Sophie Huckfield & Company: A Socially Useful Production: “The Participation Waltz”

A Socially Useful Production of “The Participation Waltz” begins with The Lucas Plan; a radical proposal developed by workers at Lucas Industries in the UK in 1976 which was nominated for a Nobel Prize. 

Lucas Industries was a manufacturer with multiple sites across the UK. By the 1970’s the workers possessed specialised technical knowledge which was being directed towards the design and manufacture of military equipment used overseas and funded by UK tax payers. In response to what they experienced as a decline in working and living conditions, and an ideological disconnect with the company’s changing end products and goals, the workers at Lucas Aerospace developed what became known as The Plan, which proposed that engineers and workers should have a meaningful role in determining what was produced and how. Rather than accepting technology as something that progresses independently of society, these workers argued that the technologies and systems we make are shaped by social choices, and that those choices should be more democratic. 

The workers developed 150 proposals for “alternative products and systems” which included dialysis machines, wind turbines, fuel cells and public transport systems. The Plan described changes to the hierarchy of the company itself, proposing job redesign, employee development, collaboration with universities and the wider community, and improving participation of women in engineering and technological development. The workers challenged Lucas’s management definition of profitability, asking instead what might happen if social and environmental needs became measures of value.  

During the plan’s inception, the play “The Participation Waltz” was developed with Lucas workers by Broadside Mobile Workers Theatre. The play was performed in factories, picket lines, car parks and community halls and explored the “many dilemmas faced by these highly skilled workers: cancellation of projects, perennial redundancies, having to work on military rather than socially useful products”. Lucas workers designed and built a stage for the theatre and supported the theatre companies Arts Council application, emphasising that dramatisation could provide a basis for a “widespread discussion” of the profound questions facing workers. remain hidden behind closed doors, whilst presenting an alternative. 

The Lucas Plan was never implemented. Its ambitions were unrealised, however it remains urgent. Who gets to decide what is valuable and useful? What is produced and why? How might we dismantle and shape the systems we are made to be part of?