un premier élément
Strikes during wartime
Report by Greg Dropkin
Published: 29/05/03
This article was written during the war against Iraq, in response to a request from the Merseyside FBU.
Until it began, the current invasion of Iraq was opposed by the overwhelming majority in Britain - and around the world outside the US. Even 3 weeks later (early April), opinion in Britain remains deeply divided. If Blair tries to blackmail the FBU into settling without a fight “because there’s a war on... and we need the troops in Iraq”, or if Prescott attempts to ban a strike or impose a settlement, their ploy may not succeed.
In the 1956 Suez debacle Britain, France, and Israel teamed up to attack Egypt after Nasser nationalised the canal. Almost immediately, the FBU Executive urged the TUC to call a general strike to make Prime Minister Eden resign. The AEU Sheffield district committee demanded a total stoppage of the engineering industry and dockers sought a T&GWU 1 day strike against the war. None of these overtly political strike calls actually materialised, though hundreds of engineering and building workers in Crawley did take anti-war strike action.
But is it possible to strike in Britain over mainstream industrial issues during wartime? Yes it is. The RMT are in dispute right now over the guard’s role in train safety. Hundreds of UNISON ancillary workers, mainly women, are due to strike over low pay at Scunthorpe General Hospital on 11-12 April and again on 16-17 April.
And is it possible to strike and win in Britain during wartime? Yes it is. It happened repeatedly in key industries during WWII, when public opinion was solidly in favour of the war against Hitler in the wake of the Blitz. Some of the main victories:
Glasgow: Rolls Royce Hillington women workers equal pay
Many thousands of women were recruited to wartime industry. In 1940, the engineering federation agreed that women would receive equal pay after 32 weeks in post. 20,000 women were employed at the Rolls Royce Hillington site in Glasgow. Rolls Royce evaded the 1940 equal pay formula and were challenged by the AEU in 1943. They settled. But 16,000 women (and some men) refused to accept the deal and walked out for over a week. They won a new agreement which specified every machine in the factory, the work done on it, and the rate for the job, regardless of who was operating the equipment.
Miners pay
In 1944 underground miners were earning £5 per day and their wage tribunal refused to raise piece rates. When the Government announced that the national average industrial manual wage had reached £6 10s, miners came out on unofficial strike in South Wales, Kent, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Durham, and Scotland - some 220,000 in South Wales and Yorkshire alone. With the invasion of France looming, the press attacked the miners.
A South Wales miner of 30 years standing commented “... The argument that a strike would let our soldiers down was countered by men who had brothers and sons in the forces who, so they claimed, had urged them to fight and maintain their customs or privileges. They argued that they must retain something for those absent ones to come back to, while the suggestion that we should wait for further negotiations was swamped by the reply that we had already waited a long while...”
In fact the Government was compelled to intervene, restored differentials, and the miners won the highest minimum wage in Britain. Their average earnings ranked 81st in 1938, but rose to 14th after the strikes.
Kent: Betteshanger Colliery bonus payments
On 10 July 1940 the government introduced Defence Regulation 58AA allowing the Minister of Labour to ban strikes and lockouts, and force compulsory arbitration. Order 1305 then allowed the Minister to refer any dispute to existing arbitration structures or the National Arbitration Tribunal - either alternative was to be binding. But as the Chief Industrial Commissioner recognised “The Order has a substantial deterrent effect but it is an instrument which would probably be shown to be useless if any considerable body of workpeople chose to defy it.” He was right.
On 9 January 1942 miners at Betteshanger Colliery in Kent struck over the level of allowances for working difficult seams. The Ministry of Labour decided to prosecute 1,050 miners for contravening Order 1305. Three local union officials were imprisoned, the men working difficult seams were fined £3 each, and 1,000 other miners were fined £1 each. Betteshanger continued their strike and other pits came out in sympathy. On 28 January they won, and in February the Home Secretary dropped the prison sentences. By May, only 9 miners had paid their fines. Most fines were never paid.
Tyneside: closed shop
On Tyneside at the beginning of 1943 workers at the Neptune ship repair yard came out for six weeks over the refusal of five men at their firm to join the Amalgamated Engineering Union. They received massive support from workers in other firms and trades, and forced their employers to concede a ‘closed shop’ agreement, setting a national precedent.
London: aircraft engineers
Workers at the former Chrysler factory converted to make Halifax bomber tail fins were subject to Essential Works Orders banning all industrial action. In 1943 they challenged management policy of locking the gates at 8:30 for the morning by threatening to turn up en masse at 8:31. Management threatened to use the Order, but then capitulated.
The workforce went on to challenge management attempts to control union representation on the works committee, and after winning that forced an increase in the minimum wage for maintenance workers.
Many of the women workers had partners in the Forces. One commented: “If I don’t fight for conditions and wages or let them get worse, my husband will kill me when he comes home”.
Engineering Apprentices: pay
The first major wartime dispute took place in 1941. It involved engineering apprentices, first on Clydeside and then in Coventry, Lancashire and London.
An Apprentices’ Charter, developed by the Clyde strike committee in 1937, called for higher pay, district-wide age-wage minimum pay scales, a right to part-time technical education on day release, a reasonable proportion of apprentices to journeymen, and a right to union representation. An Engineers’ Charter had been put forward by the AEU in 1929 in pursuit of improved terms and conditions in the industry.
The unions had previously submitted a succession of claims to the Engineering Employers Federation without success. Now the apprentices marched from factory to factory bringing out their workmates. In Coventry they included women at the local munitions factory in the campaign. The strike wave finally destroyed the log-jam in national negotiations. In weeks, agreement was reached on higher age-wage scale rates.
As the war progressed, the number of strikes skyrocketed to reach a record 2,194 stoppages with 3,700,000 days lost in 1944. Of course not all such strikes ended in victory - but neither do all strikes in peacetime.
During the Spring of 1943, soldiers serving in the 8th Army responded to pressure to denounce strikes back home. The 8th Army News ran an article headlined “The Right to Strike is one of the Freedoms we fight for”.
So the key question is not whether “there’s a war on” or what Blair and Prescott will say while Brown hands over billions to pay for an invasion most of us never wanted. It’s whether firefighters who save lives are prepared to fight for their claim with the intention of winning.
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Sources: Socialist Review Nov. 1986 (Ian Birchall) and April 1995 (Tony Dabb), The People’s War (Angus Calder), Civil Liberties in Britain During the 2nd World War (Neil Stammers), Lifelong Apprenticeship (Bill Hunter), Engineers At War (R. Croucher).
http://www.labournet.net/ukunion/0305/wartime1.html
