The Lucas Plan: As a Worker’s Alternative Strategy
“There cannot be industrial democracy until there is a real shift in power to the workers themselves.”
(Lucas Plan, 1976)
In January 1976, a collective known as ‘The Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Steward Committee’ published their alternative workers’ contingency strategy in response to management’s announcement of mass job cuts and corresponding threats of industrial restructuring. Otherwise known as ‘The Lucas Plan,’ it was an alternative to recession and redundancies. Its call for the ‘right-to-work’ made it something of a blueprint that fundamentally challenged the capitalist structures of ownership, profit and production.
The document proposed that workers no longer involve themselves in the manufacturing of military aircraft parts. Instead they should establish control over the design possibilities and production of socially useful technology, through an independent and democratic, worker-orientated co-operative. Fifty years later, the Lucas Plan still offers a model for the repurposing of the capitalist arms industry for a worker-based green industry strategy. It shows that such a transition is feasible, necessary and could be welcomed by the workers involved.
The Lucas Plan in a time of trade union militancy
The Lucas Aerospace conglomerate was one of Europe’s largest manufacturers of military aircraft systems, employing over 18,000 workers. The seventies was a time of trade union militancy, especially in the UK. Workers were striking through the freezing cold ‘Winter of Discontent’,a period between Autumn 1978 and Spring 1979. Widespread lay-offs and factory closures in the aerospace industry were being proposed, with the prospect of up to 20% of the 18,000 Lucas employees being made redundant. Shop-floor trade union representatives of 17 factories, under the leadership of Mike Cooley, an Irish man from Tuam, Co. Galway, mounted a campaign for ‘the right to work on socially useful products.’ Cooley had earlier been selected as the editor of the Combine News, a union newspaper for distribution to all Lucas workers.
The Combine itself was an early 1970’s amalgamation of 12 unions from 17 Lucas factories which were run under a centrally organised management, who could dictate their corporate policy at will. This enabled them to play one group of factory workers on one site off and against another. The Combine thus put the shop-stewards in a position where they could now stand toe-to-toe with management. Through its militant pursuit of wage increases, the Combine had grown in importance mainly through its ability to call for solidarity action across all Lucas sites, as it did in the 1972 three-month strike over pay.
Threat to the structures of capitalism
In 1974, The Combine reached out to French and Spanish labour unions. It also decided, given the urgency of the threatened redundancies, to reach out and meet with Tony Benn, who was then Secretary of State for Industry.
In November of that year, a delegation of thirty-four Lucas shop stewards met with Benn in a meeting that lasted over two and a half hours. Benn’s departmental civil servants became very disgruntled and opposed Benn’s meeting directly with the Combine; as were the bureaucratic office holders and upper echelons of the relevant trade unions. As a direct result of the meeting, the trade union bureaucrats passed a resolution stating that shop stewards must never make direct contact with government ministers and should instead go through the proper channels – meaning themselves.
Tony Benn, described by the media as ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’ was feared and loathed by the British political establishment. However, his personal belief was that workers had to fight against a system that, ‘has entrenched by law, the power of capital over labour. He was still a Labour Party minister and his party had supported the Lucas company to manufacture weapons for NATO.
To compound issues, the Combine had never been recognised by the trade union bureaucrats, further causing problems for recognition in the workplace. Despite these objections, Benn honoured his commitment, met with the Combine and suggested that they draw up an alternative working plan which could involve plans to replace the making of weapons, and save jobs. Such meetings with Benn were never to be repeated by the Combine thereafter.
Threat to management and owners of production
“The past century appears to furnish additional evidence of businessmen’s anti-social behaviour, first in the trust problem and the treatment of labour and more recently in racial discrimination, pollution of the environment, contribution towards low levels of public taste, inability to achieve stability in the economy and inadequate consumer service and protection.”
(Lucas Plan, 1976)
As a result of Benn’s suggestion, 150 product ideas were put forward by the workforce. Specific proposals included an expansion of 40% in the production of kidney dialysis machines, portable life-support machines for ambulances, development of heat pumps, solar technology, wind turbines, artificial limb control systems, sight substitution aids for the blind and fuel cell technology.
The workers themselves designed a new hybrid power pack for motor vehicles and road-rail vehicles – thirty years before EVs were talked about. They designed a road-rail bus,9 to drive on roads and rail; the idea was to provide public transport to rural areas. They designed a small car engine that was more efficient than the normal car engine of the time, at a time when renewable energy and environmental conservation were barely thought of as serious fields of study. They also designed a small vehicle for children with Spina Bifida, to aid mobility, whereby the Spina Bifida Association of Australia ordered 2,000 aids. But Lucas management refused to manufacture any of these, stating that it was incompatible with their product range. In fact at no point was the management of Lucas willing to discuss the plan with their workers nor take it seriously.
