The Great Cork Lockout of 1923
In August 1923, more than 150 Cork businesses shut their doors, locking out some 6,000 workers in one of the biggest strikes to ever hit the city. As industrial war raged across Europe, Cork found itself at the epicentre of the battle for pay and conditions. Historian Emmet O’Connor recalls the period of strikes and strife and explores how the class war helped shape the Ireland we know today.
On August 1, 1923, the Cork Examiner published a large front-page manifesto from the Cork Employers’ Federation to ‘The workers of Cork’ demanding wage cuts across the board.
The employers’ case was that since the onset of the slump in 1920/1, prices had been falling. During 1921, Irish manufacturing trade was almost halved.
By December, over 26% of workers were idle. Rising unemployment depressed consumer demand, sending the economy tail spinning into long-term recession. Now, wages too must fall if some of Cork’s main businesses were not to become totally uncompetitive.
Thanks to the economic impact of the World War and revolution at home and abroad, membership of the Labour Party and Trade Union Congress (they were one and the same organisation) had mushroomed from about 90,000 in 1916 to some 225,000 in 1920, when about one in four employees were unionised.
With growth went militancy and radicalisation, symbolised by red flags, direct action, sabotage, general strikes, and soviets (as workplace occupations were called). The dynamo of it all was the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), the One Big Union of Big Jim Larkin and James Connolly, which rocketed from 5,000 members in 1916 to 120,000 by 1920. But in the nature of capitalism, boom means bust. Growth induced by wartime demands led to a crisis of overproduction in the autumn of 1920.
In Britain, wages got ‘back to normal’ after April 15, 1921. Known as ‘Black Friday’, it was the day the National Union of Railwaymen and the Transport Workers’ Federation refused to back the Miners’ Federation in their opposition to pay cuts. The collapse of the so-called ‘triple alliance’ led to a series of wage cuts which, by 1922, had reduced pay packets for six million workers by an average of 8s. per week. Employers expected that the same pattern would apply in Ireland with the railwaymen providing the initial sacrificial victims. Instead, the Irish Trade Union Congress promised ‘No Black Fridays in Ireland’. Tom Foran’s presidential address declared:
“The employers in this country are combining and studying what is taking place in England…poor deluded employers! The course of events that will certainly follow any general attack upon the standard of living in this country will be very very different.
“There is in this country different machinery – different human material …different methods entirely…The Irish Labour Party has advised that in all industries where notice of reduction in wages or attacks on working conditions are made, all the unions in this trade or that industry should come together … and pledge themselves to stand firmly together to the bitter end.”
Irish Examiner front page on August 1 1923. Irish Examiner Archive
Not coincidentally, Foran was also president of the ITGWU. In reality, inter-union solidarity crumbled quickly. But employer expectations were frustrated by the militancy which could be deployed in the near anarchic conditions obtaining during the Anglo-Irish truce and the Civil War.
From August 1921 to December 1923, an industrial war rumbled on in fits and starts. It was particularly traumatic in Munster. As in the boom years, the province was prominent in direct action.
The first of approximately 80 workplace occupations in 1922 occurred at Quartertown in Mallow, where strikers seized the flour mills for two weeks until evicted by pro-Treaty IRA. The biggest single action of 1922 involved the Cleeve company.
In March, the company demanded a one-third reduction in wages, prompting the seizure of 39 creameries in Clare, Limerick, and Tipperary in May, together with mills and other workshops owned by the company. The end of the Cleeve’s action came in July and August as the Free State army rolled up the ‘Munster Republic’ along the Waterford-Limerick line. Effective policing was introduced gradually in 1923. Yet Labour remained defiant.
A Cork employer reported to the Manchester Guardian in February:
“The labour outlook here is as bad as ever. The Transport Union have started a levy of 8s. per ton on imported four, also levies on meal and millers’ offals in order to support the hands that are on strike in the local flour mills, while so far the Government has refused to take any action against this usurpation of their authority.
“The situation seems to be fast drifting into the same state as it was in Northern Italy before the Fascists came on the scene, but unfortunately I don’t think there is any chance of another Mussolini arising in this country.”
The final ‘big push’ on wages (World War terminology was still popular) materialised in July 1923 after a national dock strike. The dock strike signalled the lack of unity and strategy in Labour’s response to the crisis as employers had less to lose in lockouts with the ports at a standstill.
Cork Employers’ Federation had called for a conference with unions to discuss cuts in February. When unions declined the offer, the Federation proceeded with notices of cuts, but on August 1, the government asked employers to postpone wage cuts for three months to allow for talks.
