Mike Cooley obituary
The innovative
thinking and political campaigning of Mike Cooley, who has died aged 86,
influenced generations of trade unionists and advocates of a sustainable, green
and socially just economy.
It was while
working as a highly skilled design engineer at Lucas Aerospace during the
turbulent 1970s that Cooley, who was also a mililtant trade unionist, first
made his mark. He believed that a radically different relationship between
technology and human skill was needed for social transformation. At the heart
of his philosophy was a conviction that the supposed conflict between these
forms of labour should be transformed into a mutually reinforcing partnership.
At that time, when
strike action in defence of jobs and pay was commonplace and workers on the
Clyde occupied their shipyards, Lucas workers faced the loss of many hundreds
of jobs. Cooley, who then chaired the local branch of the technical trade union
Tass (the Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section of
the AUEW), and was a member of the Lucas group’s national shop stewards
committee, was instrumental in the formation of the Lucas Plan – that aimed to convert
Lucas production from arms to the manufacture of a wide range of socially
useful products.
Appalled at the
contradiction between society’s potential and unmet social need, Cooley later
wrote, in his first book, Architect Or Bee? The Human Price of Technology (1980):
“We have, for example, complex control systems which can guide a missile to
another continent with extraordinary accuracy, yet the blind and the disabled
have to stagger around our cities in very much the same way as they did in
medieval times.”
Through
consultations with community groups and health service users and workers, the
Lucas shop stewards came up with proposals for a hybrid road/rail bus and a
radically new kind of portable kidney machine. Following a visit to a centre
for children with spina bifida, a vehicle was designed to help children with
this condition to be independently mobile.
After realising
that 30% of people who die of heart attacks die before they reach the
intensive-care unit, union members at another Lucas plant developed a
lightweight, portable life-support system that could be taken in an ambulance.
Cooley subsequently wrote: “The workers involved were encouraged to think of
themselves in their dual role, both as producers and consumers.”
Without the backing
of government and with the decline of trade union power the campaign failed.
But some of the socially useful prototypes were subsequently developed and
produced by commercial companies in other countries.
Born in Tuam,
County Galway, to Eddie Cooley, a garage owner, and Frances (nee Browne), Mike
went to the local Christian Brothers school. Due to his love of design and
engineering, he was allowed to study one day a week at the nearby technical
college. He then worked as an apprentice welder and fitter for the Tuam Sugar
company. He began learning German at that time as well, then studied
engineering at Bremen Mechanical Engineering University in the mid-50s.
After a period
working for a specialist manufacturing company in the Oerlikon district of
Zürich, Switzerland, Cooley moved to London in 1957 and gained a PhD in
computer-aided design at the North East London Polytechnic (now the University
of East London). That marked the start of a lifetime devoted to a better
understanding of the role of the replacement – in Marxist terms – of living
labour by dead labour.
He became a
visiting professor at Umist (the University of Manchester Institute of Science
and Technology) and, in 1961, married Shirley Pullen, who proved a lifelong
kindred spirit and was his first publisher, of Architect Or Bee.
Fired from Lucas
for his activism, in the 1980s he was appointed director of technology at the
newly created Greater London Enterprise Board, where I
worked with him. There he helped worker co-operatives and other small
enterprises to develop 33 new ways for workers to interface with computer
technology, rather than their skilled work being replaced by machines.
Cooley drew
inspiration from the historical precedent of the builders of the great medieval
cathedrals who – he never tired of pointing out – were their own architects. In
1981 he received the Right Livelihood award for “designing and promoting the
theory and practice of human-centred, socially useful production”.
He continued to
lecture at universities across the world, and produced a series of books
outlining his ideas for restoring decision-making power to workers in the
production process. His output was compiled in the 2020 reader The Search for
Alternatives: Liberating Human Imagination.
In Delinquent Genius – The Strange Affair of Man and His
Technology (2018), Cooley disputed the “inevitability” of ever
greater de-skilling of human labour, writing: “I disagree. The script for this
finale can still be rewritten. And I do mean ‘man’ and not ‘humanity’, for it
is a relationship from which women have been largely excluded and this to
disastrous effect
The president of
Ireland, Michael D Higgins, wrote in a foreword to the book: “Mike Cooley may
well be the most intelligent Irishman, the most morally engaged scientist and
technologist Ireland has sent abroad.”
Cooley is survived
by Shirley and a son, Graham. Another son, Stephen, died in 2009.
• Michael
Cooley, engineer and author, born 23 March 1934; died 4 September 2020
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