Outside the capitalist management frame
Ultimately, the Lucas Plan never came to fruition, as the logic of the capitalist system prevented it. The Plan had shown that when workers got together, they could think for themselves and survive outside the managerial capitalist framework. This was the biggest threat and it could not be tolerated. It exposed managerial class vulnerability who saw it as a profound threat to their right-to-manage.
The Plan has since been viewed by environmentalists and socialists alike as both an inspirational and an architectural challenge to the structures of bourgeois power. The wilful sabotage of the capitalists to the Lucas Plan highlighted something that most socialists already knew; that whilst workers have the capacity to take control of the means of production and can do better than management, it can only be made permanent when the means of production pass into public ownership and the workers socialise the economy collectively.
When Margaret Thatcher came into power in 1979 with her onslaught against trade unions, the fate of the Lucas Plan was inevitably sealed. Thatcher waged war on the unions and privatised whole areas of the public sector and neoliberalism and the market became the dominant way to limit workers’ say in running production..
In 1979, The Combine was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and Mike Cooley received the Right Livelihood Award in 1981. Ironically, the same year the Lucas management sacked him in retaliation for further trade union activity. Cooley later went on to write a series of books such as ‘Architect or Bee?’ and ‘Delinquent Genius: The Strange Affair of Man and His Technology.’ In a forward to ‘Delinquent Genius,’ President Michael D. Higgins, referred to Cooley, as ‘the most intelligent Irish man, the most morally engaged scientist and technologist Ireland has sent abroad.’ He passed away on 4 September 2020, aged 86, in Slough, UK.
The Lucas Plan: As a Threat to Militarisation and Its Illusion of Security
“There is something seriously wrong about a society which can produce a level of technology to design and build Concorde but can’t provide enough simple urban heating systems to protect the old-age pensioners who are dying each winter of hypothermia.”
(Lucas Plan, 1976)
However, fifty years later, in 2026, the Lucas Plan has the potential to go far beyond its initial demands from 1976. Over the last number of years, there has been a serious escalation in military and national security-oriented rhetoric from the EU, UK & Irish government, including Minister Helen McEntee’s promise to bring a Defence Amendment Bill forward to the Dail, to render needless, Ireland’s Triple Lock requirement. This comes at a time when Ireland has been given additional access to NATO resources, such as intelligence, to counter perceived threats from Russia, China and Iran. However, it seems that these moves signal the Irish government’s intention to work much closer with NATO via its own ‘backdoor’ ruse, its drive for military legitimation, its toughening of military rhetoric as it attempts to acclimatise people towards greater spending on security, and accompanying legal changes.
In 2023, annual global military spending reached $2.4 trillion, the highest on record at the time15 and reached $2.7 trillion in 2024 and again in 2025. Recently NATO member states have pledged to increase defence spending annually to 5% of GDP by 2035; which will equate to approximately €1 trillion annually for the EU alone. Arms manufacturers are currently expanding capacity at triple the normal pace, via the EU’s ‘ReArm Europe’ military spending plan.. Now car production in Germany, for example, is being repurposed for armament production to take advantage of this new financial windfall. Such policies make a mockery of the ‘net-zero by 2050’ global pledge and investments set aside for a green transition. To make things even worse, there are plans to invest €3 trillion in AI-compatible data centres between 2025 and 2028.
As a result, working people are becoming more open to socialism worldwide and increasingly understand that the impending climate change catastrophe has been caused by ecocide-capitalism and not by themselves. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions and the worst 32 are responsible for 50% of these. In order to get a clearer picture of what 5% of European Union GDP might look like, a comparison to EU expenditure on healthcare is revealing: the total EU cost of healthcare is on average 10% of Europe’s GDP, which covers running hospitals, clinics, primary care, nursing homes and employing approximately four million nurses and midwives.
A New Lucas Plan for Grassroots Orientated Eco-Socialism
What a 21st century Lucas Plan might then suggest, is that working class people have a role in turning the tide on the new order of EU, UK and Irish militarisation. It would be against Ireland’s plan to spend €1.7 billion on drone defences and fight for a grassroots-oriented eco-socialism instead.
However, running parallel to this should be a demand from the working people of Europe, to force their governments to impose a heavy tax on the 100 polluters and ring-fence 3% GDP to the working classes in order to create approximately four million ‘ecological green-care worker’ jobs based on a non-neoliberalised, social care framework. Such an ‘ecological green-care workforce’ could be involved in local projects: coastal erosion protection projects; clean lakes, oceans and rivers projects; invasive plant species irradiation, land, forest, flora and fauna projects and wildlife protection projects.
Also, as a way of organising against the neo-liberal projects of mainstream militarisation and climate disaster, an ‘ecological green-care’ project could incorporate eco-socialist civil defence projects in preparation for ecological emergencies and disasters. A demand for ‘ecological green-care’ workforce via a new updated ecological Lucas Plan is more urgent now than ever before, especially considering that we are entering the closing stages of the 2020s in a the world is now approaching a point of no return.