The government’s primary concern was to avoid disruption during the forthcoming general election, to be held on 27 August. Despite vigorous pruning of public spending, war expenditure had created a deficit of £2.5m.
With the first Saorstát loan to be floated, public confidence needed to be bolstered urgently to meet this fiscal test of statehood. The cabinet’s nightmare was a Labour-republican alliance.
Congress pleaded for an across-the-board settlement of strikes, based on mutual economic cooperation, but Labour Party leader Tom Johnson refused to imperil democracy by threatening to ally with republicans or pulling his TDs out of Dáil Éireann, which were the only things that might have moved President W.T. Cosgrave.
The Labour Party entered the lists with pamphlets entitled How to Get Houses and If You Want Your Child to Get a Fair Start in Life and paid the price of its irrelevance to the industrial war. Clipped from 17 to 14 deputies, its share of the poll fell from 21% (in June 1922) to 11%. In Cork Borough, the Labour vote slumped from 22.5% to 12.5%. Having elected Bob Day in 1922, it fielded three candidates in 1923, Day, Dick Anthony, and William Kennealy, and all were defeated.
Though vilified for the economic vandalism that characterised much of the Civil War, Sinn Féin polled well. The Cumann na nGaedheal regime survived and was happy to let industrial relations take their course.
Meanwhile, on 10 August, Cork Workers’ Council had called on the Cork Employers’ Federation to withdraw lockout notices and convene talks. A conference opened on August 14 only to break down on 17th. The Federation wanted pay cuts of about 25%. Even intractably, the bone of contention was shifting from pay to employer prerogatives, especially freedom to hire and fire. On 20 August, 154 businesses in Cork shut down, locking out over 6,000 workers in building, manufacture, retail, distribution, and transport.
Workers organised protest marches through the streets of Cork. Pictures Irish Examiner Archive
Two thousand workers responded with a ‘route march’ through central Cork on 22 August, featuring three bands – the Connolly Hall, the Blackpool Brass, and the Fair Lane – and banners inscribed ‘Our ideal The Workers’ Republic’, ‘An Injury to One is the Concern of All’, and ‘Long live the International of the people’.
The unions most affected were the ITGWU, the Irish Union of Distributive Workers and Clerks, and smaller craft unions in the building trades. Together with disputes elsewhere in Ireland, about 20,000 trade unionists were now locked out or on strike.
In these circumstances, the poor performance of the Labour Party in the general election came as a big surprise. Chewing over the crushing disappointment, the ITGWU’s Voice of Labour harangued ‘the apathetic throng’:
You are destined forever to crawl on your belly –
Cling close for your life to the slime of the earth.
The Matador knows that your horns are of jelly,
And to-morrow he’ll stab you for all you are worth!
It was the first iteration of what would become an intermittent theme of Labour TDs: working class betrayal at the ballot box. Undoubtedly the election results emboldened Cork’s ‘matadors’ to seek a decisive victory that would eradicate ‘Bolshevism’ from Irish industrial relations.
By the end of August, the city was running short of food, fuel, and medicine and there was talk of famine. People were trying to make do with burning wood and coal, but this was an age when cities ran on coal. Coal was needed to make electricity and gas, heat houses, cook food, light streets, and power trains, ships, and factory furnaces. Conversely, 200 tons of flour had to be dumped after rotting aboard ship for 12 weeks.
The shortages gave the workers some leverage. Under pressure from the Department of Industry and Commerce the unions made exceptions for the importation of essential supplies, and employers agreed to another round of negotiations. Again, the conference collapsed as employers insisted on a fundamental change in industrial relations rather than a mere compromise on pay.
In October, the bumptious and indefatigable Professor Alfred O’Rahilly, just elected a Cumann na nGaedheal TD, led another initiative to search for a way out of the impasse, this time with greater success. O’Rahilly took a keen interest in labour affairs, led the first Irish delegations to the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, and became a close friend of Waterford-born Edward Phelan, the number two man in the ILO.
The ILO had been created as a concession to workers at the end of the World War. Its aim to was establish minimum standards of employment globally. Phelan persuaded President Cosgrave to affiliate the Free State.
The Labour Party lost the support of most workers, and trade unions descended into a suicidal sectionalism that plagued the movement up to the 1960s.
As Cosgrave envisaged, a resolution of the dock strike in mid-October paved the way for the settlement of other disputes. By November 12, most of those locked out in Cork had gone back to work on terms brokered by O’Rahilly, an acceptance of employer rights on staffing levels, and immediate pay cuts amounting to half of the employers’ demands, with the remainder of employer demands to be decided by arbitration, by O’Rahilly himself, naturally.
