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| A typical early morning picket, Timex 1993. Photo: Craig Maclean |
Thirty years ago, on 29 January 1993, workers in the multinational Timex Dundee factory launched a seven-month battle that electrified workers across the UK and far beyond.
A mostly female workforce of 343, they fought with heroic courage to stop the decimation of jobs, wages, holidays, pension rights and other conditions, but were confronted by mass police intimidation and press smears.
At a localised level, this titanic battle between workers and a ruthless capitalist employer, backed to the hilt by a press lie-machine and a virtual police occupation of parts of their own city, had many of the hallmarks of the great miners' strike of 1984-5.
This showdown occurred under a Tory Westminster government that had constructed a mountain of anti-union laws to block workers’ resistance to being exploited. But the workers and their shop stewards drove a coach and horses through the Tory laws designed to help multinationals and millionaires profit from generations of workers and then toss them aside like squeezed lemons.
They ignored the limit of six to a picket day and daily. They fought on despite elected shop stewards being banned from the picket line, with court interdicts and threats of being jailed. They confronted a diluted version of apartheid South Africa’s pass laws, which banned pickets from areas of their native city - which were saturated by police.
Waves of Solidarity
This courageous fighting militancy triggered waves of admiration and support from tens of thousands of workers across the UK, who collected in their workplaces for the Timex workers’ hardship fund, and travelled hundreds of miles to join them on the mass pickets and demos that were an almost weekly occurrence for much of the 7-month showdown.
And if the national union leaderships and STUC had shown half the determination and courage of those who mounted daily 24-hour pickets in all weather; regular mass pickets; protest demos and solidarity strike actions with the Timex workers, they could have won a clear, history-changing victory.
Timex had a Dundee branch factory for 47 years, with 5,000 workers in the 1970s. It was one of the shiny new electronic industries - alongside the likes of National Cash Registers - that was bribed to set up shop in the former city of 'jute, jam and journalism', as shipbuilding and heavy industry collapsed, with an array of council and government grants and tax breaks.
But as the SNP government of today would do well to heed, reliance on multinational capitalists setting up branch plants in Scotland for its skilled, cheap labour and generous business tax regime is a recipe for the creation of urban deserts when they up sticks and move on to even richer pastures, devastating whole communities in their global race for maximum profit.
The Sussex Spiv
Timex, whose HQ was in Connecticut, brought in a ruthless Sussex spiv, Peter Hall, as £100,000-a-year director of operations in Britain. He started to strip the Dundee plant of jobs and working conditions. Before Xmas 1992 there was open talk of layoffs. On 5 January the workers each got a letter, some of them 'thick', meaning they were sacked, others 'thin', not laid off.
The workers responded to this vicious attempt to divide and conquer by occupying the canteen. The slippery Hall promised negotiations with their union, the AEEU (now part of UNITE), and up until 29 January the bulk of the workers did rotating shifts to fill the gaps created by layoffs, awaiting the promised negotiations. Meantime they voted by 92 per cent to strike, which they did on 29 January when it was plain the promised talks and attempts to bring in ACAS weren't going to happen.
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| Women workers were the backbone of the inspiring Timex struggle |
Strike and Lockout
Round-the-clock pickets were mounted, rotas arranged, food and shelter organised on the Harrison Road gates.
Mass meetings of strikers had agreed to march back to work en masse on 17 February, united, demanding reinstatement of all. The Timex bosses locked them out, demanding lay-offs, a 10 per cent pay cut across the board, loss of holidays, increased hours, cuts to pension rights and other humiliations as the price for opening the gates. The workers refused to be cowed, and were locked out for the next 6 months, until Timex eventually gave up their attempt to run the factory with unskilled, untrained, underpaid scab labour and closed down its Dundee plant on 28 August 1993.
Eight years after the defeat of the miners, the defiant stance of Timex workers was an inspiration to hundreds of thousands of workers across the UK, who for years had faced managerial dictatorship and multiple setbacks in the wake of Thatcher’s Tories inflicting defeat on the vanguard of the trade union movement, the miners.
The Timex revolt occurred at a time when the miners and rail workers were gearing up to strike together against job losses, and public sector workers planned action against the 1.5 per cent pay limit of the time.
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Scottish Militant Labour - the biggest single component forming the SSP 5 years later - played a major role in mobilising solidarity and discussing tactics with the Timex strikers
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Scottish Socialists
Some of us who went on 5 years later to be founding members and organisers of the SSP gave our practical and political support to the strikers throughout their battle. We held regular discussions with pickets and the Strike Committee, and organized solidarity speaking tours round workplaces and public meetings all over the UK and Ireland, and even through contacts in other parts of Europe.
