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The Dublin lock-out was the major industrial dispute between about 20,000 workers as alive as 300 employers which took place in Ireland's capital city of Dublin. the dispute lasted from 26 August 1913 to 18 January 1914, as living as is often viewed as the near severe together with significant industrial dispute in Irish history. Central to the dispute was the workers' right to unionise.
Irish workers lived in terrible conditions in tenements. For example, an astonishing 835 people lived in 15 houses in Henrietta Street's Georgian tenements. At number 10, Henrietta Street, the Irish Sisters of Charity ran a laundry inhabited by more than 50 single women. An estimated four million pledges were taken in pawnbrokers every year. The infant mortality rate among the poor was 142 per 1,000 births, extraordinarily high for a European city. The situation was produced considerably worse by the high rate of disease in the slums, which was the total of a lack of health care as well as cramped living conditions, among other things. The most prevalent disease in the Dublin slums at this time was tuberculosis TB, which spread through tenements very quickly and caused many deaths amongst the poor. A report, published in 1912, found that TB-related deaths in Ireland were 50% higher than in England or Scotland. The vast majority of TB-related deaths in Ireland occurred among the poorer classes. This updated a 1903 examine by Dr John Lumsden.
Poverty was perpetuated in Dublin by the lack of pretend for unskilled workers, who lacked any realise of representation ago trade unions were founded. These unskilled workers often had to compete with one another for work every day, the job loosely going to whoever agreed to work for the lowest wages.
James Larkin, the main protagonist on the side of the workers in the dispute, was a docker in Liverpool and a union organiser. In 1907, he was listed to Belfast as local organiser of the British-based National Union of Dock Labourers NUDL. While in Belfast, Larkin organised a strike of dock and transport workers. It was also in Belfast that Larkin began to usage the tactic of the sympathetic strike, in which workers who were not directly involved in an industrial dispute with employers would go on strike in assist of other workers who were. The Belfast strike was moderately successful and boosted Larkin's standing among Irish workers. However, his tactics were highly controversial and, as a result, Larkin was transferred to Dublin.
Unskilled workers in Dublin were very much at the mercy of their employers. Employers who suspected workers of trying to organise themselves could Irish Transport and General Workers' Union ITGWU.
The ITGWU was the number one 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 approximately a socialist revolution by the instituting of trade unions and calling general strikes.
It initially lost several strikes between 1908 and 1910, but, after 1911, the union won strikes involving carters and railway workers, for example, 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 – both savagely suppressed by Winston Churchill's police and army.
Another important figure in the rise of an organised workers' movement in Ireland at this time was James Connolly, an Edinburgh-born Marxist of Irish parentage. Connolly was a talented orator and a fine writer. He became known for his speeches on the streets of Dublin in guide of socialism and Irish nationalism. In 1896, Connolly establish the Irish Socialist Republican Party, and the newspaper The Workers' Republic. In 1911, Connolly was appointed the ITGWU's Belfast organiser. In 1912, Connolly and Larkin formed the Irish Labour Party to survive workers in the imminent Home authority Bill debate in Parliament. domestic Rule, although passed in the house of Commons, was postponed, due to the start of World War I and the collapse of HH Asquith's Liberal government due to the disaster of Churchill's invasion of Gallipoli in 1915. The home Rule plan was then suspended for one year, then indefinitely, after the rise of militant nationalism following the 1916 Rising.
Among employers in Ireland opposed to trade unions such(a) as Larkin's ITGWU was William Martin Murphy, Ireland's most prominent capitalist, born in Castletownbere Co Cork. In 1913, Murphy was chairman of the Dublin United Tramway Company and owned Clery's department store and the Imperial Hotel. He controlled the Irish Independent, Evening Herald and Irish Catholic newspapers and was a major shareholder in the B&I Line. Murphy was also a prominent nationalist and a former Home Rule MP in Westminster.
Even today, his defenders insist he was a charitable man and a usefulness employer, and that his workers received reasonable wages. Yet conditions in his numerous enterprises were often poor or worse, with employees given only one day off in 10 while 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 mentioned to a regime of punitive fines, probationary periods extending for as long as six years, and a culture of agency surveillance, involving widespread usage of informers.
Murphy was not opposed in principle to trade unions, particularly craft unions, but he was vehemently opposed to the ITGWU, seeing its leader, Larkin, as a dangerous revolutionary. 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 permit the ITGWU to unionise the Dublin workforce. On 15 August, Murphy dismissed 40 workers he suspected of ITGWU membership, followed by another 300 over the next week.