which had existed between the toolmakers and particular stewards: 'skilled men are very petty, they always have been. They won't be dictated to by semi-skilled people'. Other workers argued that the skilled men thought it unlikely that their action would achieve any measure of success, and they may have believed that having a skill made it more likely that they would obtain alternative employment. Whatever their reasons, the failure of the male workers as a whole, skilled or semi-skilled, to support their fellow workers, indicates the traditional problems of trying to build solidarity where internal divisions exist, based on skill, sex or some other factor, among the workforce.

The workers realised that some extraordinary action was needed if Plessey was to be forced to reconsider its decision. They considered that the factory's machinery and stocks were still valuable assets for Plessey though the building itself belonged to the Scottish Development Agency. They decided that occupying the factory provided the best method of keeping control over the machinery and stocks. It was felt that to try to negotiate with Plessey through traditional trade union channels, or to try to block the removal of equipment and stocks from outside the plant would have proved ineffective: 'We couldn't go on a strike and we couldn't go on a go slow — what was the point?' Further, the idea of a sit-in had become popular due to the action taken by the women at Lee Jeans in 1981 — 'the idea was just there. . . . sit-ins seemed the natural thing to do'. Once the decision to occupy was made, the workers were encouraged by stewards to produce as much output as possible in the period between the closure announcement and the occupation, to boost their negotiating position. This enabled them to earn increased bonus payments, thus helping to ease the financial difficulties likely to occur when wages ceased to be paid. Also, by holding back work in the dispatch stage, the workers were increasing the value of the assets which they would control.
The decision on what action to take against Plessey was influenced by the workers' assessment of the most potentially effective ways of fighting multinational companies like Plessey. However, the decision was also conditioned by a belief on the part of some of the workers that conventional trade union tactics were of little use in dealing with multinational corporations. These issues have been dealt with elsewhere (Baldry et al., 1980). Such a choice may be more attractive to women workers, many of whom do not feel themselves to be wholly integrated into conventional trade union practices and forms of struggle.

THE ORGANISATION OF THE SIT-IN

One of the first tasks facing the 220 Plessey workers who occupied the plant was to overcome the practical difficulties involved in taking over a factory and maintaining it to a standard adequate for large numbers of people to live in for a lengthy period of time, while at the same time trying to carry on an industrial dispute, and gain support from other sections of the community. As may have been expected, most workers described the first few days of the sit-in as extremely chaotic:

We had to cover the factory 24 hours a day, and we needed someone on the factory gates at all times. We also had to find transport and organise cooking and cleaning. But the effort put in by the workers was absolutely tremendous. . . . people were willing to do shifts for the sit-in, but they never would have worked shifts for Plessey.

Since there were many tasks to be done, committees were set up to take charge of the workforce's finance; to establish contact with other workers and other trade unions; to speak at meetings in the surrounding communities; to cope with the large amount of correspondence which came in; and to collect funds from other organisations.
Each member of the working committee took charge of a specific task. There had to be people to share responsibility with the stewards — that's where a lot of things fall, with big shots trying to do everything themselves, instead of drawing all the people together.
Inevitably, it took a few days for any order to be arrived at, but most of those involved give the impression that the organisation of the sit-in was very effective. Serious attempts were made to involve the whole workforce in decision-making: mass meetings were held regularly and all of the major decisions were taken when the entire occupying force was present; no matter what shift was in progress when a meeting was held, the workers from all other shifts were called to the factory to attend. Further, in the views of the workers interviewed, most people were keen to make their opinions known, both during mass meetings and in the day-to-day conduct of the occupation, and were keen to become involved in the actual running of the sit-in, in the various areas specified earlier:
Everybody got their say. But the stewards did a good job and we were quite happy to follow their leadership.
The Plessey workers retained a high level of morale and a great feeling of solidarity and collective consciousness: workers dedicated a far greater proportion of their lives to the sit-in than would have been devoted to work, in most cases completely uprooting their domestic life in the process. Women, many of whom had never been involved in industrial action in their lives, were encouraged to go out and address public meetings, to visit other plants and ask for the support, both moral and financial, of other workers. Thus, there were many positive aspects of the Plessey occupation, no matter what its eventual material outcome. This involvement was important for many of the women:
We all got really involved as we got to understand more. . . . we were happy to get involved when we realised the degree of support we had, and we knew we were not fighting alone. I know the sit-in was successful in getting people involved. There was a definite feeling of everybody working together.
It is paradoxical that women are willing to undertake a form of industrial struggle which, more than other forms of action, disrupts their domestic life. Sit-ins require a great deal of workers' time and commitment. Since many women have a double burden, wage work and unpaid domestic labour, one might expect them to be less attracted to forms of action which make extra demands on their time. Participation in the Plessey occupation did involve added burdens for many women. These were twofold. Firstly, working shift rotas in the sit-in and looking after children proved to be particularly difficult.
Efforts were made to exclude women with children from the night shifts, since this may have led to problems of child-care. There is, however, no indication that any collective child-care was organised. Secondly, for some women, the attitudes of their husband's proved to be a source of anxiety:
A few women left as it [the sit-in] was causing family problems. . . . it was difficult to cope with families without a wage. Some got a lot of stick from their husbands and had to leave the sit-in to prevent domestic troubles. But there were many glowing examples of husbands' changing their attitudes.
However, although the women workers did believe that their domestic situation made participation in the sit-in more difficult, many of them also believed that women in general possess greater determination and stamina than men when faced with an adverse situation:
If women put their teeth into anything, and are really determined enough, they will exceed men at any time. . . . women are more determined than men will ever be, and they'll take more knocks than men.
Informal discussions with a group of women involved in the occupation indicated that the solidarity they felt may well have been engendered by a sense of common interest as women: the belief that they shared a common work and life situation. The awareness of women workers of the similar situation of other women workers, most of whom share similar domestic responsibilities, may foster attitudes of co-operation and mutual assistance. This can obviously be a great advantage during industrial disputes. Whatever the explanation of the fact that recent prominent sit-ins in Scotland have been carried out by women workers, the women of Lee Jeans, Plessey and many others, have clearly smashed the notion of women as passive workers. As one woman pointed out:
One of the achievements was that women were able to speak up for themselves, women that I would never have dreamt would have made a contribution at a union meeting, all had an opinion to give. . . . it puts a backbone into people.

Most of the occupations which have taken place in the UK in recent years have attracted considerable support for occupying workers from other sections of the labour movement. The Plessey occupation was no exception. Stewards from other Plessey plants in Britain were asked to elicit the support of their members for the workers' struggle at Bathgate. According to the Bathgate stewards, the response was heartening: regular financial contributions were made to the Bathgate strike fund, and representatives of the other workers were often present at the Bathgate plant to offer their moral support:
The other Plessey workers gave us a tremendous amount of support. . . . they showed great interest and levied their members to give us finance.
On another level, the workers at other Plessey plants in Britain took part in a one hour stoppage, then in a half-day stoppage to show their support for their fellow workers at Bathgate, as well as demonstrating outside Plessey headquarters in London. The Bathgate stewards believed that these actions alarmed the Plessey management: before the half-day stoppage, management at the English plants printed and distributed thousands of leaflets to their own workers, telling them that they should not support the Bathgate struggle. The Bathgate workers felt that this was an indication that the management were feeling pressurised:
In a way, the company must have realised that if we were getting support from other places, they might have the same problem on their hands later on.
Some of the workers had hoped that the company's employees outside Bathgate would call a full stoppage to support them. Others seemed more aware of the difficulties involved in such a course of action:
Some of the Bathgate plant was being transferred down south, so it meant jobs for them. . . . they weren't going

