Реферат: General Strike Of 1926 Essay Research Paper
General Strike Of 1926 Essay, Research Paper
The General Strike of 1926
Essay written by Michael Funk
Why did the General Strike of 1926 fail and what were the effects the strike
had upon industrial relations in Britain?
The General Strike of 1926 lasted only nine days and directly involved around
1.8 million workers. It was the short but ultimate outbreak of a much longer
conflict in the mining industry, which lasted from the privatisation of the
mines after the First World War until their renewed nationalisation after the
Second. The roots of the General Strike in Britain, unlike in France or other
continental countries, did not lie in ideological conceptions such as
syndicalism but in the slowly changing character of trade union organisation and
tactics. On the one hand, unskilled and other unapprenticed workers had been
organised into national unions since the 1880s to combat sectionalism and to
strengthen their bargaining power and the effectiveness of the strike weapon. On
the other hand, at the same time and for the same reason trade unions had
developed the tactic of industry-wide and ’sympathetic’ strikes. Later during
the pre-war labour unrest these two forms of strike action, ‘national’ and
’sympathetic’, were more often used together which in an extreme case could have
meant a general strike. The symbol of this new strategy was the triple alliance,
formed in 1914, which was a loose, informal agreement between railwaymen,
transport workers and miners to support each other in case of industrial
disputes and strikes. As G.A. Phillips summarised:
The General Strike was in origin, therefore, the tactical product of a
pattern of in-dustrial conflict and union organisation which had developed over
the past twenty-five years or so in industries where unionism had been
introduced only with difficulty, among rapidly expanding labour forces
traditionally resistant to organisation, or against strong opposition from
employers.
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