Building on wartime
arrangements, the 1947 Dock Labour Scheme brought some financial security to
what was still a casualised workforce.
It guaranteed daily attendance money, fall back pay for those registered
dockers who were not hired that day. It
did not stop conflict. On the contrary, between 1945 and 1955 there was hardly
a year without a dock strike. Up to 1951 this was despite the Attlee government
repeatedly bringing in troops to break strike using the Emergency Powers Act.
Up to 1951 out of a national total of over 14 million strike days, 2.8 million,
one in five, was in the docks where there were just 70,000 dockworkers. Paid
for by the employers, the scheme was run by local Dock Labour Boards with equal
numbers of employer and worker representatives.
In northern ports, the latter were all TGWU full time officials,
ultimately answerable to the general secretary, the rabidly anti-communist
Arthur Deakin, head of Britain’s largest union with 1.3 million members. Acting as agents of the boards, the officials,
in effect, policed the workforce.
Overwhelmingly, strikes were unofficial, led by committees elected from
the rank and file. Five big unofficial
strikes accounted for 70% of the 2.8 million strike days. One was over a local
board decision requiring dockers to unload zinc oxide in unsafe conditions, the
other four were over disagreements between the rank and file and officials such
as solidarity with the long running Canadian seaman’s strike. The 1951 unofficial pay strike for 25
shillings a day against the offer of 21 shillings led the government to use the
hated but still operative war time regulation Order 1305 banning strikes and
lockouts. Seven strike leaders were prosecuted for conspiracy. What had been patchy backing for the strike
now became solid, spreading to every port. The Old Bailey trial of the seven
was marked by solidarity strike action and clashes with the police outside the
court. With the government under severe
pressure, after eight days the Attorney General had the case discontinued and
the seven discharged without penalty.
Within months Order 1305 had been repealed.
A
1945 Manchester Guardian report spelt out the problem with the officials
This antagonism towards their own union, it must be
stressed, is no sudden development. It is a growing feeling that has been
brought to a head by the strike, and conversations with the men it any of the
control points at which they assemble to discuss matters provide evidence of a
very real solidarity on this point. They state that time after time they have
been disappointed and “let down” by the union's handling of their complaints.
Indeed, a list of union “failures” has been compiled. One striker said,
“Because their hands are tied is always their explanation for their own
inaction. They have become our masters instead of our servants.” Older men who
have experienced many disputes at the docks reluctantly agree with this
judgment. They realise that without strike pay they are facing a severe ordeal,
but so strong is the general feeling on the rightness of their actions that
there is little or no wavering among those to whom one talks.
A week after the seven
were discharged, April 1951, 2,300 Manchester dockers took action over two
colleagues suspended for refusing to work overtime in breach of a local
agreement. The strike was led by the unofficial Manchester Port Workers’
Committee chaired by George Norman, CP member who had fought with the
International Brigades in Spain.
After six weeks with 250 dockers reported to be back at work, a mass meeting
voted to return to work. The Guardian makes no report of any agreed settlement
while Ratner claims the employers capitulated with the two re-instated and all
references to the suspension removed from their work records.
The rank-and-file
committees leading the unofficial strikes were a model of democracy. The 1945 strike over pay
... established quite
clearly the real objectives of such committees: to organize the fight for the
dockers’ demands in a way that would actively involve in the struggle as many
workers as possible, irrespective of sectional divisions. Elected by mass
meetings often attended by over 90 percent of the men of a particular control
or dock, the committees represent the most progressive and advanced form of
organization yet developed by the dockers. All committee members are subject to
immediate recall. During a dispute new members will often be added to the
committee, having proved themselves useful to the running of the strike. In
between strikes, the committee will often dwindle to a hard core of five to
seven members. Immediately a new struggle erupts the committee will call a mass
meeting, place itself before the men for re-election and seek an immediate
broadening of its base, asking for other men to be elected to it. This ensures
a genuine responsiveness to the needs of the ranks and a responsibility towards
them no other form of organization is capable of providing.
In the course of the strikes the
committees are charged with holding frequent report back meetings. Decisions on
whether or not to continue the strike, on whether to extend it or not or
whether to return to work on certain conditions, have to be ratified by mass
meetings of the men, convened by the committees. The committee members are
unpaid, all are working dockers and each individual is known to the men who
have to decide whether to vote for him or not. This latter point is very
important and contrasts with union elections where men are called upon to vote
for people they may never have heard of and seldom know really well.
The strike attracted
support from engineering workers and members of the National Union of
Railwaymen (NUR). Also, perhaps not so surprising given that the docks were in
Salford, it was Salford Education Department that provided free school meals
for strikers’ children. However, the decision of Salford City Labour Party’s
executive to back the strikers brought down the full wrath of the Labour Party
machine. Reg Wallis, the party’s north
west regional official threatened to disaffiliate the local party if it did not
withdraw its support. He further
required that that all record of the original decision be expunged from the
minutes. When, on the chair’s casting vote, the City Party delegate meeting
refused, disciplinary measures followed with five senior members expelled and
only re-admitted after a year when they acknowledged they had been in the
wrong.
