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From Socialist Worker, No. 97, 16 November 1968, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Almost any day you look in your paper you’ll see them – strikes on Merseyside.
Seamen, dockers, engineers, busmen, tenants, lorry drivers, building workers, dustmen are just a few sections of the Merseyside labour movement that have been locked in struggle with bosses and government in recent times.
Why is Merseyside – that vast, sprawling area of docks, industry, and tenements in Liverpool and Birkenhead – so militant?
The papers will tell you that either Merseyside has more ‘troublemakers’ per square mile than Wales has sheep, or that it is the Mersey ‘spirit’ of not taking things lying down.
But these impressions don’t get anywhere near the real answer. Merseyside is militant and has many strikes because it has a host of problems and the workers are more prepared, politically and organisationally, to face up to them than in other parts of Britain.
Merseyside has always had high unemployment. For a long time industry centred around the docks and little new industry moved in, in spite of its being a redevelopment area.
Then Fords came.
The Halewood plant opened because of government pressure and because the firm saw an opportunity of using cheap labour compared to the Dagenham plant. Wage rates are lower here than for most car workers in the country.
But as far as Merseyside is concerned they are high. Through high unemployment and the lack of modern industry, the arrival of Fords caused a minor revolution.
Few workers stay in Fords for more than a year. The pace is simply too hot.
And the regular turnover of workers means that the other industries find their rates being compared to Fords. Then the workers strike.
The dockers struck for a £17 basic rate last year. In a magnificently solid strike, they paralysed large sections of industry.
The busmen, lorry drivers, dustmen and meat porters all demanded the ‘dockers’ £17’ one after the other.
Fords, meanwhile, had hardly any trouble at all, because of the high turnover of labour and because Fords set the standard that others want to achieve. The only major strike at Fords recently was the women machinists’ dispute.
But although Mersey workers are militant their strikes settle little. The dockers won a big increase in pay, but they have to fight off continual management attempts at rationalisation – new methods, fewer men – at their expense.
The busmen went back with an improvement on their basic rate only to find overtime cut to a minimum. The corporation said they were short of drivers but refused to take on qualified men. Buses were deliberately kept off the roads.
The lorry drivers went back to work to allow negotiations to take place – and one firm quickly sacked half its labour force.
Meanwhile 90,000 council tenants got wind of a rent rise and with the help of the Merseyside International Socialists they organised massive tenants’ associations and a rent strike. Even though only a few tenants went on strike, the council was humbled and made major concessions.
Then construction workers at Chemico’s Shellstar site at Ellesmere Port refused to work a disastrous productivity deal that would have made a third of the labour force redundant. They were all sacked.
A joint-sites committee quickly mobilised 10 major sites for collections for the men. 2,000 Merseyside building workers marched through Liverpool demanding their reinstatement and then threatened an all-out stoppage.
Merseyside did in a fortnight what the London Barbican workers fought so gallantly for a year to achieve – complete solidarity of all the building sites in one large area. So great was this solidarity that another site at Warrington gasworks was encouraged to reject a similar agreement that had previously been accepted.
But again little was solved. Shortly after they had won a complete return to work on the old agreement, the Shellstar stewards accepted a similar productivity agreement in the teeth of bitter opposition from many of the men.
All this militancy and so little won? In terms of money and conditions, yes, very little.
But militancy can give you much more than this. Through their struggles, Merseyside workers are probably more aware of the role of the union leaders and officials than anyone else.
They are more aware of which side the government and the state are on. For example during the Chemico strike, social security officials told the men’s wives that if they could not manage on strike pay they should stop feeding their husbands!
Gains from strikes can’t just be measured in pounds, shillings and tea breaks.
For example, it has long been thought that after a rents battle, tenants’ associations die away into social clubs. Not so Liverpool. Speke TA alone can still turn out hundreds for a meeting.
Another example: women workers at English Electric, where redundancies are likely because of the merger with GEC, are keen to have a fight for equal pay with men.
Yet another example: the joint-sites committee set up during the Shellstar strike is still in existence and links up workers throughout the area.
Why write all this about Merseyside? Because the militant workers on the edge of this smelly river have a lot to each us.
They teach us that militancy does pay off. Not in money which is quickly whittled away by prices and rent rises, but it prepares us us for the future battles.
Merseyside workers are learning that fighting through traditional organisations leads to defeat. Even fighting through unofficial shop stewards can lead to defeat because they are isolated.
But fighting in unison with other workers, creating new types of fighting organisations – tenants associations, joint-sites committees, equal pay for women campaigns – not only help you to win but help teach you what you are up against.
Workers fighting shoulder to shoulder, depending on one another, quickly learn their common interest.
The capitalist papers will continue to tell us why Merseyside workers are militant. But we will know better than they.
Marxist analysis can explain why they are militant and what we have to learn from their experiences.
That is the reason for writing about Merseyside.
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