Dublin lockout

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The Dublin Lockout in 1913 was the most serious social conflict in the history of Ireland - a lockout ( lockout ) of workers in Dublin to reduce the spread of the trade union movement to prevent.

origin

Statue of James Larkin on O'Connell Street, Dublin

By early 1913, James Larkin , founder of the trade union movement in Ireland, had already gained some success in labor disputes in Dublin by frequently calling for strikes and boycotts of goods. Two large companies, however, refused to allow their workers to join the unions and thus moved into Larkin's field of vision: The Guinness Brewery and the Dublin United Tramway Company.

At the Dublin United Tramway Company , the chairman himself, industrialist and newspaper owner William Martin Murphy , refused to join his workers in the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU). In contrast, the Guinness brewery's workforce was well paid and received generous allowances from patriarchal management. For these reasons, the employees showed little enthusiasm for joining the “Trade Union”. Their working conditions were the exact opposite of those of the tram. On August 15, 1913, Murphy fired 40 workers who he believed had joined the ITGWU - followed by another 300 within the following week. On August 26th, the tram workers officially went on strike. Led by Murphy, 400 city employers then asked their workers to sign a certificate stating that they were not in the ITGWU and would not go on strike.

The strike

The resulting dispute was the most serious in Irish history. Employers in Dublin agreed to lock out their workers and hired strikebreakers from Great Britain and Ireland. The survival of Dublin's workers, then the poorest in the UK, depended on donations from the UK Trades Union Congress (TUC) and other Irish sources distributed by ITGWU. A scheme to temporarily take care of the children of striking workers by British trade unionists was blocked by the Catholic Church , which protested the fact that it would put the children in an atheist and Protestant environment. The church, however, supported the employers' side and condemned Larkin as a socialist revolutionary.

The strikers organized mass rioting and verbal abuse against strikers, which the Dublin Metropolitan Police often disbanded by violent means. The police assault on O'Connell Street in July 1913 resulted in two workers dead and several hundred injured. In the labor movement, this day is also considered Bloody Sunday (not to be confused with the other two Bloody Sundays of 1920 and 1972 in Irish history). A short time later, a worker was shot dead by a strike breaker, whereupon Larkin and Connolly founded the Irish Citizen Army to protect the demonstrating workers.

The seven month lockout punished tens of thousands of Dublin workers and employers. Larkin was scapegoated by the three top-selling newspapers, Irish Independent, Sunday Independent and Evening Herald, aptly owned by William Martin Murphy. Other ITGWU leaders of the period included James Connolly and William O'Brien, while influential figures such as Patrick Pearse , Constance Markiewicz , William Butler Yeats, and Pierce Charles de Lacy O'Mahony supported workers in the otherwise anti-Larkin newspapers.

The "lockout" was only resolved in early 1914, when Larkin and Connolly's call for supportive strikes in Great Britain was rejected by the British TUC. Most workers, after months of struggle with no income on the verge of starvation, eventually returned to work and signed contracts declaring they would not join a union. The ITGWU's image was badly damaged by the defeat in the lockout and further weakened by the emigration of Larkin to America (1914) and the execution of Connolly after the Easter Rising (1916).

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