TGWU

Transport and General Workers Union

Jack Dromey and the Grunwick strike

Birmingham Erdington Labour MP Jack Dromey has died unexpectedly aged 73. Long a Transport and General Workers’ Union full-timer before he became an MP in 2010, before that Dromey played a central and generally positive role in one of the most important working-class struggles in British history – the 1976-8 Grunwick strike . The book about the strike Dromey co-authored, Grunwick: the Workers’ Story , is very much worth reading. In the 1970s he had CP-type politics and was close to the CP, but was a genuine class-struggle militant. Subsequently he moved a long way to the right. As a T&G...

Return to Gate Gourmet!

Over the decades much of the British labour movement has come to celebrate the stormy Grunwick strike of 1976-78. That does not mean the dominant forces in our movement have absorbed what was important about it. Not 45, but just 16 years ago in 2005, another struggle by mainly South Asian, migrant women workers flared up. The fight of the Gate Gourmet airline catering workers against mass sackings designed to drive down conditions and bust a strong union had important similarities with and differences from Grunwick. Although it did elicit important solidarity action, it did not produce the...

How transport workers beat the colour bar

Also available as a video talk here . This story of colour bars in the UK railway and bus industries begins after the Second World War, when Britain had a labour shortage and people moved to Britain in increasing numbers from Caribbean countries and elsewhere. The National Union of Railwaymen (NUR, predecessor of the RMT) declared in 1948 that: “we have no objection to the employment of coloured men in the railway industry” and that “coloured men had been satisfactorily employed on the railways over a long period”. But although the top of the union was getting it right, in some areas the...

The Story of Colour Bars on the UK Railway

Speaking at our online meeting in September, Janine Booth tells the story of the period after the end of the Second World War when black people came to Britain but met opposition from some white workers, until the 'colour bar' was defeated in 1966.

Talking, explaining, and telling the truth

I knew Tom Cashman as a friend and comrade from the early 70s. Tom was someone who had a hinterland; his interests spanned good whiskey, particle physics, a love of Sean O’Casey’s plays, modernist architecture, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of schisms in the Catholic Church, which quite frankly bemused me. Tom was a very rounded person and a very humorous one. But I want to say something about Tom the public man. Tom was a Marxist, an atheist and trade unionist who dedicated his life to the working class and had an unwavering conviction that socialism was the only hope of humanity. Tom’s main...

Tom Cashman

In the last issue of Solidarity , Bruce Robinson remembered the life of Tom Cashman, socialist trade unionist and long-time associate of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, who died last month. In this and future issues we will print further tributes. Tom Cashman was, quite simply, one of the finest and most principled people I’ve ever met. I first encountered him around about 1974 or 75 in the bar of Birmingham University Guild of Students. Tom was there attending a Troops Out conference; I was a naive young member of IS [today SWP] who had begun to have doubts about the Cliff regime and had...

Class War in Britain's Ports (1967)

The Devlin plan and the docker (1967) This July 1967 pamphlet was the first piece of public literature put out by the Workers' Fight group, forerunner of AWL. The "Devlin plan" was the government's plan of the time to "rationalise" the ports and push through "containerisation", a root and branch technical revolution in the workplace. THE DEVLIN PLAN AND THE DOCKER D DAY OR V DAY ? The employers have called September 15th D Day - and most dockers take this war- time language as proof that what the employers really want is not D Day but V Day: the day of their victory over the docker, when the...

How workers' action freed the Pentonville Five

Vic Turner carried aloft as the Pentonville Five are released From Workers' Liberty magazine 41, July 1997 Part two, on the role of the left, here It is July 1972. With the union leaders safely in talks with Tory Prime Minister] Heath and knuckling under to his Industrial Relations Act (IRA), the Tories now went for the real union power on the docks: the rank and file. They were going to make an example of five dockers from east London to cauterise resistance to the long-term running down of the docks, to stop the unofficial blacking (refusal to unload) of lorries and picketing at the...

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