It Could Happen Here - The London Dockworkers Strike

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

Andrew and James discuss the strike of London dockworkers in 1889 and the solidarity and support it received. Sources: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-about-a-strike  https://libcom.org/article/great-london-dock-strike-1889  https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/blog/the-1889-london-dockers-and-tailors-strikes/  https://www.britannica.com/event/London-Dock-Strike https://jacobin.com/2026/05/1926-london-docks-general-strike https://bsky.app/profile/assignedmale.bsky.social/post/3mp7473bzrs2e https://www.investopedia.com/single-stock-etf-5667162 https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-kospi-plunges-nearly-10-after-regulator-cautions-leveraged-etfs-2026-06-23/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-watchdog-regrets-rushed-launch-leveraged-etfs-considering-measures-2026-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/south-korea-market-watchdog-issues-warning-leveraged-stock-investments-2026-06-18/ https://www.barrons.com/articles/sk-hynix-stock-kospi-2503fa2d https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20260626005600320 https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/26/investing/tech-stocks-nasdaq-kospi https://www.businessinsider.com/korea-kospi-stock-market-price-today-nikkei-softbank-tech-selloff-2026-6See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Such was the case in 1889, when the dark workers in the port of London made their voices heard and shook the city to its core. Hello and welcome to Icrapin here. I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm joined once again by James. I have to be back with you, Andrew. Likewise, likewise. And have you heard of the Great London Dock Strike of 1899? Have. I went to school in a time when they still taught a little bit of labour history. Ah, ah. Okay, so I guess you will be able to have a bit of an exchange about it then.

Yeah, but I'm interested to know more. Yeah, I first learned about it through Eric O'Malley-Tester. He wrote briefly about it in one of his pamphlets, one of his many pamphlets. Yeah. But I found further information and cross-verification through a bunch of different articles that I link in the show notes and reference throughout. Now, before we get to the strike itself, we have to look to the conditions that brought it about.

The port of London, like ports around the world in that time, had terrible working conditions and terrible pee alongside it. But despite being the fulcrum of London economy, the so-called unskilled workforce that made it run was left destitute. It parts due to the inconsistent nature of the work itself. According to Libcom's article, a lot of trade was seasonal. You had sugar coming in from the Caribbean, timber from the north, and tea and spices from the east. This was in a time when, you know, the sun never set on the British Empire. Yeah.

And back then, trade was also a lot more vulnerable to weather conditions. So the flow of commerce wasn't the most predictable. And since ports were not very mechanized either, it took a lot of labor to load and unload ships. But there wasn't a consistent demand for that labor week to week. You know, some weeks you would have hundreds of ships to load and unload, and other weeks you would have mere dozens. So dark companies could get away with having a casual call-on and contact. track system. Basically, they'd have a large pool of men hanging around waiting for labour. Most of them

would only get taken on for a day or just a few hours. And whether you even got work that day or not was based on luck and female, you know, you could spend all day outside the dock waiting to get called on and end up being sent home with no pay. So it created a very desperate, competitive environment as men were basically have to push and shove each other to get a chance at being picked for work. for the day. These are conditions where the workers are clearly poised against each other, as is often the case under capitalism. But around that time, about a year before the strike was talking about, according to an article by Beverly Cook for London Museum, the so-called unskilled and impoverished young women working at a match factory in the Boat Court of London went on strike and won better

working conditions and pay, which may have even inspired the dock workers' boldness. However, what really kicked off the Great Strike was a dispute over the bonuses workers would normally get for working faster and more efficiently. One of the big dock companies, the Eastern West India Dock Company, decided to cut their bonus. And led by a man named Ben Tillett, on the 14th of August 1889, the dock workers began walking out and convincing their fellow workers to do the same. This era of labor history is always super fascinating to me. Like, there's so much at stake, right, for labor in this time period.

People's lives were genuinely miserable, right? Like, working class existence in this time period. Like, you can read, I think Engels was writing about slightly earlier than this, but like Engels has sort of about the conditions for working class people in Manchester. But also, like, your bosses and the cops can just kill your own strike, you know? like there's uh there's the stakes are so high like not that this cops can't and don't kill people now I guess but the desire to unionize was so natural right like it wasn't coming from people like knowing of generations of like we do now right like when we when we form our unions now even if we

we know we unionize let's say Starbucks is a place that's unionizing not week we can think of the generations of union workers who have come before us and the struggles and the and the gains that they've had but these folks I mean they had to have had to have. but these folks, I mean, it had to an extent the people's charter in these other things, right? Like, I know we've spoken about Luddites before and the idea of understanding Luddism as collective bargaining through riot,

