Ian Patey, the general manager of the Bristol Omnibus Company, told the paper that it did employ a few non-whites "in the garage but this was labouring work in which capacity most employers were prepared to accept them". In other words, he would not tolerate them working as drivers or conductors.
Patey made his position more explicit before a meeting of Bristol's Joint Transport Committee in March 1962. He told members there was "factual evidence" that the presence of black crews would downgrade the job and drive existing staff away. The committee voted not to overturn his policy.
But it was not only management which took this attitude. According to at least one account, in 1955 the Passenger Group (which represented drivers and conductors) of Bristol's Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) passed a resolution that black workers should not be employed as bus crews.
The union operated a closed shop on Bristol's buses - no-one could be employed on the service unless they belonged to and were approved by the TGWU.
[...]
At first the TGWU's regional secretary Ron Nethercott - at the time dubbed "the most powerful man in the West Country" by the local media - publicly declared that the crews would have no objection to black labour joining their ranks. He was soon contradicted by drivers and conductors who told the media they would refuse to serve alongside non-whites.
However, Nethercott, now aged 90, insists the bus workers were not motivated by colour prejudice but by a fear that their income would be eroded.
Basic wages on the buses were relatively low by Bristol standards. Before the war they had matched those of skilled workers at the city's British Aerospace plant, but had since fallen behind.
To match the standards of living of their neighbours, bus crews invariably volunteered for overtime.
According to one ex-conductor, it was common to work from 04:30 or 05:00 each morning until midnight. Most aimed to clock in 100 hours a week, which would raise their take-home pay to £20 - just above the average weekly wage in the early 1960s.
To be guaranteed this much overtime, however, the bus crews' rotas had to be understaffed.
At the same time, management had raised the prospect of "one-man operated buses" (OMOs), which required only one bus worker on board each vehicle to act both as driver and conductor. As a result, many felt their jobs were precarious.
According to Nethercott, it was the threat of having their incomes diluted by a newly arrived pool of migrant labour that motivated the Passenger Group's members to uphold the bar, not racial prejudice.
"Wherever they they came from, Europe, China, Alaska, it made no difference," he says.
"The busmen would have still resented it because they were taking away their overtime. Their wages were so damn low that they depended on overtime to make a living."
Not everyone agrees that the crews were entirely motivated by economic concerns, however.
Tony Fear began working as a "strapper", or a new conductor, at the start of 1961 aged 18. Having served in the Territorial Army he had a number of black friends, and was shocked by what he considered outright racism on the part of his new colleagues.
[...]
Their union eventually voiced its remorse, too. Unite, into which the TGWU merged in 2007, issued an apology in February 2013 for siding with management 50 years earlier. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23795655
[WS:] The main point of this story is that racism is motivated, for the most part, by competition for low end jobs and race serving as a convenient marker for entry barriers to those jobs to reduce competition.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."