AN IDEA WHOSE TIME MUST COME!
A conference for activists, students and academics
Nov 21st 2026, University Place, Manchester
50 years ago, workers at the Lucas Aerospace arms company launched their pioneering Alternative Workers Plan. A challenge to neoliberal orthodoxy, the plan showed how workers’ skills and available technology could be used to make socially useful products, such as heat pumps, wind turbines and kidney machines.
Today, the failure of mainstream politics to address the root causes of the problem has led to massive inequality, climate crisis, militarism/rearmament and the rise of the authoritarian right. The alliance of the right with the tech billionaires is a threat to democracy itself and will make social and environmental crises even worse.
Hear Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards and connect with new generations of workers, activists and communities to plan the economic and social transformation we need.
The Lucas workers’ concepts of socially useful production and bottom-up economic planning with communities is a vital element of a liveable future. In Italy, workers occupying the former GKN auto plant are putting those ideas into practice, making cargo bikes and solar panels.
- Climate Jobs Not Bombs!
- For a just and green transition
- Human-centred technology, not AI-driven automation and deskilling
For more information contact info@breakingtheframe.org.uk, or visit https://lucasplan.co.uk/50th-anniversary-conference/