TGWU

Transport and General Workers Union

A collection of short articles from Workers' Liberty 12-13, August 1989

Click here to download the pdf including all these short articles from Workers' Liberty 12-13, August 1989. Strikes in Stalinist and ex-Stalinist states; Rushdie; EU; Dock Labour scheme scrapped; more on USSR strikes; strikes in UK; abortion rights in USA; world economy; British economy; Scottish left and Assembly; independent union in China. The heirs of Stalin face the workers: In China, in Yugoslavia, in Poland, in the USSR, the working class is becoming an independent force for the first time in many decades. Rushdie and the labour movement: The Labour movement, Muslim zealots and Salman...

Lessons of the Liverpool docks strike

In these modern times of “global capitalism”, “global communication” and “global culture” the one thing that’s supposed to have disappeared forever is the idea of international working class solidarity. It might not be fashionable enough for the world-wide Net but it’s making a comeback nonetheless. The occasion: the Liverpool dockers strike. Unable to spread their dispute in this country because of the Tories’ viciously restrictive anti-union laws, which rule out all forms of solidarity action, the Liverpool portworkers have had to appeal for solidarity action from dockers world-wide. The...

Working-class solidarity: how British dockers built it and how they lost it

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.”...

Militancy on the docks in the 1960s

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"...

Jack Jones a Russian Spy? Rotten Politics, Not a Spy Story!

According to the official history of MI5, Britain’s spy-hunters considered Jack Jones, the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in the 1970s who died recently, to be a paid agent of the USSR. What secrets did he pass on to Moscow? Brace yourself for the shock: he passed on secret... Labour Party documents! Here the “official history” turns into an Eric Ambler or a Graham Greene spy novel. In Greene’s Our Man In Havana , a British agent there, a vacuum cleaner salesman by trade, is paid for what he says are photos of deadly Russian weaponry but are really parts of his vacuum...

Factory Occupations: Ford Visteon — A Fight for the Whole Movement

“We done what we had to do, we have a message for big multinational corporations: you can’t get away with it no more. You should treat ordinary people with respect. And it’s not us that should be treated as criminals but people like Mandelson.” Kevin Nolan, Unite convenor from the occupied Visteon car parts factory in Enfield, was speaking outside the High Court on Monday 6 April. He and the deputy convenor, Piers Hood, had gone to the court in the morning facing imprisonment for defying an eviction notice brought on behalf of Visteon against the workers occupying their former workplace in...

Further Action at Staythorpe

Engineering construction: Workers demonstrated outside the Staythorpe power station construction site, in Nottinghamshire, again on Wednesday 11 March. But Unite union officials seem to be quietly encouraging a winding-down of the action. Most of the workers currently on the site are Spanish workers, reportedly non-union and walled off from access by trade unionists, employed by two Spanish sub-contractors. The demonstrations are for labour for future phases of the contract to be hired locally under the national union agreement for engineering construction. The numbers on the demonstrations —...

TGWU Broad Left and Amicus Unity Gazette unite

At a meeting in Birmingham on 21 February, the TGWU Broad Left and Amicus Unity Gazette merged into a left grouping for the Unite union into which TGWU and Amicus are merging. There were 150-200 there, though very few young people. The event was mainly speeches from the platform and an endorsement of the merger of the TGWU Broad Left and Amicus Unity Gazette. CPB, SWP and SP were heavily present, but the only political discussion was after the speech from John McDonnell in which he pushed the "People's Charter" originating from the CPB. CPers tried to bounce the meeting into supporting the...

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