“Class War versus Social Compact? A Contemporary Analysis of the 1913 Lockout”

 

John Lovett Memorial Lecture, University of Limerick 2013 by Padraig Yeates

1913 hasn’t gone away. Of all the centenaries we will be celebrating in the coming decade this is the one where re-enactment could supersede commemoration because the issues of collective bargaining, union recognition, workplace representation and industrial democracy are even more contested today than a hundred years ago.

The Lockout occurred because of a collision between an emerging native capitalist class personified in William Martin Murphy, President of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce and the response from organised labour personified by Jim Larkin, General Secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU). Murphy was driven not just by the desire to make money and have untrammelled control of his enterprises, but by strongly held views on Irish nationality that were narrow and exclusive. Among those excluded from this vision were, of course, Larkin and his followers.

Larkin was a nationalist too, but he was also an internationalist. He was an advocate of syndicalism, which was quickly dubbed Larkinism. Syndicalism was a response to the excesses of capitalism. It was initially a revolutionary ideology that sought to overthrow capitalism rather than reform it and create a society based on socialist principles. It organised workers to wring incremental concessions from the capitalist class and build on these victories to create One Big Union capable of overthrowing capitalism itself, either single-handedly through a general strike or in tandem with political action, both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary. The proposal to create an Irish Labour Party at the ITUC conference in 1912 was made in this context by its main proponents, James Connolly and Jim Larkin. More traditional trade unionists who saw their role as circumscribed by workplace and sectional issues opposed it. Many were indeed supporters of John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party.

In fairness to William Martin Murphy he had nothing against what he termed ‘respectable’ unions. He helped fund the creation of the Dublin Trades Council in 1884. However he regarded Larkinism not just as a threat to competitiveness by organising unskilled and semi-skilled workers to demand better pay and conditions, but as part of a wider assault by Anglo-Saxon materialism on Catholic nationalist Ireland as it was about to enter the promised land of Home Rule.

Then and now

Larkinism’s challenge was met and defeated but it was a much closer run battle than many realised at the time. It was only with the aid of secret subsidies that Dublin’s employers held the line. Of course it can equally well be argued that Dublin’s working class could only sustain its resistance to Murphy’s strategy because of massive aid from the British labour movement.

One of the ironies of Irish historiography is that the Lockout tends to be regarded in terms of Ireland’s long march towards nationhood. Many commentators miss the point that it was only possible because Dublin was part of the United Kingdom, home to one of the most powerful trade union movements of the day and that the Lockout was part of a European wide wave of social unrest soon to be submerged in the great catastrophe of the First World War.

In other words the Lockout was fought in the context of a modernising, liberal, urban democracy that was beset by conflicting demands from suffragettes, Home Rulers and Irish Unionists – as well as Trade Unionists. Britain was a world power capable of treating with other great powers and international capital on equal terms in 1913. Its government was talented and contained the most effective British social reformer of the twentieth century in David Lloyd George. He is remembered in Ireland for sending us the Black and Tans, but he also gave us old age pensions and unemployment benefit. He would have provided the foundations of a national health service too if John Redmond had let him.

The other point that needs to be emphasised is the sheer ambition of Murphy’s objective in 1913. He did not merely wish to eradicate the nascent ITGWU within his own business empire, but he convinced 400 other employers to follow suit. Not only did the Dublin Chamber of Commerce and the Dublin Employers’ Federation require employees of affiliates to leave the ITGWU but they required members of other unions to dissociate from Larkin’s union and, in some cases, required them to expel members who did not obey these instructions. Murphy was in many respects Larkin’s greatest convert, responding to the threat of the sympathetic strike, or general strike, with a general Lockout. He even dubbed his policy ‘Murphyism’.

Nor should we forget that it was the employers who unleashed this industrial and ideological offensive against organised workers. Larkin is so often depicted as a revolutionary firebrand that even some on the left think he was the aggressor and the Lockout was a victory rather than a defeat. The evidence suggests that Larkin actually wished to avoid strike action by Tramway men because he thought their chances of success slim. He would almost certainly have refused to sanction industrial action if he had realised it would be used by Murphy as a pretext for a Lockout.

