A Short History of the T&G - Part 2 (1969-2007)
April 2020
This is Part 2 (of 2 Parts) of a short history of the T&G and features some of the key dates leading up to its amalgamation with Amicus.
In the opening years of the 1920s a series of conferences resulted in fourteen trade unions operating in the transport and general workers' sectors combining to form what was to be the largest trade union in British history. The Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU or T&G) officially came into existence on 1 January 1922. By the end of the decade it had absorbed nearly twenty further unions and it was to continue merging with smaller unions throughout its life, to a total of at least eighty. Two of its General Secretaries—Ernest Bevin and Frank Cousins—were to become Labour government ministers. In 2007 it amalgamated with another major union, Amicus (itself the product of a series of amalgamations), to form Unite.
Key historical dates
1969 Jack Jones succeeded Frank Cousins as general secretary.
1970 T&G has 1,500,000 members.
1972 Five dockers who had had been jailed for trade union activity were released from Pentonville prison. The “Pentonville Five” were five shop stewards. They were jailed in July 1972 by the National Industrial Relations Court for refusing to obey a court order to stop picketing a container depot in East London. Their arrest and imprisonment led to the TUC calling a general strike on 31 July, demanding the release of the five shop stewards.
1970–73 The TUC led a campaign against the repressive Industrial Relations Act which had been passed in December 1971 by the Conservative government. Under the Act, the National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC) was established. This Court was empowered to grant injunctions as necessary to prevent injurious strikes and also to settle a variety of labour disputes.*
1974–79 The Labour government introduced progressive legislation which advanced the position of women workers, dockers and others. Jack jones and other trade union leaders agreed the “social contract” with the labour government which limited growth in wages.*
1977 T&G membership exceeded 2,000,000.
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Jack Jones was born in Garston, Liverpool on 29 March 1913. He left school at 14 and worked as an engineering apprentice. He then joined his father as a Liverpool docker.
Jack Jones was converted to socialism by reading “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist” by Robert Tressell (if you have not already read this book then I heartily recommend you to beg, borrow or buy a copy and do so). He became a member of the T&G, and was elected shop steward, then a delegate on the National Docks Group Committee.
In 1936 at the start of the Spanish Civil War, Jones joined and served with the British Battalion of the XV International Brigade and was seriously wounded at the Battle of the Ebro in 1938.
Jones was elected General Secretary of the TGWU in 1968. While general secretary, he was chief economic spokesman for the TUC and one of the authors of the Social Contract. Jones was also instrumental in the creation of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) in 1975.
In retirement from the T&G, Jones served as the President of the National Pensioners Convention, an umbrella organisation representing over 1,000 local, regional and national pensioners' groups, of which he was Honorary Life President.
After writing his autobiography, Union Man (published in 1986), Jones became a campaigner on behalf of pensioners.
At the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth in October 2003, aged 90, he received a special award in recognition of his service to the trade union movement.
The TGWU building Transport House in Liverpool was refurbished by Unite renamed Jack Jones House in 2009.
Jones lived in South London until his death on 21 April 2009.
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1978 Moss Evans succeeded Jack Jones as general secretary.
1979 Widespread disputes (known as “The Winter of Discontent”) occurred in the public and private sectors as the government incomes policy broke down.*
A Conservative government was elected with Margaret Thatcher as prime minister leading to eleven pieces of anti-union legislation being passed and a massive rise in unemployment ( over 3 million people in 1983) as the manufacturing industry contracted.
1984 Ron Todd was elected as general secretary of the T&G.
The Miners’ strike for jobs started.
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Ron Todd was born in Walthamstow on 11 March 1927. He served as the General Secretary of the T&G from 1985 until 1992. He was a member of the General Council of the TUC, served as the Chair of the (TUC) International Committee, was a member of the National Economic Development Council and president of the Trade Union Unity Trust.
Todd was also an honorary vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He was a committed Internationalist, a relentless campaigner for nuclear disarmament. Todd was also an active campaigner in the anti-apartheid movement, who counted Nelson Mandela as a close friend.
In his retirement he refused all honours, repeatedly turning down the opportunity to become a member of the House of Lords.
Ron died on 30 April 2005.
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1987 The Link-Up campaign to recruit temporary and part-time workers was launched. This sought to extend trade union organisation to the growing number of temporary and part-time workers, the great majority of them women, employed in the British economy. The campaign raised recruitment to a rate of over 200,000 per year - a major achievement, but one that did no more than cancel out losses due to the redundancies and closures which have repeatedly swept through British industry and to the anti-union attitude of many employers.
1989 The National Dock Labour Scheme was abolished and the unions defeated in the subsequent strike.
1990s In the 1990s the union combined political and industrial pressure to crusade against the evil of low pay that had spread like a virus through the economy since the 1979 election returned the Tories to office. The £4 Now campaign aimed to win a pay rate of at least £4 an hour for all members not already earning as much and secured pay increases for thousands of workers. Pressure from the T&G and other unions won a commitment from the Labour Party to introduce a national minimum wage aimed at eliminating the scandal of poverty pay once and for all. When Labour was elected in the 1997 landslide election, establishing a national minimum wage was one of its earliest achievements.
1991 Bill Morris was elected as general secretary of the T&G. Bill was the first black trade union leader in Britain.
1993 The number of T&G regions was reduced from eleven to eight.
1994 the T&G CareXpress legal helpline was launched. This was the first free 24-hour union legal helpline foe members.
1995 Bill Morris was re-elected as general secretary. This was the first such re-election to be required, owing to Tory legislation.
