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.

A significant minority of the industrial workforce were involved in forty-six hundred other strikes for higher wages, better working conditions, and trade union organization. Women workers played an active and prominent role within a number of strikes, and what the Fabian couple Sidney and Beatrice Webb described as the “spirit of revolt in the Labour world” even spread to school students’ strikes in September 1911.

It was not only the scale and diverse range, but also the character of strike action that seemed extraordinary. It was a revolt dominated by unskilled and semiskilled workers, encompassing members of established and recognized trade unions as well as workers hitherto unorganized and/or unrecognized who became engaged in a fight to build collective organization and secure union recognition against the hostility of many employers.

Action largely took place independently and unofficially of national trade union leaderships. Workers rejected those leaderships for their unresponsiveness, their attempts to channel grievances through established channels of collective bargaining and conciliation machinery, and their advocacy of compromise and moderation, favoring militant organization and strike action from below instead.

An important factor in the development of this assertion of independent working-class power was the role assumed by young workers (both men and women). They were largely free from the defensive mentality associated with earlier forms of official trade unionism conditioned since the defeat of New Unionism and eagerly sought new forms of militant organization that would allow a direct struggle against the employers and the state.

“Direct action” became the gospel of the day — the notion that no one could help the workers unless they helped themselves, by taking into their own hands the task of organizing against employers. Belligerent working-class self-confidence, and the vigorous and emancipatory nature of much strike activity with its underlying demand for dignity, self-respect, and control over working lives, was a defining feature. The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union strike leader, Jim Larkin, captured the spirit of revolt when he observed: “Labour has lost its old humility and its respectful finger touching its cap.”

Demonstration Effect

The realization that militant strike action could win major concessions from employers had a “demonstration effect” that encouraged strikes as a key weapon across many industries. This led, despite a dramatic reversal of fortune in some individual battles, to a spectacular growth in the total power of organized labor.

Previously unorganized workers flocked into unions, with the general unions catering for less skilled workers growing much faster than the movement as a whole. In the process, trade union organization in Britain was completely transformed, surpassing (in absolute if not relative terms) the New Unionism strike wave achievements of 1888–89. There was a 62 percent increase in union membership, from 2.5 million in 1910 to 4.1 million by 1914, and an accompanying increase in union density from 14.6 percent to 23 percent.

An important novel characteristic was the willingness of significant sections of workers to take sympathetic action for others in dispute, both within and between different industries. In doing so, they often took the opportunity to press demands on their own employers, with strikers from separate but simultaneous disputes pledging not to go back to work until the demands of all had been satisfactorily settled.

Such widespread solidarity broadened day-to-day struggles against individual employers into a struggle against employers in general. It was accompanied by the widespread appeal of industrial unionism as the means to overcome the inherent fragmentation and sectionalism of existing trade unionism. This led to breakthroughs and innovations in union organization straddling a multiplicity of occupational and industrial boundaries.

Thus in 1910, there was the establishment of the National Transport Workers’ Federation that brought together numerous unions organizing in ports across the country, with the amalgamation of three existing organizations into the National Union of Railwaymen in 1913. By 1913–14, there was a formal attempt to link the action of 1.5 million miners, transport workers, and railway workers into a “Triple Alliance” of their unions that raised the potential for coordinated strike action between its three powerful affiliates.

“Getting to Know Their Strength”

Ministers from the Liberal government became increasingly alarmed at the danger posed by nationwide strikes, which were perceived as being severely disruptive to the functioning of the economy as well as a threat to social order. The waterside and transport strikes held up perishable goods and considerably disrupted food supplies, the miners’ strike threw up to a million workers from other industries out of work, and the railway strike paralyzed the movement of goods and passengers.

The cabinet responded with a series of initiatives. These initiatives included the spread of conciliation and arbitration boards and the utilization of George Askwith, the Board of Trade’s indefatigable industrial troubleshooter, who rushed from one dispute to another to assist parties in negotiating settlements. There were also various social and industrial legislative reforms, including the 1911 National Insurance Act and 1912 Miners’ Minimum Wage Act. But the government’s response also involved encouraging hard-line police action against mass picketing and supporting or authorizing the deployment of large detachments of troops in numerous industrial disputes.

