Strikes and trade union history

Connolly and a history relevant now

A review of our new pamphlet, a collection of writings by James Connolly on effective trade unionism. Click here to order now James Connolly, who was executed after the 1916 Easter Rising, is, along with James Larkin, Ireland’s most famous socialist and union leader. This pamphlet, Effective Trade Unionism , contains his writings on industrial unionism, in both Ireland and the USA, and his account of the 1913 Lockout in Dublin. Connolly is a clear and concise writer and you don’t need to know any of the historical background to be able to understand the pamphlet. But read up on the historical...

A titanic struggle: the Dublin Labour War, 1913-14 (part 2)

This is part two of the section on the 1913-4 Dublin Labour War in our series on 'Connolly: politically unexpurgated' What is the truth about the Dublin dispute? What was the origin of the Dublin dispute? These are at present the most discussed questions in the labour world of these islands, and I have been invited by the editor of the Daily Herald to try and shed a little light upon them for the benefit of its readers. I will try and be brief and to the point, whilst striving to be also clear. In the year 1911 the National Seamen’s and Firemen’s Union, as a last desperate expedient to avoid...

Glorious Dublin!

Dublin workers wait for food aid ships sent by British unions To the readers of Forward possibly some sort of apology is due for the non-appearance of my notes for the past few weeks, but I am sure that they quite well understand that I was, so to speak, otherwise engaged. On the day I generally write my little screed, I was engaged on the 31st of August in learning how to walk around in a ring with about 40 other unfortunates kept six paces apart, and yet slip in a word or two to the poor devil in front of or behind me without being noticed by the watchful prison warders. The first question I...

One of the Hollywood Ten

The independent film Salt of the Earth (1954), about a 1950-2 miners’ strike in New Mexico, is well known to activists in the labour movement. One of the Hollywood Ten , directed by Welshman Karl Francis in 2000 and shot in Spain, follows Salt ’s director Herbert Biberman (played by Jeff Goldblum) when he refuses to give evidence at a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the McCarthy period. He is jailed for six months. On his release he is determined to make a film about the strike. Since he has been sacked by Warner Brothers, it is a struggle to find finance. Only five...

More on our half-price book offer

The coming weeks of fewer labour-movement meetings and activities are a good time to read our longer books, and within our general half-price offer we’re doing a special deal on The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1 and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism : both large books for £10 post free. If you’ve already read those, or want something easier, the half-price offer also makes many shorter texts more available. Socialism Makes Sense is an attempt to allow anti-socialist ideas full voice and then refute them in favour of the idea of socialism which was advocated by the mass socialist...

Kino Eye - Ireland on film: Strumpet City

The recent articles in Solidarity on James Connolly and other aspects of Irish labour history bring to mind what some have called the “great Irish novel”: James Plunkett’s Strumpet City , adapted for TV by Hugh Leonard and broadcast in Ireland in 1980 and then the UK. Strumpet City covers the period from 1907 to 1914, taking as its central event the Dublin Lockout of 1913. Connolly doesn’t make an appearance (he was in the USA for some of this time) but we are offered a surprisingly bravado performance from Peter O’Toole as the famous labour leader Jim Larkin. For me, however, the TV...

1888: Río Tinto and Spain’s first climate strike

In 1888 thousands of miners and farmers, along with their families, marched through the streets of Ríotinto, in the province of Huelva, and stood against the most powerful company in Spain. Led by anarchist trade unionists, this was Spain’s first climate strike and the beginning of a nascent environmental movement, demanding better pay, conditions, and, crucially, an end to open air copper refining (calcination). The valley of the Río Tinto river in southern Spain has been used for ore mining for approximately 5000 years. Sections of the river flow bright red and orange due to the presence of...

Justice for the 37 jailed for fighting for jobs!

Eddie Marnell was one of the workers jailed for taking part in an occupation to stop job cuts at the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead in 1984. On 20 October he spoke at a Workers’ Liberty meeting in Liverpool to promote our pamphlet about the occupation, alongside its author John Cunningham and local Unite organiser Ross Quinn. Ross spoke about more recent struggles at Cammell Laird, including a largely successful strike against job cuts in 2018. The first thing to say is that 37 men went to jail because of the occupation. Others were sacked for supporting it — one of them is here in the...

Return to Gate Gourmet!

Over the decades much of the British labour movement has come to celebrate the stormy Grunwick strike of 1976-78. That does not mean the dominant forces in our movement have absorbed what was important about it. Not 45, but just 16 years ago in 2005, another struggle by mainly South Asian, migrant women workers flared up. The fight of the Gate Gourmet airline catering workers against mass sackings designed to drive down conditions and bust a strong union had important similarities with and differences from Grunwick. Although it did elicit important solidarity action, it did not produce the...

1968: Martin Luther King and the Memphis sanitation strike

On February 1, 1968, two sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were riding on the back of a garbage truck when the compactor accidentally activated. Both men were chewed up, like garbage. The deaths led to a strike by the city’s 1,300 sanitation workers and the participation of Martin Luther King Jr., ending with his assassination. Little did the striking workers know “that their decision would challenge generations of white supremacy in Memphis and have staggering consequences for the nation”, as Michael K Honey put it in Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis...

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