Strikes In Britain Research Articles

Another Winter of Discontent? Strikes in Britain

Another Winter of Discontent? Strikes in Britain

Britain's Biggest Wartime Stoppage: The Origins of the Engineering Strike of May 1917

AbstractThis article re‐examines the causes of the May 1917 engineering strike, the biggest strike in Britain during the First World War. Besides official files, it uses private papers and the records of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. The stoppage began in sympathy with sacked employees at Tweedale & Smalley in Rochdale, who were resisting the spread of ‘dilution’ (replacing skilled by unskilled workers) from military contracts to private and commercial work. A second major issue was the government's replacement of the ‘trade card’ scheme protecting skilled engineers from military service. These issues would have been easier to resolve had it not been for underlying war weariness and falling real earnings, as well as uncertainty over whether skilled men could regain their pre‐1914 employment privileges. The strike was unofficial, and would not have spread so far and fast without local leadership from shop stewards, though this later proved a source of weakness. None the less, although the strike initially seemed a failure, it frightened the government and elicited major concessions. In part this was because Prime Minister David Lloyd George accepted that he must combine repression with the alleviation of legitimate grievances.

Intra-union conflict and the 1970 dock strike in Britain

ABSTRACT The docks are one of the most academically scrutinised sectors of the British economy and, due to the industry’s historical reputation for strike-proneness, episodes of workplace conflict are generally popular sources for research. Nevertheless, one dispute remains curiously under-examined – the 1970 national dock strike. This is particularly remarkable since it constituted the first national strike in the industry for nearly half a century, lasted almost three weeks, led to the declaration of a State of Emergency and required a government-sponsored inquiry to reach a resolution. On the surface, it was provoked by disagreement between the national employers’ association and the union over basic weekly wage bargaining. Behind the scenes, however, the course, nature and outcome of the dispute is best understood in the context of the relationship between the membership and officialdom of the union, which was rooted in a history of antagonism, and the revolutionary technological changes taking place in cargo handling at this time. What follows is a detailed account of the 1970 national dock strike and the events surrounding it, considered in the context of the literature relating to hierarchical divisions in trade union organisations. Abbreviations LMC: Local Modernisation Committee NAPE: National Association of Port Employers NASDU: National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers Union NDLB: National Dock Labour Board NDLS: National Dock Labour Scheme NJC: National Joint Council for the Port Transport Industry NPSSC: National Ports Shop Steward Committee TGWU: Transport and General Workers’ Union TUC: Trades Union Congress TUR: Temporary Unattached Register

Out of Step

When was the Irish Revolution? The question was posed again recently at the twentieth Conference of Irish Historians in Britain, held at the University of Liverpool in July 2016, and answers offered by the roundtable participants and the audience ranged from ‘1798’ to ‘never’.1 In Hesitant Comrades, Geoffrey Bell implies that there was an Irish Revolution and that it began with the 1916 Easter Rising and concluded with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.2 Such conservative dating seems odd for a book that takes the labour movement as its subject, especially since James Connolly and – later – Constance Markievicz (first Minister for Labour in Dáil Éireann) regarded 1913 as the initial contemporary revolutionary moment.3 James Connolly’s militarization of the Irish working class began with the organization of the Irish Citizen Army, founded during the 1913 Dublin Lockout to defend Irish workers from brutality enacted by organized capital and by the Dublin Metropolitan Police, whom the workers perceived as acting in the interests of the capitalist-imperialist state. It is well established that a key contributor to the failure of Irish labour’s ambitions during the Lockout was its fraught relationship with British labour, leading to the Trades Union Congress’s refusal to sanction a sympathetic strike in Britain.4 The TUC’s rejection came despite an outpouring of sympathy from the British public and important denunciations of Bloody Sunday (31 August 1913) by prominent figures in the British left, including George Bernard Shaw.5 The dissonance between public opinion and the actions taken by labour leaders in Britain is an essential context for interpreting how the broad spectrum of the British left reacted to the Easter Rising and its aftermath.

Has protest increased since the 1970s? How a survey question can construct a spurious trend.

The literature on political participation asserts that protest has increased over the last four decades, all over the world. This trend is derived from surveys asking questions about participation in various forms of protest, including demonstrations, boycotts, and unofficial strikes. The latter question made sense in the context in which it was formulated, Britain in the early 1970s, and with regard to the original methodological aim, measuring 'protest potential'. The absence of a generic question on strikes, however, distorts our understanding of protest. Two sources of data on Britain in the 1980s and 1990 s - a population survey and an event catalogue - comprehensively measure strikes. They show that strikes greatly outnumbered demonstrations and other forms of protest. Another claim in the literature, that protesters are highly educated, no longer holds once strikes are properly counted. Strikes in Britain, as in many countries, have dramatically declined since the 1980s. This decline more than offsets any increase in demonstrations and boycotts, meaning that the total volume of protest has decreased. The episode illustrates how survey questions, when replicated without scrutiny, can misconstrue social trends.

