TGWU

This story of colour bars in the UK railway and bus industries begins after the Second World War, when Britain had a labour shortage and people moved to Britain in increasing numbers from Caribbean countries and elsewhere. The National Union of Railwaymen (NUR, predecessor of the RMT) declared in 1948 that: “we have no objection to the employment of coloured men in the railway industry” and that “coloured men had been satisfactorily employed on the railways over a long period”. But although the top of the union was getting it right, in some areas the grassroots was not. In 1950, white workers...

I knew Tom Cashman as a friend and comrade from the early 70s. Tom was someone who had a hinterland; his interests spanned good whiskey, particle physics, a love of Sean O’Casey’s plays, modernist architecture, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of schisms in the Catholic Church, which quite frankly bemused me. Tom was a very rounded person and a very humorous one. But I want to say something about Tom the public man. Tom was a Marxist, an atheist and trade unionist who dedicated his life to the working class and had an unwavering conviction that socialism was the only hope of humanity. Tom’s main...

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In the last issue of Solidarity, Bruce Robinson remembered the life of Tom Cashman, socialist trade unionist and long-time associate of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, who died last month. In this and future issues we will print further tributes. Tom Cashman was, quite simply, one of the finest and most principled people I’ve ever met. I first encountered him around about 1974 or 75 in the bar of Birmingham University Guild of Students. Tom was there attending a Troops Out conference; I was a naive young member of IS [today SWP] who had begun to have doubts about the Cliff regime and had...

T&G Election outcome (1995) Download PDF

The Devlin plan and the docker (1967) This July 1967 pamphlet was the first piece of public literature put out by the Workers' Fight group, forerunner of AWL. The "Devlin plan" was the government's plan of the time to "rationalise" the ports and push through "containerisation", a root and branch technical revolution in the workplace. THE DEVLIN PLAN AND THE DOCKER D DAY OR V DAY ? The employers have called September 15th D Day - and most dockers take this war- time language as proof that what the employers really want is not D Day but V Day: the day of their victory over the docker, when the...

It is July 1972. With the union leaders safely in talks with [Tory Prime Minister] Heath and knuckling under to his Industrial Relations Act (IRA), the Tories now went for the real union power on the docks: the rank and file. They were going to make an example of five dockers from east London to cauterise resistance to the long-term running down of the docks, to stop the unofficial blacking [refusal to unload] of lorries and picketing at the container depots that were taking the dockers' work, and, most importantly, to complete the enforcement of the IRA and finally succeed in beating down the...

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Click here to download the pdf including all these short articles from Workers' Liberty 12-13, August 1989. Strikes in Stalinist and ex-Stalinist states; Rushdie; EU; Dock Labour scheme scrapped; more on USSR strikes; strikes in UK; abortion rights in USA; world economy; British economy; Scottish left and Assembly; independent union in China. The heirs of Stalin face the workers: In China, in Yugoslavia, in Poland, in the USSR, the working class is becoming an independent force for the first time in many decades. Rushdie and the labour movement: The Labour movement, Muslim zealots and Salman...