For Labour, 1923 was indeed annus horribilis. Just about everything went wrong. Could it have been otherwise? Negotiating reductions was never going to be easy, the more so as Labour leaders had promised so much during the boom, convinced that the forward march of trade unionism would eventually bring a Workers’ Republic.
Irish Examiner front page on August 24 1923. Irish Examiner Archive
The best hopes of preventing the worst were in 1921/22, when workers could take advantage of the lack of effective policing and their leaders could exploit the political uncertainty to get an across-the-board adjustment of wages and conditions. Instead, inter-union solidarity disintegrated. There was no national co-ordination of strike policy. And the Labour Party’s absolute commitment to the Anglo-Irish Treaty gave the Cumann na nGaedheal government a blank cheque on industrial policy.
Employers got the decisive shift in mentalities that they wanted, and destroyed the spirit of ‘the Red flag times’, as the 1917 to 1923 years were called.
The Labour Party lost the support of most workers, and trade unions descended into a suicidal sectionalism that plagued the movement up to the 1960s. The problem was compounded by the loss of memory.
Conservatives wanted to pretend that the militancy and revolutionism of Europe’s red years never happened in Ireland. Labour chiefs wanted to forget the defeats and embarrassments. The recollection of this period came to be monopolised by competing versions of nationalism and Ulster Unionism.
Lockout meant Dublin 1913; the one incident in public history dominated by Labour, an achievement that owed much to the towering personality of Jim Larkin. Yet as well as the War of Independence and the Civil War, there was a class war between 1921 and 1923, and the Cork lockout was an important part of it.
For all their mistakes, Cork workers displayed a determination to struggle for a decent wage and an impressive spirit of solidarity. Not for the last time, they proved that the ‘rebel’ moniker was well deserved. As the ‘history guy’ might say, ‘It is a history that deserves to be remembered’.
The propaganda war
Workers and employers battle for the hearts and minds of the people of Cork as protests gripped the city
with the city in lockdown, the local economy in freefall and striking workers marching on the streets, the battle for public support played out across the pages of the Cork Examiner.
With deeper pockets and the most to lose, unions and employers funded a series of Page 1 adverts pleading their case, highlighting their plight and pressuring workers to do the right thing – drop their demands, accept lower wages and return to work.
One of the ads proclaimed: ‘Cork pays the highest rates of wages in the principal states of any town in the free state’.
On October 12, 1923 – another advert warned: ‘The loss in WAGES due to the present strikes is at least £12,000’.
For their time, the ads were quite cryptic, clever and direct: ‘STRIKES! - a Labour leaders opinion: “The general strike is the last resort of the idiot’.
With neither side willing to compromise, the Cork Examiner published a letter from a clearly frustrated union leader, which detailed how talks had run into the ground and tried to set out the background to the lockout and strikes to allow readers make up their own minds.
Sirs,
All thoughtful citizens are dismayed at the prolongation of the labour disputes that for more than two months have paralyzed the trade on which all of us, employers and employees alike, ultimately depend for our daily sustenance.
Day after day anxious fathers ask, when are these strikes to end? Alas! when they do end, many of these poor victims will learn that our crippled industries have no work to give them.
Others ask has reason no voice at the conference tables, and must this nightmare endure until one side has crushed the other into submission. Every method of composing industrial disputes that has succeeded elsewhere has been tried in Cork and all have ended in failure.
Irish Examiner front page on October 12 1923. Irish Examiner Archive
There is but one explanation of these repeated deadlocks, namely, that one side or other has not been amenable to reason. Tho public is entitled to the full facts of this dispute, so that an informed public opinion may be brought to bear on the obdurate party. I am convinced that a strong public conscience, courageously expressed, is the best guarantee we can have against a repetition of the industrial anarchy that is today threatening the very existence of our country. And I intend now to give the public all the facts.
Diary of the dispute
1 Last February, the employers invited all the Trade Unions to meet them in conference for the purpose of enquiring into the industrial position of Cork.
This friendly and reasonable invitation the Trade Unions unanimously declined. At the subsequent meeting of the Cork Trades Council the actions of the employers was denounced in uncompromising speeches that reflect no credit on the men who had made them.
The burning of our city had crippled some of our largest employers; the destruction of every railway running out of Cork had killed our wholesale trade; the political unrest had destroyed the credit of the country.