The dispute shows the contradictions involved in any attempt to co-ordinate protest between employees of the same company in different plants in different parts of the country, or across countries. While it may be in the workers' long-term interest to try to prevent policies which involve mass redundancies from being carried out, in the short term the increased job security which the closure of one plant may mean for another plant can be a source of division among workers (Haworth and Ramsay, 1984).
Despite the fact that the support of other Plessey workers was qualified, the Bathgate stewards argue that it was significant:
It was the first time Plessey factories had ever helped each other, and it hasn't happened since. There have been other redundancies and closures, but none of them even fought.
However, the workers involved in the occupation and subsequently re-employed in the Plessey plant do now show a great deal of solidarity with other workers' struggles, in the form of financial contributions to other strike funds and the offering of help and advice to other groups of workers. This appears to be in marked contrast with their behaviour prior to the occupation. It can be argued that for some of the Plessey workers at least, experience of collective struggle did enhance their belief in the need for labour solidarity to fight multinational corporations, and their consciousness of the resources which workers possess, although it may also have increased their awareness of the contradictions involved in attempts to extend solidarity among workers.
An attempt was made to co-ordinate pressure on Plessey internationally, by making contacts with the Plessey plant at Arco in Italy, a sister plant to the one in Bathgate. The Bathgate workers encountered difficulties in getting information on the Bathgate struggle to the Italian workforce, not least because the Italian management had provided their workforce with entirely misleading information on the dispute. Finally, the Bathgate workers sent a representative to Italy to inform the Italian workers directly of the occupation.
Since the occupation ended shortly after the contact was made, it was impossible to test whether the Italian workers would have taken direct action in support of their Bathgate colleagues. Many of the workers and shop stewards at Bathgate believed that a basis was there for extending the struggle to an international level, with the Italian workers refusing to accept machinery and stocks from the Bathgate plant, and perhaps pressurising the Plessey management through stoppages. This hope appears to have been based on a verbal commitment from the Italian workers to take some action on Bathgate's behalf.
Had the dispute continued, the hopes of the Bathgate workers might have been disappointed. The divisions which exist among workers at one plant can have a detrimental effect on solidarity, and this is compounded by divisions which exist between workers at different plants, even where these workers are employed by the same company. Such difficulties are magnified when attempts are made at international solidarity (Haworth and Ramsay, 1984). This is not to say that international labour solidarity is unachievable. However, such solidarity cannot be assumed to exist automatically.
Support in the United Kingdom for the Plessey women was not confined to Plessey employees. According to one worker: 'We caught the imagination of the trade union and labour movement in Scotland'. This certainly appears to be true. The Plessey workers received massive financial contributions: the ship workers, miners and others paid a levy from their wages each week into a strike fund, while many other workplaces carried out collections at regular intervals. Towards the end of the sit-in, the workers were receiving between £5000 and £6000 per week. Clearly, this was a crucial component in the ability of the workforce to continue with the sit-in. More importantly, however, the Plessey workers emphasised that support from other workers, mobilised in the main through informal shop steward networks, provided a tremendous boost to their morale:
This is what gave the women the will to fight on … they felt that to stop fighting wasn't only letting themselves down, it was letting down that whole labour movement as well. If we'd been left on our own, I don't know if we would have lasted eight weeks.
The dispute does show that the labour movement can elicit significant reserves of solidarity and support. However, there are constraints on such support: it will be forthcoming so long as other workers do not feel they are putting their jobs in jeopardy by offering support. Financial contributions and participation in demonstrations are unlikely to jeopardise jobs. However, strikes by other Plessey employees may indeed have threatened their jobs, and this may explain why such action was not taken.

COMMUNITY-BASED SUPPORT
The sit-in not only won the support of workers in other areas, but it also won the commitment of the Bathgate community. The realisation of the dire prospects facing the town contributed to the support which the townspeople showed the Plessey workers. Donations came from all sources to the plant: from local shopkeepers, families, pensioners, in the form of finance and provisions, and from the few factories which still existed in the area, particularly from British Leyland. The workers were also supported by their local regional and district councils, and by their Member of Parliament, Tarn Dalyell. The workers argued that the townspeople had realised the impact that the closure would have on the community, and on their children's prospects.
People could see the community going down and down. The British Leyland dispute was going on and everyone was worried there wasn't going to be any work left. It let the workers know that the people outside did care about them, and were appreciating the fight the workers were putting up.
It may be the case that the domestic roles of many women workers, such as shopping, involvement in local schools, youth and community organisations, and also in informal neighbourhood groups and kin groups, provide the foundation on which community support can be built, more so than is the case for male workers. Many women spend time and energy constituting these kinds of networks, and these may be of great significance in an industrial dispute, particularly where a dispute affects many members of the same community, as was the case at Bathgate.

THE ROLE OF FORMAL TRADE UNION STRUCTURES
In accordance with previously laid down procedures, the trade union officers were informed of the Plessey closure decision at around the same time as the workers. According to the AUEW Glasgow Divisional Officer, they were stunned at the news, and apprehensive about Bathgate's employment prospects in the future. Many of the leading members of the unions involved encouraged the workers to fight to save their jobs. However, this was before any specific form of industrial action had been decided on. Such a supportive position did not continue throughout the dispute.
Formally, the full-time trade union officials were not informed of the intended occupation until it took place, and thus were not party to the decision. However, it seems likely that certain officers of the union, with whom the workers had good relations, were told informally of the workers' intentions.
The main assistance given by the official trade union structure took the form of paying strike pay (although this was not paid until four weeks after the occupation began); helping to collect funds; commissioning a study on the reasons behind the plant's closure, and of the state of the capacitor industry in general; and attempting to provide legal advice for the workers (although in some cases this advice proved to be wrong). As far as the Glasgow Divisional Officer of the AUEW was concerned:
Whatever assistance was sought by the workforce, if it was physically possible to provide that assistance, whether it be financial, moral, legal or whatever, then it was given. That is what the trade union is for.
Some stewards and ordinary workers at Plessey disagreed with this view, as these comments indicate:
I thought the officials could have done a lot more. . . . they left an awful lot in the hands of the officials [stewards] here. They could have given us more support. We didn't see them doing anything. We always got the feeling they were too busy. I'm quite sure they could have done more. They should have played an active part in what was going on. As far as I'm concerned they wanted the dispute tidied up and wrapped in a bow and then they would have been quite happy.
It is worth quoting at length the comments of one trade union official when confronted with the views of the Plessey workers:
We live in a democracy and everybody is entitled to their opinion. Bearing in mind the conflict and confrontation people were faced with, in a situation like an occupation, or any form of industrial action. . . . you look at that kind of situation as you want to see it, irrespective of whether that may be the true position affecting everybody. The simple matter is that if indeed the membership were dissatisfied with the officials who were directly involved at a local level, or even at a national level for that matter, they have the opportunity at a future date to ensure that that official is no longer a representative of the union.
However, while trade union members may have the periodic opportunity to vote against any official with whose conduct they are dissatisfied, this can hardly be said to compensate for the lack of active support during a dispute, when such support is most necessary. Trade unions cannot afford to be complacent with regard to the feelings of sections of their membership if they are to retain support in the future.
PLESSEY'S TACTICS
The Plessey company used various tactics to put pressure on the workers occupying the factory, in attempts to end the occupation. At an early stage in the occupation, the Glasgow Herald newspaper reported the workers' fears that Plessey might organise a raid on the plant to snatch £650 000 worth of components for electronic circuits. These fears were fuelled by the appearance, on several occasions, of a Plessey helicopter circling above the plant. In their defence, the workers had piled up barrels and wooden palettes in readiness for scattering to prevent any helicopter landing.
On 12 February Plessey management left dismissal notices at the gatehouse of the factory for all of the workers involved in the occupation, informing them that they had been dismissed without any entitlement to redundancy payments. At the same time the company instructed telephone engineers to cut off all telephone lines at the factory, leaving the workers with only the payphone at their social club. Despite these mounting pressures, and even after the company had announced the dismissals on radio, and had intimated that the sit-in had cost the workers their redundancy payments, the workers unanimously reaffirmed their intention to continue the occupation.
It can be argued, however, that all these pressures had a far smaller effect on the workers than had the court action taken by Plessey against the occupying workers. For ordinary working people, the courts are an arena in which they have very little experience, and about which they appear to have great apprehension. The complex debate on the legal situation surrounding the Plessey occupation cannot be discussed here (for a detailed discussion, see Findlay, 1984). The attempts by Plessey to use the courts to evict the occupying workers, although ultimately unsuccessful, were significant in indicating that the owners of capital will resort to the power of the state to defend their property rights against perceived challenges by workers.