The historical reality is that the Irish trade union movement in 1913, even in its most virulent Larkinite form, was not strong enough to save the world. It barely proved capable of saving itself. A look at the sums demonstrates this very clearly. During the dispute the British TUC sent £93,000 worth of aid to Dublin and £13,000 came from other sources. Wages lost were estimated at £400,000 in working class districts of the city. Business suffered more in absolute financial terms, which experienced commentators estimated at £300,000 a week at the conflict’s peak. The overall cost may have been £2.3 million (including the £400,000 in lost wages), but this was widely spread and, as Murphy was fond of reminding workers, the employers could still afford three square meals a day. The revenue of the Dublin Port and Docks Board, which was one of the enterprises most affected, only fell from £94,128 in 1912 to £86,215 in 1913, a drop of 8.4 per cent. Murphy’s Dublin United Tramway Company, the firm at the epicentre of the dispute saw its net profit fall from £142,382 to £119,871 over the same period, which was reflected in a drop of half a per cent in the annual dividend on ordinary shares. By contrast the six days of the Easter Rising caused an estimated £2 million in damage to property, a lot of it owned by William Martin Murphy. The cost of the Lockout in subsidies to Dublin employers’ was less than £20,000, with the largest amounts coming from the British Shipping Federation, the Engineering Federation and Lord Iveagh. In other words it cost the labour movement over £5 for every pound spent by the enemy.

In a capitalist system of course the rules are stacked in favour of the capitalist. This is why trade unions need a supportive state that values industrial peace and social equity as much as the rights of capital if workers’ organisations are to flourish.

A different World

Today we live in a very different world to 1913. We have s secularised society, an open economy dominated by FDI firms and Dublin is probably more cosmopolitan than at any time since the Viking era. Yet the industrial relations environment is even more hostile to organised labour than in the lockout. Modern captains of industry no longer even pretend they have no objections to ‘respectable’ unions. They operate unapologetically in a ‘union free’ zone. This change is reflected in the rewriting of history through a rather one dimensional interpretation of the Enlightenment that, we are assured, gave birth to the modern world. It is the Enlightenment of Adam Smith (and his recently rediscovered Irish forerunner Richard Cantillon). The motor force of this narrative is the discovery and propagation of the mechanisms of enlightened self-interest and the resultant triumph of capitalism and possessive individualism – You Are What You Own. Other aspects of the Enlightenment, that inspired architects of the Dutch, English, American and French revolutions at least as much as the pursuit of possessive individualism – the quest for democracy and social justice – are largely ignored. Yet this quest is as old a quest as human society itself, and it is no accident that the roots of European socialism run deep within the Christian tradition. British socialism, of which Larkin was a product, was particularly influenced by that tradition and we should not forget that Larkin, the only self-proclaimed Communist ever elected to Dail Eireann, was a practising Catholic.

We do not know what future forms this age old quest for social justice will take but we would be very foolish to put all our eggs in the basket of possessive individualism.

The nearest thing we have had to incorporating the quest for social justice into contemporary Irish democracy was Social Partnership. I wrote a book entitled Lockout: Dublin 1913 some years ago and collaborated with Brian Sheehan and Tim Hastings on another book, Saving the Future. Both were written when social partnership was at its apogee. Today it is fashionable to put social partnership in the dock of public opinion as one of the principal authors of our current misfortunes, alongside politicians, bankers, property speculators and trade union leaders (the latter usually as agents of social partnership).

I am not a dedicated follower of fashion, either of the right or the left, so I still think Social Partnership was a good idea. It was a rather late Irish variant on the historic compromise between capital and labour that followed the Second World War in the wider European context. I do not believe it failed because of some innate conceptual flaw. It failed because it lacked ambition, it lacked vision and it lacked a will to realise its potential.

Social Partnership’s failures

The main reasons for the failure of Social Partnership were:

1. Firstly, and most importantly, the failure of the partners to agree long term goals for the type of society, as well as economy, they wished to achieve. They even lacked commonly agreed values. Without such goals it was impossible to assess long term progress. The GDP and GNP rates triumphantly paraded year after year during the boom were only measuring instruments, like a milometer on a car. They are not much use if you do know where you are going. Yet we sold the Irish model on our success in measuring them and we gloried in the fact that Social Partnership was a process rather than a road map; a problem solving technique praised for its flexibility and sophistication as an end in itself. As Social Partnership was a marriage where the contracting parties did not have to agree to anything in advance, is it any wonder it ended in divorce?

