IN DUBLIN CITY IN 1913

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: february 2014 :: RMTnews 24 In 1913 Dublin lacked a real industrial base and work was generally of a casual nature with poor union organisation and slave wages. A third of the city’s teeming population inhabited the centre city tenement slums. The overcrowding, squalor and inadequate sanitation combined with poor diet to give Dublin one of the highest infant death rates in Europe. High levels of violence and prostitution offered further evidence of the demoralised state of many of the population. It was in many ways an unlikely seed-bed for trade unionism. The social system was typified by insecurity of employment, personal daily struggles for survival and the frequent indifference of the longer established - but conservative - craft trade unions. The New Unionism, marked by its organisation of the unskilled and socialist zeal, had briefly flourished in Dublin in the 1890s. But the odds were heavily stacked against permanent success: many union organisations had become moribund. With James Larkin’s arrival in Ireland as organiser for the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL), the waterfront workers rose again, firstly in Belfast in 1907 and subsequently in other Irish ports. Disagreement with the NUDL’s Liverpool Executive led to Larkin’s suspension and the launch in 1909 of a Dublin- based union for unskilled workers - the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. From the beginning the new union enunciated in its rule book a wide programme of industrial and political agitation to change society in the interests of the Irish working class. But the employers would not be silent observers. The Bosses Organise Under the calculating leadership of William Martin Murphy, owner of the Irish Independent and controller of the Dublin Tramways Company, over 400 employers combined in the Dublin Employers’ Federation to deny the same rights of combination to the city’s underprivileged. Their aim was to remove the threat of the ITGWU and its message of discontent articulated by Larkin's street oratory. The crunch came on August 15 1913 when Murphy offered the workers in the Independent’s dispatch department the choice of Union or job. When their loyalty to the union resulted in dismissal, prompt solidarity action saw the dispute escalate with further dismissals in Eason’s and on the trams. The now confident employers issued the infamous ‘document’, locking out any worker that refused to sign a pledge to disown the ITGWU. By the end of September over 20,000 were locked out. Bloody Sunday On Sunday, 31 August, the IN DUBLIN CITY IN 1913 At this year’s RMT Charles Watkins memorial lecture Francis Devine told the story of the Dublin lock-out and its lessons for today POLICE RIOT: Members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police launch an unprovoked attack on both passers-by and union supporters who had turned up for a public meeting in Dublin's O'Connell Street.