THE NEGOTIATIONS
Negotiations between the unions with members involved in the Plessey occupation and the Plessey management began on 5 February 1982. The first real hint of any breakthrough came much later, however, on 8 March, when the union negotiating team attended talks at the London offices of the Arbitration and Conciliation Advisory Service on the invitation of the company. The talks were arranged to consider a proposed management buy-out plan, and also to discuss a possible takeover by Wedge International Holdings BV. At the end of these discussions a plan was outlined in which Arcot-ronics, a subsidiary of Wedge Holdings, proposed to take over part of the plant and employ around 80 workers on the condition that the occupation be terminated immediately.
However, at a mass meeting, the workers at Bathgate voted overwhelmingly to reject the Arcotronics takeover bid on the recommendation of their stewards. They were dissatisfied with the number of jobs on offer; they were not convinced that the takeover would prevent an asset-stripping operation by Plessey; and they did not believe that they had enough information on Arcotronics to warrant accepting its offer — as one shop steward pointed out, 'It was like asking you to take a house with no roof. Only seven days later, however, the Plessey workforce voted two to one to accept the Arcotronics takeover bid. The proposal had changed little since it had been on offer the previous week, except that Plessey had agreed to guarantee that the jobs would remain in existence for one year, by placing sufficient orders with Arcotronics. In the first bid the guarantee had been for three months only. Some of the Plessey workers have very strong views on why the takeover was finally accepted so soon after being overwhelmingly rejected. The Convenor at the plant believed that in the week separating the two offers, the trade union officials worked to undermine the sit-in. According to this steward, the officials were talking privately to key shop stewards, and winning them over to their position, 'They were really saying, "That's all you're going to get; reject this and you'll lose everything'". Other rank and file workers argued that the unions, along with management, 'had an almost common objective to bring the occupation to a halt as quickly as possible'.
We felt they [the union officials] could have got more jobs than 80, but they said it was over. They weren't for us, they were for the firm. . . . more on the management side than on our side.
They wanted to get us off their back really — they were paying us strike pay and unions don't like to pay strike pay.
They [the union officials] said they did their best, but you've just got their word for that.
For these workers the sit-in was still going strong: the interim interdict and order for eviction against the workers had been recalled; the Italian factory had indicated some willingness to refuse to allow any of the Bathgate machinery into their plant; and financial contributions were flowing in at a rate of £6000-£7000 per week.
However, many of the occupying workers held opposing views to these, as indicated by the outcome of the vote. Many workers accepted the interpretation of the situation given by the union officials:
They had taken us to the end of the road, and there was nowhere else they could take us.
The unions were persuading us to accept the takeover — I listened to them and thought '80 jobs are better than none'.
As the sit-in had progressed into its later stages, divisions had appeared between the workers. Some were becoming increasingly disaffected with the struggle, and were increasingly more vulnerable to mounting external pressures. To them the sit-in was falling apart, and the workers were becoming depressed and anxious over the possible loss of redundancy payments. As one woman pointed out:
You can fight as long as you have your troops, but when people want out, irrespective of what the union thinks, or what the people who have led that fight think, they're not going to stay and fight, and the majority of people in that hall had had enough.
It is difficult to assess which view of the sit-in was more realistic. On the one hand, the offer involved only 80 jobs, which meant that only one-third of those workers who occupied would remain in employment; the offer included a management right to appoint the workers they wanted; and a wage freeze imposed for one year. Further, workers were to sign an agreement saying that they would not oppose the movement of any machinery out of the plant, in direct opposition to the aims of the sit-in. However, on the other hand, there is little concrete evidence to indicate that a more acceptable settlement could have been obtained. Moreover, there were obvious difficulties in sustaining the momentum of the industrial action over a long period, and the appearance of divisions among the occupying force augured badly for the continuance of the sit-in.
For those workers who had disagreed with the decision to accept the takeover bid and end the occupation, the general feeling at the end of the sit-in was one of bitterness and disappointment.
There was no victory feeling — just a lot of bitterness.
Much, much more could have been achieved if others had had the confidence to keep going.
However, amongst those workers interviewed, there was complete agreement that the sit-in had been a worthwhile experience, and most expressed satisfaction at having taken part:
When you consider how things were stacked against people, the occupation was remarkable, courageous and solidaristic.
The sit-in definitely brought people together. There was a great feeling of being together and of camaraderie during the fight.
The sit-in was a success as everybody pulled together — the majority took their turn at doing what needed to be done. These workers argued that they would recommend the sit-in to other workers facing closure, where they felt that there was some possibility of either reversing the closure decision or attracting new capital. The general feeling was that the sit-in was an effective tactic against redundancy: in many ways it was seen as the only action workers could take which had any hopes of success. They did point out, however, that workers who were considering occupying their factories should be fully aware of the difficulties involved in occupations, and should take into consideration the sacrifices of home life and social life which have to be made: 'Yes, I would recommend it to other workers, but everybody has to want to do it'.
CONCLUSION
Examination of the Plessey occupation enables us to take a close look at the potential significance of direct action against multinational companies — at the rationale behind such action, as well as the gains to be made by workers who choose to use it. Forms of direct action such as occupations are responses to the absolute power of capital with respect to plant closure. Multinational corporations are particularly powerful in this respect, due to their ability to relocate investment and production in various parts of the world. This has rarely been successfully challenged by the labour movement. Trade unions work from the basis of a continuing bargaining relationship with the employer. Where such a bargaining relationship ceases, as in the case of closure, conventional trade union actions such as strikes and go-slows are unlikely to have much effect on employers' policy decisions. Many workers have come to realise these limitations on trade union actions with respect to closure, and have been forced, therefore, to resort to the other methods of protest.
It would be difficult to argue that the Bathgate plant would have remained open at all (albeit with vastly reduced employment levels), without the direct intervention of the workforce. Thus, in this respect, this form of action paid off for the Plessey workers. However, it also brought other gains — as outlined earlier, the occupation stimulated high levels of solidarity, involvement and collective identification amongst the Plessey workers, as well as extensive support from the labour and trade union movement.
The involvement of a large number of women in this dispute was also a significant factor. There is no evidence to suggest that the decision to close the plant or the tactics used against the occupying workers were affected by the fact that the workforce was mainly female, and thus the importance of the workers being female was not in terms of its effect on the company's policies. Rather, in this particular dispute, there is some basis for suggesting that the importance of the workers being women was in terms of their attitudes to struggle and solidarity, and their particular experience as women workers. The questions surrounding the particular nature of women workers' involvement in, and attitudes towards, industrial action, need to be further investigated, however, before any definitive conclusions on the specific role of women in industrial action can be drawn.
NOTES
1. Baldry et al., 1980, came to similar conclusions on the strategy of the Massey-Ferguson company in the run up to the closure of the company's Kilmarnock plant.
2. The workers of the Lee Jeans factory in nearby Greenock had occupied their factory in February 1981, in protest at the decision of their employers, the American VF Corporation, to close the plant.
REFERENCES
C. Baldry, N. Haworth and H. Ramsay, 'Confronting Multinationals: The Case of Massey Ferguson, Kilmarnock', Paper to British Sociological Association Conference, Aberdeen, March 1980.
A. Elder, 'Plessey: A Multinational in the Eighties', Junior Honours Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1982.
P. Findlay, 'Worker Reaction to Closure: A Case Study of the Occupation at Plessey, Bathgate', Honours Dissertation, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, 1984.
N. Haworth and H. Ramsey, 'Grasping the Nettle: Problems in the Theory of International Labour Solidarity', in P. Waterman (ed.) For a New Labour Internationalism (The Hague: International Labour Education, Research and Information Foundation, 1984).
Labour Research Bulletin, 'Leading British Multinationals', Labour Research Bulletin, October 1978.
R. MacPherson, 'Bathgate — Frontline Town' (Edinburgh: Conference of Socialist Economists, 1982).
Trade Union Research Unit, The Proposed Closure of Plessey Capacitors Ltd., Bathgate: A Trade Union Report (Glasgow College of Technology, 1982).

