1972: Dockworkers Strike

1972 was a big year for strikes and labour unrest in the UK. Famously the Miners strike of 1972, seen as a opening fight in the big conflict between the Miners and the government in 1974, which lead to the defeat of Ted Heath. But there was also a serious builders strike which involved a young Ricky Tomlinson who was one of the Shrewsbury 2, arrested for picketing. Residents of Kirkby held a massive rent strike in the same year.

And there was a nation wide strike of dockers. The strike was motivated by growing government interference in labour disputes with its new legislation on union activities, planned redundancies after the container revolution and other technological improvements meant employers felt confident they could pay fewer people to do more work, and the growing monopolisation of the shipping industry.

Cinema Action made a short documentary on the picket lines of the strike and its very interesting. Trade Unions in Britain have a reputation of being extremely conservative and sluggish, so it was surprising to see a strike organised mostly by the shop stewards that pushed the bureaucracy much further than they wanted to go. And we hear many striking dockers denounce capitalism, how capitalism uses technological progress purely to increase profits instead of as means to improve conditions and lives of everyone.

And several dockers outline how the attitudes of both Labour and Conservative governments to the industry and the dock workers isn't particularly different. Labour governments have also a pretty dark track record of handling disputes in that industry.

"We've got this tremendous struggle by the employing class, for the survival of their profits. And that means they're going to intensify the struggle against the working class in order to maintain their profits. Anybody that advocates going along with the law as a kind of a tactic and wait for a general election so that the next government can repeal it, is just ignoring history.

Because the law we've got today is just a reflection of all the governments we've ever had in the past, every government that we've ever had in Britain has been a government that has tried to anchor off the working class in one way or the other. It happens to be a Tory government this time, the last one was a Labour government who laid the blue print for it.

And unless we can return to the masses, to the workshop floor, that the workers themselves who are working there every day of the week, clocking on, clocking off. Getting a pittance for the work that they do for the employers. Unless we can get that in our own head, that we can fight this battle and win. Then we'll lose."




Link https://youtu.be/qQGnKf58fkg