James Larkin - Definition


James Larkin - Definition

Statue of James Larkin on O'Connell Street

James (Big Jim) Larkin (1874-1947), an Irish trade union leader and socialist activist was born in Liverpool, England on 28 January 1874, of Irish parents. Growing up in poverty he had little formal education and began working in a variety of jobs while still a child. He later moved to Ireland, founding The Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, the Irish Labour Party, and the Workers' Union of Ireland. Perhaps best known for his role in the 1913 Dublin Lockout, "Big Jim" continues to occupy a significant place in the collective memory of Dublin.

Contents

1 Beginnings

2 Organising the Irish labour movement, 1907 - 1914

3 The Dublin Lockout, 1913

4 Larkin in America, 1914 - 1923

5 Return to Ireland and communist activism

6 Return to the Labour Party

7 Further reading

Beginnings

Larkin's family lived in the slums in Liverpool during the early years of his life, and from the age of seven he attended school in the mornings and worked in the afternoons to supplement the family income - a common arrangement in working-class families at the time. At the age of fourteen, after the death of his father, he was apprenticed to the firm his father had worked for, but was dismissed after two years. He was unemployed for a while and then worked as a seaman and docker. By 1903 he was a dock foreman, and on 8 September that year he married Elizabeth Brown.

From 1893 Larkin had developed an interest in socialism, and he became a member of the Independent Labour Party. In 1905 he was one of the few foremen to take part in a strike on the Liverpool docks. He was elected to the strike committee, and although he lost his foreman's job as a result, his performance had so impressed the National Dock Labourers' Union (NDLU) that it appointed him a temporary organiser. He later gained a permanent position with the union, and in 1906 it sent him to Scotland, where he successfully organised workers in Preston and Glasgow.

Organising the Irish labour movement, 1907 - 1914

In January 1907 Larkin undertook his first task on behalf of the trade union movement in Ireland, when he arrived in Belfast to organise the city's dock workers for the NDLU. He succeeded in unionising the workforce and, as employers refused to meet their wage demands, he called the dockers out on strike in June. Carters and coal men soon joined in, the latter settling their dispute after a month. Larkin succeeded in uniting Protestant and Catholic workers but the strike ended without significant success by November. Tensions over the leadership of the strike arose between Larkin and NDLU general secretary James Sexton. The role of the latter in taking over negotiations and agreeing a disastrous settlement for the last strikers ensured a lasting rift between him and Larkin.

In 1908 Larkin moved to southern Ireland, and organised workers in Dublin, Cork and Waterford with considerable success. His involvement, against union instructions, in a dispute in Dublin resulted in his expulsion from the NDLU. The union later prosecuted him for diverting union funds to give strike pay to Cork workers engaged in an unofficial dispute. After trial and conviction in 1910 he would serve three months in prison for this, a sentence widely regarded as unjust.

After his expulsion from the NDLU, Larkin founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU) at the end of December 1908. The organisation still exists today as the SIPTU (The Services Industrial Professional & Technical Union). It quickly gained the affiliation of the NDLU branches in Dublin, Cork, Dundalk and Waterford, while the Derry and Drogheda branches stayed with the British union and Belfast split along sectarian lines. Early in the new year, Larkin moved to Dublin, which became the main base of the ITGWU and the focus of all his future union activity in Ireland.

In partnership with James Connolly, Larkin helped form the Irish Labour Party in 1912. Later that year he was elected to the Dublin Corporation. However, he did not hold his seat long as a month later he was removed on account of his fraud conviction.

The Dublin Lockout, 1913

In early 1913 Larkin achieved some notable successes in industrial disputes in Dublin, making frequent recourse to sympathetic strikes and blacking of goods. Two major employers remained non-union firms and a target of Larkin's organising ambitions: Guinness and the Dublin United Tramway Company.

Guinness staff were well-paid and enjoyed generous benefits from a paternalistic management, and as a result they showed little interest in trade unions. This was far from the case on the tramways. The chairman of the Dublin United Tramway Company, industrialist and newspaper proprietor William Martin Murphy, was determined not to allow the ITGWU to unionise his workforce. On 15 August he dismissed forty workers he suspected of ITGWU membership, followed by another 300 over the next week. On 26 August the tramway workers officially went on strike. Led by Murphy, over four hundred of the city's employers retaliated by requiring their workers to sign a pledge not to be a member of the ITGWU and not to engage in sympathetic strikes.

The resulting industrial dispute was the most severe in Ireland's history. Employers in Dublin engaged in a lockout of their workers, employing blackleg labour from Britain and elsewhere in Ireland. Dublin's workers, amongst the poorest in the then United Kingdom, were forced to survive on generous but inadequate donations from the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) and other sources in Ireland, doled out dutifully by the ITGWU.