Some background on hospital occupations, which goes back to the late 1970s. In the early 1970s both the private and private sector was being restructured: partly in response to IMF directives, and in response to the relatively high wages and defenses (‘restrictive’ work practices that workers built up through the years. This ‘restructuring’ took the form of further centralisation, deskilling, redundancies, productivity deals, speed-ups, casualisation, tougher discipline. This is highly simplified — but we’ll leave it for the time being.

Since this restructuring often involved closures, people began occupying workplaces instead of simply going on strike. The work-in in the industrial setting.

Some of these occupations developed into work-ins — actually continuing production. Briants' Colour Printing and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders were the first. UCS became a rallying point due to the size and its location in area of militancy and close ties between the workplace and the community. Shop stewards seized control of the yards; they manned the gates on a rota. Those sacked were retained in jobs by rest of workforce who were now in control of production — they were already sitting on top of a lot of capital and unfinished work.
Work-ins later took place at a number of companies — Plessey’s, the River Don steelworks (interestingly with redundant workers retained by their union for campaign work, not for work for the plant’s liquidator!). Some tried to set up as cooperatives.
Over 1000 occupations & work-ins took place in 1972, including some white-collar workers.  

Contradictions of work-ins

There was an element of self-management becoming self-abuse! A cartoon of the time said it all: “Brothers and sisters! If the bosses won’t exploit us, we’ll have to do it ourselves!” ‘Workers Control’ was often by control by trade union bosses; though many occupation committees were formed that aimed to draw together all employees and operated outside the established union structures.                                                                                                                                                                           

Hospital work-ins and occupations was an extension of this tactic to the public sector, a good tactic to use as a response to closures. A strike would have been difficult unless it was in the form of sympathetic action in other hospitals or workplaces, but by taking the opposite route and forcing management to keep providing the service, the workers created a rallying point and area of alliance with people who would be deprived of the service.
Work-ins and occupations at hospitals tended to develop together.

Hurdles facing hospital work-ins

The first hospital work-ins were initiated amid a lot of uncertainty & fear: the sensitive nature of work, fear of putting patients at risk, realisation that patients might not want to have a baby or an operation in the middle of an industrial dispute were all thorny issues. Action was discussed with present or prospective patients.
Occupations were undertaken on a kind of loophole that specified that as long as patients are present in a hospital, the Health Authority is obliged to keep funding the hospital. However, there is the problem of insurance. It is stipulated that management must be present on the premises and be legally liable/responsible; however management obviously has a history of obstructing actions like this!
So the employees in a hospital work-in may acquire more power, but this occurs alongside a functioning administration. So some hospitals refused entry to the majority of management, allowing only a token management force that would not be able to obstruct the work-in.
Another problem is the role of doctors. In order to keep a hospital occupied, you need physicians willing to admit patients and do the business. Members of such a prestigious profession tend to be politically conservative. They may also remain in service in accordance with their ideas of professional ethics — if there are patients, they will care for them. But they generally stay away from political aspects of a campaign.
We will look at two hospital work-ins and occupations that are particularly relevant to what happened later at the South London Women’s Hospital. They are the occupation of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital and the Hounslow Hospital.

The E.G.A

The first occupation of a hospital was also a women’s hospital — the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, which used to be on London’s Euston Road. Founded by the UK’s first officially practising woman doctor, the EGA’s goal was to train women doctors and to provide treatment for women by women. Closure had been contemplated since 1959, on the grounds that a woman-only hospital was anachronism from the Victorian era. Demand was reckoned to be limited to small groups of orthodox Muslim & Jewish women who would object to treatment by men for religious reasons. There was also a drive within the NHS to ‘rationalise’ and to close down small hospitals.
However, they hadn’t reckoned that the women’s movement at this time was growing and support for medical care for women by women was increasing. Also more concern as to the nature of care — which goes beyond only having women doctors doing the caring. More on this later…
Throughout the 1960s Health Authority ‘ran-down’ the EGA, by not replacing work equipment, not doing repairs or replacing staff. Bed space had declined from 300 to 150. A malfunctioning lift in 1976 brought patients down to 46 and closed off the operating theatre. The Hospital faced a succession of closure threats. The first one in 1974 was headed off when demonstrations and a petition signed by 23,000 women forced the nursing council to back down. However, the EGA maternity hospital had been closed down, and this had angered staff.
An Action Committee formed that represented different sections of the staff, but was dominated by the consultants. EGA was in a good position to be the first to try the occupation tactic — its unique position of being a women’s hospital created ground for support and unity; all its consultants were part-time in order to allow women with children the opportunity to practice. Women doctors at EGA were relatively progressive (one received her training as an anti-fascist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War). The main tactics were oriented towards lobbying, petitioning, writing letters etc.

The EGA's closure was announced in 1976. At this point the rest of the staff was getting involved. The big health unions got involved: the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE), COHSE (representing nursing staff), and ASTMS (paramedical staff). Union involvement at the beginning of the anti-closure campaign was minimal. In July 1976 health workers protested against health service cuts and the EGA closure in particular: 700 workers staged a ‘day of action’ and marched to the House of Commons. Others took action in their hospitals, forcing four London hospitals to restrict admissions to emergencies. Some occupied the health authority offices; the occupation involved some pensioners who had occupied the Ritz hotel in the 1930s! Future New Labour health minister Frank Dobson was then leader of Camden council and gave his support.
Rank-and-file groups were a major factor in organising these actions. Health Secretary David Ennals claimed that EGA was "small, aging… can never be developed to fulfill functions of a modern, acute hospital." It was suggested the EGA could be a unit at the Whittington Hospital in Highgate.
The Action Committee replied in their own report arguing that in its present location the EGA could be both a specialised national facility and a centre fulfilling local needs. As a small hospital it could maintain “a friendly, unthreatening atmosphere, necessary for a hospital interested in educational, preventative and outreach work relevant to the specific health needs of women.” They also pointed to growing Somerstown estate nearby waiting for their own health centre  — supporting facilities for women at the EGA could take pressure off the Somerstown health centre. Increasingly Somerstown residents and EGA campaigners worked together. The EGA’s central location made it accessible to both patients from other boroughs and from outside London.

