J. T. Murphy

Modern Trade Unionism


Trade Unions and Strikes

FROM the moment Trade Unions came into existence the strike has always been their principal weapon. The “right to strike” has always stood in the forefront of Trade Union experience and behind all negotiations, bargains, and settlements. Indeed, all Trade Union power rests upon the common will of Trade Unionists to “withdraw their labour”. It is a “right” which cannot be taken away. It can be legally fettered. Intimidation may make it difficult but the exercise of the common will to cease work, which is the essence of working class combination, is inalienable.

Other means than the strike may have been adopted by the Trade Unions to achieve their objects. Propaganda, agitation, political persuasion, all come within the category of Trade Union activities to secure their aims, but the strike weapon remains basic, though it may be used only “as a last resort”.

Before we consider the various forms of strikes and their significance, it is important to realize whence this form of action derives its importance. It is considered by some recent apologists that Trade Unions arise more from vocational economic relationships than from class relationships. What are the facts? Class relationships are based upon property relationships, and the peculiar characteristic of all wage workers is the proletarian or propertyless feature of their economic position in society. By the very nature of their position within capitalism they must sell their labour power to the owners of the means of production, and this necessity applies to all workers irrespective of their vocation. It was precisely this fact that gave rise to Trade Unions. Had it been merely a question of the “self-expression” of the workers in their vocations then there would have been “weavers unions”, “agricultural workers unions”, and the like before the industrial revolution. It was the creation of a proletarian class, the establishment of a new property relationship, which brought the Trade Unions into existence. The vocational aspect of union organization was due to the form and incidence in which the new class relationship expressed itself and has no wider significance. It is a factor which becomes of less and less content the greater the integration of industry and the more the property relationship becomes the central question upon which all economic and political issues turn.

The struggle of the early craftsmen and tradesmen was not a struggle to make good craftsmen, it was a struggle against exploitation. The fight to limit apprentices was an economic fight against the operation of the economic law of supply and demand to the detriment of the craftsmen. It had little indeed to do with their vocational interests. Even the struggle for “good working materials” engaged in from time to time has had a deep economic basis although the workers have sincerely desired to work on good materials because undoubtedly they prize the greater æsthetic satisfaction thus afforded to them. But capitalism offers little scope for aesthetic considerations in production and the revolt against bad materials has been stirred far more by the effect on earnings than æsthetics.

With the growth of the machine industry and the increasing division of the labour process the vocational form of organization has been greatly modified and the largest of Trade Union organizations assume the industrial or general labour form. It is patent and obvious that the vast majority of the struggles of the unions are struggles for improving the price of the commodity “labour power” and all questions of vocational interest are subordinate to this issue. This applies as much to the modern unions as to the early struggles. True, the average worker wants to like his vocation, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred he curses it, because of the incessant vitiation of his interest by the competitive relations of capitalism. On the vocational interests of the worker it will be necessary to dwell in a further chapter on “Workers’ Control of Industry”, suffice it at this stage to emphasize that the basis of the Trade Union struggles is the class basis. The form of the Trade Unions may be largely vocational, but their struggles transcend the vocational structure and epitomize class issues and they must do so until the property issue is solved by social ownership. Then, with the cessation of the exploitation of man by man, can and will vocational interests find free and full expression.

In assessing the significance of strikes, it is important to realize that they have been varied in form, character, and extent. There have been short strikes and strikes of long duration. There have been those which have been confined to the members of a local craft union. There have been countless strikes of national Trade Unions, sympathetic strikes, political strikes, general strikes. But all of them have meant the withholding of the commodity “labour power” from the service of the owners of the means of production: they have all been forms of the class struggle.

Strikes will vary in their importance according to their dimensions, the circumstances under which they are waged, their duration, and the extent to which they strengthen the workers in the fight against the employers. Although in the early years of the history of Trade Unions strikers were severely punished, the later history reveals an indifference on the part of employers and the State to small-scale strikes, but the political strike and the general strike have roused deep hostility in the ranks of the ruling class. And the reason is clear.

There are those who define the character of a strike by the declared aim of the strikers. This method had led to much controversy in Labour ranks especially after the General Strike of 1926. This strike was a sympathetic strike in support of the miners who refused wage reductions. The General Council of the Trades Union Congress insisted that the General Strike was purely an “industrial strike”. That it was a strike of industrial workers is true. That its declared aims were industrial is beyond dispute. But we cannot judge the full significance of a strike by what the strikers think of themselves or their aims. As well might we value a person by what he thinks of himself, as measure the significance of a strike on such a principle. A general strike cannot be merely an industrial stoppage. When millions of workers simultaneously cease work at the bidding of an authority other than the State it means a challenge to the authority of the State. No Government can stand by under such circumstances and watch the machinery of production come to a standstill without taking up the challenge to its authority. It is this fact which takes the issue of the economic aim of the strike into the political field. To wage a general strike means to marshal class against class. The moment the struggle has passed into a trial of strength it must become a challenge to the political authority, namely the State.

