‘Because we were living it’: the hidden work of a strike

Introduction

The collective nature of strike action and its impact on individuals developed as an academic analysis (Batstone et al., 1978; Lane and Roberts, 1971) during the 1970s and 1980s, and offers detailed contextual accounts of specific strikes. Some have sought to tell the workers’ story and engage with iconic disputes from a particular political angle (Arnison, 1970; Beck, 1974; Dickinson, 1984). The literature demonstrates how strikes may be a short burst of frantic activity with an immediate impact on the individual and a memory, but not necessarily a long term effect. For others, the strike may be a major event and also the culmination of a period of active engagement, not only at work but also in the community, and the outcomes may derive from a range of circumstances rather than an abstract ‘linear model of activism’ (Spence and Stephenson, 2007: 4). Indeed, the case presented here demonstrates the complexities of the layered social and personal impacts of extended strike action, not only for the strikers but also their family relationships as well as their community. The authors add to this by highlighting how a strike may include individuals other than the workers themselves. The narrative presented is that of a woman who was not employed at the company where the strike took place, but was a wife and mother of two employees; yet she became central to the ‘work’ of running the strike.

Such ‘work’ presents another overlooked issue in the literature on strikes, in that the range of activities that strikers and families are involved in is arguably a form of ‘unrecognized work’ or ‘hidden work’ (Noon and Blyton, 2007). This work is demonstrated in the narrative that follows. However, prior to presenting the narrative account, the circumstances of the strike need to be contextualized in terms of the employment relations climate of the period and in relation to the company involved in the dispute itself, Magnet.

Magnet had sustained a manufacturing facility in Darlington since 1973 and had experienced mergers and a management buy-out. As the narrative indicates, there were feelings of ‘loyalty’ to the company and an almost paternalist approach to the employment relationship (that shifted in 1994 when Berisford International took over ownership). That loyalty included workers agreeing to wage freezes to deal with the perceived financial difficulties of the company. The Darlington factory was unionized with around 350 workers in four different unions organized around occupations (TGWU, GMB, AEEU and UCATT) with the TGWU taking the lead role.

Unions, generally, and strike action, in particular, had been the ongoing focus of legislation in the UK since at least 1979. This legislation, along with a broader climate of employers’ willingness to use the laws established by the Conservative government, had a significant impact on union strike activity. For example, Gall (2006) records that, over a roughly similar period to the Magnet dispute (1996–8), unions held 8977 strike ballots. A longer ten-year period saw the use of 82 injunctions by employers, of which 59 were successful. As can be seen from the following narrative, this activity provides circumstances in which the strikers were at pains to point out that they were acting legally. However, their legality was not effective in supporting the strike itself but may well have had an impact on union officials wary of putting their assets at risk or leaving themselves open to expensive court cases. This wariness could lead to arguments of ‘betrayal’ that continue to feature in long running disputes.

There is also the issue of strikes themselves, and particularly in relation to one that was taking place in a period approaching a ‘must win’ election for New Labour. There had been a general decline in strike activity in the period leading up to the dispute but 1996 had seen a resurgence of activity, with 1.3 million working days lost compared to 415,000 in the previous year. This had the effect of increasing pressure for the removal of restrictive trade union laws and New Labour increasingly seeking to distance itself from ‘old trade unionism’ (see Smith and Morton, 2006). Magnet’s workers were squarely in the constituencies of New Labour leaders, Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Peter Mandelson. This hopefulness for change and particular disappointment in the New Labour leadership is poignantly reflected in the narrative.

The strike began in August 1996 with a dispute about a pay offer made to only 60 per cent of the 320-person workforce after a three-year wage freeze that had helped the company secure millions in profit. A ballot conducted in compliance with legislation led to the beginning of official strike action and the company sacking and replacing the 320 workers. After a long, bitter dispute for almost two years, strike action ended with a ballot of the remaining 82 strikers in April 1998 that saw pay-offs as low as £250. The effect of this strike was so dominant that it remains an important part of the collective memory in Darlington’s community and in other parts of the North East.

The narrative presented here provides a powerful account of the strike never previously shared in writing, that illuminates wider social and political issues as well as the underlying personal, emotional and physical consequences of strike action. As Hyman (1972) suggested, ethnographic accounts such as this are less common in the literature and this narrative highlights issues that combine both a personal account of activism and the work involved in maintaining a strike. The interview was transcribed verbatim and the following narrative is presented within a thematic framework.

The early days of work during the strike: letters and lobbying

My daughter worked in the offices at Magnet and she’d just left to have a baby and my husband worked at Magnet and he’d been there around 13 years. And my husband – well I knew that there was something wrong, there was a change in the way he was. He was withdrawn and everything, and he’d always loved going to work. He would go into work even though he had the flu, sweep up if the machine was down, he was always wanting to provide for his family. But Brian came home and said, ‘We’ve had an official ballot and we’re going out on strike.’ He was worried about the money side of it and everything. I wasn’t. I know it sounds daft because I’m not one for wanting a lot of money or anything, as long as we’ve got enough to get by on; I was more worried about the effect it had on him.

