The Dublin lock-out was a major industrial dispute between approximately 20,000 workers and 300 employers which took place in Ireland’s capital city of Dublin. The dispute lasted from 26 August 1913 to 18 January 1914.
Dublin slums
Irish workers lived in terrible conditions in tenements.
For example, an astonishing 835 people lived in 15 houses in Henrietta Street’s Georgian tenements.The infant mortality rate among the poor was 142 per 1,000 births, extraordinarily high for a European city. The situation was made considerably worse by the high rate of disease in the slums, which was the result of a lack of health care and cramped living conditions. The most prevalent disease in the Dublin slums at this time was tuberculosis (TB), which spread through tenements very quickly and caused many deaths amongst the poor.
Poverty was abundant in Dublin by the lack of work for unskilled workers, who lacked any form of representation before trade unions were founded. These unskilled workers often had to compete with one another for work every day, the job generally going to whoever agreed to work for the lowest wages.
James Larkin was a union organiser.
Unskilled workers in Dublin were very much at the mercy of their employers. Employers who suspected workers of trying to organise themselves, could blacklist them, destroying any chance of future employment. Larkin set about organising the unskilled workers of Dublin. He set up an Irish union, the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU).
The ITGWU quickly gained popularity, and soon spread to other Irish cities. He believed in bringing about change by establishing trade unions and calling strikes.
It initially lost several strikes between 1908 and 1910, but, after 1911, the union won strikes involving railway workers. Between 1911 and 1913, membership of the ITGWU rose from 4,000 to 10,000, to the alarm of employers.
William Martin Murphy and the employers
William Martin Murphy was chairman of the Dublin United Tramway Company and he owned a department store and the hotels.
Conditions in his many businesses were often poor or worse, with employees given only one day off in 10 while being forced to labour up to 17 hours a day. Dublin tramway workers were paid substantially less than their counterparts in Belfast and Liverpool.
Murphy was opposed to the ITGWU, seeing its leader, Larkin, as a dangerous revolutionary. In July 1913, Murphy presided over a meeting of 300 employers, during which a collective response to the rise of trade unionism was agreed. Murphy and the employers were determined not to allow the ITGWU to unionise the Dublin workforce. On 15 August, Murphy dismissed 40 workers he suspected of ITGWU membership, followed by another 300 over the next week.
Employers in Dublin locked out their workers, and employed blackleg labour from Britain and elsewhere in Ireland.
Strikers used mass pickets and intimidation against strike-breakers, who were also violent towards strikers. The Dublin Metropolitan Police baton charged worker’s rallies. On 31 August 1913, the DMP attacked a meeting on O’Connell Street that had been publicly banned. It caused the deaths of two workers, James Nolan and John Byrne. Over 300 more were injured.
This baton charge was a response to the appearance of James Larkin, who had been banned from holding a meeting, to speak for the workers; he was smuggled into William Martin Murphy’s Imperial Hotel and spoke from a balcony.
End of the Lockout
The lock-out eventually concluded in early 1914. Most workers, many of whom were on the brink of starvation, went back to work and signed pledges not to join the ITGWU.
Many of the blacklisted workers joined the British Army, having no other source of pay to support their families, and found themselves in the trenches of World War I within the year.
Although the actions of the ITGWU and the smaller UBLU had been unsuccessful in achieving better pay and conditions for workers, they marked a watershed in Irish history. The principle of union action and workers’ solidarity had been firmly established. No future employer would ever try to “break” a union in the way that Murphy attempted to with the ITGWU. The lock-out had damaged commercial businesses in Dublin, with many forced to declare bankruptcy.
