1911-A STRIKE FOR LIBERTY

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: july/august 2011 :: RMTnews 12 August this year sees the centenary of Britain’s first national railway strike. August 1911 was a turning point in trade union organisation, which created the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), Britain’s first industrial union in February 1913 and hastened the Labour Movement's awakening everywhere. The causes of the 1911 strike are familiar today. Wage levels fell 10 per cent between 1900- 1910, while prices rose and bosses used anti-union laws to stop workers taking strike action. The August 1911 rail strike was one element in a huge upsurge of worker militancy between 1910-14 known as ‘The Great Unrest’. Overall union membership doubled to 4.1 million. Numbers of strike days rocketed from two million in 1907, 10 million in 1911 and 41 million by 1912. The ‘Triple Alliance’ of miners, dockers and railworkers forged through industrial solidarity in 1913 became for a while the most powerful organisation ever created by British workers to fight for their interests. The frustration and anger of railway workers built up from 1907 when the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants(ASRS) All Grades Movement to cut working hours, raise wages and secure union recognition was diverted into a ‘Conciliation Scheme’ that left pay and conditions unchanged. Tom Lowth, of the General Railway Workers’ Union (GRWU) said: “It does not look to me like a very satisfactory settlement” and he was right. By August 1910 Lord Claude Hamilton, Chairman of the Railway Companies Association boasted: “The union of course is not recognised in any way. Not a loophole as far as I can see has been left open for them”. The following month in September 1910 a full-scale, workers’ revolt broke out led by the South Wales Miners’ Federation against the Cambrian Coal Combine. On January 9, 1911 Liverpool ship-repairers struck for better pay and the National Sailors’ and Firemens’ Union held mass meetings in London, Cardiff, Bristol, Southampton, Hull, Glasgow, Grimsby, Dublin and Manchester under the slogan ‘War Is Now Declared: Seamen Strike Hard and Strike For Liberty on 14 June 1911’. A 72-day national seamen’s strike began in Southampton on 9 June 1911 and spread like wildfire around British ports. In Liverpool, Tom Mann the charismatic leader of the National Transport Workers’ Federation (NTWF) was invited to chair the strike committee. Mann arrived at Liverpool docks on 14 June 1911, while the government sent 3,000 troops to occupy the city and anchored a Royal Navy gunboat in the Mersey. The ASRS leadership tried to negotiate a return to work by rail workers. However, the rail companies were intransigent against demands for a two- shillings per week wage increase and a reduction from 60 to 54 hours per week. Unofficial railway strikes continued to spread from Hull, Bristol, Swansea and Manchester through June and July. On ‘Bloody Sunday’ August 13 1911 a mass strike meeting at St George’s Plateau outside Liverpool’s Lime Street station was attacked by police from Birmingham. The Liverpool strike committee declared a general strike from midnight August 14. Tom Mann announced: “A strike of all transport men of all classes; of railway workers, passenger as well as goods men, drivers, stokers. It will mean all connected with the ferry boats, tug boats, river tender men, Dock Board men, Overhead and underground railways, flatmen, bargemen, dockers, coal heavers, crane men, elevator men, warehouse workers, carters, and in fact every conceivable section and branch of the great 1911-A STRIKE FOR LIBERTY RMT president Alex Gordon marks the centenary of a strike that led three railway unions to put aside their differences and form the National Union of Railwaymen