Britain’s Great Labor Revolt Was a High Point of Working-Class Power
In the years leading up to World War I, Britain was rocked by an unprecedented upsurge of labor militancy. Millions of workers began to learn their own strength and posed a major challenge to the social order.
Dock workers on strike in London, circa 1910. (Photo12 / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The so-called “Labor Unrest” — or what more accurately should be termed “Labor Revolt” — swept through Britain in the years leading up to the outbreak of World War I between 1910 and 1914. It was one of the most sustained, dramatic, and violent explosions of industrial militancy and social conflict the country has ever experienced. After some twenty years of relative quiescence in strike activity, there was a sudden and unanticipated eruption that spread rapidly on a scale well in excess of the “New Unionism” upsurge of 1889–1891.
By the time Robert Tressell’s celebrated classic novel of working-class life and politics, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, had been published in 1914, its representation of the apparent weakness and “apathy” of exploited workers had been superseded by the actuality of an explosion of self-confidence, organization, and militancy by a working class that had, according to historian James Cronin, “thrust itself into the centre of Britain’s social and political life.”
Spirit of Revolt
The strike wave involved a number of large-scale disputes in strategically important sections of the economy. A protracted strike in the South Wales coalfields in 1910–11 was followed in the summer of 1911 by national strikes of seamen, dockers, and railway workers, as well as a Liverpool general transport strike. There were national miners’ and London transport workers’ strikes in 1912, a series of Midlands metal workers’ strikes and a Dublin transport workers’ lockout in 1913, and a London building workers’ lockout in 1914.
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