Huntley Street squatters

When Ennals asked the Area Health Authority to close in-patient services at the EGA, staff held emergency meeting vowing to sit-in or work-in if necessary. The Work-in had been urged by community activists (not staff members) on the EGA Campaign Committee, but was rejected as impractical in a hospital setting. No staff members were particularly radical or activist in outlook. But as closure more imminent, a work-in was seized upon as the last chance. It began a few days before the actual closing date — with official support from the unions.
In November 100 nurses and 78 ancillary staff began the occupation — to last until the AHA repaired the broken lift and undertook maintenance. Pictures taken outside the EGA on that day show pickets in front of the hospital with a banner declaring, “This hospital is under workers’ control.”

“Workers’ control” in a hospital work-in.

Did this mean control by trade unions? What was the input of members of local community? Major decisions were made by meetings of all the staff; the actual organisation was done by committees set up by general meetings. Committees organising the work-in included the Joint Shop Stewards Committee, the Medical Committee and the Action Committee; the latter was made up of elected representatives of all sections of staff, and linked union members and consultants.
The Campaign committee (Save the EGA) consisted of supporters outside the hospital. Set up by Camden Trades Council, it then became autonomous, drawing in people from other hospitals, local residents, people involved in housing & childcare campaigns, and activists from the women’s movement. One shop steward participated in campaign meetings, and the campaign sent a representative to other groups.
Was the campaign committee a support group or does it take initiative on its own and influence what goes on inside the hospital as well? The main support for working in came from the campaign committee.
In order to have insurance cover, management had to be present on the premises. They could be ‘management’ in the person of AHA representatives, or on-site administrators. Management could sabotage work-ins by refusing to do repairs or running down staff levels, by threatening to sack workers. But sometimes repairs have been done by outside workers. Ambulance drivers and workers in referral agencies such as the Emergency Bed Service were vital for support if the staff wanted to oppose management attempts to stop the flow of patients into the hospital – workers could notify drivers etc that the hospital remained open and ask them to bring patients.
In small hospitals the presence wasn’t so extensive. At EGA the on-site management consisted of the hospital secretary.

Work-ins are essentially defensive; they are aimed at keeping the premises in repair, countering moves by the authorities and maintaining morale. They are not aimed at implementing ‘workers’ control’ or transforming social relationships within the hospital. But they do usually result in an increase in the power of the staff as a group, and in the strengthening of organisation and initiative among ancillary workers and nurses.
However, they usually have to progress beyond defence to ask for extensions or improvements in the service they’re defending. In taking direct action to preserve a service or facility, you start thinking of the role the facility has played in the community, what needs it fulfills and what previously neglected needs it can be developed to meet. There is an awareness that they are defending a public resource. A lot of redefinition and expansion of the original concept took place in the context of the women’s movement, defining the EGA as a women’s hospital and both a national and local health facility. While the health authority was dismissing women’s hospitals as a Victorian relic, the women’s movement was raising the issue of discrimination against women as practitioners and alienation as patients a major issue.
This resulted in pushing for a Well-Woman’s clinic taking a wider, community-oriented approach to health. It would be an information centre as well as medical facility. According to Rachael Langdon of the EGA Well-woman’s Support Group:
“The dissatisfaction experienced by women in health care will not be overcome alone by seeing a doctor of one’s own sex or only by the existence of a women’s hospital. The issues are wider and preventative health is not merely a matter of individual effort. This is where the importance of alternative and women’s movement health groups lies… A well-woman clinic and a women’s hospital which could develop an exchange of ideas and knowledge with alternative and women’s health groups would be a step forward for women’s health.”
The demand was not merely keeping the EGA open, but that it be upgraded to become a ‘centre for innovation and research’ in women’s health matters, and being a resource in the community. Campaigners and workers sponsored discussion meetings relating to various women’s health issues — menopause, contraception, overweight, which were very well-attended — often over 200 people. There were also arguments between doctors and radical feminists who were challenging the medical establishment!
There were more closure threats in 1978; in May, a large demonstration in front of the hospital stopped traffic on Euston Road.
In 1979 campaigners won the battle to keep the EGA open as a gynaecological hospital. When there wasn’t an immediate crisis, initiative had been taken by the consultants from hospital workers. Both the EGA and later the South London Women’s Hospital faced the issue of whether it should plead as a special case, or wage defence of the hospital as an across-the-board opposition to Health Service cuts. People in the EGA Campaign group believed that campaign should ‘feel free’ to split from Action Committee, if it didn’t not take a direct line against the cuts; they felt the Campaign should take the initiative, which people in the hospital could follow or not follow. The Campaign’s responsibility was to those who used services, which expressed itself in total opposition to the cuts and transcended the interests of workers in saving their particular hospital.

Hounslow Hospital

In contrast to the EGA, West London’s Hounslow Hospital did not have advantages of national reputation, special support from the women’s movement, and supportive consultants. It faced more repression and practical disadvantages. The authorities had backed down from closure threats to EGA at least three times, and did not attempt to break the work-in outside of morale erosion and running down facilities. Hounslow workers faced constant threats and intimidation, a forcible smashing of the work-in — followed by a local occupation.
There was less support by doctors, which also resulted in more initiative by nurses, porters, cleaners and other staff, and more challenge to the hierarchy. The Work-in only lasted six months, but the occupation of the hospital that followed lasted years. Lines were drawn clearly, and there was no special pleading.
Hounslow was a small hospital for geriatric and long-stay patients — common in occupied hospitals. The hospital was considered a home as well as a place for treatment.  
It was situated in an industrial area, girdled by two motorways and Heathrow Airport. The response to proposals for possible closure in 1975 started with admin staff and friends, plus local volunteer and charity organizations, who wrote letters and petitions. Hand-written sheets were passed around the neighbours. Senior nursing staff took an interest, opening communication with ancillaries and porters, and these involved workers from ‘outside’ in the campaign. Activists from the West Middlesex District General Hospital looked into plans and discovered a whole series of cuts planned for the region.
As a small hospital, there was an element of paternalism. Activists from the Middlesex had a go at everything — the Government, AHA, hospital admin etc., and tension resulted. But it became apparent the management was determined to close down the hospital, and staff organised a Defence Committee that made all decisions for the campaign. Local campaigns & joint shop stewards committees also arose.
Hounslow’s closure was announced in January 1977, set for August; the work-in started in March. Management tried to transfer staff, and threatened those who refused with sanctions & sacking. They met with GPs, warned them against admitting patients to Hounslow and threatened them with sanctions.
When the August closure date arrived, staff organised a local march through Hounslow and a party for the patients. When they pushed past the closure date, there was a lot of fear. Workers had no idea if they would get paid; the authorities tried to claim that the AHA did not have to maintain staff and facilities if patients were present — though the law said otherwise.
The EGA had on-site consultants who could admit patients; Hounslow had none and was dependent on GPs. They had to tout for more admissions, even though August is traditionally a slow time! The authorities tried to turn patients away, and cut off the phones. The EGA had been treated as a freak case, but Hounslow indicated a trend of resistance to health service rationalisation. If a small, weakly-organised hospital was becoming such a focus for community resistance, they foresaw potential difficulties in enacting any cuts and rationalisation. Furthermore, the Hounslow work-in had gone further to challenge the hierarchical relationships of the hospital. There was little presence of consultants, and the process of campaigning had broken down traditional boundaries. Control of admissions taken over by the campaign and the staff: “With consultants no longer in control of admissions, the hierarchical system of privilege in the NHS was smashed.”
When threats didn’t succeed, a district team of officers took forcible action on October 26, 1977. Legally the authorities had to continue funding as long as patients were present; the authorities got around that by removing the patients themselves! Aided by the private ambulance service (public ambulance staff had nothing to do with it), police administrators, top nursing officers and consultants moved into the hospitals. The phone lines were cut, thwarting the emergency ‘phone tree’ for organising resistance. 21 patients were pulled out of their beds and taken into waiting ambulances. Pictures showed a lot of destruction had taken place — beds and furniture were wrecked, the floor strewn with food, torn mattresses, sheets, personal articles. According to a nurse: “old ladies had to queue up for an hour, crying all the time, as we remonstrated with the AHA people to cover them against the cold.”
The raid provoked a public outcry and led indirectly to the downfall of Hounslow’s Labour leader. A week later 2000 striking hospital workers picketed the Ealing, Hammersmith and Hounslow AHA to protest the raid and demand that the hospital be reopened. The AHA had to censure their own officials and called for a public enquiry, which was turned down by David Ennals. The District Administrator later admitted that losing 66 geriatric beds had badly affected geriatric care in the area.

