Strikes and trade union history

British factory occupations in the 1970s

Part One: History and background 1.History The occupation of their workplace by working people is certainly dramatic but it is not a new tactic of trade union struggle. The most dramatic occupations to occur were the seizure of factories by workers during the Russian revolution in 1917, and the widespread occupations that took place in Italy in 1920. Groups of British miners and railwaymen staged stay-down or stay-in strikes in the 1920s and 1930s. In America, also in the 1930s, car workers of the emerging CIO union organisation were involved in a number of sit-ins. In France around the same...

The Working Class Self-Education Movement: The League of the "Plebs"

In October 1908 industrial workers who were union-sponsored students at Ruskin College in Oxford founded what they called the League of the “Plebs”. Former students who had returned to their jobs as miners, railwayworkers, textile workers and engineers, supported them. From January 1909 they began to organise socialist classes in South Wales, the North East, Lancashire and other working-class areas. Under the umbrella of the National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC), there were, by 1926-27, 1,201 classes like this across Britain, with 31,635 students. Many classes that had begun in this way...

The real story of Made in Dagenham

In June 1968 women sewing machinists in the Ford car plant in Dagenham took a stand for equal pay in a strike that stopped production for three weeks. They succeeded in getting abolished their lower “women’s rate” of pay and precipitated wider action: there were other equal pay strikes that year and the National Joint Action Campaign Committee for Women’s Equal Rights (NJACCWER) was formed by women trade unionists, who organised a demonstration for equal pay in 1969. Without the Ford women, there would have been no Equal Pay Act of 1970. Equal Pay Act of 1970 Equal pay had been a confused...

Tom Mann: Independent labour gets organised

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.” He might have been talking about the trade union leaders of today. Unfair? Why else, except a burning desire for respectability, have they acquiesced in the hollowing out of the democratic and political life of the Labour Party, the party, which Hardie helped to establish? The trade union leaders’ relationship to the Labour Party is like that of the trade union leaders of the...

The Labour Party: born of struggle

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. The trade unions expressed themselves politically by serving as the arms and legs of one or other of these parties — usually the Liberals, though in an area such as Lancashire and Cheshire where the employers were strongly liberal the trade unions might retort to this by supporting the Tories! The political prospect of the...

Tom Mann 3 —1889: The Great Trade Union Turning Point

Continuing a series on the life and times of Tom Mann with an account of the London dock strike of 1889. Today the trading and industrial activities of the port of London are a shadow of what they once were. The areas where docks and wharves once heaved with cargo, boats, ships and people, are now sites for skyscraper office blocks, exclusive apartments, trendy studios and pricey restaurants — a product of Thatcher’s demolish and “develop” project for the docklands in the 1980s. Go to the London Docklands Museum (located between two bistros and opposite a smart marina) and you will find out...

Socialist pioneer Tom Mann part 3: the struggle for free time

Cathy Nugent continues a series on the life and times of Tom Mann For part 1 click here For part 2 click here For part 3 click here Soon after Tom Mann joined the Social Democratic Federation he proposed to a packed meeting of his Battersea branch that they launch a campaign for an eight-hour day. The SDF had already made the demand part of its policy, but it was a paper policy, not something to agitate about, or fight for. John Burns opposed the motion on the grounds that the “capitalist system was on its last legs and that it was our duty to prepared at once to seize the whole of the means...

The birth of the new unions

Cathy Nugent continues a series on the life and times of Tom Mann “During 1888, the years of propagandist effort on the part of the socialists, urging the people to bestir themselves and try to find a way out of the terrible poverty that existed were beginning to show results.“ Tom Mann, Memoirs That was how, looking back with thirty years of hindsight, Tom Mann saw it. This was the beginning of the great upsurge of unskilled workers, how the most exploited workers formed unions to fight for better wages and conditions, the start of what became known as “New Unionism”. But did the socialists...

Live working or die fighting?

Paul Mason, author of Live working or die Fighting (Harvill Secker), spoke to Mark Osborn Question: What are you aiming to do with this book? PM: I’m trying to bring some of the great scenes of labour movement history to a new generation of readers. The readers I have in mind are not activists, are highly individualistic, have no party line or much knowledge of real history. What I’ve attempted to do is to produce a book in a way that parallels my journalism: telling the story through the stories of individuals. It brings the history to life. In the course of writing the book I found much...

The 1984-5 Miners' Strike, the Miners Who Scabbed, and the Fate of the Pet Pig

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. (Parables for Socialists-5) Reared close to the family, as was common in nineteen century England, the pig is well-treated, mothered like a pet and fed on tit-bits — all the better to fatten it up so that it could at the right moment be turned into as much pork and bacon as possible. The pig is happy and contented, not knowing his place in the human scheme of things. Then one day the...

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