but like still, these people who really like built the modern labor movement in the 19th century, they paved the way with their blood for all of us to an extent, right? And I think that's always like really impressive to me that people were prepared to like step into that fight. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we take it for granted that we have

legacy to draw upon today, but, you know, somebody had to be the first. Some group of workers had to be the first, you know, come together and stand up in those industrial conditions, in those urban conditions. I'm sure there's a history of workers standing up prior to the Industrial Revolution. You know, you would have collective bargaining and even back in antiquity, but the miserableness of the conditions really push them to take a stand. And even though the work itself was made so competitive, they still recognize their common cause. I'm sure that before that strike, they might have had some petty rivalries, some petty grudges amongst each other. Like, oh, that guy keeps taking my job.

Like, it's like three days straight. Now I haven't gotten any work because he keeps on shoving me aside. But they put all that aside for the strike. Their union was unofficial at the time. but that union would go on to form a strike committee to put forward their demands, which were an increase in wages, an overtime wage, work time minimums, an end to the contract system and a limit on the call-ons, which would be fixed to specific times of day,

and the recognition of their union. Their strike would soon be joined by the amalgamated Steve Ador's union, which were basically a higher status kind of dock worker, and even more critical to the function of the docs. their support lended legitimacy to the strike. The stevedores would issue a request to other workers in London, particularly connected to shipwork, to stand in solidarity to duck workers and their demands, and to donate contributions to support the strikers, which is of course critical to any long-term strike action.

So across workshops and factories are the workers joining the cause, rope makers, carmen, and lighter men among them. By the 27th of August, an estimated 130,000 men were on strike. To quote one newspaper article from the time, dockmen, lighter men, bargemen, cement workers, carmen, ironworkers, and even factory girls are coming out. If it goes on a few days longer,

all London will be on holiday. The great machine by which five millions of people are fed and clothed will come to a dead stop. And what is to be the end of it all? The proverbial small spark has kindled a great fire which threatens to envelop the whole metropolis. End quote. And according to Beverly Cook, after two weeks of the dockers striking, 10,000 tailors in East London also went on strike.

Now, these were mostly Jewish immigrants working in the clothing industry's sweatshop conditions, scattered across around 500 cramped workshops of mostly 10 workers or less apiece across white, across Whitechapel. The tailors demanded fixed 12-hour work and days, a mandatory one-hour break outside of the workshop, increased wages, and a ban on forcing workers to take home their work. They mostly spread the word of their strike through informational boosters. They weren't necessarily too connected to the dock worker strike at first. They had their own demands, and it seems have been a coincidence of fate that they both rose up around the same time.

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a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life. Listen and laugh but not least with MC Gin on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Now, during the strike, as Malatester put it, quote, they strove to feed a population, women and children included of upwards of half a million people, to raise subscriptions, collections across the city, to keep up with fast correspondence by letter and telegram, to organize meetings, demonstrations, and talks, to keep an eye. out, put pen to people, and stay alert less the bosses successfully trick English or foreign

poor into blacklegging, to monitor all the dock's entrances to see if there were people going to work and how many. All of this stunningly well done by unsolicited volunteers. There was one noteworthy incident. A shipload of ice arrived and a rumor was rife that this ice was meant for the hospitals. The strikers raced in such numbers to help unload it without it care for whether they would be paid for the job or not. The sick, and especially the patients in the hospitals, were not to suffer on account of the strike, end quote. I hadn't heard that before. That's quite touching. Like, this is especially part of the discourse in the UK at the moment, right? Like, when medical workers go on strike, like, this always gets trotted out, like, by the right-wing

press that, like, oh, well, they've just chosen to make that patient suffer or whatever, when, in fact, like, the procedures and planning that medical workers go through before, you they go on strike to ensure that like people don't die because they went on strike are many and complex right but like it's interesting to see that even back then people were like as they were working out the best ways to to take collective action they were trying to also not harm other working people yeah i mean also the extent of the strike and the extent of the suffering is really determined by the extent to which the bosses are holding out, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So if you want to blame anybody, you have to blame the bosses, not the workers. Yeah, absolutely. It's within the power of employers to not have their employees have to go on strike in order to be treated with dignity and respect, however they consistently choose not do. Yeah, exactly. And I think what the workers demonstrate and strikes like that and strikes in this time period as well is just their capacity to analyze a situation, to organize themselves, to respond effectively to problems that arise. You know, Malta has to described mass meetings and pickets, daily processions to rally support. They even worked on persuading scabs to join them.

