The Definitive Strike: A History of the Great 1919 Railway Strike
by Brian Denny
(RMT, £5)

“COLLECTIVE bargaining without the right to strike is little more than collective begging,” Ieading British labour lawyer John Hendy QC wrote in  recent pamphlet about what a future for trade unions could look like.
 
It is fair comment at a time when the strength of working people in this country is at a historic low. While one in nine workers languish in insecure work, the trade union movement struggles to gain new recruits and the number of employees covered by strong unions who bargain on their side has plummeted to less than a third of the overall workforce.

If our movement is to turn this bleak future around, it needs to learn the lessons of our forgotten history. As part of their longstanding commitment to workers’ education and emboldening their members, the RMT have published The Definitive Strike, a short and accessible account of the intense class confrontation that engulfed Britain after the first world war.

Written and researched by RMT news editor Brian Denny and accompanied with a foreword by general secretary Mick Cash, the pamphlet powerfully evokes the 1919 railway strike as a culmination of a decades-long struggle of railway workers to defend guaranteed hours, standardised wages, paid holidays and overtime agreements.

While the attacks on rail workers intensified after the slaughter of the trenches, it was clear that militant industrial trade unionism, based on uniting rail workers from all grades in one industrial union, undermined even the most entrenched anti-union employers, who felt strong enough to hold on to their profits even after war’s end.

However, considering the gravity of the event — which saw 500,000 workers take to pickets under the watch of 23,000 soldiers —  the dispute remains a little-known story. This pamphlet examines the development of workers’ dissatisfaction and how the government provoked what was then the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) by demanding pay cuts for the most poorly paid of the workforce.

A fascinating strength of the pamphlet is to show just how much the media and political establishment were taken off guard by the campaign.

In response to the media slurs on workers, the NUR pioneered an incredibly effective media strategy, aided by sympathetic journalists, which decisively undermined the anti-worker propaganda churned out by 10 Downing Street and helped the workers gain wide support across the population.

It also shows the unity among workers in resisting the government and their enthusiasm in continuing the strike and how they forced it to cave in after nine solid days of strike action. A particularly resonant section of the pamphlet deals with the solidarity messages sent to the NUR’s general secretary JH Thomas.

It compares them to tweets, with each branch proudly communicating the unity of their local pickets to the union headquarters, telling “Jimmy” Thomas that he can take a rest for a week, because all is in order.

The reader can take plenty away from this new pamphlet, which deserves a wide readership. Not only would workers in the casualised trades gain from reading of the unity of all workers in a head-on confrontation between their representatives and the boss class, so too would unionised railway workers who, a century after the 1919 strike, are talking in the mess rooms about how to fight the “minimum service requirements” the Tory government is attempting to impose.

If we are going to make serious steps forward for our class in this century, it is essential we learn the defining moments of our past.

The Definitive Strike: A History of the Great 1919 Railway Strike is available from RMT,   rmt.org.uk/shop