2. The Government initiated Social Partnership, Charles J Haughey to be precise in 1987, in order to tackle a previous economic crisis and the government remained the key mover throughout. One of the consequences of this process, driven by a Government without clear cut long term objectives, or principles, was that successive administrations, and particularly those of Bertie Ahern, succumbed increasingly to short termism. Electoral cycles came to dictate policy. Ahern’s governments increasingly bought their way out of problems, raising public expenditure and reducing the tax base while riding the tiger of the property boom. The short lived Rainbow Coalition of 1994-97 made the best use of the Social Partnership process and extended it to include the Social Pillar. Yet even that administration failed to identify long term goals and baulked at the idea of giving a meaningful role to opposition parties. Its predecessor, the Fianna Fail-Labour Coalition of Albert Reynolds and Dick Spring did establish the National Economic and Social Forum but this had no substantive role in the process. With the parliamentary opposition parties locked out, it was inevitable that they would attack Social Partnership as a threat to democracy. The fact that they all embraced it in office inadvertently endorsed the legitimacy of their concern.

3. Workers and the trade union movement benefitted immensely from the partnership process. It gave workers the greatest improvement in real earnings and living standards in the history of this island. It gave them more workplace rights than ever before and important social wage benefits. Unions had a direct input into social and economic policy and received significant subventions that allowed them to pursue long standing institutional objectives. However the focus of the agreements remained on pay, both directly and as mediated through taxation and social wage measures. Take-home pay remained the issue that clinched agreements. Meanwhile the general upturn in employment and union membership disguised declining density, particularly in new sectors of the economy; it bred complacency and it perpetuated dependency on outdated service models of trade unionism not fit for purpose in a rapidly changing labour market. The very success of unions in securing legislation to protect individual employees in the workplace reduced the need for union membership in order for workers to vindicate their rights. The increasing importance of economic growth through union free FDI firms undermined the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and there was an increasingly obvious deficit between the formal power exercised by unions in the partnership process and their declining economic muscle.

4. Employers benefitted even more than workers from the boom. It was only in the concluding agreements that the workers’ slice of the national cake began to grow proportionately faster than the employers. This development no doubt reinforced the realisation amongst employers of the imbalance that had emerged between the formal institutional power of trade unions and their growing weakness in the workplace. It is debateable if a majority of employers ever saw social partnership as more than a necessary evil to ensure pay moderation. To have made Social Partnership work in the long term would have required them embracing the concept of unions as equals and unionised workplaces as the norm. Even if IBEC, the premier employers’ body, had been willing to do so, we have to recognise that an increasing number of its members were pushing HR agendas that left them union free. Such companies were happy to free load on a system that ensured industrial peace at little or no expense to themselves. These companies now represent a majority of IBEC affiliates. Of course IBEC has never been a mirror image of ICTU. It is a club where members only avail of services they want. The decision by IBEC to appoint an economist rather than an industrial relations trouble shooter as its latest Director General, along with the ‘new pricing model’ being developed for members would appear to be part of a natural progression along the ‘club’ route and to further reduce both its inclination and its capacity to act as a Social Partner.

It is now clear that, when the economic crisis struck in 2008, it was a hammer colliding with an empty shell. The ability of unions to mitigate some of the worst aspects of the economic downturn is a tribute to the skill of their negotiators. The Croke Park Agreement and the Private Sector Protocol are legacies of Social Partnership that provide an indication of what might have been possible in the current crisis if the process had been grounded in shared values and in long term, sustainable, commonly agreed strategic objectives. But the skill of individual trade union leaders, the Labour Court, the LRC and experienced industrial relations practitioners on the other side of the negotiating table is not enough to revive Social Partnership, nor, in its old form, does it deserve to be revived. Whether the conditions exist for some new, more ambitious form of partnership in the future it is too soon to say, but something is urgently needed to redress the current imbalance of power in the industrial relations arena. If too much union power can undermine competitiveness and stifle growth, too little can foster social inequality which, in turn, can not alone undermine growth but foster political instability. Nor should we forget that many strands of social radicalism, secular as well as religious, contain a strong millenarian streak that we provoke at our peril.

Fortunately we are not reduced to such extreme choices, yet. But we must remain cognisant of the fact that in capitalist economies wage bargaining remains one of the most widespread and effective means by which wealth is redistributed outside of war and revolution.

How then can we strengthen trade unions and social equity without resorting to either war, or revolution?