There’d just been a takeover and we noticed that going from a really kind management, these new people were saying, ‘Oh you can’t have time off for this, you can’t have time off for that,’ and all the conditions were kind of being taken away. The woman that had taken over in my husband’s section had started to take photographs of the men and said she was going to put them on the wall to shame them into not stopping working. And they were timing them going to the toilet and if you were going to a funeral you had to get straight back and they were being horrible to them if they wanted leave for anything. And then they had people coming in who were saying to the existing workforce, ‘We need you to train these new people up,’ but then they were making the original, skilled workers redundant. In other words they were deskilling the workforce and then when they did have the official ballot and they came out on strike, there were people who’d been off with cancer and heart conditions – and they sacked them even though they had these problems. One man was getting his 25-year watch for his service and they said to him, ‘We’ve got your watch engraved,’ but they wouldn’t give him it because we’d gone out on strike. He never got his watch.

I actually wrote to the management to say, ‘Why are you treating the workforce like this?’ You know, really naive. ‘They’ve always been a good loyal workforce.’ Well, most of them had worked there from leaving school at 15 for 40 odd years, the average length of service was 20 odd years… and all the people that you think are going to help you… I didn’t expect to be involved in the middle of it all… well, it was just a few of the wives, we kind of knew each other… and just by word of mouth, we met and a few of us went to see our MP, Alan Milburn, and he said ‘The best thing you can do is go and get a petition up and going and get support because I think it’s wrong and all this but –’ Well, really, he didn’t want to get involved. There was an election coming up and this was August 96.

Alan Milburn said he’d talked to the firm and ‘They had said that your husbands are militants.’ And I went home to look in the dictionary to see what militant meant and it said ‘to be angry’ and I thought, ‘Well if they’re trying to cut your wages and conditions you’re going to be angry aren’t you?’ Sounds naive but that’s how naive I was, I just thought everybody would do the right thing.

So, after seeing Alan Milburn is what really spurred me on. One of the mothers of one of the young men on the strike said after the meeting, ‘We can’t take on millionaires.’ And I thought, ‘Hang on, we’ve got four general secretaries – there were four unions involved – there’s Alan Milburn, and there was Tony Blair who was a local MP and Labour leader then. So I went to see Tony Blair.

When I went to see Tony Blair we sat for two hours because he was being interviewed about being Labour leader and it was in Ferryhill so he was doing his surgery … And when I went in to see him, this finally had made me decide, ‘I’ve got to do something because they’re not going to do anything.’ I’d written to him before and said, ‘Look, please can you do something, you’ve got workers in your constituency that work for Magnet,’ and Alan Milburn had the majority in Darlington and Peter Mandelson had a couple – never heard from Peter Mandelson – and William Hague had a few in his – and Tony Blair had quite a few in his constituency. He said to me, ‘Can you clarify for me, what is it, what do Magnet make?’ And I looked at him and I thought – this had been in all the news for a few weeks by then and I thought ‘He doesn’t give a toss about anything but becoming Labour leader,’ and I don’t know why because I’d admired him before that. I really thought he was going to be our hero. And oh [sighs] he really was, he was my hero and he just let us down – flat. I came out of that meeting and I felt like crying.

The broadening of working the strike to the wives: unions, bouncers, shareholders and the police

There were 350 workers and what they [Magnet] done was, they sent an ultimatum round to all the workers saying, ‘If you don’t sign this thing’ (basically a new contract to sign away all of their rights) then they would be sacked and of course, no one wanted to sign away their rights. They took a secret ballot and the majority voted to come out on strike, it was official, everything was done by the book and the T and G regional secretary said, ‘Don’t worry lads, I’ll have you back in work in a couple of weeks.’ [Laughs] And in a couple of weeks they all got sacked.

I know it sounds awful because I really believe in the trade union movement… but I’ll tell you what it was like… it was like a bereavement.

And we’d just had funerals before the strike, my father died with mesophelioma through asbestos, my daughter’s fiancé was killed in a really bad road accident, my grandson was born with this really bad heart problem, well you just didn’t need or want any hassle you know.

Nobody had even imagined they would get sacked. And then you suddenly think, ‘Who is going to pay the mortgage?’ And we couldn’t get benefits because they’d had the ballot and the kids couldn’t get school dinners or anything and you were thinking, ‘This cannot be right.’ When you haven’t been in that situation you don’t know how it’s going to affect you – and that’s why some of us women got together because we thought, ‘Blimey, we can’t let this happen.’ The men at first, well the shop stewards had meetings but the T and G and the GMB didn’t get on. A couple of them had found out that they’d applied for another job straight away at the beginning of the strike but at the end of the day they were turned down because they were shop stewards. And then, the four area union officials asked for a meeting with us women – and I’m not being female chauvinistic or anything – but I think they realized that we were having ideas and getting on with things.