In July 1911, Home Secretary Winston Churchill acknowledged in a cabinet memorandum that the government needed to use the police and military. The leaders of the unions were unable to control their members, he explained, and there was widespread adoption of the sympathetic strike:

There is grave unrest in the country. Port after port is called out. The police and military are asked for at place after place. Fresh outbreaks continuously occur and will go on. The railways are not sound. Transport workers everywhere are getting to know their strength . . . and those conversant of labour matters in practice anticipate grave upheaval . . . and now specially a new force has arisen in trade unionism, whereby the power of the old leaders has proved quite ineffective, and the sympathetic strike on a wide scale is prominent. Shipping, coal, railways, dockers, etc. etc. are all uniting and breaking out at once. The “general strike” policy is a factor which must be dealt with.

Throughout 1910–14, employers attempted to break strikes by encouraging “blackleg” labor. Combined with the unequivocally partisan intervention of police and troops, this led to repeated outbursts of dramatic violent confrontation (including sometimes even street rioting) in numerous places across the country (including Liverpool, Tonypandy, and Llanelli). These confrontations resulted in numerous casualties and on occasion fatalities.

Social Polarization

The aggressive challenge to the legitimacy of public order and state power mounted by strikers produced deep levels of social polarization. A divide opened up between local communities in which strikebound workplaces were located, on the one hand, and the employers and the representatives of civil, police, military, and government authorities, on the other.

This spurred a culture of community solidarity and self-defense that involved the relatives and friends of those directly involved in strikes, as well as local trade unionists and other supporters, in picketing and direct action. This collective willingness to flout, challenge, and defy the established authorities encouraged a serious questioning of traditional patterns of respect for “law and order” and constitutional behavior and allegiance.

There was also widespread questioning of the political system. In pursuing their immediate goals of increased wages, better working conditions, and trade union organization, workers were confronted not only with intransigent employers and hesitant union leaders, but also hostile government officials and magistrates, and persistent attacks by police and troops.

Many workers became disaffected with parliamentary politics because of the functioning of the newly formed Labour Party in the House of Commons, which acted as a mere adjunct of the Liberal Party government and frowned on militant industrial struggle. Consequently, the established “rules of the game” — piecemeal social reform by means of institutionalized collective bargaining, on the one hand, and parliamentary action, on the other — were widely questioned and put under considerable strain, reinforcing the appeal of combative industrial struggle as the weapon to advance labor-movement interests.

Even the government’s own leading industrial relations adviser viewed the unrest as motivated by a “general spirit of revolt, not only against the employers of all kinds, but also against leaders and majorities, and Parliamentary or any kind of constitutional and orderly action.” It encouraged a process of radicalization, a counter-politics which stood for the celebration of class solidarity, aggressive strike action, and mass picketing. This had the effect of shifting the balance of class forces in society toward the working class.

This workers’ rebellion took place within the broader context of a battle for Irish independence from British imperialism and the threat of civil war in Ireland arising from a Home Rule Bill. There was also an escalating, militant campaign of civil disobedience mounted by the suffragettes under the slogan “Deeds not Words” to force the Liberal government to give women the vote. This fed the wider challenge to the political system in Edwardian Britain.

Containment

Within this process of political radicalization, a number of combative leaders and activists, including militant trade unionists, socialists, Marxists, and syndicalists, played a significant role.

Strike action derived from factors directly related to economic grievances, work intensification, erosion of job control, and either lack of union recognition or the constraints of existing union organization, as well as certain contingent circumstances that gave workers the self-confidence to take collective action. Yet the readiness of workers to engage in militant strike action also often critically depended upon the encouragement they received from the minority of uncompromising propagandists and agitators within their own ranks, with the radical left’s anti-capitalist objectives proving to be of appeal to a large minority of workers.

However, the forward momentum of this working-class revolt, let alone any revolutionary outcome, was to be seriously undermined by numerous underlying limitations and weaknesses. There were some serious strike setbacks and even disastrous defeats, which combined with the way in which national trade union officials were often ultimately able to reassert their authority and control over embryonic rank-and-file networks and organizations with detrimental consequences.

The Liberal government was able to accommodate the simultaneous three “rebellions” — labor strikes, the threat of civil war in Ireland, and the campaign for women’s suffrage — because they were essentially discrete struggles only bound together tangentially in a diffuse and uncoordinated fashion. The political, organizational, strategic, and tactical shortcomings of the radical left, notably the separation made between industrial and political struggles, also hampered developments. And of course, the strike wave was to suddenly shudder to a halt, stopped in its tracks by the onset of World War I in August 1914.