Forty Hours Strike
Before the First World War, the standard working week was 54 hours. National negotiations had established a 47-hour working week for men in the shipbuilding and engineering trades, to be introduced in 1919. A Joint Committee of shop stewards, members of the Scottish TUC and Clyde Workers' Committee however proposed a campaign to limit working-hours to 30 per week, which was altered to 40 per week after the Glasgow Trades Council became involved. It was, however, opposed by the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and most other unions.
The immediate objective was to alleviate unemployment, exacerbated by the post-World War I recession, by sharing out available working hours more widely at a time when unemployment was rising as war contracts were completed and when tens of thousands of ex-servicemen were returning to the civilian labour force. Many workers also resented the fact that the new 47-hour week agreement removed their traditional morning break.
A strikers' meeting was called for Monday, 27 January, and more than 3000 workers gathered at the St. Andrew's Halls; 40,000 Glasgow workers came out on strike that same day. By Friday 31 January, the number had swollen to "upwards of 60,000". It was Scotland's first mass picket since the Radical War of 1820. The strike culminated in a mass meeting in George Square on the Friday to hear Lord Provost Sir James Watson Stewart issue a response from the British government to the unions' request for government intervention in the dispute. Emanuel Shinwell, the Glasgow Trades Council president was amongst those to address the crowd.
Read more about this topic: Battle Of George Square
Famous quotes containing the words forty, hours and/or strike:
“The cattle are grazing,
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—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
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Else, why should he, with Wealth and Honour blest,
Refuse his Age the needful hours of Rest?”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)