18.05.1995

Well done, London dockers!

From Workers’ Dreadnought, paper of the Workers’ Socialist Federation, May 15 1920

British workers waking up at last

ON MONDAY May 10 at 1pm, the shipping dockers in the East India Dock, who were ordered to load the ‘Jolly George’, which was to carry munitions to Poland, struck work. They had only been working 20 minutes when they saw the guns coming down and declined to touch them.

The coalies heard a great commotion amongst the dockers and asked the cause of the trouble. When they learnt it, they refused to coal the ship.

Meanwhile someone rushed along to the Dockers’ Union offices and the union officials agreed to the strike.

The ship cannot be diverted to another port until she has been coaled.

... It is expected that the stevedores will refuse to load any further provisions for the counter-revolutionaries, and that this movement will spread to all sections of dock workers, and to all ports ...

The action of the Port of London workers provides a splendid opportunity for explaining to all sections of workers the great ideas that are at stake in the war which capitalism is making upon the Workers’ Republic.

... We can handicap the capitalists in their attack on Soviet Russia by striking and sabotage; but we cannot per-manently stop that fight till we overturn the capitalist system at home.