Anger with the officials persisted. Three years later, the
autumn of 1954, a breakaway movement started, not to a new union but to leave
the TGWU to join the more democratic National Stevedores and Dockers Union
(NASD) organising a mix of stevedores skilled in the loading of ships to ensure
the cargo was safely stowed and dockers who did the graft loading and
unloading. The NASD were known as the
Blues from the colour of its union card, the TGWU being known as the Whites for
the same reason. First to leave the TGWU
were dockers in Hull where officials had badly mishandled a dispute over the
traditional unpleasant and antiquated ‘scuttling’ method of unloading grain by filling
sacks by hand in the hold. The grievance
was that new technology made it no longer necessary to scuttle but the
officials had failed to act. They were
followed by dockworkers in Birkenhead where over half joined the Blues, then
others in Liverpool and Hull. Five
hundred joined in Manchester. In February 1955 Joe Harrison who had been
dismissed from the Scheme because he took a position as paid organiser for the
NASD opened an office on Trafford Road, Manchester, after Birkenhead dockers
had made contact with Walsh and Butters, the leading rank-and-file militants in
Manchester and arranged for a campaign committee in Manchester. In total upwards of 10,000 joined the NASD
which had previously had a membership of 7,000.
April 1955, the TGWU
counter-attacked, insisting that all dockers on Merseyside and in Manchester
should have a TGWU card to register for work. When following this, NASD members
were refused registration as dockers, 13,000 out of 17,000, including the great
majority of TGWU members working in the three ports struck. Victory came in just two days with the Dock
Labour Board issuing cards to all dockers.
Still lacking official
recognition by the employers in the northern ports, the NASD now seized the
initiative calling an official strike starting 23 May with the demand of
recognition by the employers. Despite
the CP-led unofficial Port Workers Committee not supporting the strike, 1,400
dockers in Manchester struck against 1,000 who continued working. There was a
similar split in the Merseyside and Hull workforces. When after a few days the London based NASD
leadership recommended suspending the strike, their proposal was soundly
rejected. Just two voted in favour at
Manchester’s mass meeting. With 19,000 out on strike nationally, the
Guardian reported that ‘the TGWU is even more unpopular in the North than had
been supposed. Not only the National Dock Labour Board but the NASD itself has
been taken aback by the strength of the rebellious response.’
The TUC having expelled
the NASD for poaching 10,000 members from a fellow union, the TGWU’s ninety
full time dockworker officials now worked to break the strike. It nevertheless continued with no signs of
weakening for a fortnight. Excluding
delegates from the northern ports from the vote, the NASD conference then
accepted the TUC’s proposed enquiry and the NASD executive now recommended a
return to work. There were still big majorities at mass meetings voting to
continue even when in the fifth week the 7,000 NASD members in London voted to
return to work ‘provided the Northern strikers would go back too.’
The response from the
north was to organise coaches travelling through Sunday night to London to
appeal face-to-face with the London dockers. Manchester dockers visited
Trafford Park factories and local shopkeepers to help pay for three coaches to
London. Despite harassment by large numbers of
police, they assembled at Tower Hill and other points to march to the dock
gates. With ongoing police obstruction,
they set up picket lines which succeeded in increasing the numbers on strike by
200 compared to the Saturday two days earlier. Richard Barrett who had resigned his position
as NASD general secretary just a week earlier, walked through the pickets onto
the Surrey docks to apply for work at the call-on point. Only one docker joined
him in this, a symbolic gesture since as a full time official he was not a
registered docker and ineligible for work. One eye-witness talked of dockers
with tears in their eyes as their former leader stepped through them. The northern pickets then went to lobby their
MPs asking why after five weeks the strike still had not been raised in
parliament. Having concluded its
enquiry, the TUC General Council now ruled that the NASD must refuse membership
to those leaving the TGWU. With the NASD
leadership accepting the ruling, the strikers in Manchester and the other ports
returned to work Monday 4 July. The
Guardian reported
Few
seemed to feel perturbed that the strike had produced no tangible gain. The
satisfactory thing was to have made such a good show of solidarity independent
of the TGWU. They feel that in spite of their substantial loss of wages –
amounting to perhaps £100,000 on Manchester docks - the strike was worthwhile
and necessary. But they are well aware that the return to work far from settles
the inter-union trouble and they are anxiously “waiting for the showdown.”
The 1954/55 strikes were
‘among the bitterest industrial disputes in post war Britain’ For all the NASD’s greater democracy, under
pressure its officials also became separated from the rank and file. One
outcome was a tradition of non-unionism among dockers – ‘A plague on both your
houses’ - Among the rank and file, politically motivated dockers - CPers and
Trotskyists – continued to get a hearing and maintain a following but only when
they directly engaged with their workmates industrial grievances. ‘Trotskyist
influence in the move to the NASD and the recognition strike was ... marginal,
to say the most.’ With full employment continuing, the shift of
power from the union office to the shop floor that the Donovan Report
found in manufacturing in the 1960s also applied to the docks. With the Tory government determined not to
use troops as strike breakers as the Labour government had done, they and the
employers had a greater reliance on the union officials. Workforce unity was however still undermined
by inter-union rivalry, non unionism and a lack of trust between workers in
different ports.
Politically, the Labour
Party’s insistence on keeping politics separate from industrial matters, in
effect, a ban on party involvement in disputes persisted. Peter Grimshaw, one of the five expelled from
the Labour Party for supporting the local unofficial strike in 1951, went on to
be secretary of Salford City Labour Party.
Thirty years later, with the council under attack from Thatcher’s
government, he was arguing ‘...we are living in a capitalist system. If the
council did not reduce its workforce, it would be the unemployed who would have
to pay the price through higher rents or rates.’
Check
Salford City Reporter and Daily Worker. It may have been the U-turn by the
Runcorn tug men on whether to join the strike that tipped the balance in favour
of a return to work.
Steven Fielding, Duncan Tanner, The 'Rise of the
Left' Revisited: Labour Party Culture in Post-war Manchester and Salford,
Labour History Review, Dec 2006, Vol.71(3), pp.211-233