Militancy among staff and campaigners

After the hospital was shut the campaigners took complete control of the building. They didn’t have a clear idea what to do with it now that patients gone and wards wrecked. Eventually they cleaned it up and used it as a local centre. Some of the original staff continued to be involved with the occupation — with the end of the occupation two years later, five were left.
However, the occupation itself drew in new people and took on a life of its own. Following the raid Hounslow had become a national issue. Nurses, porters and food service workers travelled to hospitals and meetings all over the country, discussing their experiences and asking for support. They initiated national campaign — though SWP-dominated! — against NHS cuts, called Fightback. This Campaign was based at Hounslow, and involved people from the EGA, St Nicholas, Plaistow and Bethnal Green work-ins.
The Matron’s office was occupied by the Fightback production team, the Assistant Matron’s office was used as headquarters for the West London Fire Brigades Union, Maple Ward became a ‘conference hall’ used by various local groups. (The National Union of Journalists used hospital facilities during their strike, which ensured favourable coverage of the occupation!)
The occupation became very intense, lasting as it did for so long, with a great variety of groups being involved, and the strong emotions provoked by the raid... There was lots of discussion and change. Women whose world was defined by husband, family and job found themselves making speeches and going out every night. Women had to fight with their husbands to go on tour or to stay overnight at the hospital on night picket. Or male construction workers would get challenged for sexist remarks by female picketers. Seven marriages broke up in the course of events — and how many new relationships started??
After a year of occupation, AHA backed down on the eviction threats and conceded to negotiations on the Occupation Committee’s demand that Hounslow Hospital be reopened as an upgraded diversified community hospital — (plans for which had been developed during the occupation). The OC would not negotiate as a special case — the opening of a community hospital meant little if cuts were to be made elsewhere. However, negotiations broke down when management did not give firm dates to provide plans, or guarantee commitment of funds.
The Occupation Committee ended occupation in November 1978, claiming that ‘no positive political gain’ would come from an eviction. They thought the demands of maintaining a 24-hour picket were draining resources from other kinds of campaigning, and diverting attention from cuts in other areas. They claimed it had dislocated the programme of cuts, and put forward detailed plans for the expanded community hospital. Apparently, as soon as the occupation ended work began on redesigning facilities in the new community hospital/health centre.

In 1976-78 there were work-ins or occupations in at least ten hospitals. About five work-ins were waged over an extended period of time to oppose closure, and the rest were shorter actions to oppose under-staffing and to back up other trade union demands. There were also sit-ins in administration and Health Authority offices, including an 8-week occupation at Aberdare Hospital, and in one nursery school and an ambulance station. Hospitals occupied included Plaistow Maternity Hospital, 2 wards at South Middlesex, one at Bethnal Green, where local people assisted the work-in by occupying the wards that had already been closed.
Work-ins had a greater chance of success in hospitals with chronic, long-stay patients.

Union officials - keep ‘em away!

Trained in negotiation, not conflict, and little use in an open-ended struggle where there was a need to continue and maintain morale, union officials think in terms of ending it all, and negotiating the terms. The Union offices that came into Hounslow when the work-in was made official “caused more havoc than management.”
Hounslow Hospital’s occupation showed the need for community initiative, and for balance between community supporters and workers in hospitals.

Now onto the ‘80s!

Many of the occupations of the late ‘70s had actually achieved short-term goals; or some work-ins were defeated due to lack of support from consultants. The tactic itself was not in use by the early ‘80s however.

The South London Womens Hospital

In 1983, however, the Wandsworth Health Authority announced intentions to close down the South London Women’s Hospital. This Hospital had some similarities to the EGA, (which at this point was employing male consultants) and similar issues came up in defending it. This time the authorities couldn’t say that a hospital where women could be treated by women was a remnant of the Victorian age. This was when London was allegedly run by a coalition of blacks, gays and feminists under the helm of Ken Livingstone! Arguments were still made in terms of rationalising and budgets. (To be honest, I don’t remember all the claims and counter-claims taking place at the time.)
A staff work-in was begun in late spring 1984, which only lasted a couple of months. As with some previous work-ins in the ‘70s, the work-in ended when there were fewer consultants admitting patients. Then they all were offered other positions and jumped ship. Not surprising!  
However, nurses and other staff wanted to fight on. Together with local activists they called for a “Sleep-in” to take place in July 1984 following the exit of the last remaining patient. The outpatients’ department (housed in an adjoining but separate building) was due to shut later, in the spring of 1985.
I personally found out about the campaign to save the hospital when I went to use the well-woman clinic and there was a stack of leaflets. I think the work-in might have been going on then.
The Sleep-in

A good 200-300 women came to take part in the action, which consisted of sleeping in the wards and maintaining a mass picket to keep the authorities from removing equipment. So it was a fairly full house. All the large wards were filled. The top wards that had private rooms were still empty, but eventually women moved up to them for longer-term living.
Though there were no longer any patients at the hospital, the aim of the occupation was to keep all the equipment on site in readiness for re-opening. Though a relatively small hospital, it was a large rambling Victorian building with many entrances and exists. We maintained a picket at the main front door — and locked the other doors in the main building — and also kept a picket on the lookout in the car park. There was still a lot of coming and going in relation to the outpatients, and we actually had security guards still stationed at the front.
The role of the picket was to make sure no one was taking out beds and equipment.
All kinds of women took part in this event — local old ladies, hospital staff, nurses, anarcha-punky girls – (I recognised the lead singer of a band called Flesh for Lulu). It was also racially mixed. Most of the wards in the main building were occupied, except for the very top ones. There was a generally fun atmosphere, with lots of people sitting outside on picket. It was a warm summer night, people also relaxed in the garden.  
Unfortunately, the next day there were a few snotty social worker types who scolded girls for fooling about on the water-beds when the press was due to arrive!
Of course, when no attempt was made to evict us the next day, we had to decide how we would continue the occupation for an extended period of time and how we would organise ourselves. One problem was the security guards — during the first couple of nights of the ‘lie-in’ they were doing their rounds in the rest of the building while we were sleeping. At the time we were only in the large wards, with those guys walking around shining their flashlights. There were some tense talks about this, but eventually they agreed to stay in their office/post on the bottom floor.

Continuing the occupation

Numbers were still high for the first couple of weeks, but as you might expect they started to dwindle. It had already become a strain maintaining the picket. After the third week or so the council informed us that they wouldn’t be evicting us while the outpatient facility was still going. Obviously, they knew it would be cinch for us to get back into the building. They insisted that the security guards remain downstairs, but as they had been keeping to their area it wasn’t a problem. (Not a bad number — they didn’t have to do much work!)
So the receding of an immediate eviction threat meant lower numbers, though we still had to maintain a presence to prevent them from dismantling the hospital and taking equipment out surreptitiously.

