From "The Guardian" Sept 10th.
They could have been like any other Merseyside family enjoying a late summer day trip up the coast in Blackpool. But instead of buckets and spades, the Mitchells - Colin, Sue and their son, Graeme - brought placards. Home-made, multi-coloured boards complaining at the injustice visited on 500 Liverpool dockers by their former employer.
Almost a year ago since the dockers were sacked by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company for refusing to cross a picket line, the Mitchells and other families came to Blackpool to let the union movement know they were still fighting. Outside the Winter Gardens, they chanted, heckled delegates and rattled buckets for much needed cash. It was a symbol of industrial struggle strangely incongruous with the smartly-dressed, mobile phoned "new unionism" taking place inside.
They made their entrance in style. As the TUC president, Margaret Prosser, opened conference, they unfurled a banner from the gilded balconies surrounding the conference floor. It earned them the first standing ovation of Congress, but to the dockers, the applause from the platform at least, sounded hollow.
That they felt the need to remind their former comrades of their existence is evidence of the ordeal the families have gone through in the last 12 months. While support poured in from trade unionists around the world - American dockers went so far as to blockade ships bound for the "scab port" of Liverpool - the TUC and their union, the Transport and General Workers, have been unable to offer official, substantial support: the dockers have fallen foul of Conservative union law.
The circumstances surrounding the dispute - perhaps the most vociferous since Timex in Dundee in the early 1990s - are complex. The men were sacked after a strike which took place without a ballot. The company line is that the dockers sacked themselves, with the result that the union movement cannot support them.
With clear echoes of the miners' dispute, it is the dockers' wives who have emerged as the true champions of this struggle. Their group, Women of the Waterfront, has spoken at thousands of meetings up and down the country.
According to Sue, their transition from apolitical Merseyside housewives to sophisticated campaigners has not been easy. Yet Sue and the other wives remain determined. "I'm proud that my husband refused to cross a picket. We're not just doing it for their jobs, but for the future of Graeme and the other children who will need jobs when they grow up."
