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The Dublin lock-out was a major industrial dispute between approximately 20,000 workers and 300 employers that took place in Dublin, Ireland. The dispute, lasting from 26 August 1913 to 18 January 1914, is often viewed as the most severe and significant industrial dispute in Irish history. Central to the dispute was the workers' labour rights.
Poverty was perpetuated in Dublin by the lack of work for unskilled workers, who did not have any form of representation before trade unions were founded. The unskilled workers often had to compete with one another for work every day, with the job generally going to whoever agreed to work for the lowest wages.
Unskilled workers in Dublin were very much at the mercy of their employers. Employers who suspected workers of trying to organise themselves could blacklisting them to destroy them any chance of future employment. Larkin set about organising the unskilled workers of Dublin, which was a cause of concern for the NUDL, which was reluctant to engage in a full-scale industrial dispute with the powerful Dublin employers. It suspended Larkin from the NUDL in 1908. Larkin then left the NUDL and set up an Irish union, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU).
The ITGWU was the first Irish trade union to cater for both skilled and unskilled workers. In its first few months, it quickly gained popularity and soon spread to other Irish cities. The ITGWU was used as a vehicle for Larkin's syndicalist views. He believed in bringing about a socialist revolution by the establishment of trade unions and calling .
The ITGWU initially lost several strikes between 1908 and 1910 but after 1913 won strikes involving carters and railway workers like the 1913 Sligo dock strike. Between 1911 and 1913, membership of the ITGWU rose from 4,000 to 10,000, to the alarm of employers.
Larkin had learned from the methods of the 1910 Tonypandy riots and the 1911 Liverpool general transport strike.
Even today, Murphy's defenders insist that he was a charitable man and a good employer and that his workers received fair wages. However, conditions in his many enterprises were often poor or worse, with employees given only one day off in 10 and being forced to labour up to 17 hours a day. Dublin tramway workers were paid substantially less than their counterparts in Belfast and Liverpool and were subjected to a regime of punitive fines, probationary periods extending for as long as six years and a culture of company surveillance involving the widespread use of informers. Rebel City- Larkin, Connolly and the Dublin Labour Movement, by John Newsinger, Merlin Press Ltd 2004
Murphy was not opposed in principle to trade unions, particularly craft unions, but he was vehemently opposed to the ITGWU and saw its leader, Larkin, as a dangerous revolutionary.Morrissey, Thomas, William Martin Murphy, 1997 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 whom he suspected of ITGWU membership, followed by another 300 over the next week.
The "Kiddies' Scheme" for the starving children of Irish strikers to be temporarily looked after by British trade unionists was blocked by the Roman Catholic Church and especially the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which claimed that Catholic children would be subject to Protestant or atheist influences when in Britain. The Church supported the employers during the dispute and condemned Larkin as a socialist revolutionary.Kostick, C., (1996), "Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917 to 1923", p. 18
Notably, Guinness, the largest employer and biggest exporter in Dublin, refused to lock out its workforce. It refused to join Murphy's group but sent £500 to the employers' fund. It had a policy against sympathetic strikes and expected its workers, whose conditions were far better than the norm in Ireland, not to strike in sympathy; six who had done so were dismissed. It had 400 of its staff who were already ITGWU members and so it had a working relationship with the union. Larkin appealed to have the six reinstated but without success.Guinness 1886–1939, SR Dennison & Oliver McDonagh (Cork Univ. Press 1998). See: Chapter 8, "The employees; work and welfare 1886–1914", and chapter 9, "Industrial Relations 1886–1914".
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) leader, Bill Haywood, was in Paris when he heard of the lockout. He collected 1000 francs to aid the strikers and travelled to Dublin where he addressed a crowd in front of City Hall.
Strikers used mass pickets and intimidation against strike-breakers, who were also violent towards strikers. The Dublin Metropolitan Police carried out a baton charge at worker's rallies. On 31 August 1913, the DMP attacked a meeting on Sackville Street (now known as 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.
The 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 had been smuggled into William Martin Murphy's Imperial Hotel by Nellie Gifford, the sister-in-law of Thomas MacDonagh, and spoke from a balcony. The event is remembered as Bloody Sunday, a term used for three subsequent days in 20th-century Ireland and for the murderous charge of police in the Liverpool general strike. Another worker, Alice Brady, was later shot dead by a strike-breaker as she brought home a food parcel from the union office. Michael Byrne, an ITGWU official from Kingstown, died after he had been tortured in a police cell.
Connolly, Larkin and ex-British Army Captain Jack White formed a worker's militia, the Irish Citizen Army, to protect workers' demonstrations.
For seven months, the lock-out affected tens of thousands of Dublin families. Murphy's three main newspapers, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent and the Evening Herald, portrayed Larkin as the villain. Influential figures such as Patrick Pearse, Countess Markievicz and William Butler Yeats supported the workers in the media.
The union was rebuilt by William O'Brien and Thomas Johnson. By 1919, its membership had surpassed that of 1913.
Many of the blacklisted workers joined the British Army since they had no other source of pay to support their families, and they 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 substantially better pay and conditions for workers, they marked a watershed in Irish labour history. The principle of union action and workers' solidarity had been firmly established. No future employer would ever try to "break" a union as Murphy had attempted to with the ITGWU. The lock-out had damaged commercial businesses in Dublin, with many forced to declare bankruptcy.
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