Or according to some news reports, they were intimidating those scabs. But there was another quote from that, the bookam article I wanted to read. He said, Sir, during this week, I have witnessed the most open intimidation practiced by the men on strike. Howling crowds going from dock to dock and warehouse to warehouse, stopping businesses and threatening vengeance and all who do not comply with their demands. Until now, there are thousands who are out who had no desire to strike, but were compelled to do so. Those who dare to work for their wages are being brutally maltreated and threatened with worse if they dare attempt to work in defiance the strikers' wishes. I saw several men severely injured today on Tower Hill, the blood being made to fly in all directions by gangs of strikers. What are the authorities for for not to protect peaceable citizens in earning an honest living, signed a lover of freedom.

This was sent into the Times on the 24th of August 1889. And to me, it kind of sounds like a doc boss writing in. Yeah, right. Trying to sound like, oh, an innocent bystander. Yeah, violence is not a thing that is absent in the labor movement, but again, like, to your point earlier, often the discourse does not talk about the violence, which is done by forcing people to live in poverty and labor in humane conditions. Exactly, exactly. That's where the real violence lies. To be fair, there were a couple instances of charges of assault and intimidation, but the strikes were mostly peaceful. You know, they were exercised a lot of courage and discipline and restraint. Yeah. They really showed that these working class people were not impossible to organize or absurdly dangerous.

They had a capacity for order and collective organization that could just as easily prefigure a free society as it merely is directed towards negotiation with the powers that be. Another aspect of their resistance that I took note of was the fact that a rent strike also took place. You know, you often hear nowadays when you try and talk to people about, you know, organizing a strike, organizing a general strike, whatever, or just like a strike in the industry, from people I've spoken to you often hear that, oh, I have bills to pay, I have rent to make, I have, you know, this and that to do. And these violent and poor conditions at risk of their lives, the families of strikers just chose not to pay rent for the duration of the strike. That's right. Yeah. All of them collectively. Yeah, a rent strike.

And they also would have been gathering donations and such in all of this time as the strike is going on to sustain, you know, their keep in other ways, their other basic needs. Yeah. But unfortunately, the donations do not look like there would be enough to stave off starvation. You know, despite food tickets being distributed to cover food needs after the direct food distribution couldn't keep up. there still wasn't enough to cover for the swelling mass of strikers and their families. And yet the strikers still held on and rationed what they had, even as the bosses waited and waited for them to give up. You know, the bosses were literally counting on the starvation of the workers to break the strike

so they wouldn't have to give in to the demands. Yeah. And it really got to a point in the beginning of September where it looked like the strike might not be able to go on. And then a miracle of international solidarity came through. The Brisbane Warf Laborers Union in Australia sent money from citizens of all classes across Australia to support the strikers. The strikers got a first installment of £150, which I found out is worth £17,000 today. Jeez. And the dark workers received over £30,000 in total, or over £3.3.3.000.

million pounds to do to sustain their strike long term and secure their victory. Obviously, with a win-for like that, they'll be able to sustain the efforts. And even though the tailor's strike was mostly separate from what the dock strikers were doing,

the dock strikers made sure that the tealers got funds to support themselves. Amounting to about 100 pounds or 11,000 pounds today. Nice. I mean, can you imagine that kind of solidarity today? Where, that that swell of resources can be poured in to support fellow workers in their efforts.

Yeah, fellow workers who you had so much less communication with than we do today, right? Like, it's not like they could, there's not like they logged onto, uh, yeah, like, Twitter and we're like, oh, yeah, well, these people are on strike and let's talk to them and okay, we should support them. Like, yeah, at a time when people had less communication, they still managed to have more solidarity. And we see people have raised millions of dollars for instance to feed people in Palestine, right?

Like, yeah. Solidarity still exists. For sure. But specifically in the labor movement it is hard to come by often. And even when you do see solidarity in the labor movement, it tends to be restricted to the borders of the nation. You might see the occasional

solidarity strike within the country. But how often do you see strikes cross-end those borders. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. If dock workers in London were to strike today, what are the chances that dock workers in Australia or dock workers in the US would support them?

