I was actually a trade union "office representative" at Kent Instruments in Luton in 1975 and 1976. There weren't a lot of Marxists around, and the main job of the trade union was to defend the people they represented from the bizarre delusions of the people who supervised them. The personnel department lied to us a lot, and didn't like it when I called them out on it. I was happy to move on to a much better job at EMI Central research during 1976, and stopped being an active union member. I'd got stuck with the trade union work at Luton largely because I could move on in that way - everybody else owned their homes and had kids in the local schools.
Not so much re-construction as de-construction. Thatcher and her crew didn't like manufacturing industry and preferred to make money by shuffling money around. They pretty much wrecked what was left of British industry - though the upper class twits who that thought that they were running it had already done a pretty good job.
A lot of my work involved getting around them - there were people in British industry who knew what they were doing, but there were a lot of upper class twits who had to be fobbed off. The fact that I had a Ph.D. from a respectable colonial university meant that the upper class twits thought that I was on their side, which helped.