Possible solutions

1. I believe we could take a leaf from history, from the years immediately following the Lockout. The single most important factor in the rapid recovery of the Irish trade union movement from defeat was the advent of the First World War. It not only created a labour shortage that strengthened the hand of organised workers but a political consensus within the British political establishment that the country had one overriding priority – the defeat of Germany.

This was to be achieved by a variety of means but one of the most important was the creation of industrial peace on the home front. The Committee on Production system was established to eliminate disputes in key war industries. If employers and union representatives could not resolve a problem themselves it could be referred to the Committee system, which operated under the auspices of the Board of Trade. It could then provide compulsory arbitration. In order to preserve the legitimacy of the system the arbitrators were usually careful to strike compromises that gave both sides something. Although focussed on industries vital to the war effort, awards made by the Committee on Production system inevitably provided benchmarks for other sectors.

It did not eliminate strikes and ultimately resulted in the emergence of a powerful shop stewards movement as British workers felt increasingly alienated from official trade union structures. But in Ireland the system had almost no negative effects. It proved extremely useful to unions who knew that by invoking the state system they could gain automatic recognition at the price of compulsory arbitration. Nor did it lead to the emergence of a strong shop stewards movement here, possibly because Ireland is a much smaller place where the gap between union leaders and rank and file was much less. During the Social Partnership era most Irish unions adopted more democratic structures with sophisticated consultative processes. In SIPTU, for instance, members were consulted before talks began to identify their priorities and the final package was brought back to them for debate and a secret ballot. For the price of a union subscription ordinary workers had a greater say in key decisions affecting their lives than they were allowed in general elections once every four or five years. This facility to educate and co-opt workers into successive social pacts was a key factor in securing industrial peace and ensuring policy strategists spent time identifying the potential practical impact of agreements at both micro and macro levels. Unfortunately I think the importance of this democratic aspect of agreements was greatly undervalued by the political and business elites. Either that or they understood it only too well, and set their faces against it.

To me the merits of co-opting workers into a system of policy concertation are blindingly obvious, as is the point that it can best be done by expanding the trade union base to incorporate the entire workforce.

I realise employers would want a trade-off for union recognition. If our over-riding common objective is to defeat the forces that keep us trapped in the current Troika bail-out then a reform of our voluntary system of industrial relations that guarantees trade union recognition in return for industrial peace and compulsory arbitration must be an option worthy of consideration. The Croke Park Agreement contains provision for binding arbitration and many private sector agreements include no strike clauses and provision for third party arbitration. Would it be such an enormous leap to devise a national concordat between the social partners even on a trial basis?

2. An alternative approach could be a licensing system for employers. I first suggested this in 1998, the year of the Ryanair baggage handlers’ dispute, when the question of union recognition was finally taken off the back burner within the partnership process. As we now know, attempts to solve the problem through the 2001 and 2004 Industrial Relations Acts failed. Ryanair played a key role in sabotaging the legislation through its successful appeal to the Supreme Court of the IMPACT case. Licensing employers should not raise any Constitutional issues and could be achieved by simply amending company law. Under existing legislation companies are already accountable to the state for how they conduct their business in recognition of their obligations to shareholders, customers, creditors and employees. They must meet these requirements in order to avail of such benefits as limited liability and the protection of the courts.

Employers already comply with a wide range of obligations to employees under what can generally be called the human resources agenda. Most medium and large sized companies are also required under European law to have Works Councils – part of the legacy of the German revolution of 1918.

Unions are licensed by the Registrar of Friendly Societies. They must comply with various obligations to obtain and retain their negotiating licences. Indeed licences are required for an enormous range of activities in our society and, while some may be little more than revenue raising devices, the basic principle involved is that people should only be licensed to carry out certain activities if they have a proven competence and the relevant qualifications. Can anyone argue that employing people is a less socially responsible activity than driving a car, owning a dog or running a pub?

A licensing system for employers need only require them to hold an acceptable qualification in Human Resource Management, and have in place adequate consultation and negotiation procedures that are lodged with the Companies Office and open to site (workplace) inspection. The basic criteria, or benchmark document, could be the LRC’s Code of Practice: Voluntary Dispute Resolution S.I. No. 76 of 2004. If there are legal concerns the Code of Practice could be referred to Europe to ensure it complies with EU law and the Charter of Fundamental Rights (rather than the Irish Supreme Court).

