But Churchill was not a splendid Chancellor. He had one great decision in front of him and he got it wrong. In March 1925 he summoned four economists to dine at the Treasury to thrash out the burning economic issue of the day – the Gold Standard ... Globalisation with Britain at the centre ... The radical young economist John Maynard Keynes thought that going back to gold would devastate Britain’s already weakened industry. By instinct Churchill was also against ... And hell it was. The return to the Gold Standard made British exports more expensive, including coal ... An industrial dispute was coming to the boil. The mine owners stood firm. Then at one minute to midnight on the third of May 1926 the TUC called a general strike. Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain, BBC 2009
The struggle of ordinary people for jobs, security and dignity is the story of modern Britain. It’s been an epic story of gain and setback and courage – the miners, the transport workers, the nurses, the dockers, and it’s still going on especially here in Liverpool, although you wouldn’t know it reading the people’s papers. John Pilger, article ‘Breaking the Mirror: The Murdoch Effect’
Members of the flexible workforce might find a lesson in the dockers’ fight against casualisation.
Near the end of Dockers, shown last Sunday on Channel 4, there is a scene in which Big John, a docker, is found dead in his garden. It is deeply moving. I remembered the freezing day last year when Bill Rooney had a heart attack and died. A week later, Jimmy McUmiskey, who seemed a fit man in his 50s, followed. He was the fourth to die since the Liverpool dockers and their families made their stand: one of the longest and most tenacious in British labour history.
Dockers, the film, was written by Jimmy McGovern and the dockers themselves and their wives. It is fine work that guards the memory and tells the truth from the ground up. Among the characters, I recognised Doreen McNally. Feisty, funny, eloquent wife of Charlie, a Liverpool docker for 29 years, Doreen helped found Women of the Waterfront. I first saw her one Saturday in the autumn of 1996 at the Pier Head, a year after the sacking en masse of 500 men described by Lloyds list as the most productive workforce in Europe. The heroic Liver building reared up behind her to a watery sun; a flock of seagulls rose and fell until a hooter sent them flapping back to the Mersey. ‘Where is the union,’ she asked a rally, ‘where is Bill Morris, where is the TUC?’
It is a question millions of Britons might ask as Tony Blair’s ideas about flexible working guarantee a poverty that gives the children of British working people the worst health in western Europe, now on a par with Slovenia and Albania.
This was everything the Liverpool dockers fought against. Since the abolition of the National Dock Labour Scheme in 1989, casualisation had spread through the docks; they believed they were next. In September 1995, they refused to cross a picket line which included their sons and nephews sacked by Torside, a sub-contractor to the main company at the port, Mersey Docks. Within 24 hours, their jobs were advertised. When they tried to return to work, they found the gates locked. It was a trap.
In July 1996, Bernard Bradley, managing director of Torside, revealed to the Commons employment committee that he had wanted to give his men back their jobs almost immediately. Having passed the offer to a regional official of the TGWU, Jack Dempsey, he heard nothing. The Torside dockers were never told about the offer. Had they been told, Mersey Docks would never have had a pretext to get rid of the main workforce.
Almost none of this was reported. Misrepresented as relics from a bygone era, the dockers looked abroad. ‘It was 6 a.m. on a December morning in the fiercest blizzard for 70 years,’ said Bobby Morton, one of four dockers who set up a picket at the port of Newark in New Jersey just as a container ship had docked from Liverpool. ‘We didn’t know what to expect. When we told the longshoremen coming to work what it was all about, they turned their cars around. We were dancing on the picket line, and we hadn’t had a drink.’
From a room with one phone, a fax line and a tea urn, they ignited a show of international labour solidarity believed to be without precedent this century. ‘Pacific Rim trade sputtered to a halt’, reported the Los Angeles Times, as dozens of mammoth cargo ships sat idle in their ports as union dockworkers from LA to Seattle backed the dockers of Liverpool. In Japan, 40,000 dockworkers stopped. Ships were turned away from Sydney harbour. In South Africa, dockers closed all ports ‘in solidarity with the Liverpool dockers who stood by us during the years of apartheid’.
