Still chasing the tanner (1989)

From the January 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1989 workers' backs are to the wall. Who will be the next for the chop in the ongoing economic terrorism known as rationalising the economy? Union bureacrats in posh offices are thinking up new cliches to put in their tired old speeches to those who pay their salaries To be sure without unions workers would be exploited even more — they are our best defence against the class who buy our labour power and milk us for profit. But all the militant rhetoric in the world will not disguise the fact that unions can only do what the capitalist system will let us get away with. And in 1989 the bosses will be getting away with murder.

What a difference a century makes. Back in 1889 the workers were on the move. For the first time unskilled unions were being formed, organised by working men and women with a growing political consciousness of their class position. The New Unionism, as it was called, was a major development in the thinking and activity of British workers

The gas workers showed the way to do it. Back in 1872 the gas stokers — unskilled workers who had not been welcome in the old skilled, craft unions — formed the Amalgamated Gasmen's Association. When union members were sacked and scabs brought in to do their work at lower rates in plants at Beckton, Stepney, Bow, Hackney, Bermondsey and Fulham, 2,000 workers came out on strike. More scabs were brought down from Yorkshire and Lancashire to fill their jobs. Five of the Beckton stokers, alleged by the bosses to be the strike organisers. were arrested and sent for trial at the Old Bailey for breach of the Masters and Servants Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act. They were sentenced to a year s hard labour. In 1884 and 1885 two further attempts to unionise were crushed by the parasites who owned the gas plants but never produced any gas, save for that emitted in defence of the great "freedoms'' of the profit system.

On 31 March 1889 the gas workers held a mass meeting in Canning Town to organise a union. Will Thorne, a member of the Social Democratic Federation and an employee of the Gas, Light and Coke Company at Beckton, addressed the meeting At the end eight hundred men voted to form a union. Two weeks later the union's membership stood at 3,000: its motto was “Love, Union and Fidelity". These workers did not know much about the class war, except that they were poor and the bosses were rich and the bosses were rich because the workers were poor. Thorne himself, an unskilled labourer with a wife and five kids, was taught to read and write by Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor, who threw her full support behind the striking gas workers.

Under capitalism you don't always win even if you fight hard. The system is weighted in favour of the capitalists, and it takes a lot of hard struggle for workers to win battles in the class war. But the gas workers understood what the "new realists" of the modern trade union movement have yet to learn: if you don't fight hard you won't win. The gas workers fought for eight-hour shifts and double rates on Sundays. Within a month the bosses were on their knees. The strike was won. Unprecedentedly, these unskilled workers had shown the capitalists the power of labour united.

That was in the spring a hundred years ago. By the summer an even greater strike of unskilled workers took place, the only strike of the last century which, in Ben Tillett's words, "has the dignity of capital letters": The Great Dock Strike. On 14 August unskilled labourers in ten London docks formed the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and Labourers' Union of Great Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands. They started with 800 members and went on to recruit 150,000. Their demand was 6d. an hour (less than 3p. in modern money). It became known as the fight for the dockers' tanner. 30,000 workers marched through the streets. Not for them the "new realism" of sitting in smoke-filled rooms doing deals with the bosses. They went out and took their message to their fellow workers, not just in speeches, but in song. To the tune of "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching", the dockers sang

Strike boys, strike for better wages!

Strike boys, strike for better pay!

Go on fighting at the docks.

Stick it out like fighting cocks

Go on fighting till the bosses they give way!

Not a chorus to be heard that often around the table of the General Council of the 1980s' TUC. In Hyde Park on 1 September, 100,000 workers gathered to listen to speeches, many from socialists, in support of the striking dockers. There was no Norman Willis there to counsel caution; no Kinnock to condemn the dockers for getting the working class a bad name.

A significant feature of the Great Dock Strike was the solidarity shown within the working class. Workers seemed to feel, politically limited as their knowledge was, that an injury to one was an injury to all. So the money flooded in. Throughout London street collectors asked workers to contribute their pennies. The loafers in the gentlemen's clubs gave not a farthing, but the wage slaves collected a magnificent £11,732. The other trade unions sent donations amounting to £4,234. But solidarity was expressed not only by British workers. 1889, after all was the year of the formation of the Second International. Useless as that body subsequently proved to be, back in 1889 it rallied support from workers in France, Belgium, Germany and the USA, who managed to send over £100 to the strike fund. But most inspiring of all was the effort of the Australian trade unions who, quite unexpectedly, managed to send over £30,000 to the dockers. The capitalists may have been divided into competing national gangs, but the workers showed that they were not. No struggle under capitalism can be won by a movement which is broke, but the dockers did not stand alone and the strike ended with the employers conceding enough for the union to return to work as victors in the battle. (In fact, the dockers' tanner was not won, although 5d. an hour was granted. Other demands were met and, perhaps above all, the capitalists knew just how mighty a force the workers they exploited could be).

There is nothing like victory to give workers confidence. Without doubt, the Great Dock Strike showed what could be achieved by united class action. As Engels observed at the time.

That these poor famished broken down creatures who bodily fight amongst each other for admission to work, should organise for resistance, turn out 40-50,000 strong, draw after them into the strike all and every trade of the East End in any way concerned with shipping, hold out above a week, and terrify the wealthy and powerful dock companies that is a revival I am proud to have lived to see.

Socialists like Engels were not alone in seeing the dockers' struggle as an awakening of our class. On 24 September 1889 these lines from a working-class poet were published in the East End News:

O, this is the turn of the night and the tide.

And the sea's coming in, and the sunrise spreads wide.

Who said that these men were too weak to unite?

Who said that wrong should always triumph o'er right?

Who said that the devil should always hold sway?

What matters who said it. They're answered today! 

Who said that we slept, and would never awake?

To see how those suffer who live for our sake 

Such lives that we mean soon that no man shall live?

Are we waking, oh brothers, we cheer you and give 

Our gold, our good word. Now that this fight is won 

The whole world is with you. Take heart and press on.

For the past century the workers have been pressing on. And the capitalists have been pushing back. With their police scab-herders and their anti-union laws and their puppet Judges and their parties of Left and Right who seek to run the wages system, our class enemies have pushed and pushed. The tragedy is that in 1989 workers are still chasing the tanner — still fighting, when we can muster the confidence to fight, for the crumbs from the cake we ourselves bake. We should learn from the events of the last hundred years that it is not enough perpetually to be chasing the tanner. It is the wages system itself which is our enemy; only its abolition will mark the true victory of the working class.

Steve Coleman