Greenham women

Early on women came from Greenham to support the occupation. Sometimes there were a lot of them! By this time, at Greenham there were different gates, which had their own character and politics. We first had one lot who annoyed some of us by telling us we should have non-violence training — I think these women came from Green Gate. I felt this was imposing their own way of organising on us. There was some tension. At the same time, there were other groups from Blue Gate and some from Yellow (before the shit with Wages For Housework) who were maybe more down-to-earth.

In the beginning, there was a lot of Labour lefty influence. This may have reflected influences on the campaign before I got involved with it. This was in the last days of the GLC, which was facing abolition. We got visited by ‘sisters’ like Valerie Wise and other politicians. I remember her giving speeches in front of the hospital, and she kept telling us ‘My name is Valerie Wise, and I’m here to talk about the GLC.’ Some of the women there were chuffed by this! Personally, it made me sick! I also found that a few of the women I had the most agreement with were SWP members. I was having my doubts about staying on.
I went away for about ten days, and the day after I returned I received a phone call that more pickets were needed. Already !?? I was gonna give it a few days before going down again, but my caller said it was very important so I turned up.
There were a bunch of new people around, and I found out that someone was in the process of having a baby upstairs with a midwife in attendance. Then when the baby was born, there was a lot of celebrating and then the TV bods turned up. The baby was a little girl who was named Scarlet.
The new women had just moved to London and set themselves up in the wards with the private rooms. There was a general movement to occupy the wards upstairs, and use the large wards as communal and social areas. With the involvement of new — and full-time occupiers — we launched a new phase. We couldn’t just sit around indefinitely in an empty building. Taking a cue from the Hounslow experience (among the local supporters was a nurse who had been active in earlier struggles in the health service), we made the hospital into a campaign centre. It was beginning to turn into a kind of social centre a well. We invited other groups to use the space, and held activities like jumble sales, tea dances, picnics. One picnic was held in the garden with performers, Vi Subversa, singer from the anarcho-punk band the Poison Girls, came, and ranting poets etc. The 1st big jumble sale was massive – there were bags & bags, which costumed the entire occupation group.
There was a radical nurses’ group that had been active at the time; an Asian women’s health group also met there and did acupuncture. Some of this kicked off quickly, other things took a while to get going.

The Miners strike

During 1984-5 there was the big miners’ strike. We made contact with Women Against Pit Closures and some of them came to visit the hospital. There were women from Rhodesia in Nottinghamshire and from Dinnington in South Yorkshire.

Other occupations in hospitals

At this time there was a work-in in a geriatric hospital in Bradford, the occupation of the A & E at St Andrews Hospital at Bromley-by-Bow… As a group we took part in pickets and occupations like this; we also visited a long-term picket at Barking Hospital — where an anti-casualisation struggle had been going on for over a year.

Actions at Health Authority Meetings

Usually we went to these to ask awkward questions and disrupt things. We went to one meeting just after the eviction and ended up storming the platform and throwing chairs at the authority bods! As time went on, the occupation did become more radical and militant in tactics.

Meetings

Decisions were made at general meetings. We had them every evening when stuff was happening, though this became unnecessary. We set up groups involved with particular tasks — publicity & propaganda, coordination, outreach & campaigning, looking after the building.

Wards

With the big wards getting used for communal purposes, meetings and events, everyone eventually moved into the private rooms (sometimes sharing). Like the gates at Greenham, each ward took on its own character.

Cloud Nine: When a lot of women were around, the top ward in the main building was occupied too. It was favoured by the spaciest Greenham girls, mostly from Green Gate. Some of these girls were great, but there was some tension (from me) because they came to the hospital to chill out (or warm up, during the winter! Because of outpatients still going, the central heating and hot water was still on) Because they considered their stay in the hospital a kind of holiday, they didn’t do any picket shifts.
Chubb: Youngish activists
Preston House: A separate annexe reached via a tunnel or a separate front door — overspill from Cloud Nine
A Ward with Karyn, Viv & Lol: — Primarily local campaigners who’d been there at the beginning. A lot of lesbian nurses!
Coudray: Ground floor ward. Mostly straight women with babies (though there were also lesbian mothers as well, in Chubb and others). Many of them were the offspring of a matriarch called Antonia, who had been involved with a squatted street, Notting Hill’s Freston Road.

Relationships

This was a time when a lot of women ‘came out’! There was general interest in feminist & lesbian politics, as well as lots of copping off. This wasn’t all women who were already feminist activists; all kinds of women who got involved explored new ideas and relationships.

‘Women with special needs’

Because the building was warm and comfortable, and it was an open situation where any woman can come and live there, it drew women who were fairly vulnerable! This was a paradox — while we were supposedly defending health service provision, we found ourselves doing the kind of work that the health services is meant to do or provide back-up in — looking after people who needed sometimes constant care and had no resources. There were disagreements about how to deal with this. Some women didn’t want to know; others got very involved in it.
Some of the difficult folk: an 80yr old Communist called Bron, a quite interesting but demanding character; usually having a go because we didn’t do things the way Uncle Joe said we should;
someone who was a kleptomaniac; Audrey, a schizophrenic.

Problems

There were also problems around childcare, and being that this was the ‘80s — a lot of talk about identity politics.  It wasn’t all fun and parties and solidarity: About a month before the eviction, morale was very low and there was lots of bitching. There were arguments over which ward got the TV! There was also the problem of how to deal with vulnerable women who couldn’t really be hanging around when the place is getting stormed by the cops. In most cases, they left when they realised that things were going to get hot.
In one case, a schizophrenic woman, her sister came to take her and had her sectioned her out of fear that it would be worse when the cops did it.
There was a problem also with others using the occupation as a hotel: we had a couple of invasions of American women’s studies students who kept asking 'How often do they change the sheets here?'

The eviction

With the date of the closure of the outpatients drawing closer, eviction was once again a real threat. When the outpatients was closed, we took control of the whole building. As a group, we got the security guards to leave. They did without too much argument. Then we took over the phones, the switchboard and the communications network — a number of walky-talkies, this was in the olden days before mobile phones were invented!
The imminent eviction had been publicised, and suddenly many more women turned up! Rallying from a depressing period, the occupation took on another kind of life and became vital again.
There had been many discussions about tactics. Some women did not want to do barricading and engage in any resistance, or weren’t able to. In most cases, though they left the building they still put themselves on the phone tree and took part in picketing and demonstrations.
There was one woman called Sharon who insisted that she’d lie down in front of the cops and use her body as a barricade, though she opposed any other kind of barricade. We all thought that would be extremely dangerous, and tried to talk her out of it but she insisted even more and got very shrill and even abusive. At that point, we had to get her to leave. In the end we had to carry her out bodily. I mention this because I think it’s important to record the disagreements and fuck-ups!
We planned to barricade the entrances, leaving only the big front door with a movable barricade (ie. A big heavy plank). Women would barricade themselves into particular wards or on the roofs, while a mobile group would go up to the top floor — turn fire hoses on the bailiffs, chuck sawdust and then go up to the roof of the main building. There would be time for those women who wanted to leave the building before we did the remaining last-minute barricading when the bailiffs came — making sure they got out was one of the jobs of the mobile group before heading to the roof. One thing that sticks in my mind is how we tried to organise things so that people could do that they were prepared to do. Those who were not in a position to risk arrest had plenty of other things to do (for example, do look-out in a van on roads near the hospital), and there was no sense of some actions being more important than the others.
Every afternoon we held rallies in front of the hospital — passing out leaflets, talking to people. Some of us would hang out on the balcony, dressed in various hospital uniforms, surgeon’s masks and sing songs like ‘what shall we do with the cops and bailiffs’. It was very fun and theatrical.
We were on a state of alert — of course many false alarms came through on the walky talkies! I remember code names like “Merrydown” and “Spikeytop”.
Once we got a report that someone was digging up the electricity in the road, and we swarmed out (with surgeon’s masks etc on) to confront the folks alleged to be doing it — turned out to be ordinary road works. Most people were very supportive, people from other hospitals turned up to help picket. A miner who we met in at the Bradford picket also turned up — seemed a bit embarrassed when he realised it was a woman only occupation! (though later sorted out with a miners’ support do).
However, I should mention we were also harassed by homophobic schoolboys.
There was an all-out barricading effort. Loads of wood to be gathered, hammers ringing out. When we were barricading the outpatients, someone had the great idea of pouring vegetable oil on the floor and pouring soybeans on the floor to make it a bit slippy-slidey for the bailiffs.
Being very security-conscious, we wore surgeon’s gloves and masks while performing these operations. While we were barricading, there was a group of alternative women video-makers following us around. We were just about to use some cabinets and trolleys for barricades, then the video-makers insisted we wait for them to film the rows of trolleys to portray “all that is lost”. Wish I could have got a hold of those videos – I don’t remember the names of the women who were on the team, or the name of their group.   
For safety, we all moved out of the private rooms upstairs and everyone slept in Nightingale ward.
Pickets usually involved over 30 women or so. They were more like a party. The mobile group — which I was in — slept in a room downstairs near the door, so we had the party near us all night. But sleep? Did we need it? Not then, nah…