Yeah, like even living as I do, like at an international border, like issues of international solidarity will come up in union discussions. Like there might be times where we might take a collection or something for you to the south of what it's a border now in between US and Mexico, right? But the idea that you could raise that much money and that like your solidarity could be so profound

that like that is a thing that let these people get through. Yeah. I think that's very hard to imagine that happening now, which is a shame. It's just so fascinating to me how like we have this period of the Industrial Revolution, right? Where labor becomes even more exploitative, right? more surplus value accrues to the people who own the means of production to like be

crudely Marxist about it, I guess. And the working class, which is the people creating the value but not receiving the benefits from it, has to decide how to respond to that. And around the world, they're like, fuck this. Like, we're not having that. And like, the whole genesis of labor organizing, international solidarity. Like, it exists. It exists. did before, as you said, of course it did, but like the sort of formal structures that we have today arrives pretty quickly alongside that increased level of labor exploitation. There's a moment from then till maybe the 19 teens, I mean, maybe till the Great Depression, like where it really seems like that the class between capital and labor is like a really an equal and fierce fight, you know.

Now, like it almost seems like by comparison with sort of labor organizing tends to ask more nicely and be a bit less, like, a bit less radical and a bit less international compared to how it was back then. Yeah. I guess not all of it. There is still very radical labour organ, I think, of course, I didn't want to, like, overlook that, but it's just, uh, this is a particularly remarkable time.

Yeah, it's not as, it sounds prominent. Yeah. Or perhaps it's, it's less apparent, less recognizable, less amplified. If it does exist, it could stand to be amplified more. Right. This was a time when bosses were really worried. like it's as influenced by the lover of freedom writing into the newspaper they were very concerned

with this right like they uh they weren't sure how long i guess they could pull this shit off like how long they can make it last where they could exploit people this much exactly and you kind of see them biting their time today right because these battles were fought but the war wasn't won you know the class war is yet to be won right Or I suppose, if you want to be particularly cynical about it, you could say that it has been won, and the Catholicsists are the way inside. Yeah. But you'll notice that where we have won concessions, where workers have won concessions in the past, the capitalists merely buy their time and wait for an opportunity to roll back those concessions. Yeah, without a doubt.

And so we could continue to exist in this kind of cycle of biting and stopping short of total. victory by accepting concessions just for the fight to have to restart again years down the line. Or we could, you know, reach the finish line as it were. Yeah, the kinder, gentler capitalism that we were supposed to build through collective action hasn't really delivered. And all it's done has resulted in capitalism moving to places where it can more readily exploit labor. I was having this discussion with a colleague, right? Like an older colleague, they had been industrial union person.

in their whole lives. And they were saying that like in this era of like neoliberal globalization, the greatest failure of United States unions was to fail to internationalize. Like when borders dropped to capital, but not people, right, in the late 20th century. And money and job started moving from the United States to, in a lot of cases to Mexico, right? And unions could have responded by saying, we will go to Mexico and we will organize our siblings in the working class in Mexico. Not the Mexican people can't organize themselves and don't have a a very long and proud tradition over Work Plus organizing, they do. But like those unions that had the resources from years of struggle in the US, by and large, didn't go to South and Central America

and say, we're here with you. Like, we are not going to allow them to exploit you in the way that they once exploited us. And they didn't do that, right? They kind of doubled down on protectionism. You see it now with unions under Trump a lot as well, you know, talking about tariffs and things, and if they were protect jobs. Like, they're sort of choosing the nation. to date over the working class when they do that. And that's bitten them in the ass before, but they still continue to keep doing it. Yeah.

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always searching for inspiration for support and useful tools to help maximize joy so this podcast Let's us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.

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Getting a new one put up in its place. As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's going to be a politics of remembering the Civil War. To get to school, I had to go down Robert Ely Boulevard. Get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. If you're an historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job. I'm Akila Hughes, and Rebel Spirit Season 2 goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space. more than our bodies. We contain essence. We contain spirit. How do you represent that?

They are just fueling a fire that is really catching. You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What did black music, food, and culture teach us about who we were becoming? 2016 was sort of that last era of monoculture, where we still consumed things in community. From Beyonce and Rihanna. Everybody wanted to be Beyonce. I don't think we'll ever see another Rihanna.

To soul food, memory, identity, and the stories we carry through black culture. What does it mean to be black? And eat in America. So we were this group of people who knew how to work the land, who knew how to live with the land. We make it do what it do.

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Yeah, yeah. The workers, after receiving that, that windfall managed to hold on for just a bit longer and entered negotiations with their bosses through a committee initiated by the Lord Mayor of London, whose city was obviously quite paralyzed over the past month. The strikers also received the support of the Irish Catholic Archbishop Cardinal Manning, who shared that Irish Catholic background with a lot of the workers, a lot of the dark workers. And what I found, I guess, interesting reading that was that according to the Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, his involvement in the dark workers negotiations kind of foreshadowed an encyclical that was

issued by the Pope at the time two years later, which directly addressed the conditions of the workers and set out a church policy that supported the right of labor to form unions while, of course, rejecting socialism and affirming private property rights. So one step forward, two steps back. Yeah. And I found that interesting that that encyclical was issued. around the time that, you know, as many would have heard, the Pope of today has issued a new encyclical on the subject of AI, in part in relation to labor.

