The 1913 Lock-Out

Posted by Jim on September 1, 2018

A brief history of Ireland’s landmark industrial and social dispute,
between approximately 20,000 workers and 300 employers, which began in
Dublin 105 years ago this week. By Francis Devine.

In Dublin City in 1913
The boss was rich and the poor were slaves,
The women working and the children hungry,
Then on came Larkin like a mighty wave.

Dublin 1913

In 1913 Dublin lacked a real industrial base and work was generally of a
casual nature with poor union organisation and slave wages. A third of
the city’s teeming population inhabited the centre city tenement slums.
The overcrowding, squalor and inadequate sanitation combined with poor
diet to give Dublin one of the highest infant death rates in Europe.

High levels of violence and prostitution offered further evidence of the
demoralised state of many of the population. It was in many ways an
unlikely seed-bed for trade unionism. The social system was typified by
insecurity of employment, personal daily struggles for survival and the
frequent indifference of the longer established – but conservative –
craft trade unions.

The New Unionism, marked by its organisation of the unskilled and
socialist zeal, had briefly flourished in Dublin in the 1890s. But the
odds were heavily stacked against permanent success: many union
organizations had become moribund. With James Larkin’s arrival in
Ireland as Organiser for the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL),
the waterfront workers rose again, firstly in Belfast in 1907 and
subsequently in other Irish ports.

Disagreement with the NUDL’s Liverpool Executive led to Larkin’s
suspension and the launch in 1909 of a Dublin-based union for unskilled
workers – the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. From the
beginning the new union enunciated in its rule book a wide programme of
industrial and political agitation to change society in the interests of
the Irish working class. But the employers would not be silent
observers.

The Bosses Organise

Under the calculating leadership of William Martin Murphy, owner of the
Irish Independent and controller of the Dublin Tramways Company, over
400 employers combined in the Dublin Employers’ Federation to deny the
same rights of combination to the city’s underprivileged. Their aim was
to remove the threat of the ITGWU and its message of discontent so
marvelously articulated by Larkin’s street oratory.

The crunch came on 15th August, 1913 when Murphy offered the workers in
the Independent’s dispatch department the choice of Union or job. When
their loyalty to the Union resulted in dismissal, prompt solidarity
action saw the dispute escalate with further dismissals in Eason’s and
on the trams.

The now confident employers issued the infamous ‘document’, locking out
any worker that refused to sign a pledge to disown the ITGWU. By the end
of September over 20,000 were locked out.

Bloody Sunday

On Sunday, 31 August, the police attacked a crowd gathered to hear
Larkin address them in O’Connell Street. The meeting had been banned by
the authorities. Scores were injured in the baton charge and British
public opinion was shocked at the scenes. As a result of injuries
recived in the baton charge and subsequent violence James Nolan, James
Byrne and Alice Brady paid for their loyalty to the workers’ cause with
their lives.

Questions were raised in the House of Commons and the issue was debated
at the British Trades Union Congress.

Support soon came on foot of the distress but Larkin’s ‘Fiery Cross’
crusade in Britain, where he preached the ‘Divine Mission of
Discontent,’ generated rank-and-file rather than official reaction.
Assistance was limited to food and material support rather than
sympathetic industrial action.

James Connolly, now co-ordinating industrial matters, drew the port of
Dublin shut as ‘tight as a drum’ and both sides settled for a long
attritional war through the winter with the bosses relying on starvation
and the workers on the simple message of ‘each for all and all for
each.’

To The Bitter End

The TUC Dublin Food Fund and other support marshalled by the Dublin
Trades Council sustained the workers and there can have been few
occasions as emotive as the landing of the food ships on the quays. The
workers also began to defend themselves through the formation of the
Irish Citizen Army. Intellectuals and many middle-class sympathisers
rallied to the workers’ side shocked at the awful conditions and
horrified at the pig-headedness of the employers. The Church was less
sympathetic and positively hostile to the notion of Dublin’s starved
youngsters going to the ‘godless’ homes of English sympathisers for the
duration. Connolly wondered why souls were of greater concern than
bellies.

In the face of uneven odds the Lock-Out began to crumble in January 1914
as the Building Labourers’ Union returned – as many others were to do –
without signing the offending document.

Some stuck it out until May, but in the end the employers could and did
claim victory as resistance collapsed. But they lacked the strength to
enforce their victory, as the ITGWU survived.

In defeat, the ITGWU had gained many adherents and, more significantly,
had laid the foundations that led Connolly to conclude:

“From the effects of this drawn battle both sides are still bearing
heavy scars. How deep those scars are, none will ever reveal. But the
working class has lost none of its aggressiveness, none of its
confidence, none of the hope in the ultimate triumph. No traitor amongst
the ranks of that class has permanently gained, even materially, by his
or her treachery. The flag of the Irish Transport and General Workers’
Union still flies proudly in the van of the Irish working class, and
that working class still marches proudly and defiantly at the head of
the gathering hosts who stand for a regenerated nation, resting upon a
people industrially free.”

The Legacy of 1913

1913 was, in fact, a victory drawn from the jaws of defeat. The trade
union and labour movement was soon to become an essential and important
part of the new southern Irish State but the battle was not won in 1913,
and progress since has been uneven.

Despite tremendous growth in numerical terms in the size of the trade
union movement in the 1970s, working class organisation has not been
reflected in political gains.

In terms of a social audit of Ireland today as compared to 1913 can we
really claim to be in credit? Certainly extreme poverty has gone but
things are relative to the times. We still have acute housing problems,
attacks on hard-won health, education and social services and new
problems of urban decay, drug abuse, vandalism and crime in the
alienation of our youth. Regrettably there is now a gathering attack on
trade unionism and the essential collective value that it represents and
to which the whole of Irish society owes many of its freedoms.

The new’ documents’ are the beliefs in privatisation, deregulation,
public spending cuts and increasing appeals to individualism. Trade
union values are being dismissed as ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘belonging to the
nineteenth century’ but in fact they were never more necessary if we are
to win the struggle for control of our destinies and management of our
own economic, social and political affairs.

The Lessons of 1913

We must learn from 1913’s solidarity between different trade unions,
national and international. The trade union movement fought for the
whole of the working class not just the organised sectors.

Larkin’s newspaper the Irish Worker through its mass readership
countered the employers’ message from the bosses’ servant press. The
trade unions provided social and cultural activities for its members as
well as industrial and political leadership.

The Lock-Out tried to outlaw a culture counter to capitalism. It failed
partly because it was so crude and ham-fisted. Today’s attack is more
subtle and all the more dangerous because of it.

To honour the memory of 1913 we must once again set out the task of
regenerating a nation on “the shoulders of a people industrially free.”