29.01.1998

Dockers end fight for jobs

This defeat proves once again that the key to winning workers’ struggles is to go beyond trade union forms

The heroic two-year struggle of the 300 sacked Liverpool dockers has ended.

By a four-to-one majority, a mass meeting on January 26 decided to accept pay-offs of up to £28,000 to those dockers formerly employed by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company and its subsidiary, Coastal Container Line. Eighty dockers formerly employed by the Torside company, whose sacking and subsequent picket had sparked the dispute, will get nothing.

The pay-offs will provide no nest eggs. Under social security regulations there will be no entitlement to Jobseeker’s Allowance until each claimant’s savings fall below £8,000. Many dockers will need much of the money to pay off mortgages and other debts run up during the long struggle. The settlement is substantially the same as the offer first rejected by the dockers in December 1996, one which was last thrown out by a 70% majority in a ballot imposed by Transport and General Workers Union general secretary Bill Morris three months ago.

In a statement issued at that time the dockers said: “Should the dockers vote to reject the offer, we fully expect that the tide of solidarity unleashed since the second anniversary of our dispute will rise to a flood, and we will be demanding that the International Transport Federation throw its weight behind the growing international actions.” The expected growth in solidarity action did not occur. Although Morris’s action in imposing the ballot was condemned in resolutions passed by a number of TGWU regional committees, and many branches of the union submitted motions to the union’s general executive committee calling for positive action to support the dockers, all of these resolutions were bureaucratically ruled out of order by the union’s president at the GEC meeting on December 1.

More recently the weekly dockers’ mass meetings had heard that promised escalation of international solidarity actions had not been delivered, and that the dispute appeal fund was close to exhaustion. Physical solidarity from other workers within Britain remained at the lamentably low level that it has been from the outset.

The courage, resolve and solidity of the dockers has been magnificent, and their organisational work has been inspirational. The paramount importance which the dockers placed upon international working class solidarity shows us the future of workers’ struggles, in contrast to the narrow, implicitly nationalist sectionalism that dominates much of the workers’ movement. However, it has to be recognised that the ending of the dockers’ fight represents yet another blow in a long line of defeats for the working class.

As dockers’ speakers told last year’s second anniversary rally in Liverpool (see Weekly Worker, October 2 1997), there is no doubt that it is a defeat that the TGWU leadership, as well as the Blair government, wanted.

The dockers were from the outset already aware of the union bureaucracy’s attitude. A statement issued in April 1997 recalled that “between 1989 and 1993 the Liverpool dockers requested on four occasions an official ballot relating to job losses, privatisation and centralisation. These requests were refused by the union for various reasons”. Journalist John Pilger gave elucidation in his Guardian article of November 23 1996 : “Eric Leatherbarrow (Mersey Docks Communications Manager) wanted me to know that … the company had no criticisms of the union or its general secretary, Bill Morris … ‘We show the TGWU far more respect than the men’, he said”.

The TGWU leadership’s determination to maintain its presence in the last unionised dock in Britain had led it to adopt the role of industrial policemen. Union bureaucrats even went so far as to threaten the dockers that if they did not comply with management they would be sacked.

Any illusions in New Labour as a party sympathetic to workers’ struggles were shattered in the first few months of Blair’s government.

There is no doubt that the dockers did reach a better understanding of the nature of the trade union bureaucracy, the Labour Party and the state. In their ‘Appeal to the British working class’ (Dockers Charter No18, September 1997), they called for “a mobilisation against any government which continues these policies” (privatisation, casualisation, anti-trade union laws), and suggested: “Our powerful circles - our trade unions - should be used for our advance to socialism.” They were looking for answers through working class political organisation.

Some leaders, like Jimmy Nolan and Mick Cullen, joined the Socialist Labour Party; others called for a new formation. The dockers’ defeat proves once again that the key to winning workers’ struggles, today more than ever, is to go beyond trade union forms. We need to raise those struggles onto a higher, political, plane, to direct them consciously against this reactionary pro-boss government, against the capitalist state itself.

Above all, it shows the urgent need for the building of a Communist Party.

Derek Hunter