Dockers and UNITE
The news this weekend that Britain’s biggest union is to join forces with American and Canadian giant the United Steelworkers (USW), is one of the most significant responses by organised labour to the growing globalisation of the world economy.
The merger between UK union Unite and the USW is to be announced this summer at the USW convention in Las Vegas … a long from Wapping and the roots of the British giant. Trade unions have their complex family trees of mergers and consolidations, and trace Unite back to the late 19th century and you find one of the first trade unions for unskilled and casual labourers. The catalyst for the forming of the union was the London Dock Strike of 1889; the creation of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers Union was a huge leap forward in the power of labour in Britain, and ushered in the Labour Party itself a few years later.
There had been strikes in the London docks before 1889 and there would be more after. Life as a docker was notoriously hard and insecure, with the ‘chain’ system meaning that workers would fetch up for a day on the docks, never knowing if they would work or not. The men would wait behind the chain, while the overseers would pick the strongest and fittest looking for the limited supply of work on offer. Any attempt at organising labour would see a docker marked down as a troublemaker and unlikely to work again.
Even the general manager at Millwall Docks, Colonel GR Birt, who might not have been expected to support the men, painted a sympathetic picture when he gave evidence to a parliamentary committee:
“The poor fellows are miserably clad, scarcely with a boot on their foot, in a most miserable state.These are men who come to work in our docks who come on without having a bit of food in their stomachs, perhaps since the previous day; they have worked for an hour and have earned 5d; their hunger will not allow them to continue: they take the 5d. in order that they may get food, perhaps the first food they have had for 24 hours.”
The main demand from the dockers was for 6d an hour, the ‘dockers’ tanner’ as it became known. A succession of peaceful marches won the sympathy of middle class Britain (which might otherwise have feared organised labour). Famous names to emerge from the strike included organisers Joseph Havelock Wilson, Will Thorne, Tom Mann, John Burns and Ben Tillett, who had cut his teeth a couple of years before, forming the Tea Operatives and General Labourers Union downriver at Tilbury docks. The new DWRGLU swiftly signed up new members as the dockers gained confidence. At the same time, the match girls strike at Bryant and May’s works in Fairfield Road, in Bow and the organisation of the London gasworkers by Will Thorne, were showing the potential of organised unskilled ‘non craft’ labour. Thorne, who would started work in a Birmingham mill aged six in the early 1860s, would go on to become one of the first Labour MPs and be made CBE before his death in 1946.
But if there’s power in a union, then it made all the more sense for unions themselves to merge, grow bigger and take on the increasingly consolidated and massive employers. The DWRGLU joined forces with the National Union of Dock Labourers and the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union in 1910 to form the National Transport Workers’ Federation. They would call the ill-fated dock strike of 1912. The NTWF in turn would form the bedrock of the Transport and General Workers Union in 1922. Joining them were a multitude of other long forgotten unions - the Associated Horsemen’s Union, the North of England Trimmers’ and Teemers Association, the Greenock Sugar Porters’ Association and the Amalgamated Association of Carters and Motormen. And down the years in would come the Belfast Breadservers’ Trade Union, the Scottish Busmen’s Union, the National Glass Bottle Makers’ Society, the United Cut Nail Makers of Great Britain Protection Society and dozens more down the years.
The final member was the Community and Youth Workers’ Union in 2006. In the same year the T&G started talks on a merger with the two other giants of UK organised labour, the GMB and Amicus. GMB withdrew, but Amicus (the UK’s second largest union) joined with the T&G to launch Britain’s biggest union on May Day 2007. Months of wrangling over a name saw ‘Unite - the Union’ (or simply ‘Unite’) eventually emerge as the new name just a month before launch. And now, just a year later, it’s merger time again. Once, the world’s trade came through the London docks - now organised labour itself goes global.
The timeline
1889: Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers Union formed in wake of the 1889 London Dock Strike.
1910: DWRGLU, NUDL and NSFU join together at the National Transport Workers’ Federation.
1922: NTWF unions becomes founder members of Transport and General Workers Union.
1 May 2007: TGWU (by now the T&G) merges with Amicus to form Unite.
2008: Unite announces plans to merge with USW in the US and Canada to form the first global trade union.