For seven months the lockout affected tens of thousands of Dublin's workers and employers, with Larkin portrayed as the villain by Murphy's three main newspapers, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent and the Evening Herald. Other leaders in the ITGWU at the time were James Connolly and William O'Brien, while influential figures such as P�draig Pearse, Countess Markievicz and William Butler Yeats supported the workers in the generally anti-Larkin media.

The lockout eventually concluded in early (1914) when the calls for a sympathetic strike in Britain from Larkin and Connolly were rejected by the British TUC. Although the actions of the ITGWU and the smaller UBLU were unsuccessful in achieving substantially better pay and conditions for the workers, they marked a watershed in Irish labour history. The principle of union action and workers' solidarity had been firmly established. Perhaps even more importantly, Larkin's rhetoric, condemning poverty and injustice and calling for the oppressed to stand up for themselves, made a lasting impression.

Larkin in America, 1914 - 1923

Some months after the lockout ended, Larkin left for the United States. He intended to recuperate from the strain of the lockout and raise funds for the union. His decision to leave dismayed many union activists. Once there he became a founding member of the American Communist Party. Due to his membership, his radical socialist publications, and the "Red Scare" that was sweeping the nation he was jailed in 1920 for 'criminal anarchy'. He was sentenced to five to ten years in Sing Sing prison. In 1923 he was pardoned and later deported by Alfred E. Smith, Governor of New York.

Return to Ireland and communist activism

Upon his arrival in Ireland in April 1923, Larkin received a hero's welcome, and immediately set about touring the country meeting trade union members and appealing for an end to the Civil War. However, he soon found himself at variance with William O'Brien, who in his absence had become the leading figure in the ITGWU and the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress. Larkin was still officially general secretary of the ITGWU, and a bitter struggle between the two men ensued which would last over twenty years.

In September 1923 Larkin formed the Irish Worker League (IWL), which was soon afterwards recognised by the Communist International (the Comintern) as the Irish section of the world communist movement. In 1924 Larkin attended the Comintern congress and was elected to its executive committee. However, the League was not organised as a political party, never held a general congress and never succeeded in being politically effective. Its most prominent activity in its first year was to raise funds for republican civil war prisoners.

During Larkin's absence at the 1924 Comintern congress (and apparently against his instructions), his brother Peter took his supporters out of the ITGWU, forming the Workers' Union of Ireland (WUI). The new union quickly grew, gaining the allegiance of about two thirds of the Dublin membership of the ITGWU and of a smaller number of rural members. It affiliated to the pro-Soviet Red International of Labour Unions. However, like the IWL, the WUI would be hampered in its growth by Larkin's chaotic and dictatorial approach.

In January 1925, the Comintern sent British communist activist Bob Stewart to Ireland to establish a communist party in cooperation with Larkin. A formal founding conference of the Irish Worker League, which was to take up this role, was set for May 1925. A fiasco ensued when the organisers discovered at the last minute that Larkin did not intend to attend. Feeling that the proposed party could not succeed without him, they called the conference off as it was due to start in a packed room in the Mansion House in Dublin.

In the September 1927 general election, Larkin ran in North Dublin and was elected. This was to be the only time that a self-proclaimed communist was elected to D�il �ireann. However, as a result of a libel award against him won by William O'Brien, which he had refused to pay, he was an undischarged bankrupt and could not take up his seat.

From the early 1930s Larkin drew away from the Soviet Union, which itself had developed clear reservations about him. While in the 1932 general election he stood without success as a communist, in 1933 and subsequently he ran as "Independent Labour". During this period he also engaged in a rapprochement with the Catholic Church. In 1936 he regained his seat on Dublin Corporation. He then regained his D�il seat in the 1937 general election but lost it again the following year. In this period the Workers' Union of Ireland also entered the mainstream of the trade union movement, being admitted to the Dublin Trades Council in 1936, although the ITUC would not accept its membership application until 1945.

Return to the Labour Party

In 1941 a new trade union bill was published by the Government. Inspired by an internal trade union restructuring proposal by William O'Brien, it was viewed as a threat by the smaller general unions and the Irish branches of British unions (known as the 'amalgamated unions'). Larkin and the WUI played a leading role in the unsuccessful campaign against the bill. After its passage into law he and his supporters successully applied for admission to the Labour Party, where they were now regarded with more sympathy by many members. O'Brien in response disaffiliated the ITGWU from the party, forming the rival National Labour Party and denouncing what he claimed was communist influence in Labour. Larkin later served as a Labour Party deputy in D�il �ireann (1943-44).

James Larkin died in his sleep on 30 January, 1947. His funeral mass was celebrated by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, and thousands lined the streets of the city as the hearse passed to Glasnevin Cemetery. Today a statue of "Big Jim" stands on O'Connell Street in Dublin and a road in Clontarf, North Dublin, is named after him. He has been the subject of poems by Frank O'Connor and Lola Ridge, his character has been central in plays by Daniel Corkery, George Russell (AE), and Sean O'Casey, and he is a heroic figure in the background of James Plunkett's novel Strumpet City.