Karl Marx's daughter helped organise unskilled workers in the East End of London. Here we reprint a section of the new Rebel's Guide, plus an extract of Eleanor Marx's May Day speech, and Siobhan Brown explains why she wrote the book.
The Great Dock Strike of 1889 represents New Unionism’s most significant action, involving thousands of workers in east London. An estimated 150,000 families relied on port work in the 1880s. It was mostly casual, with just 10 percent of workers having permanent and regular employment.
Beginning in Poplar in mid-August before spreading up and down the river and into other trades, the strike involved 37,000 workers by 22 August. By 25 August there were an estimated 130,000 strikers involved, including ship painters, carpenters and workers in largely female trades such as jam, biscuit and match manufacturing.
Workers in different industries often lived in the same slums, were members of the same families and came from the same areas of origin in Ireland, Scotland and England.
These workers were often deemed “unskilled”. They were anything but. In gasworks, for instance, workers had to contend with numerous hazards and often for very long days and nights. The drive to profit through the use of new machinery made for very skilled and tiring work.
Eleanor described scenes at the docks: “The men fight and push and hustle like beasts — not men — and all to earn at best 3d or 4d an hour! So serious has the struggle become that the ‘authorities’ have had to replace certain iron pailings with wooden ones — the weaker men got impaled in the crush!”
As well as the female branches of Eleanor’s gas workers’ union, women were continuously involved in New Unionism and the Great Dock Strike in particular.
Women showed their support in visible ways. During a demonstration of some 10,000 workers marching through the City, the procession stopped to encourage some scabs to stop work.
William Morris reported in Commonweal that “on their not complying, groans and execrations burst from the crowd, the women being the loudest”. Louise Raw also notes further support for the dock strike among women workers: “Female participation in the strike was again demonstrated when 150 tinplate workers, ‘mostly girls’, came out in solidarity, and ‘when a procession of dock labourers passed [them]... they followed in the rear, singing and dancing and playing mouth-organs’.”
During the Dock Strike, Eleanor played an important role behind the scenes. She undertook much of the administration during the strike. This was a critical task to organise support for thousands of strikers and their families while employers were trying to force them back to work. A newspaper report of the time describes how Eleanor Marx and local women “work in the interests of the strikers, some 16 or 17 hours a day”.
Eleanor Marx and other socialists argued for the importance of solidarity and self-organisation. The move away from “up on high” preaching of socialist ideas towards on-the-ground organisation was a radical departure from the norms of British socialism at the time.
The May Day demonstration of 1890 was when New Unionism was at its most visible. It was here that Eleanor Marx made one of her most famous speeches (see below).
From Silvertown to Stepney to the cities across Britain, New Unionism represented — without overstatement — one of the turning points of working class history. On 7 September, The East London News main editorial, with the headline “Strike Fever”, summed up how widespread the strikes were:
“The present week might not inaptly be called the week of strikes — coal men, match girls, parcels postmen, carmen, rag, bone and paper porters and pickers and the employees in jam, biscuit, rope, iron, screw, clothing and railway works have found some grievance, real and imaginary, and have followed the infectious example of coming out on strike.”
That “infectious example” remains an inspiration today. Workers who were told and believed for years that they could not improve their working conditions, their pay or their hours were beginning t