04.01.1996

Inventing a tradition

THE Merseyside dock strike echoes the past, but at the same time it sheds light on some contemporary issues.

The port labour force has declined from 16,085 on the Liverpool register in 1957 to the 500 sacked this year. Containerisation revolutionised dockside work and Merseyside now ships more tonnage with a fraction of the old workforce. The high productivity of dock labour has not been used to humanise conditions of work, but has led to a return to casual labour.

Casual labour on the docks is only one small example of a shift that affects the whole economy. Shoppers at Food Giant will not be aware that new workers are contracted below nine hours a week to avoid European protection of part-time workers. The scandal of zero-hour contracts was recently highlighted by the case at Burger King, where workers were only paid for the time working. Enforced waiting time was unpaid. Recasualisation on the docks is the tip of a very large iceberg.

It is all the more unusual then to find Steve Munby writing in New Times (November 11 1995) that the dispute is chasing an “imaginary tradition”. That tradition is summed up as: honour picket lines, despise scabs and win by traditional industrial methods of solidarity, spreading the action to other sections of workers. Steve Munby, representing the ‘modernisers’, calls for a new approach through “developing a political role and building alliances”. Steve is commendably clear on who may form these alliances: councils, churches, unions and business. It has been left to Bill Hunter, writing in Workers Press, to defend the ‘invented’ tradition from the modernisers’ attacks.

Steve Munby and Bill Hunter are both well known figures on the left in Liverpool. Indeed the first left paper I ever bought was from Bill Hunter on a pub sale in the late 1960s. Bill represents serious and dedicated Trotskyism at its best. Steve Munby is the best known local representative of the liquidationist ‘communists’. Always an opponent of revolution, he is now an editorial board member of New Times. It is the Trotskyist Bill Hunter that defends the tradition of communist dockers from the slanders of the ex-communist Steve Munby.

The New Times article claims that

“Many of the traditional shibboleths of trade unionism are an invention of the 1980s. The Communist Party members who built the Transport and General Workers Union of the Liverpool docks in the 1940s and 1950s had a lot of experience crossing picket lines, especially in the conflict with the breakaway blue union.”

This description of the past is completely rebutted by Bill Hunter. As the author of They knew why they fought, a history of the unofficial struggles and leadership on the docks between 1945 and 1989, Bill Hunter is well placed to know. He quotes the CP docker Frank Deegan, who remained out for the full six weeks of the 1955 strike with other TGWU members, and concludes: “There was no question of Frank Deegan and the others he [Steve Munby] mentioned crossing the picket lines.” This defence of the CP dockers comes from a principled opponent, who, as he himself notes, has “had many sharp and bitter arguments with Merseyside docker CP members ...” (Workers Press December 2 1995).

The defence of tradition is no abstract question. Steve Munby uses his version of history to argue a policy for dockers in the current dispute: “The dockers’ stewards should have led their members through the picket line placed by the Torside dockers, however difficult this would have been.” Steve Munby’s reasoning is that picket lines only deserve to be recognised when they represent the democratic decision of “the group placing the picket and the group of workers being picketed have been consulted ...” Ignoring the dynamics of a dispute as a practical task, Steve Munby sets up an ideal gate through which only legitimate pickets must pass. Is he seriously suggesting that in 1977 I and the other firefighters on strike in Liverpool should have consulted the troops prior to picketing their barracks, turning away post office staff, telecoms engineers and others?

In truth Steve Munby’s picket line test is a scabs’ charter. The broad alliances and political role he suggests as modernising the labour movement are a cover for class collaboration. Stripped out of the British Road tradition, Steve Munby has kept only some of the worst formulations. The advice of the modernisers is to abandon industrial action as its “pressures and imperatives ... will blow apart ... a coalition and alienate the public support on which it rests.” A communist policy for such a dispute is not to avoid a political role or building alliances; it is to build through internationalism and solidarity. The support of longshoremen in New York is more important to Liverpool dockers than the goodwill of church or business leaders.

A political role does not come from abdicating leadership and conceding to business or religious prejudice; it comes from independence. This is the bedrock of the labour tradition that the modernisers wish to break from. The attack on communist stewards by Steve Munby disguises an attack on the entire labour movement.

Millions of workers are faced with problems of organisation that come from ‘flexible’ labour practices. The dockers’ fight to resist recasualisation is an inspiration, and their history of struggle a vast resource.

The dock strike, like all the current batch of strikes on Merseyside, is immediately political. Labour councils have shown the face of New Labour towards organised workers in the firefighters’ and residential social workers’ disputes, but in the dock strike we see a direct confrontation with the anti-trade union laws.

Striking in the 1990s requires a political response. The need to reforge a united revolutionary party of the working class is urgent. Such a party will need to contain the best elements of the various traditions, as the exchange between the Trotskyist Bill Hunter and ex-communist Steve Munby clearly illustrates.

Chris Jones