After calling off the General Strike on 13 May, the TUC’s main concern was making deals with the government and companies that allowed the striking workers to return to work.
They wanted everything to return “to normal”. This is what the TUC had publicly promised – that it had called off the strike to allow for an “honourable peace”.
The bosses had other ideas. They saw the TUC capitulate and now felt able to flex their muscles. They did not take the workers back on their pre-strike terms. They forced them to take pay cuts, demoted them to lower positions, made them work longer hours, or simply refused to take them back at all.
As a result, for hundreds of thousands of workers there was no immediate return to work. In Hull, 30,000 railwaymen, printers, engineers and dockers remained on strike to support the reinstatement of 150 tram operators.
In protest at the terms of reinstatement, 30,000 railwaymen marched through Manchester instead of returning to work on 14 May.
The rank-and-file of the unions attempted to come out against these attacks. But they had been abandoned by their leaders and were at the mercy of the bosses. They were forced to agree to humiliating settlements, in an attempt to minimise the reprisals.
Even with these compromises, 1,900 busmen and transport workers lost their jobs. These defeats affected workers for some time afterwards, with further restrictions on trade union action being passed by the Trades Dispute Act of 1927.
The last workers to be defeated were the coal miners who continued their dispute until November. Herbert Smith, the Miners Federation president, was opposed to any settlement that victimised the miners. A. J. Cook, the secretary of the miners’ union, entered into secret negotiations with the chairman of the London Chamber of Commerce at the end of July, trying to get a deal, but these went nowhere.
On 13 and 14 May, the government met separately with both the coal miners and coal owners. Both rejected the government’s proposals aimed at ending the dispute.
After multiple failed negotiations over the following months, the miners unions were reduced to making their own district-specific agreements with the bosses – a classic divide-and-rule tactic.
These agreements varied, with workers in Yorkshire returning on a seven and a half hour day, whilst longer hours and wage reductions were enforced in South Wales, Scotland and the North East.
However, in a few districts, such as Nottinghamshire, the workers returned on a four shilling per week wage increase. Overall, after months of solitary struggle, abandoned by the TUC and subjected to brutal treatment by the government, the miners were starved back to work and forced to admit defeat.
Despite the TUC’s attempts to dress this up as a victory, it was clear that this was a defeat. The capitalist newspapers began to publish reports of the strike, including the ‘Dover Fifty’ at work once more and of the “heroic” work of the volunteers during the strike.
The winning side depicted the strike in terms of a reasonable government versus the unconstitutional, law-breaking, unruly, excessive trade unions.
The legacy of that defeat stayed with the labour movement for many decades. It wasn’t until the 1970s that another national miners’ strike took place in Britain.
Find more articles in our series ‘The 1926 General Strike as it happened’.
