Workers' Liberty

Continuing the series on the life and times of Tom Mann

In 1887 Keir Hardie called the leaders of the trade union movement “holders of a fat, snug office, concerned only with maintaining the respectability of the cause.”

Down to the 1880s there was no “labour movement” [in Britain] in the continental sense at all. There were strong trade unions (of skilled workers), and these unions were politically-minded — but the only parties were the two ruling-class ones, the Tories and the Liberals.

Continuing a series on the life and times of Tom Mann with an account of the London dock strike of 1889.

Cathy Nugent continues a series on the life and times of Tom Mann

Cathy Nugent continues a series on the life and times of Tom Mann

Paul Mason, author of Live working or die Fighting (Harvill Secker), spoke to Mark Osborn

By Paddy Dollard

In Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, there is a strange, affecting scene, in which the butchering of a hand-raised pig is described. It is told with great sympathy and empathy from the pig’s point of view.

Last night my father told me a story I had never heard before which I would certainly like to know more about. He was talking about his brother-in-law, who at the start of WW2 was in the fire service but was then called up and put as a Lieutenant in an unit designated as part of the Royal Engineers who worked on the Mulberry harbours which were moored off the coast of Normandy and served as the means to get supplies across.

Browsing Lansbury's Labour Weekly again, I found this article from June 27 1925. So, what do you reckon? Are union branches obsolete?

I'm currently writing a book about Poplarism, which gives me a superb excuse to leaf through labour movement stuff from the 1920s. On Friday, I browsed 'Lansbury's Labour Weekly', the newspaper that George Lansbury set up after the TUC took over his 'Daily Herald' in 1922.

Faryal Velmi reports on the Grunwick commemoration event held by Brent Trades Council on 17 September.

The Trade Union Freedom Bill is being proposed to coincide with the repeal of the “Taff Vale Judgement”. What was “Taff Vale”?

PRE-MAYDAY EVENT with the
Industrial Workers of the World

SATURDAY APRIL 29
THE SQUARE OCCUPIED SOCIAL CENTRE - 21 Russell Square

4 pm - WORKPLACE ORGANISING TRAINING
with Adam Lincoln, IWW dual carder and

By Cynthia Baldry, Workers’ Fight, March 1973

In Shrewsbury on 15 March, 24 building workers appearing in court were met by a show of solidarity from other workers, meeting outside the court and then marching through the town.

The following extract is taken from Frederick Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England.

Writing in 1845, Engels described the misery of life for English workers at this time, particularly in and around Manchester. The book is a passionate indictment of capitalism, and is well worth reading for that alone. But it is also full of ideas.
The nature of capitalism in the UK has changed in some respects — just as early industries were subject to many booms and slumps — but the imperatives of capitalist accumulation still rule our lives. The basic struggle between bosses, out to maximise profits, and workers, struggling to maintain a standard of living, remains in all essentials the same.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), otherwise known as the Wobblies, in the United States.

Contemporary accounts of labour movement struggles from the 1830's.

The story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs is used by the TUC to popularise basic trade unionism. Every summer there is a festival in Tolpuddle to commemorate the group of Dorset agricultural labourers who in 1834 were prosecuted and transported to Australia for trying to organise a union.

By Jean Lane

No Sweat was once more at the Tolpuddle Festival this year. Organised by the South West TUC, this is the annual celebration of the men who fought to set up a trade union, in their a tiny Dorset village in 1830.

Des Warren, who died on 24 April aged 66, was one of the "Shrewsbury pickets", a group of building workers who were jailed by the then Conservative government in 1973 after a bitter dispute. Warren was a steel fixer and a member of the Communist Party. He later joined the Workers' Revolutionary Party.

In his TV review, Jack Cleary gives a rather confused potted history of the Daily Herald (Solidarity, 8 April). You might be interested in a more accurate version from one who was a regular reader of the paper.

By Pablo Velasco

In the summer of 1766 Mexican silver miners of Real del Monte, about one hundred kilometres north of Mexico city, developed a major industrial strike without a trade union or a political ideology to sustain them. It was the first strike in the history of Mexican labour and the first strike in North America.

by Oona Swann

The workers’ fight goes on

“In the year 1831-32, there was a general movement of the working classes for an increase of wages, and the labouring men in the parish where I lived [Tolpuddle] gathered together, and met their employers, to ask them for an advance of wages, and they came to a mutual agreement, the masters in Tolpuddle promising to give the men as much for their labour as the other masters in the district… Shortly after we learnt that, in almost every place around us, the masters were giving their men money, or money’s worth to the amount of ten shillings a week — we expected to be entitled to as much — but no, nine shillings must be our portion. After some months we were reduced to eight shillings per week. This caused great dissatisfaction...

By Nick Holden

This year's Tolpuddle Festival is on Friday 18-Sunday 20 July, at Tolpuddle, Dorset. It is a heady mixture of music, drama and politics, uniting people across the country in a celebration of the trade union movement, and the memory of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

by Jim

On May 1 1886, 80,000 workers and their families walked down Chicago's Michigan Avenue in the worlds first ever May Day Parade. At the same time 340,000 workers in 12,000 factories across the US downed tools in a general strike to demand an eight-hour day. They demanded that their employers provide work for the thousands who were being made unemployed by new machinery.

By Paul Hampton

Two million people are killed at work around the world every year according to the International Labour Organisation. This is greater than the numbers killed in wars, by AIDS or by alcohol and drugs.