Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living! Mother Jones, The Autobiography of Mother Jones 1925
The governor can stop a strike any time. If I were the governor I would stop a strike by simply saying, ‘These men have a grievance and demand redress from you. Come and discuss these questions with the miners on the fair soil of America like intelligent, law-abiding citizens. If you refuse I will close up your mines. I will have the state operate mines for the benefit of the nation.’ It is not right for public officials to bring scabs and gunmen into any state. I am directly opposed to it myself, but if it is a question of strike or you go into slavery, then I say strike until the last one of us drop into our graves. Mother Jones, 1913
On their side the workers had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. Mother Jones
My friends, it is solidarity of labor we want. We do not want to find fault with each other, but to solidify our forces and say to each other: ‘We must be together; our masters are joined together and we must do the same thing.’ Mother Jones
What Obama and the bankers and generals and the IMF, the CIA, and CNN and BBC fear is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It’s a fear as old as democracy, fear that suddenly people convert their fear to action as they have done so often in history. John Pilger, lecture Socialism Chicago 2009, ‘Power Illusion and America’s Last Taboo’; viz also website
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, Breaking the Mirror: The Murdoch Effect, ITV 1997
Why are we here? Why are we doing this every 26th January – year after year? Of course, we know why – Indigenous people are saying to Australia: ‘Look, we are still here. We have survived the massacres and the cynicism. We have survived.’
But is that enough, I wonder? Is survival without action ever enough?
The sources of power in Australia – especially political and media power – draw both comfort and delusion from the very idea of Survival Day.
Yes, yes, they say, we understand. We have a place for you on the great Australian facade, next to Qantas and Anzac and Fair Go. Their delusion is that as long as Indigenous people have a token role in the theatre of Australia Day, then all is well. As long as there’s a bit of dancing and a smoking ceremony down by the Harbour Bridge, then all is well.
Societies like Australia – with dark secrets and dishonest politics – feed off image and tokenism. They admire their own image of gormless, unthinking patriotism, while secretly admiring their capacity to silence and divert dissent and to control and co-opt people and never to change. It’s a clever system of divisiveness. How does it work?
Take the idea of ‘reconciliation’. It sounds good, but what does it mean? What is there to reconcile between oppression and suffering, poverty and privilege? Does it include ‘justice’? Of course not. Reconciliation is to make the majority feel good with symbolic gestures and symbolic speeches. Nothing more.
Is this acceptable to us, here today? John Pilger, rally Sydney Town Hall 26 January 2016
There is another superpower: and that’s us. Ordinary people everywhere … By speaking out, they deliver a warning to all of us: can we really afford to be silent? John Pilger ***** The Coming War on China, ITV 2016
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 am 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?’
What are we here for eh if we don’t make our mark ... It’s the buzz. Building a team. Finding the job, planning the job. Carrying it out. It’s the camaraderie. Trusting other men with everything you know. With your life. Great Train Robbery II: A Copper’s Tale ***** Bruce Reynolds, BBC 2013
And together they begin to make their voices heard. In October 1836 women from the Lowell Mills gather after work and organise. Their protest against wage cuts is one of the first strikes in US history. And they will win. The mill bosses backed down. A generation of young women go on to become teachers, writers and college graduates. Harriet Robinson would become a leading suffragette. America: The Story of the US: Division, History 2010
The Tolpuddle Martyrs – still a landmark in British labour history. Michael Wood, The Great British Story: A People’s History 7/8: Industry & Empire, BBC 2012
The rights of the British people were not handed down from on high but won by the people themselves – at a cost. ibid.
The Peterloo Massacre inspired new forms of social action. ibid.