The pioneers of the theory of the general strike had no illusions about this question. William Benbow who put it forward as a “general holiday”, in what is familiarly known as the period of revolutionary Trade Unionism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, advocated it as the means of social revolution. He wrote, “There will not be insurrection; it will simply be passive resistance. The men may remain at leisure; there is, and can be, no law to compel them to work against their will. They may walk the streets or fields with their arms folded, they will wear no swords, carry no muskets; they will present no multitude for the Riot Act to disperse. They merely abstain, when their funds are sufficient, from going to work for one week or one month; and what happens in consequence? Bills are dishonoured, the Gazette teams with bankruptcies, capital is destroyed, the revenue fails, the system of Government falls into confusion, and every link in the chain which binds society together is broken in a moment by this inert conspiracy of the poor against the rich.” The general strike was thus conceived as a means of effecting a social revolution and bringing about the greatest conceivable political, economic, and social changes.

Whether of itself the general strike can do that is another matter. It must be fairly clear to the reader that such a negative form of action could not possibly succeed in its objective of the transformation of society for a variety of reasons. It assumes that the Government with all the forces of the State at its disposal would adopt a passive attitude. But in such circumstances the Government must act at once and would act at once, as a matter of self-preservation. It would seek alternative forces for the manning of various industries for the supply of the means of life. It would call on the army, navy, and police and voluntary supplementary forces to run skeleton services. It would mobilize the press and all organs of publicity. It would prohibit the workers from issuing papers, arrest their leaders under the various conspiracy acts, intimidate the strikers, etc.

The idea of carrying through a social revolution by means of a folded arms policy is romantic. When the idea was first advanced it was certainly a striking advance on the little sectional strikes which had marked the history of Trade Unionism up to that time. The vision of the new order was a big advance from that of the machine breakers and the small bargaining policy of the early Trade Unionists.

Benbow and his colleagues did not realize that to carry through a social revolution by means of the General Strike it was necessary not only to have a political programme but the conditions which would make such a programme possible of realization. A revolution without an all national crisis in which the armed forces of the State have become “disaffected” and the capitalists can no longer govern as before, and without a working class politically conscious and willing to “face the last fight” without a general staff, i.e. a party supported by the mass organizations of the workers prepared for the most drastic forms of action, cannot hope to beat the forces of the old State and create the new State power. A general strike has either to be a demonstration of short duration or the first steps towards the taking of power by the working class. It may be the means of exerting mass pressure on the Government of the day but such mass pressure would have to be strictly limited or pass into the more serious stage of the direct struggle for power. To enter on the preparations for a general strike without a due recognition of these facts is to pave the way to defeat.

The history of strikes fully bears out this analysis and these conclusions. In the early stages of British Trade Union history when Benbow propagated the “general holiday” this method failed precisely for the above reasons. There was no party of the workers equipped in theory and practice with the art of revolution, to function as the general staff of the army of the working class. The mass strikes were an accumulation of local strikes on distinctive economic issues. It was too early in the history of the workers’ movement for the creation of a party to lead the class.

The strikes of the nineteenth century were, in the main, Trade Union strikes for the sectional interests of the workers. They were fought out by a trial of strength between the employers and the workers, the State cracking the whip of the law and occasionally giving them a severe cut, as, for example, with the Criminal Law Amendment Act. After the passing of the 1871 law legalizing strike action, it proceeded to punish the strikers with the new law for attempting to make the strikes effective.

General strikes do not make their appearance until the beginning of the twentieth century, although there was a general strike in Belgium in 1893. The aim of this strike was to bring pressure on the Government to secure universal suffrage, and was partly successful. There were general strikes in Sweden and Holland in 1902 and 1903 which were limited to demonstrative action of agreed duration. The Swedish strike of 1902 is of special interest because it was called at the behest of the Socialist Party of Sweden on a political issue before the Swedish Parliament.

The general strike in Holland in 1903 was defeated because of bad organization. But it is of importance because of the issue involved. The Government was projecting legislation to prevent strikes in the public services. The Trade Unions took exception to this and were defeated. This action of the Holland Government was a precursor of what was to follow very quickly in other countries.

The growth of industry was massing the workers together in ever-larger numbers. The greater the growth of industry the greater also the growth of “public services” controlled by the State. The “public services” were staffed by wage labour and the workers in them were subject to the operation of the same economic laws as the rest of the working class, although a number of concessions were given to them for political reasons, the principal one of which was a certain regularity of employment. They accordingly also organized themselves in Trade Unions and became part of the organized working class movement.

This alarmed the ruling class since it would impede the centralized control of the State machine in the event of any big dispute with the working class. To have the Civil Service in alliance with the industrial masses they conceived to be almost as dangerous to the authority of the State as the alliance of the army and navy with the workers, especially in this period when disputes achieved such dimensions that almost every conflict rapidly passed from a dispute between the workers and the employers into a dispute with the State.

