COALMINING - LUDDISM
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
Coalmining & Luddism: Laurie explores the meaning of progress, from the former pit villages of South Wales & Durham to contemporary high tech industry. He's joined by Huw Beynon, Emeritus Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Cardiff, who charts the rise and fall of coalmining. What has happened to those communities in a post industrial era? Those who opposed the closure of the mines were often described as Luddites, trapped in a romanticised version of a lost world, but Gavin Mueller, a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, suggests that Luddism may not always be regressive. His research provides an innovative rethinking of labour and machines & argues that improvement in people's working lives may depend on subverting or halting some technological changes. Thinking Allowed is produced in partnership with the Open University.
Producer: Jayne Egerton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
| 0:07.0 | Happiness Podcast. |
| 0:08.0 | For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want |
| 0:14.4 | to share that science with you. |
| 0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
| 0:19.4 | I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that |
| 0:25.4 | calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:36.0 | This is a Thinking Loud Podcasts from the BBC and for more details and much, much more about |
| 0:42.2 | thinking aloud, go to our website at BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:47.0 | Hello, my father was delighted when I returned home at the age of 20 and announced that I had at last got a proper job. |
| 0:55.2 | I was to be a sales clerk at the British anchor artificial silk works, |
| 1:00.0 | bang next to the Grand National Racecourse at Aintry. |
| 1:03.2 | Well, Sales Clark didn't sound all that grand, but I was able to tell Dad that if it was the pathway to better things, |
| 1:10.0 | because if I did well in the office, then the next step up would be promotion to a sales rep, a fully-fledged Rayon salesman, |
| 1:16.3 | someone with a company car who would spend his days selling beams of artificial silk to the blunt mill owners of Lancashire. What I didn't know at the time |
| 1:25.7 | was that Rayon was already a declining industry. The factory closed in the early 1980s with a loss of 1500 jobs, part of the changing industrial |
| 1:35.9 | landscape. |
| 1:36.9 | They were shut down despite the protestations of the local MP Robert Kilroy Silk. |
| 1:42.1 | I remembered that sad time. time as I was reading about a far more |
| 1:45.6 | extensive shutdown. The disappearance of an industry that had devastating |
| 1:50.9 | consequences not only for tens of thousands of workers but for |
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