Every sensible man knows that an employer’s ability to pay wages depends on the earning capacity of his business. The burning of our city had crippled some of our largest employers; the destruction of every railway running out of Cork had killed our wholesale trade; the political unrest had destroyed the credit of the country. And in face of all this, Cork was paying wages fixed at the height of the 1920 trade boom when trade flourished and profits were unprecedented.
When the slump came in 1921 and grew worse and worse during 1922, wages were reduced in every trade in England and our competitors with lower charges to meet, under-cut us for the little business offering in Ireland.
The Cork employers could carry on no longer; sheer necessity drove them to action. But with a patience that deserved better appreciation, and a patriotic reluctance to force an issue in a chaos then existing, they sought from February to July to find some means of initiating friendly discussion of their position with trade unions.
Far from reciprocating this attitude, the trade union leaders took steps that made our position intolerable, and this brings me to the second date in my diary.
2 At the beginning of July, the S.S. Carrigan Mead arrived in Cork with large consignments of maize and wheat for Cork merchante. No dispute of any kind existed between the Transport Union and the Cork consignees, and the S.S Carrigan Head had come from Belfast, where part of her cargo had been discharged by dockers belonging to the Transport Union, yet the Cork dockers were called off the ship by their organiser Mr Hickey.
When asked for an explanation, the union's reply was that "they didn’t know, but had their orders from Dublin."
And for the past fifteen weeks this valuable cargo of food is resting in the holds of the Carrigan Head. The loss to the Cork importers is over £12,000 and this loss is - wilfully and with the whole facts of the case before them - inflicted by the Transport Union in paying 35/- per day to the dockers. No merchants could trade under such conditions.
Irish Examiner front page on October 18 1923. Irish Examiner Archive
3 July 16 - The Cork Steam Packet and Clyde Companies reduced their wages and their men struck work. Cross Channel companies in the other Free State ports also reduced wages and the dockers strike became general but affected only the steamers owned by the companies who had notified a reduction of wages, all other steamers being discharged in all ports, except Cork.
4 The first step was to refuse to work any steamers in Cork. A cargo of timber arrived on 16th July, and discharge was begun at 8am. At 8.30 am, the dockers were called off. The owners of the cargo had not given any notice of wage reduction, and were paying 18/- per day. The rate in London, Liverpool, and other large English ports is 10/- per day and in Dublin 16/- per day.
The rate in Cork is the highest in Europe. When asked for an explanation, the reply of the union was just one word ‘tactics’. Having refused to discharge this cargo, the union announced that no coal would be discharged even at the old rales.
Without coal factories cannot work, and the only possible explanation of the union's action is that they had determined to create industrial stagnation. Let me emphaise that only in Cork was this policy adopted.
5 July 18 - Having failed to initiate friendly discussions with the trade unions, the Cork employers notified a general reduction of wages and salaries to take effect the 20th of August.
It was not necessary in most trade unions to give such long notice, but the employers still hoped that reason would prevail, and some approach made by the unions.
Irish Examiner front page on October 18 1923. Irish Examiner Archive
The unions remained adamant and the Government called a conference for the 13th of August. The conference failed to find a solution, and a strike seemed inevitable when on Saturday, 18th August, Mr T . J. Walsh requested the employers to postpone their reduction of wages until September 3rd in order not to prejudice the general election, and on the understanding that Mr Whelan, Assistant Minister for Industry and Commerce, would preside over a conference not later than Wednesday, August 22nd.
The employers at once agreed, but the trade unions refused to allow their men resume work, although rates of pay and conditions wero to remain unaltered up to September 3rd.
It is obviously far easier to adjust differences before a strike than after; a postponement would prejudice neither side, and would have given the workers of Cork two weeks' work at the old rates of pay. Why, then, did the trade union leaders precipitate the sirike?
6 September-October. I must for brevity group the numerous conferences held during these months. The employers' case is published and available to all interested. The published report is verbatim ; nothing added and nothing omitted.
I challenge trade union leaders to publish a verbatim report of their replies. What the Cork trade union leaders want will then be clear to all citizens but let their replies be published without omissions.
As circumstances compel me to write over a nom-de-plumo, I wish to state that I have attended the various conferences as a representative of the employers.
At those conferences, I have always endeavoured to find some avenue likely to lead to accommodation. I have no desire to see a rupture in the ranks of the trade unions, but I have a very strong desire to bring home to its real authors the responsibility for the condition of things that blight our city today.
Yours faithfully,
Finbarr
This letter is written without the knowledge of the Employers' Federation Cork, October 15th, 1923.
Published in the Cork Examiner October 1923
Irish Examiner Longread
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