Striking Back: Novels of Class Conflict by Two Proletarian Women Writers

For the first time since the General Strike in Britain in 1926, the two biggest member unions of the national Trades Union Council (TUC), Unite and Unison, which together organise over three millio...

The engineering construction strikes in Britain, 2009

The militant, unofficial grassroots-led engineering construction strikes of 2009 dominated the news in Britain for many months, attaining international prominence because of their alleged xenophobia. To mainstream commentators, they appeared to be a throwback to a distant past, and inexplicable given that only a very few groups of workers are now seen as having the capability to undertake such action. Indeed, conventional explanations relied on using the alleged xenophobia as the motivating and organising rationale. This article examines the strikes, explaining their genesis, dynamics and achievements as well as their limitations. A key finding concerns how an industry class consciousness played a critical role in facilitating the workers’ ability to mount militant and successful collective action.

Ralph Darlington and Dave Lyddon, Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain, 1972. London: Bookmarks, 2001. xii + 304 pp. £13.99 paper.

Official statistics for 1972 (which certainly understated the total picture) recorded over twenty-five hundred strikes in Britain, a figure exceeded only once before (in 1970) and three times subsequently. The number of “days lost,” almost twenty-four million, was the highest since 1926, the year of the General Strike; in only two subsequent years has the total been greater. To a generation that reached maturity in a dark period of trade union defeat and decline, the record of those years of (at least partial) victory and advance must seem like another world. In providing a chronicle of trade union activism in that year, Darlington and Lyddon perform a genuine service.

Book reviews

Keeping the Peace? Policing Strikes in Britain 1906–1926 by Barbara Weinberger, 1991 Oxford: Berg, pp. 229, price £27.50 hbk. The Case for the Prosecution by McConville, M. Sanders A. and Leng R. Routledge 1991, £35 hardback. Chief Constables, by R. Reiner Oxford University Press, pages 383 + xii, 1991, £17.95. On the Mersey Beat: Policing Liverpool between the Wars, by Mike Brogden. Oxford University Press, 1991, 184 pages, £14.95.

Keeping the peace?: policing strikes in Britain, 1906-1926

The trade unions and the Trades Disputes Act maintaining the peace - Newport, 1910 the south Wales coal strikes, 1910-1911 the summer of the great unrest the great unrest concluded strikes in wartime two challenges - labour and police, 1919 policing the post-war strikes.

Industrial Conflict and Resolution in Canada and Britain

Approaches to industrial conflict resolution in Canada and Britain are examined. The Canadian policy to regulate industrial conflict through a discrete interventionist formula, as opposed to British government′s “hands‐off” approach in dealing with industrial disputes, would suggest a much greater volume in strike activity and incidence of strikes in Britain than in Canada. But this is not the case; the reverse is true. A “politics of production” approach, concentrating on three key loci of workplace struggle between management and labour in the two countries, is presented, concentrating on areas of discipline, regulation of the internal labour market and job control. It is argued that rather than reducing industrial conflict, the Canadian policy may actually be a major cause.

The local organisation of a national dispute: the British 1979 engineering strike

The national engineering strike of 1979 was by far the largest strike in Britain in recent years. Here the authors examine a crucial aspect of the strike which has been given little systematic attention, that is in the way it was organised at local level and mobilised mass support.

Book reviews

Book reviews in this article: EUROPEAN INSIGHTS: MANPOWEREdited by Barrie O. Pettman, WORKERS AND EMPLOYERS: DOCUMENTS ON TRADE UNIONS AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN BRITAIN SINCE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURYJ. T. Ward and W. Hamish Fraser (eds.), INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN THE NHS—THE SEARCH FOR A SYSTEM Nick Bosanquet(ed.), STRIKES IN BRITAIN C. T. B. Smith, Richard Clifton, Peter Makeham, S. W. Creigh and R. V. Burn, MORE BAD NEWSGlasgow University Media Group, Routledge and Kegan Paul MANAGING AND DEVELOPING NEW FORMS OF WORK ORGANISATIONG. Kanawaty (ed.), NEW FORMS OF WORK ORGANISATION 1 NEW FORMS OF WORK ORGANISATION 2 INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR: THE FIREMEN N. F. Dufty,

The Natural History of the Strike in Britain

In this paper we shall describe the development of the strike in Britain, paying special attention to its importance within the framework of collective bargaining and trade union growth. A fuller discussion of all the major aspects of Britain's strike record would of course require more than a single paper.1 Perhaps the most useful and concise definition of a strike is that given by Peter sen?'a temporary stoppage of work by a group of employees in order to express a grievance or to enforce a demand'.2 Such a collective stoppage of work must be undertaken in order to bring pressure to bear on those who depend on the sale or use of the products of that work.3

Facts to dispel those flights of fancy

It's always pleasing when someone demolishes a myth. The myth in question could be heard at the height of the troubles involving car and hospital workers. It goes something like this: “No wonder there are so many strikes in Britain when the State makes welfare payments to strikers and their families.”