Women workers blossomed as public speakers, winning the hearts and minds of tens of thousands. As one of them expressed it at the time, "When I was in there in the factory I felt like a nobody, now I am somebody. I feel ten times more important than anyone in there [scabs]".
Mass Pickets
One of the key means of building wider support for the locked-out workers was mass pickets, often on a Monday morning, with buses and carloads from all over the UK arriving. On several occasions at least 1,000 thronged outside the main gates; arguably the biggest pickets in Scotland in modern history.
Two schools of thought competed. Some top union officials, who had done nothing to call or build these expressions of workers’ solidarity, wanted just a passive gathering. Others, including the Strike Committee and pickets themselves, agreed with those of us who advocated mass human walls of solidarity outside the factory entrance to block buses ferrying in scabs.
We argued that to be fully effective, and to sustain the momentum and involvement of workers trekking across the country to join them, the mass pickets needed to aim at halting the buses, halting production, even if only for a few hours or a day. And on some occasions, Hall gave the scabs a day off when a mass picket had been announced - a tremendous boost to morale at the time.
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| Police were mobilised from across the UK to escort scab-carrying buses through the pickets |
Police thuggery
Mass police operations were mounted to block the pickets from being effective, with police violence and snatch squads. Some of their actions were beyond belief for the workers, a harsh eye-opener to the role of the state.
They crushed pickets up against fences whilst they escorted scabs into work. A young woman had her arm broken during arrest by snatch squads on the picket line, was dragged into police cells, then taken to have her arm set on the hospital, and brought back to the cells for 27 hours before being released - without charge!!
A Glasgow socialist who drove a minibus to the mass picket to drop people off was arrested and charged with attempted murder, but after the fury that erupted at the arrest she had her charge reduced to dangerous driving; from ‘attempted murder’ to ‘attempted driving‘!!
Despite the peaceful nature of the pickets themselves, Tory prime minister John Major denounced "picket line violence“. The majority of the press took their cue from this monstrous lie, with headlines like "mob fury".
Police chiefs and editors collaborated with Timex bosses to demonise the pickets and their supporters, in a vain attempt to isolate them from the mass of workers.
Union Right-Wing Treachery
But the most scandalous aspect of this was the way right-wing AEEU and STUC officials and Labour politicians aped the Tory talk of ‘picket line violence‘.
Needless to say most of them had never attended a picket, especially during the 90-day sacking notices. But when the Timex workers’ resilience and mass pressure for action from below by active trade unionists obliged the STUC's general secretary Campbell Christie to lead a special STUC General Council trip to the picket on 19 May, he rightly stated, "There will be no peace and tranquility at the Timex factory until all sacked workers are reinstated".
But he went on to wreck the impact of that comment by telling TV cameras, "We will be asking people to come to Dundee...but we don't want anyone to come to break the law or create violence."
As I wrote at the time, "Who did Campbell have in mind? Was it over 500 'outsiders', bussed into Dundee at public expense, fed and paid overtime from the public purse, who fought desperately to clear the road for Peter Hall’s hired scabs...and who dress in distinctive blue uniforms?"
AEEU leaders Gavin Laird and Jimmy Airlie went far further in their treacherous treatment of 343 members who had inspired fellow workers across the land.
They wrote to Timex workers threatening them with expulsion from the union. They threatened to withdraw the modest £30 a week strike pay these workers got. They tried to ban a prominent strike leader from speaking on socialist public meeting platforms.
Boycott
Instead of these acts to undermine the fight, they should have thrown the weight of the union behind the boycott of Timex products that had been gathering pace across the UK. And as we argued at the time, they should have been organising AEEU workplace meetings with Timex speakers alongside national union leaders calling for a 'boycott' of Timex at firms that supplied them and were their chief customers, such as Creda, IBM and Electrolux.
General Strike
Alongside mass pickets to blockade the scab factory to actually halt production, and union-organised boycotts of Timex supplies and products, the other chief strand of struggle was unified solidarity strike action.
The call for a 24-hour general strike, initially in Dundee, later Scotland-wide, was repeatedly discussed, debated and pondered on the picket lines and Strike Committee. Those of us advocating this did so in the context of mounting opposition to the Tories from numerous sections of workers, including teachers, firefighters, miners, rail workers, NHS staff, council staff and postal workers. In the latter case, posties took unofficial strike action - and won!
The wave of support for Timex was shown by the 10,000 who marched with them as early as mid-March. On several occasions, we advocated that the STUC should call a one-day strike, at least in Dundee, and then build for it through workplace meetings. That was no mere socialist wishful thinking, plucked out of the air, but based on the fact that partial walkouts were organised from below in the absence of a fighting plan being forthcoming from either the AEEU or STUC leaderships.
