Nine days in May
May. 3rd, 2006 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThe General Strike began as midnight ticked over into the morning of May 3rd, 1926. For nine days, the Trades Union Congress called on union members to strike in support of the miners, who were locked out by their employers, the pit owners who were trying to impose longer hours and reduced pay.
For nine days, bus drivers, printers, builders, factory workers, two million workers were on strike. Gradually, a number of volunteers came forward: my father, who was a boy of six, remembers only that the tram drivers were not in uniform.
When the TUC called off its strike, the people who did not return to work were the miners, who had not been on strike to begin with. The lock-out lasted until the following November. But when they did return to work, the terms of the settlement imposed on the miners of Durham (according to the Durham Mining Museum) were:
I sit and stare at this information, and it looks at the same time incredibly remote, from that other country where they do things differently, and incredibly familiar, full of patterns which repeat time and again across the intervening years. After all, it's eighty years since 1926, but it's already over twenty years since 1984.
For nine days, bus drivers, printers, builders, factory workers, two million workers were on strike. Gradually, a number of volunteers came forward: my father, who was a boy of six, remembers only that the tram drivers were not in uniform.
When the TUC called off its strike, the people who did not return to work were the miners, who had not been on strike to begin with. The lock-out lasted until the following November. But when they did return to work, the terms of the settlement imposed on the miners of Durham (according to the Durham Mining Museum) were:
- A reduction in the percentage addition to basis wages from 110 per cent. to 89 per cent.
- A reduction in subsistence wage from 7/6½ to 6/8½ per shift.
- An increase in hours from 7 to 8 per day for all classes with the exception of Deputies and Hewers, who were to be increased to 7½ hours.
I sit and stare at this information, and it looks at the same time incredibly remote, from that other country where they do things differently, and incredibly familiar, full of patterns which repeat time and again across the intervening years. After all, it's eighty years since 1926, but it's already over twenty years since 1984.
