by nineteensixtyseven

The immediate post-war period was one of intense industrial militancy across Europe. Some of the most famous events from this time were the Italian factory occupations in the autumn of 1920, where hundreds of thousands of workers took control of their workplaces in the country’s northern industrial heartland, and the Battle of George Square in Glasgow which took place during the great Forty Hours Strike. At the same time as the strike in Glasgow, in January 1919, Belfast workers took part in the largest strike in the city’s history; the Great Engineering Strike.

The issue in Belfast, as in Glasgow, was the reduction of the working week from 54 hours. In Belfast the figure agreed was 44 and in Glasgow, 40. Nationally the TUC had agreed a 47-hour week with employers but this was rejected by ordinary workers. After pressure from militant workers, the Federation of Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades held a ballot which was opposed by the TUC and the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. It was, however, supported by Belfast workers on a vote of over 20,000 in favour of a 44-hour week and unofficial strike action to achieve it.

The strike got under way on the 25th of January and the next day some 8,000 workers gathered in Custom House Square to show their support for it. Within a few days the engineering and shipyard workers were out, the city’s electricity supplies were down to everywhere except hospitals, and the distribution of several newspapers was affected. Pickets were used at the Sirocco works in east Belfast and also to ensure the co-operation of clerical workers. The strike outlasted the conflict in Glasgow and united workers across the sectarian divide. Even when the Corporation turned on supplies of gas and electricity and re-activated the trams on 11th February, strike pickets stopped the vehicles in the tracks and ordered the passengers to get off. By that evening, gas and electricity were back down to their agreed levels. It even appeared that old enmities were dying; one member of the strike committee wrote in the Workers’ Bulletin:

“The workers have discovered their friends. They are not in the City Hall, nor yet in the Elected Legislature. They, like themselves, were always to be found on the Queen’s Road and on their way to the engine shops all over the city at 5:30 each morning. Labour in Belfast has discovered that when it must fight, it must fight alone. No helping hand is stretched out to help on the way. Labour will fight, and labour will be right. LABOUR CAN STAND ALONE!”

However, despite the strength and morale of the workers involved, and in the face of relentless barrage of criticism from right-wing newspapers such as the Newsletter, the lack of strike pay was causing great hardship. Moreover, on the 12th February the Clydeside strike committee was forced to admit defeat so thereafter the Belfast workers would be on their own. To compound these difficulties, the workers were divided when the shipyard employees were offered 44 hours but the other employers insisted on 47. The next ballot was much closer, and sensing the strike was losing momentum, the Corporation restored power and other services. The engineering bosses then announced they would be re-opening with a 47-hour working week.

Michael Farrell puts the ultimate failure of the strike down to the committee’s failure to call out the transport workers and challenge the military occupation of the gas and electrical works. This, he argues, was because the workers wished to avoid a situation like that which happened during the Battle of George Square. The Belfast workers interpreted the Glasgow violence not so much as an act of class war by the state against the workers but merely as symptom of a vague disorder that they wished to avoid, being responsible and ‘loyal’. To demonstrate the difference in political consciousness, when the Glasgow leader Willie Gallacher came to Belfast as chairman lf the Clyde workers’ committee in Feburary 1918 one worker shouted “I want to ask Mr Gallcher is he loyal to his King?” “That’s a stupid question he,” Gallacher replied. “You know I am a revolutionary and that the only loyalty is to the working-class. The engineers refused him the use of their hall.

More fundamentally, there was a desire to keep ‘politics’ out of the strike itself which inhibited the strikers from elevating their struggle beyond a simple act of industrial relations via the recognised channels of arbitration into. This can be explained one two levels: one ‘organic’ and the other ‘conjunctural’, to use Gramsci’s helpful distinction. Organically, that is to say on the level of the deeper structural development of the Ulster working-class, as Austen Morgan and Eric Hobsbawm have written, the ‘traditional’ division of the working class between skilled craft-based workers and the unskilled (which is found in almost every other industrial economy in this period) was overlaid with ethno-religious divisions. Not exclusively but on the whole, the craft-based workers, linked as they often were to Orange lodges and similar organisations, were from the Protestant section of the population, whilst the unskilled workers (carters, dockers etc) came were Catholics. Thus, what was a normative structural inequality of labour common to industrial capitalism in the process of development manifested itself disastrously as an ethno-religious, that is to say ‘national’, and therefore ‘political’, division. Therefore, in the conjunctural context of the First World War, the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, the desire to remove ‘politics’ was understandable. ‘Labourism’ had to be disassociated at all costs with the revolutionary nationalism of Sinn Féin, so revolutionary socialism suffered as a consequence. The removal of politics, defined as it was by the national question, meant the negation of anti-systemic ideologies such as socialism and revolutionary syndicalism. A strike is, of course, an inherently political act so separation of the two is impossible but the attempt in this case restricted the workers to a mild labourism in their goals, which reflected necessarily on their tactics.

This contention is demonstrated by way in which the strike impacted on class consciousness. Just how much of an impact it had on working-class consciousness in a quantitative sense can be demonstrated by the levels of support achieved by the Belfast Labour Party before and after the strike. In the 1918 General Election the Belfast Labour Party, linked to the British Labour Representation Committee, unsuccessfully ran 4 candidates and secured around a fifth of the vote. In May 1919, in the aftermath of the strike, over 100,000 took part in the city’s May Day celebrations and when the Belfast Municipal Elections were held under proportional representation in January 1920 Labour put up 20 candidates in 60 seats. 13 of them were returned, including 5 strike leaders. Two of them even topped the poll, one of these in the Protestant working-class heartland of Shankill, trouncing the Edward Carson’s Unionist Party-linked Ulster Unionist Labour Association (UULA).

However, qualitatively this consciousness was brittle, liable to be smashed at any time by the exogenous intrusion of the War of Independence and of ethno-religious politics into Belfast life. On the 12th of July 1920, Edward Carson made a violent speech associating Labourism with Sinn Féinism, accusing the Labour candidates of knowing as much about workers as the man on the moon. Five days later, a Banbridge-born Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) officer was murdered by the IRA in Cork and the spark was lit for a massive sectarian conflagration. The counter-revolutionary British Empire Union, the Belfast Protestant Assocation and the UULA seized their chance to gain the upper hand and on the 21st July the tragic cycle of shipyard expulsions resumed. At least 7,500 Catholics were expelled (some estimates have as many as 12,000), some swimming for their lives across the River Lagan amid a hail of ‘Belfast confetti’ (bolts and washers). Not only Catholics but thousands of Protestant trade unionists and socialists- disparaged as ‘Rotten Prods’- were forced to flee for their lives. Vigilance committees were set up to keep out ‘disloyal’ workers and on 25 August a huge Union Jack was unfurled in the plumbers’ shop at Harland and Wolff. John Crumlin, one of the ringleaders said: “Loyalists would be compelled to take matters into their own hands” if the British Government did not stop Sinn Féin.”

As Austen Morgan was written, a ‘new loyalist industrial order…premised on a purging of the trade-union leadership’ had been created. Working-class unity was vanquished. The ‘Orange Card’ was trump and, yet again, had won the trick.