Back to the relationship stuff: Intensity revved up again. For safety, we were all sleeping in the big Nightingale ward. However, the nurses' station acquired some extra curtains and became known as “the bridal chamber”. Lots of affairs started… ended and started… lots of cavorting…

The eviction date came and went, and we were still there. So we again planned on doing things while occupying the building. We put on a party to celebrate (We had the Sleaze Sisters djs doing the music), and started to make plans again. We turned the first floor ward into a place to relax, painted a mural on one wall and gave each other massages; we disrupted a health authority meeting. Some of the groups who’d been meeting at the hospital came back.

About three weeks later, the hospital was evicted on 27th March 1985 by about 100 male cops and 50 female cops. Our numbers had gone down from around 100 to 30, but we still made a good stand. There had been the usual number of false alarms, when a phone call came through the switchboard with a tip-off. This one turned out to be true.
At about 3.15am the alarm was raised that the bailiffs were there. I was upstairs getting a massage at the time!
Women got themselves barricaded into wards or onto the roof while the mobile group barricaded the last door and stairs and turned fire hoses on the cops.
Women were on the roof of Preston House — I think they were the first ones brought down. Meanwhile, a small crowd had gathered in front — summoned by the phone tree. I should mention at this point that we did get support outside the building from men. A local activist called Ernest was very prominent in this — later he was very involved in Wandsworth anti-Poll tax stuff, going to jail for non-payment. I remember him shouting at the cops “why do you have to be so macho?”
Our group ran up to the top floor, turned on the waterworks at the cops & bailiffs (unfortunately, the water pressure wasn’t as great as we imagined), went to the roof and threw the last barricades in place and sat on the cover to the latter leading up to the roof. From the other roof, from the balconies we heard women shouting and singing (I can’t remember any of the songs besides ‘What shall we do to the cops and bailiffs’ — kind of sad…) Smoke bombs and fireworks were let off. We heard the banging below as the cops and bailiffs hacked their way through the barricades. It took them about two hours to get to us up on the roof.
A lot was made of the use of women coppers — it was called “the gentle touch”. Not that it matters, but the policewomen played a subordinate role. It was male coppers that got us off the roof. Whatever their gender, they were big on arm twisting. They made a big show of starting to nick us, “Prepare to receive prisoners”, but pushed us aside outside. However, they did start to cart off two other women. There was lots of pushing and shoving, some fighting in an attempt to save the two women.
Later, we picketed Kennington Police station where the two women were being held — they were released after two hours, though they’d been roughed up while in custody. We then picketed Cavendish Road police station where the cops were holding a press conference on the eviction. After the picket, some of us were walking to a café near the hospital when six of us were arrested again as we walked past cops hanging outside the hospital — they’d been arresting one woman and others went to rescue her. A bunch of schoolgirls were going by and they were so angry about what was happening they tried to help — and got arrested. They were taken to the police station, strip-searched and held for six or seven hours, and released with cautions. The active role of the schoolgirls in this melee makes me think of more recent events, like the 2003 anti-war school walkouts.

Aftermath

A Clause in the Hospital’s Freehold said that the  building must be used for a woman’s hospital. It was also a listed building. The council had tried on a number of plans — one was to turn it into a hotel — but the clause got in the way. It was empty for twenty years after that.
The latest plan is to build a Tesco’s on the site (just on the border of Lambeth and Wandworth, but within Lambeth jurisdiction.) There’d been a lot of local opposition and an appeal against the permission was lodged, but it was recently turned down. I don’t know the details on how the dealt with the clause in the lease. So the Tesco plans seem to be going ahead — unless? … (this needs updating)

Political aftermath

An attempt was made to continue a health-oriented action group. We had a public meeting that was fairly well-attended, even received a small grant and had a meeting place in a disused bunker in front of St Matthews Meeting Place in Brixton. But that fell apart, partly due to political differences (ie. Kings Cross women’s centre!) Perhaps, with the end of the occupation itself, the really transforming part of the action was gone — we were just turning into another lefty campaign group that failed to inspire people, including ourselves. And it seemed time to move on…
Not to end on a totally downbeat note, the eviction of the hospital led to an influx of a lot of women doing stuff in South London, particularly, but not entirely, around squatting, and led to a great anarcha-punky dykey coming together. Culturally, this was very important to a lot of women who’d been alienated from boy-dominated politics AND the dyke scene.

What made this occupation different than others — Why it stands out as a memorable and important experience. The length of time involved, nine months. It did become an important point of contact between groups who might not have worked together otherwise.
In the EGA campaign there was tension about taking the hospital as a special case — a women’s hospital — playing up the feminist angle AND the position of acting in opposition to all cuts as a class struggle. Though it took some time to arrive at this point, at SLWH we did both. Our banners said ‘Stop these murderous cuts’. We also did highlight the women’s health angle as central part of this opposition. (NOTE: by this time, the EGA was using male consultants, though a specialist hospital in gynaecology) Throughout the occupation we sponsored workshops around women’s health, complementary medicine, cervix-spotting. Most of us were aware that just having women doctors wasn’t enough.  
Women-only — I don’t agree with idea that women are inherently lovey-dovey and wonderful and fluffy, but we are socialised differently according to gender and it showed in how we worked together. Despite problems that have also been pointed out, there was a greater degree of cooperativeness, non-competitiveness and a lighter attitude about a lot of things — even taking 1980s identity politics into account. In many discussions we were able to arrive at consensus and allow a chance for everyone to speak.
I’ve only just realised that we were really ahead of our time with our planning for ‘diversity of tactics’ — allowing for more confrontational tactics alongside ‘fluffy’ ones. Back in the ‘80s this wasn’t really done – it was either pacifism or Class War (the group, not the actual class war) posturing. Also within the diversity we placed equal importance on the different tactics and didn’t elevate one above the other.
Around 2000 anti-capitalists started to plan actions with different blocks using different tactics; several years later perhaps the blocs and tactics may have become ritualistic and stuck in a rut. However, the core principle of diversity is still vital.

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• To read an account of a later occupation at another London hospital, UCH, go to http://libcom.org/library/occupational-therapy-university-college-hospital-strikes-occupations-1992