I’d decided to write to all the shareholders because I thought this can’t be right. We sent letters to all the shareholders to see if they knew what these people were doing when they took the firm over. We got quite a good response and one of the main shareholders in London asked to meet with us and it just seemed to snowball.

We did it because we’d thought Alan Milburn doesn’t want to know and Tony Blair doesn’t want to know and what are the (union) general secretaries doing? They were supposed to be letting everybody know all around the country so one of the wives and myself, we went through to the T and G’s office to check to see how far they’d got and they weren’t doing anything – they’d done a little bit and written to a few people, like the Trades Councils, and we thought, ‘There must be something quicker than this, this is taking forever,’ and we were the ones that were suffering, we couldn’t get benefits and we were really finding it hard. And some of the men had to leave the picket line because they couldn’t afford to live. And others who had a bit in the bank or whatever, they stayed. At the end of the day they did what they had to do. I know it would have been better if everyone had stayed but… The men had 24-hour picket lines and us women, we were going outside the Sales Rooms to stop the sales.

Us women used to stand outside the showrooms separate to the factory, at least the men had camps and fires and things, we were stood out in the freezing cold. We’d got other women’s groups from around the country to join us and they were picketing other Magnet stores all around the country so we had really good support. Magnet paid for bouncers to try to stop us. They paid for those bouncers to go whenever we went to the shareholders’ meetings in London and stand outside to stop us outside there as well. The bouncers used to come up to our faces and say, ‘You lot had better eff off,’ and they were really horrible at first. We actually won those bouncers over. They started bringing us hot soup and things because we said, ‘We’re not going anywhere.’ We didn’t dare drink the soup like, because we thought they’d poisoned it.

But it was hard and got harder. A few of them went back in over the picket line, I can’t even say the word scab, I think it’s horrible, but then you got some of the new workers coming out and showing their wage slips and spitting at you and calling you all sorts and in the end it just comes naturally. The first word my granddaughter said in her pushchair was ‘scab’. Some nurses came on the picket line and they were throwing plastic cups after they’d finished their drinks and they got arrested. I got arrested – I don’t know what I got arrested for. They only locked me up for five hours, it was supposed to be because of something I said. It wasn’t a swear word. They just used to do it to show that they could, I think.

After the strike – the long term effects on the workers, families and their communities

You know, you’re going through all this and… it’s awful… my husband was driving past a church one day and said to me, ‘I don’t know why God is letting me live.’ [Long emotional pause] It was terrible, it was like… he’d been through that much and the longer it went on it was soul destroying… and that’s how I felt the passion you know… and I felt that somebody has got to see this through. I suppose I still get emotional about it because I’ve seen what those families have been through and a lot of those men died quite young after they’d been on that picket line nearly two years and standing over them braziers and all that. I think it was the stress of it all. At the end, the unions wanted us out of the way because they thought, ‘Oh well, we’ve got a result now,’ but really, they did turn their backs on us. But I don’t want to take anything away from the men because what they went through… they manned that picket line for a year and nine months, standing over them braziers, having to put up with all the insults with the scabs going through and laughing at them.

For those two years it was all about the strike. There was a time when I was going down to London and because I didn’t want to leave my poorly grandson, he came down with me and we stayed at my sister’s house in London. She put us up and I spoke at this meeting and the next day we travelled back up and he had to have open heart surgery! And it was agony – but Josh used to come on the picket line with us, he was only a toddler and he used to collect with a bucket and he used to think it was his money. We met bishops, a judge gave us £1000 to help… I think because everybody was getting to know what was going on, you know, like with the miners, everyone got to see how it was affecting the families as well.

When you see people’s houses getting repossessed, dying of cancer and getting sacked and their families being left with nothing you just have to do something. Brian used to drive me about and he drove me to Dundee one night to speak – only 10 or 12 people sometimes at a meeting – and we used to drive back during the night to go back on the picket line for a mass picket at 6 o’clock and then I used to be making crumpets and toast and cleaning the caravans out and that. And people don’t see that. And I think because you do those things you hear about what’s happening from the men as well and you’re hearing it from the grass roots. And if you didn’t do that – that’s what was wrong with the general secretaries, they just don’t see that – I did the caravans and I did my time stood on that line, my feet were freezing, we were like blocks of ice at those show rooms during those months – you had to do it all. So if you got up and spoke you were passionate because you were living it.

But I don’t forgive those general secretaries who wouldn’t give anything to them – it’s not all about money but you do need it. The unions and politicians didn’t want to know, because it was the election – they couldn’t care less and they’ve gone on to prove it.