Five months after the dockers were sacked, Bill Morris, general secretary of the TGWU, their leader, came to Liverpool. ‘I am proud to be with you,’ he told them. ‘Your struggle is so important that our grandchidren will ask, ‘Where were you at the great moment?’ and you will either stand up with pride, or you’ll hang your head in shame. There can be no backsliding until victory is won … God is on our side.’
The union gave the dockers money, though not enough to live on. Morris refused to make the dispute official, claiming the government would invoke Thatcher’s law on secondary picketing – a technicality in this case – and sequestrate his funds. Had he launched a legal campaign challenging the injustice of the dockers’ dismissal and anti-trade-union laws that are shameful in a democracy, the battle could have been won there and then.
Betrayal is the political theme of Blair’s Britain, whose pillars include those paid generously to protect the vulnerable, with or without God. In such surreal times, the dockers’ great achievement was to show what was possible. For me, watching their principled fight as they lost almost everything, until the loss of Bill and Jimmy proved too much to bear, was watching Britain at its best. John Pilger, article July 2006, ‘What Did You Do During the Dock Strike?’
The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating. Cesar Chavez
A general strike must become a physical force, revolutionary struggle aimed at the forcible overthrow of the constitutional government and the seizing of power by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress ... nobody with half a brain believes that in Britain such a policy could be successful. Herbert Morrison
Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of labor is the future of America. John L Lewis
In the summer of 1973 the men at the Brookside Mine in Harlan, Kentucky, voted to join the United Mine Workers of America. Duke Power Company and its subsidiary Eastover Mining Company refused to sign the contract. The miners came out on strike. Barbara Kopple, Harlan Country USA ***** 1976
He died of black lung ... I was beginning to hate the company. ibid. Lois Scott
Organise the unorganised. With organisation you have the aid of your fellow men; without organisation you are a lone individual, without influence and without recognition of any kind. And exploitation of you and your family when it pleases some industrialist to make money out of your misery. ibid. John L Lewis, president UMW, televised address
They used to abuse us actually ... If you stuck together in solidarity you can defeat them. Besides that, I learned that the politicians worked with the coal companies. I found out that the union officials were working with the coal companies. I also found out that the Catholic hierarchy was working with the officials. ibid. old miner
The government is acting as their muscle man. ibid.
We have to fight for our rights. ibid. miner’s wife at meeting
We didn’t give them any resistance whatever. We just lay down in the road. ibid.
It’s a feudal system. ibid. Houston Elmore, UMW organiser
Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on? ibid. folk song
Consolidated Coal’s Mannington Mine in Farmington W. Va. was inspected by the Federal Bureau of Mines sixteen times in 1968. Extensions were granted to the company sixteen times. On November 20 1968 the mine exploded. 4 men survived, 78 men were trapped in the mine. ibid. caption
It’s not true that the inhalation and retention of coal dust in the lungs necessarily results in any impairment of the pulmonary function. ibid. Bitumous Coal Operators Association attorney, televised address
If a company kills a man, the company gets let off. ibid. miner
Three months after the contract was signed at Brookside, the national coal contract expired. For the first time in UMW history the rank and file has the right to ratify the contract. ibid. caption
July – August 1975: 100,000 strike to protest company abuse of grievance procedures. ibid.
The trade unions and the Labour Party ... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing. Arthur Scargill
I’ve never known the employer who gives you anything; you get as much as you are prepared to go out and take. Arthur Scargill
In my time we was beaten, rotten-egged, cussed, threatened, tarred and feathered and blackballed from other jobs. Hurt in so many different ways. But at our meetings our advice to the men and women that was hurt, we would just say to them what the good book says – the Lord will not put more upon you than you can bear, at least none of us lost our lives like some did in the early 30s. Thank God! W M Jack Anderson, UAW local 645 TX first local president
Those unions that enjoy the right to strike have no guarantee that sacrificing their jobs and their livelihood will result in victory but they nevertheless engage in lengthy strikes, not because they are assured of winning but because they are determined to fight. William Burrus, 1998