Strikes and trade union history

Tubeworker online meeting, 21 March, 3pm: 40 Years Since the Miners' Strike

📢 A Tubeworker and Off The Rails public (Zoom) meeting

Thursday 21 March
15:00-17:00

In 1984-5, a strike by mine workers rocked the foundations of the British capitalist state. The strike was a counter-offensive against the Thatcher government’s class-war policy which aimed to smash the labour movement.

Women and the miners' strike 1984-5

The 1984-5 miners’ strike is a moment ripe with lessons and with stories that are devastating and inspiring in equal measure. Among them is the incredible story of the coalfield women. The women’s support movement whirred into action only a few short weeks after the strike began on 6 March 1984. Support groups were set up in every coalfield by local women, predominantly the wives, sisters and daughters of miners. They would keep the strike going for 12 long months. Class In Never the Same Again , published in 1987, Jean Stead wrote about the traditional values held by those in the mining...

Gays and miners: the enemy within

Clive Bradley is a socialist and a screenwriter ( Trapped, Castlevania: Nocturne ). In the 1980s he was a member of Socialist Organiser (the forerunner of Workers’ Liberty) and an activist in Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), a campaign group which supported the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) during the year-long strike of 1984–5. LGSM is depicted in the film Pride (2014) which brought the story to a wide audience. Clive spoke to Ruth Cashman. The idea for LGSM came from Mike Jackson and Mark Ashton at the end of June, at the London Pride march. I found out about the meetings...

Agitate for socialism!

The working-class movement is on an uphill journey. The latest official (Certification Officer) statistics on union membership, published 6 July, are thankfully out of date, but sobering. Between December 2019 and December 2020, union membership rose a bit. Between December 2020 and December 2021, it fell a bit, despite lockdowns and work-from-home beginning to fade. The figures depend on unions compiling returns at their year-ends (mostly December 2021, a few as late as September 2022) and sending them in. Even now, the result is incomplete because Unite the Union has done no report since...

The IWW: the great anticipation

A pamphlet by James P Cannon, 1955 Click here for text on the Marxist Internet Archive ... The CIO became possible only after and because the IWW had championed and popularized the program of industrial unionism in word and deed. That alone – the teaching and the example in the field of unionism – would be sufficient to establish the historical significance of the IWW as the initiator, the forerunner of the modern industrial unions, and thereby to justify a thousand times over all the effort and sacrifice put into it by so many people. But the IWW was more than a union. It was also – at the...

The children, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, and the Archbishop

Our good friend the Daily Citizen describes the scenes attendant upon the intended departure of some Dublin children to Great Britain, under the auspices of a committee organised there for the purpose of taking care of children of the locked out workers; as “the most extraordinary scene in this most extraordinary industrial conflict in this country.” We do not wonder at our British friends being surprised, nor at them being horrified, nor at them being scandalised and shocked at the treatment to which they have been subjected, and the vile aspersions cast upon their motives. For ourselves we...

When other workers struck to back the NHS

NHS workers on strike over pay, 1982 In the 1980s large numbers of other workers went on strike directly in support of NHS workers’ demands. In 1982 there was solidarity action on a scale comparable to the 1972 strikes that freed the Pentonville Five or even the 1926 General Strike. During the 1982 NHS pay strike, the biggest in the health service’s history, many hundreds of thousands of other workers struck in support. On a national day of action in September, over two million workers took part in one way or another (there were about a million NHS workers). A hundred thousand demonstrated in...

Shoulder to shoulder for the strike

"Bevan Boys" during the Second World War In May 1944, four Trotskyists, Ann Keen, Heaton Lee, Roy Tearse, and Jock Haston, were jailed for “inciting and furthering” an illegal strike, after a prolonged press campaign, led by the Daily Mail and the Communist Party’s Daily Worker , against their efforts around an apprentices’ strike on Tyneside. This is Ann Keen’s speech for the court. Consistently throughout the trial the prosecution has attempted to separate me from my comrades. He has pictured me as a dupe of Lee and the others. I do not ask for any special consideration. The part I played in...

Connolly, unions and politics

Liam McNulty, author of a forthcoming book on James Connolly, and co-author of the introduction to the new Workers’ Liberty collection of James Connolly’s writings on “Effective Trade Unionism”, spoke to Solidarity about the collection. As far as I know, Connolly did not directly address the “mass strike” debates arising from the 1905 Russian Revolution — for instance, in German Social Democracy between Luxemburg, Kautsky and others. He was, of course, aware of and inspired by the example of 1905. However, his most direct comments in May 1915 in an article on the “Moscow insurrection” focus...

How Connolly linked class struggle to socialism

Liam McNulty, author of a forthcoming book on James Connolly, and co-author of the introduction to the new Workers’ Liberty book of James Connolly’s writings on “Effective Trade Unionism”, spoke to Solidarity . In 1918 John Reed, just returned to the USA from revolutionary Russia, reported that Lenin thought Daniel De Leon to be “the greatest of modern Socialists — the only one who had added anything to Socialist thought since Marx”. The addition was the idea that a workers’ government would be based on organisations developed from workplace struggle against capital, such as industrial unions...

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