Where a dispute arises over the interpretation or implementation of in-house Codes of Conduct these could be referred to the new Workplace Relations Commission, and the Labour Court where necessary. In this context it would be important that the Court retain its historic composition, remaining representative of employers and trade unions. Where a firm loses its licence, fails to qualify for one in the first place or simply refuses to apply, it need not cease trading. An agency that does meet the licensing criteria could take over human resources functions from a recalcitrant principal. In fact such a licensing system would help clean up the sub-contracting and agency sectors as everyone employing another person would require a licence, albeit exclusions or less demanding criteria might be set for small enterprises.

Whether a licencing system is practicable or compulsory arbitration is desirable, they are ultimately nothing more than a means to an end. What is important is that we find new ways of providing Irish workers with a meaningful say in the development of our society.

3. We could take another leaf from history, again invoking David Lloyd George. When he introduced social insurance he made provision that trade unions could establish benefit societies. Jim Larkin was one of the first trade union leaders to recognise its value. In the current crisis the growing pensions’ bill in the public sector and lack of adequate pensions’ provision in the private sector will lead to social catastrophe if not addressed in the near future. We need a universal pension system to which all would contribute proportionately. Why not allow trade unions to once more become providers of social insurance under such a scheme? They could hardly perform worse than the current providers.

Doing ourselves a disservice  

I referred earlier to the First World War and how a political consensus emerged on the need to do whatever it took to defeat Germany. When the Second World War broke out politicians in all parties were very aware of the disillusionment that set in after 1918 when a land fit for heroes failed to materialise. The wartime coalition knew that, if it was not alone to mobilise people but sustain public support for the war effort in the difficult years of sacrifice that lay ahead, it must offer more than military victory. It had to offer them the prospect of a better future that was credible. Pledges of intent were given by measures such as compulsory billeting, food rationing, taxing excess profits, surtax on high earners (18s in the £), creating a National Arbitration Tribunal for industry and giving unions a voice on production committees that regulated the industries in which they worked – including the removal of restrictive practices. The Beveridge Report was commissioned to outline the shape of the future welfare state and small but important symbolic gestures such as the Royal Family remaining in Buckingham Palace during the Blitz gave credibility to the concept that ‘we are all in this together’. When did an Irish Government ever do that?

Finally, I wonder if we do ourselves a disservice by defining these issues in narrow industrial relations terms. Surely the questions posed by social relations and civil liberties within the workplace are too big to be treated merely as specialist aspects of a subcategory of sociology? When I was young Beatrice and Sidney Webb were still castigated on the left as at best middle class do-gooders and at worst as class collaborators. Today their ideas on Industrial Democracy are dismissed as, at best, hopelessly utopian and at worst as dangerously revolutionary – a case of one step forward and a century backwards?

Hopefully this year will see questions of Industrial Democracy assume a new relevance, at least when it comes to the relatively modest demands for the right to collective bargaining, the right to organise and to have a voice in the workplace. Whether we like it or not, and despite the defeat of 1913, organised labour is part of who we are. The Irish Citizen Army grew directly out of the Lockout and forced the pace of armed insurrection; the 1916 Proclamation was printed in Liberty Hall; the labour movement organised the general strike against conscription in 1918; it provided the first draft of the Democratic Programme of the First Dail and it organised the munitions strike of 1920 that was the single most effective weapon against British military repression during the War of Independence. Without the support of organised Labour a modern Irish State might never have come about and it would certainly be even less socially progressive; whether it was worth the effort is a question this year might help answer.

 

Suggested Further Reading:

 

Calder, Angus, The People’s War: Britain 1939-1945, Jonathan Cape, 1969, London

Hastings, T, Sheehan, B and Yeates, P, Saving the Future: How Social Partnership Shaped Ireland’s Economic Success, Blackhall Publishing, 2007, Dublin

Moriarty, Theresa, ‘Work, warfare and wages: industrial controls and Irish trade unionism in the Great War’, in Ireland and the Great War, edited by Adrian Gregory and Senia Paseta, Manchester University Press, 2002, Manchester

Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, The History of Trade Unionism, 1920 Edition, Reprints of Economics Classics, Augustus M Kelley, 1965, New York

Wolfe, Humbert, Labour Supply and Regulation, Oxford University Press, 1923,London

Yeates, Padraig, Lockout: Dublin 1913, Gill and Macmillan, 2000, Dublin

Yeates, Padraig, A City in Wartime: Dublin 1914-1918 by Padraig Yeates, Gill and Macmillan, 2011, Dublin