Yeah. So by the end of the committee negotiations, the dark workers had all their demands met, and the strike was agreed to be over on the 16th September 1889. The tailors also secured their victory. And after the strike, the dark workers formed an official new general laborers union, and the strike inspired thousands of unskilled workers to also organize themselves. According to Libcom, union membership overall grew from 750,000 in 1888 to 1.5 million in 1892 to over 2 million in 1890. And this growth would be a 12 numbers for the existing unions as well as the establishment, as well as the establishment of new unions. Now, if we look at the strike through Malatester's eyes,

I think he provides a very useful analysis. In about a strike written in 1889, likely right after the strike itself, when Malatester was in London, while he recognised that Dark Wickers had won the battle, he like I is questioning why they didn't go ahead and win the war. You know, he questioned why a movement, powerful enough to bring one of the world's largest ports to a standstill,

didn't go any further. The docks have been running because workers, by the thousands, collectively made them run, and when those workers withdrew their labor, an entire section of the economy crowned a halt. So from Aletesta, the first lesson of a strike and their value for revolution was that they reveal where the power actually comes from. Everyday life under capitalism and the state tends to hide that fact. You know, they make it seem like societies organized by governments, investors, managers, owners, but a strike makes it very clear that the people who do the work are the people who make society function. People who may have felt isolated would begin acting together, holding meetings, organizing relief, feeding hundreds of thousands, managing communications,

in the process, gaining practical experience and self-organization, demonstrating the potential to organize the city itself by themselves, for themselves. In other words, they're developing new powers which would shape their new drives and establish a new consciousness. So strikes are schools of struggle, but as Maltaxasda points out, they're limited. They review workers' power, but they don't use that power to transform society. The dock strike won higher wages and better conditions, but the basic structure of society was untouched. The dock bosses were still bosses and the workers were still workers, and the state was still the state

protecting property and maintaining the existing order. And this was Maltaester's critique of the labor movement. They got stuck on winning concessions instead of shaking up the system. And we see through history that employers regroup in economic conditions change and the previous gains would come under pressure. So one battle being won, does not mean the class war has been won. Literally a few decades later, another strike took place in the port of London by dock workers. In 1926, as recounted in Kalamkant and Macaulay's article on the making of London's general strike,

the Yakman, dark workers, transport workers and other laborers joined coal miners in nationwide strike after mine owners sought wage cuts and longer hours. In that strike, dark workers once again effectively shut down key parts of the city's economy, but during this strike, state repression was especially severe. The government deployed police, volunteers and emergency powers to keep services running and break picket lines. Violent clashes accoled around the docks where workers tried to prevent strike breakers and the movement of goods. Also, the leadership of the trade unions Congress, TUC, was quite conservative in response to this worker action. While rank and file workers demonstrated strong solidarity and willingness to continue the struggle,

union leaders ultimately called off the strike after nine days without securing major guarantees for the strikers. It was a major betrayal of the movement and demonstrated the weakness of traditional unionism structurally and ideologically. You see the signs of unions basically being part of the system in the end, as we see today. And you see the potential of workers, as always, to act autonomously. So strikes like these leave me with questions. You know, can a strike develop beyond a negotiation over wages and conditions into a broader challenge to who controls society?

Can the solidarity bill during the strike survive after the immediate dispute ends? Can workers begin to see themselves not just as employees with demands, but as people capable of managing social life themselves? Can we assail the legal order and the property protection that stand in the way of our survival? And in all of these questions, what I'm getting at is, how would you turn a general strike into a social revolution? There's still gaps to be bridged between labor struggles and the grander ambitions of such a revolution. And labor conditions have certainly changed for many. You know, I don't want to put forward the position that we just need to recreate the rugged industrial unionism of the past. Yeah.

But we still have power in our refusal to work. That hasn't changed. And if we leverage that alongside organization within and outside of the workplace to support our struggles, to build and fight, to propose and oppose and push for the vision of a world beyond workers and bosses, not merely pushing demands to bosses, maybe we can accomplish the social revolution that Malatesta sought more than a century. Bigger strikes, stronger unions are not the answer. There may be steps toward workers using solidarity, confidence. and organizational capacity to take direct control of all aspects of social life.

As always, all power to all the people. Peace. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

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