Amazed. That is how the Liverpool dockworkers that lost their jobs in 1995 feel. Despite the fact that they have never given up the struggle to return to their jobs, the Transport & General Workers Union has announced that it will represent the men who replaced them, the Liverpool “scabs”. The former workers and the International Dockworkers Council (IDC) have asked them to remedy this situation immediately.
Ten years on, the 500 Liverpool dockworkers that were dismissed from the port by the Mersey Docks & Harbour Company refuse to accept that they have definitely lost their jobs. Despite the time that has passed, the Liverpool dockworkers have never stopped demanding their right to return to the docks that they left - against their will - in 1995. At the time, the struggle of these workers’ became a symbol for dockworkers around the world, as the interests at stake at that time have been repeated again and again in different settings: governments which fail to act, thus benefiting large companies, apathy by large trade unions - in this case the TGWU - and the emergence of poorly trained blackleg groups. Liverpool is still the symbol of how it is possible to lose one’s job, but keep one’s dignity. The Sacked Liverpool Dockworkers are still demanding a return to the port where they and their Fathers before them had spent the best years of their working lives.
The tenth anniversary of the Merseyside workers’ dismissal has coincided with the acceptance by the British union TGWU to provide trade union representation for the Liverpool scabs. This decision has led to a deep-seated movement of rejection among Liverpool dockworkers, which was clearly expressed during their participation in the Second General Assembly of the International Dockworkers Council (IDC), which took place in Barcelona between 16 and 18 March. At the Assembly, trade union representatives from 21 different countries expressed their rejection of the TGWU’s decision, and are asking it to change its decision, and once again demanded that the Liverpool dockworkers return to their jobs.
For the IDC, it is an insult that the ‘Scabs’ who broke the strike and sided with the Mersey Docks & Harbour Co and the ‘Thatcherite’ Conservative governments anti- trade union laws should now consider themselves trade unionists. The scabs contributed to the dismissal of professional workers in Liverpool and the destruction of the port agreements on salaries, working conditions and health and safety for which those workers had fought for years. The TGWU’s acceptance does nothing to help the struggle of the Liverpool workers to improve their conditions.
