Strikes and trade union history

The Workers’ Educational Association was founded in the early 1900s by Albert Mansbridge. Part 1 Mansbridge was exactly what the Christian socialists in the university extension movement hoped to produce: a working-class person who believed in harmony between the employers and the workers, and who thought adult education could bring this about. Mansbridge came up with a solution to the extension movement’s problem of not attracting a sufficient number of workers to its project of preaching class harmony. This solution was the tutorial class. The Education Act passed in 1902 was shaped by the...

In October 1908 students and former students at Ruskin College in Oxford founded the League of the “Plebs”. From 26 March to 6 April 1909 they took strike action in the college. Part 2 The Plebs League eventually became a national movement, providing what was called independent working-class education (IWCE). Later it was called the National Council of Labour Colleges. Through this movement, which was still functioning in 1964, tens of thousands of working-class people both taught and learnt. The basic aim behind IWCE was that the working class should produce its own thinkers and organisers...

Marxists support, orient to, and give great importance to trade unions as basic organisations of the working class. But in most circumstances, in capitalist societies, trade unions are dominated by the better-off sections of the working class, and often follow a narrow sectionalist policy. The British labour movement was like that for all the time that Marx was politically active in Britain, and broadened out only after Marx's death and when Engels, though still alive, was an old man. None of the excerpts below is a straightforward "educational" explanation of the socialist and Marxist case...

Nothing will ever efface for me the memory of my first real strike — on the Salford docks — the first time I saw my class acting as a surging, uncontrolled force breaking the banks of routine capitalist industrial life and, for a while, pitting itself against those who control our lives. Docks strikes were quick and frequent then, in the mid-’60s. Dockers fought back; they stood together. Lord Devlin’s Commission of Enquiry into conditions in the ports reported that to get a strike going in Liverpool often all that was needed was somebody running down the quays shouting “everybody out.”...

According to a recent article by Mark Smith in "Scotland on Sunday", a “controversial new history" which contains "new revelations unearthed by Stirling University historian Dr. Jacqueline Jenkinson" accuses Red Clydesider Manny Shinwell of having "encouraged Glasgow seamen to launch a series of attacks on black sailors." Shinwell, according to Smith, was one of Red Clydeside's "towering figures". When "Churchill ordered British army tanks into Glasgow's George Square to avert a Scottish revolution," he writes, Shinwell was "thrown in jail for his part in the revolt after he faced down the...

A discussion series on British working-class history, from the Chartists to today. Download pdf.

[A review of "They knew why they fought: unofficial struggles and leadership on the docks, 1945-1989", by Bill Hunter.] Bill Hunter's book retells the story of the early struggle of the dockers, with great feeling and conviction. He also retells the story of how dockers in Liverpool, Manchester and Hull walked out of the savagely bureaucratic T&G in 1954 and attempted by way of joining the little, London-based NASD, the Blue Union, to create a responsive and democratic national union for dockers. Some dockers wryly called this "The Greatest Prison Break in History." In a six-week strike for...

Nothing will ever efface for me the memory of my first real strike - on the Salford docks - the first time I saw my class acting as a surging, uncontrolled force breaking the banks of routine capitalist industrial life and, for a while, pitting itself against those who control our lives. Docks strikes were quick and frequent then, in the mid-’60s. Dockers fought back; they stood together. Lord Devlin’s Commission of Enquiry into conditions in the ports reported that to get a strike going in Liverpool often all that was needed was somebody running down the quays shouting "everybody out"...

Readings from Genora Johnson Dollinger, Leon Trotsky, and Antonio Gramsci. See also: the background notes ; pdf version with these readings and the items below on "How to negotiate" and "How to win a sit-in"; How to win a sit-in , by Amy Offner: excerpts , or full text ; How to negotiate : tips from the US labour movement. The Flint Sit-Down Strike 1936 Genora Johnson Dollinger Remembers the 1936-37 General Motors Sit-Down Strike A considerable amount of preparatory work was done before the strike. That preparatory work was done by radical parties. We had several very active organizations in...

Notes on the readings : FLINT 1936 Excerpts from an account by Genora Johnson Dollinger, who was a leader of the Women's Auxiliary. The occupation was decisive in winning union recognition in the US car industry. Genora Johnson Dollinger was a left-wing member of the Socialist Party USA who became a Trotskyist. * What happened. The car industry in the USA (and elsewhere) had been a bastion of non-unionism. The car firms paid relatively high wages but policed their workers fiercely. Ford had an internal police force, and also monitored workers' lives outside work. Henry Ford sympathised with...