The Working Party Report published in 1948 became a key reference point in post-war discussions of the jute industry, and the need for its ‘modernization’. The establishment of this Working Party was one important sign of a major new national emphasis on industrial efficiency which began during the war and was strongly pursued by the Attlee government after 1945. In many respects this shift was a straightforward consequence of wartime Britain moving from a labour surplus economy, suffering mass unemployment, to one in which labour was in short supply, and therefore had to be used more efficiently. While the emphasis on efficiency led to national initiatives on everything from Research and Development to investment to training, at the centre of much of the argument was labour; ‘higher labour productivity’ became a key aim, and in many analyst's and policy-maker's views this was to be achieved by direct action on labour usage and labour effort.

Working parties were set up by the Labour government for a range of industries with a similar remit, which in the case of jute was to:

A central feature of British history in the twentieth century is the long decline of the great staple export industries of the pre-1914 period. These industries were the core of Britain's industrial economy before the First World War, employing huge numbers, and providing the majority of exports which underpinned Britain's extraordinarily globalized economy of that era. At the time of the 1907 Census of Production the four biggest of these staples – textiles, coal, iron and steel and general engineering – employed 25 per cent of the working population and produced 50 per cent of net industrial output. Coal, textiles and iron and steel alone contributed over 70 per cent of total British export earnings. But over the following decades, at varying tempos, they all shrank to a small fraction of their previous size. After the great iron and steel and coal strikes of the 1980s these two industries followed cotton and shipbuilding downwards, with employment in iron and steel going from 186,000 in 1979 to 54,000 by 1990, in coal over the same period from 232,000 to 42, 000. The contribution of these four to British trade had likewise shrunk to insignificance.

The demise of these industries resulted in both their owners and governments facing enormous problems of ‘managing decline’. On the employers side a whole range of responses were deployed, usually in combination.

The historiography of the jute industry discussed in Chapter 1 identified the era marking the end of the nineteenth century through to the First World War as the high point for the industry. This historiography faces a paradox; as an industry of the first industrial revolution, one in which technological change was limited or transferable between competitors, and an industry that saw rapid international competition leading to mass unemployment in the 1930s, it is quite remarkable that jute in Dundee not only continued but thrived into the post-war years. The explanation for the longevity of the jute industry requires a detailed explanation. A significant part of that explanation, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate, lies with the ability of the industry to successfully regulate market conditions. The invisible hand of market forces was partly displaced by the visible hand of firm level co-ordination and government regulation of competition and prices. In Chapter 3 we highlighted the degree to which the industry collectively managed labour supply, labour costs and the labour process. As this chapter now examines, management of the industry on a collective basis extended further than simply the question of labour and extended into all aspects of its commercial relationships. That collective approach included co-operation and regulation both vertically between firms within the supply chain and horizontally between competitors within each sector of the industry. Industry regulation thus played a significant role in a range of areas that are essential to understanding the longevity of the industry after 1945.

As previously demonstrated, the decline of the Dundee jute industry had emerged by the first decades of the twentieth century. Only the introduction of Jute Control in 1939 succeeded in providing the industry with any measure of protection from international competition. At the end of the Second World War these competitive pressures re-emerged, resulting in the continuation of pre-war and wartime protection for the jute industry. Aided by the continuation of this protection, the post-war decades, until the 1970s, can be understood as ones of relative prosperity for the industry. Under Jute Control the industry underwent significant specialization into protected, higher-quality product markets. This was associated with changes in production processes in the form of increasing capital intensity, and an associated move away from a concentration on female labour. The main argument in this book is therefore that this decline was in many ways successfully managed in the period from the end of the Second World War until the final ending of Jute Control. The diminution of the industry thus took place simultaneously within the wider crisis in British manufacturing of that decade and, especially, the subsequent recession of 1980–1. In Scotland, and Dundee specifically, this was also reflected in the closure of newer manufacturing industry associated with the growth of foreign direct investment in the earlier decades.

The decline of jute in Dundee has an air of inevitability. An unsophisticated product, with a large part of its costs of production comprising a foreign-grown raw material, it was unsurprisingly subject to devastating competition from producers in developing countries who could (with a little help from Dundonians) successfully enter the industry, using local raw materials. Yet, as we have sought to show, the story of jute's decline in Dundee is not a simple story of the undermining of ‘juteopolis’ by low-cost competitors. The industry responded pro-actively and in a range of ways to its problems. Even before the First World War it was moving its products away from the bags and sacking which dominated in the period of the extraordinary growth of world trade in primary products after 1870. At the same time it sought protection for the industry, a search which was only ultimately successful in 1939 because of the contingencies of war – always a powerful force in the industry's fortunes.

While the industry thereafter sought to make protection permanent, it could not and did not couple this defensive posture with neglect of the need for ‘modernization’ and diversification. Central to the story of post-war jute is the interaction of these two imperatives

At a meeting of the AJSM in May 1977 the jute employers sought to challenge the analysis of the industry's recent past put forward in a draft of the McDowall Report in dialogue with the authors of the Report.