The Lucas Plan

The Lucas Plan is a visionary proposal crafted by a rank-and-file group of unionized workers (known as "Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee") at the UK based Joseph Lucas Industries (popularly known as the Lucas Aerospace Company) who were facing downsizing due to "redundancy" (i.e. capitalist cost cutting in service of profit seeking) in 1976.

The workers believed that they could repurpose the company's spare manufacturing capacity and machines to produce socially useful products, such as advanced braking systems, hybrid-electric engines, medical equipment, and even renewable energy generating equipment (such as early generation solar electric panels) instead of weapons of mass destruction or luxury cars for the rich (Lucas produced motors for Rolls Royce, among other companies).

The combine was a rank-and-file organization, led by rank-and-file workers, focused at the point-of-production, that worked outside of the official union structure, which was seen by many of the rank-and-file as too timid or intransigent, and far too closely connected with the employers. Rather than seeking electoral solutions, running candidates for the union leadership, or even socialist party building, the Combine centered militant, rank-and-file organizing as their primary means to achieve their goals. However, the combine, while syndicalist in practice, didn't enforce ideological purity, as it was composed of workers from a polyglot of differing left and labor tendencies, including socialist, communist, liberal, and anarchist. In other words, it practiced the industrial unionism the IWW advocates. It didn't rule out electoralism, left parties, or running candidates for union leadership, but such work was seen as peripheral to the main shopfloor struggle.

Furthermore, the general consensus of the combine was pro-environmental. The overall analysis of the combine included environmental outlooks, noting how (colonialist, white-led) civilization had already significantly damaged the Earth by the mid 1970s, and the proposed repurposing included a good faith effort to produce environmentally and socially beneficial alternatives (although, since this plan was devised long before the dangers of climate change and loss of biodiversity had become daily realities, they still saw a role of ocean-floor mining and oil extraction, though they intended to produce equipment to make the process as non-destructive as possible, which, in 1976, was fairly leading edge).

It's no exaggeration to say that the Lucas Plan is an example of green syndicalism in practice.

• Download a PDF Version of the Lucas Plan.

The effort ultimately failed, primarily due to resistance from the bosses, bureaucratic inertia from the union officialdom, lack of support from the Labour Party (and outright opposition from the Conservative Party), and contemporary objective conditions which, in 1976, meant to ascendancy of neoliberalism and deregulation, which would accelerate greatly under Thatcher two years later. The fact that the Combine had an insular focus and was making a new road by walking into mostly unexplored territory didn't make the job any easier.

Now, as climate crisis deepens, as left-green and/or climate and environmental justice organizing continues to grow and deepen while neoliberalism is in sharp decline, and many workers and unions are growing increasingly favorable to green unionism, conditions for something like an updated version of the Lucas Plan (or many Lucas Plans) are growing increasingly favorable. As a result, interest in the Lucas Plan itself, long consigned to obscurity, has grown significantly in recent years.

The following articles, videos, and documents--organized in reverse chronological order from most recent to oldest--offer further insights into the Lucas Plan if you wish to take a deeper dive and learn more:

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.