A comparison of the pre-War strikes with those of post-War years reveals a most remarkable constrast. Before the War the State was rarely called upon to interfere. It could afford to remain unconcerned in the disputes which followed the collapse of the Chartist Movement in the ’forties right up to the War. After the War the situation had changed. The first big clash was the Forty-hour Strike. This rapidly developed into a Scottish general strike and saw the State interfere on a large scale. Glasgow was transformed into a military camp. After about ten days the strike was defeated though its moral effect on the rest of the working class movement was enormous. In 1919 the great railway strike took place. This was a direct conflict with the State for the railways were still under government control. It ended in a compromise. The miners’ strike of 1921 was, directed against the mine owners and the State and against the de-control of the mines by the State. Here again the issue was not pushed to a conclusion. State interference and control of the issues involved occurred in the disputes in the cotton and woollen industries in 1929, whilst the General Strike of 1926 followed by the seven months’ continuation of the miner’s lock-out stand out as of enormous significance in the class battles of post-War years.

The General Strike of 1926 was the greatest act of workers’ solidarity known in the history of this country. It arose out of a dispute concerning the wages of the miners. From the first the State was brought into action, and appeared as the open ally of the mine owners. The miners were taking a stand against wage reductions and the lengthening of the working day. The whole Trade Union Movement stood firmly behind them. The State prepared for a first class struggle. Finding itself unready for decisive action in 1925 it advanced a subsidy of £25,000,000 to cover the cost of maintaining the status quo for nine months pending preparation. The conflict was precipitated in the spring of 1926. The Strike began on 1st May. It lasted nine days. Army, Navy, Emergency Powers, the Organization for the Maintenance of Supplies for strike breaking were all brought into action. The country was very close to a civil upheaval.

The workers were beaten. The miners stood firm for seven months more but in the end they also were defeated. The Government immediately decided to follow up the advantages gained after the collapse of the General Strike. The workers were unable to strike back. It passed the 1927 legislation which tore the Trade Unions in the Civil Service out of the control of the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, forbade political strikes, made sympathetic action illegal, controlled picketing, and created new crimes.

It appears to me, therefore, to be an obvious conclusion to draw from these events the lesson that the greater the development of industry and the closer the massing of the workers in the towns, the greater is the prospect of mass conflict with the State, and the more society reveals the appearance of two forces mobilized against each other. The State stands at the head of one force representative of property-holders, the leaders of labour at the head of the workers’ army massed in the Trade Unions.

It must also be clear that the more this process continues the more politically significant do the strikes become. The keen anxiety of the capitalists to devise means of collaboration with the workers’ organizations to-day should therefore be regarded not as due to a change of heart but as a symptom of their fear of the logical development of the strike. Despite all the fluctuations of the strike waves throughout the history of capitalism the main curve of their development is in the direction of larger and larger general strikes. The nearer the approach to a revolutionary crisis the more likely is this to characterize labour struggles.

This, of course, is the logic of the development of a system based on economic contradictions. Large-scale industry masses the exploited workers together in ever-larger numbers. Their organizations consequently cover a larger body of workers and once set in motion draws into action still larger numbers of workers. The more acute the class relations which arise from the economic crisis the greater is the likelihood of still larger scale conflicts possessing all the potentialities of a revolutionary upheaval.

Other features of the history of strikes are of considerable importance in considering the relation of strikes to revolutionary upheavals. So long as the strikes were confined to small sections of workers there was nothing of outstanding importance in the form and activity of the strike committees in the localities where the strikes were conducted. But the post-War strikes, because of their dimensions and the effect of their class solidarity and appeal to the workers, developed new organs of control which can only be described as embryonic “workers councils”. So complete was the “Forty-hour Strike” of 1919 in Belfast that the whole city for several days passed almost entirely into the hands of the strike committees which enlarged their functions and took upon themselves the responsibility for the maintenance of order, lighting of the city, and the feeding of the people.

Again in the movement of the masses which threatened a political general strike to stop the war on Soviet Russia in 1920, there were established up and down the country what were known as “councils of action” which represented a coming together of all the workers’ political and industrial organizations ready for the general strike. In form and character they were a close approximation to the “Soviet”. This “soviet” form of organization which develops with the General Strike was still more clearly outlined in the great strike of the German workers in 1920 against the Kapp-Lutwich “putsch”.

The period of the small strikes in the middle of the nineteenth century gave rise to the Trades Councils; the mass strikes of the twentieth century are giving rise to the councils of action. The development along these lines follows necessarily the course of the mass-actions of the workers and the changed relationship to the State. It is not in contradiction to the development of their political activities for the conquest of government by Parliamentary action but supplementary or, shall I say, parallel to it.

There is, indeed, an intimate connection between the two forms of advance being made by the Labour Movement. They are not separate from each other as many people would like to have us believe. Nor are they alternative forms of action. They are both reflexes of the one struggle against exploitation, the character of which varies according to circumstance. From the moment that the political consciousness of the working class crystallized into the formation of its own political party every great period of strike action has had its sequel in sweeping advances in the political arena. The political advancement of Labour has had its own reaction on the strikes and intensified the political significance of the strikes in the minds of the workers. The strikes and political action act and react upon each other, and the outcome, in relation both to the conquest of power by the workers and to the forms of government which will ensue, may be totally different from the generally accepted belief in the Labour Movement itself. But that opens up questions to be dealt with in a later chapter.


Next: VI. Trade Unions and Politics