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| One of many large solidarity marches, mostly built from below by shop stewards and union activists |
Strikes From Below
In mid-April, the STUC called a demo, and 1,000 joined the mass picket earlier that morning. Big contingents of Dundee workplaces walked out to join the 6,000-strong demo, in the likes of NCR, Valentine’s, Bulkbag, Holochrome, Ninewells hospital laundry and Dundee district council. In some firms, management gave time off work as they faced a 2 or 3-hour strike anyway.
If union national leaders had built on this, solidarity strike action even in the Dundee area itself would have divided employers, as they lost production due to the stubborn refusal of Timex to reinstate their workers.
But instead of taking up this, the best the STUC could do after 92 days of struggle was to promise “to consider demonstrations against those who supply Timex”, with Campbell Christie declaring “There will be no secondary action and we will not be calling for secondary action”, and BBC TV reporting “He rejected the call for a 24 hour general strike despite repeated calls for it.”
Christie explained, “Tory anti-union laws are unfair and the STUC want them changed, but the Timex campaign has to operate within the legal constraints introduced by the government.”
The real fact of life was that Timex workers defied these vicious laws for the previous 90 days, and inspired such vast working class solidarity that the bosses dare not use Tory laws to remove all bar 6 pickets, for instance.
One STUC General Council member took the next logical step, arguing against Strike Committee members who advocated a 24-hour general strike, advising them to “wait for a Labour government”. If they had swallowed that line, all too common in the unions at the time, they would have had to wait 4 years - and then get treated to Blair’s New Tories in office!
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| John McAllion, Labour MP at the time, now a member of the SSP. Photo: Craig Maclean |
Handpicked Workforce
After the 90-day sacking notices expired on 17 May, Timex bosses would have dearly loved to pick and choose who to reinstate. But the workers made it plain it was ‘one back, all back’, demanding removal of the scabs and reinstatement of all 343 under their old contracts with continuity of service.
The Strike Committee called more mass pickets and a rally, appealing to workers across Scotland, who responded in their thousands.
Instead of escalating the action, the AEEU leadership of Laird and Airlie had secret phone calls to Timex, who came up with a new “offer”. This was, as one woman picket described it, “diabolical crap”!
They offered a 27 per cent pay cut, loss of shift premiums, loss of the Xmas bonus, and skill tests for workers’ own jobs so as to weed out those they wanted to be rid of.
Despite Laird recommending this, a mass meeting threw it out by 341 to 2, and I witnessed women literally chasing him down the street to the train station in fury!
Timex next tried to cow the workers and clear the gates of pickets with a threat of closure by Xmas, with vague talk of enhanced redundancy payments and taking back 100 or 150 workers on reduced wages.
Women told us, “We will hunt down Fred Olsen [Timex owner] across the world and destroy him” and “If Olsen pulls out of Dundee we will drive him out of Europe.”
Factory Occupation
The time had arrived for a new tactic to stop asset stripping of the machinery and to force reinstatement, either by bludgeoning Timex bosses into submission, or a Tory government alarmed at rising turmoil into intervening: a factory occupation.
We discussed that with the Strike Committee, who were open to the idea, but all the obstacles thrown up by mass policing and the cowardly role of national union leaders meant it didn’t happen.
Nevertheless, the plan Timex bosses had of bringing back some of the skilled workers to bolster production, with predictions of at least £25m sales in the remainder of 1993, and to then either continue production in a high tech factory with a skeleton workforce of skilled workers on Third World wages - or to sell it off for a good price - collapsed in the face of incredible tenacity by the workers.
They were forced to pull out of Dundee in late August - possibly afraid the workers would precisely seize the factory. They caught them unawares with such a sudden closure.
Permanent Closure
That was a tragically sad day for a city whose workers had piled up Timex profits for generations, with whole families working there.
But for most of the heroic fighters who had inspired a generation during their prolonged battle, it was the lesser of two evils; a better outcome than to let a ruthless multinational cast aside its skilled, organised workforce for a slave camp geared to churning out profit on the backs of super-exploited workers.
This chapter in Scottish workers’ history is rich in lessons - too numerous to cover in one article. But above all, it proved the willingness of working people - working women in particular - to stand up and fight for their rights if they are given even half a lead.
And it underlined the need to construct a fighting leadership in their unions, in contrast to those over-paid union officials who quake in their well-heeled boots at the thought of defying vicious anti-union laws designed to enslave workers for profit.
We should never forget the women and men of Timex who showed such courage, tenacity and ingenuity - in a titanic battle that could have been won with a different type of leadership at the head of the unions.
A new young generation of workers should be inspired to follow their example - and learn from it.