1995 Bill Morris refused to give union backing to 500 Liverpool dock workers who were sacked. Bill claimed that it was an unofficial strike even though the union had failed to act on concerns relayed to the union in the lead up to the dispute. Bill’s view was that the union could have been exposed to the threat of considerable losses as a result of legal proceedings against it, in effect leaving the dock workers to fight the cause themselves.
1996 The T&G’s legal services recovered over £85 million in compensation for members, bringing the total recovered since the T&G’s foundation to over £1 billion.
1997 A landslide Labour government was elected. This government did initially deliver on some of its pledges – a minimum wage was introduced, unions did secure the right to recognition (under a cumbersome procedure) and the previous Tory prime minister’s opt out from the EU social chapter was abandoned. Unemployment was kept low although this was masked by very large numbers of the long-term jobless claiming disability benefits. However, the bulk of the anti-union laws remained on the statute book.
2003 Bill Morris retired and Tony Woodley was elected as the 9th and last general secretary of the T&G.
After his election Woodley said in an interview with The Independent newspaper:
"A priority for stronger unions in the workplace must be a repeal of the anti-union laws ... British employment laws make it easier and cheaper to sack workers than on the Continent. I will campaign to stop the scandal of British workers being the cannon fodder of Europe."
2005 Gate Gourmet dispute. Gate Gourmet was an airline catering supplier which was under pressure from BA to cuts costs. It dismissed most of its employees at one site (mainly Asian women) after a contrived confrontation aimed at bringing in cheaper agency staff. The workers were for a time locked in a canteen while others were sacked by megaphone outside. As the site was near Heathrow airport and other T&G workers there – mainly baggage handlers and ground staff employed by British Airways, some of them related to the gate Gourmet employees – immediately and spontaneously walked out in protest at the brutal management act. This closed down much of Heathrow for 24 hours at a considerable cost to British Airways. BA had been responsible for the pressure to cut labour costs so bore a large responsibility for the actions. However, the action was illegal under the Tory laws that had been left on the statute books by the New Labour government. These laws prohibited any form of secondary action between workers in different firms. In accordance with its own conference policy, the union fully complied with the requirements of the law by repudiating the secondary action. Not to do so would have put the union at risk of legal action. After hard bargaining the union secured reinstatement for many of the more than 700 sacked workers while most of the rest accepted a -off from gate Gourmet.
2005 Discussions started between the TGWU, Amicus and the GMB about the possibility of merging the three unions into one organisation with potentially 2.5 million members covering almost every sector of the economy.
2006 The GMB Conference voted not to continue with discussions although the other two unions proceeded, with delegates approving the proposed 'Instrument of Amalgamation' at a special conference on 18 December 2006.
2007 The result of the ballot of members on the merger was announced on 8 March 2007: 86.4 per cent of T&G members and 70.1 per cent of Amicus members voted to support the merger, from a turnout of 27%.
2007 On 1st May Unite the Union, usually shortened to Unite, was created.
Tony Woodley moved the Executive’s resolution to amalgamate with Amicus and form UNITE at the T&G Conference in December 2006. At the end of his book, “The T&G Story”, Andrew Murray states that Woodley’s address to the Conference “is as good a place as any to end the T&G story”. I agree with him and below is Tony’s speech.
“We have lived through a generation of decline in our movement. We have no intention of letting that become a lifetime of decline. The big prize is not this merger, but the millions of workers out there who need trade unionism.
We take into the new union our rock solid T&G values of fighting for peace and socialism. Values first taken to the international stage by Frank Cousins, elected as our general secretary half a century ago this year. Those values – standing for social justice, international solidarity, nuclear disarmament, against racism and imperialism, for a world where poverty, unemployment and discrimination belong in the history books – are T&G values. But they are not the values of the T&G alone.
They are shared wherever working men and women come together to fight for a better world. They are shared in Amicus, too, of course – today more than at any time for a generation.
Today we reaffirm our commitment to our past, to the achievements and self-sacrifice of the men and women who built the T&G as the greatest force for social progress in twentieth-century Britain and Ireland.
And we reaffirm that the way – the ONLY way – to genuinely honour that past is to ensure its vitality into the future by building a union as powerful in this century as the T&G was for much of the last.
If this merger is about one thing, it is this: working-class unity, the historic aim of our movement, founded on the realisation that unity makes us stronger. That every trade unionist has far more in common with his brother or sister in a different union than there are things that divide us. When we stand together our opponents in the workplace and society – bad bosses and callous governments – suddenly start to look much smaller.
So judge this by the standards Bevin and Cousins, of Ron Todd and Jack Jones – giants who left us this great instrument, the Transport and General Workers Union not to let it whither, not to see history pass it by but as a mandate to be renewed in each generation. Meeting the particular challenges of the day in new forms, unafraid to change but steady in its purpose.”
Inevitably I have only scratched the surface of the history of the T&G in these 2 parts. I hope you will be inspired to find out more about the T&G, trade unionism in general and the great men and women who have contributed so much to our movement.
If you would like more details about the history of the T&G then I would recommend reading the T&G publication “Members First – The Story of the T&G” and Andrew’ Murray’s “The T&G Story”. I have “borrowed” from both of these books in this article.
( * More details can be found in the Part 8 of the trade union history entries at www.madsmeds.org/trade-union-history )
If you would like more details about the history of the T&G then I would recommend reading the T&G publication “Members First – The Story of the T&G” and Andrew’ Murray’s “The T&G Story”. I have “borrowed” from both of these books in this article.
Solidarity
Brian Madican
April 2020
