From The Irish Independent, November 17, 1913.
To the Editor ‘Irish Independent.’
Sir—I frequently receive letters, visits, and telephone messages from amiable people who have various nostrums for settling the Labour unrest in Dublin, which they want me to put into operation straight away. It will save the time of my advisers and myself if you will allow me to say, through your columns, that I have not power to settle the trouble.
The deadlock in Dublin has not been so bad as is represented, and it is only in the part that it has become serious, but, such as it is, the people who can settle it are Mr. James Larkin and the officials of the Irish Transport Union, who produced the deadlock by terrorising men into going out on sympathetic strike, and who, by the same methods, are restraining many from returning to work that are most anxious to do so. Sir George Askwith in his report says—
‘No community could exist if resort to the sympathetic strike became the general policy of trade unionism.’
There are not five per cent. of the men out of employment who may not return, before their places are filled up, without any sacrifice of principle, or without giving any undertaking except to do the work they are paid for doing. The employers have shown that they do not object to re-employ the men on strike as far as they have vacancies for them. Men who have returned to work say they never knew what tyranny meant till they joined the Irish Transport Union. Personally, I would rely mostly for future peace on the experience of these men and the strength of the employers’ organisation.
It must not be forgotten that the Employers met delegates from the Trades Congress and Trades Council, and, after hours of discussion, it always came round to the point that if there was an agreement arrived at there were no parties who could be relied on for a single day to carry it out. This was at first contested, but no one now pretends that a Transport Union agreement could be relied on, or that any person or body who might guarantee the fulfilment of agreements would have the slightest power to give effect to the guarantee. If further evidence of this were wanted it was furnished this week by the breaking of the contract with the shipping companies, solemnly entered into under the chairmanship of the Recorder of Dublin. These companies have been pandering to the whims of the Transport Union ever since the strike commenced, so that the conduct of this union shows them to be equally unscrupulous whether dealing with friend or foe.
It was explained by Mr. Gosling at the Board of Trade Inquiry that any agreement come to should be with all the employers of Dublin, and that for any employer who did not join there would be no mercy. Under a general settlement the employers would all be bound to employ no unskilled labour except Transport Union members, so that the last state of the employers would be worse than the first.
What the Peace Committees, who see the situation only from outside, do not appear to understand is that meetings between the employers and the Dublin Trades Council would lead to no (?) while the recurring proposals for these meetings have already had the effect in many cases of delaying the return of men to their work. It requires to be emphasised that there is not a man out of work in Dublin to-day on the question of wages or conditions of labour, although the idea has been spread abroad, especially in England, that all the trouble arises from sweated and underpaid labour. There was not a word of evidence given at the Board of Trade Inquiry to support such a charge, and yet Mr. Bernard Shaw at the Albert Hall uttered the slander, and coupled my name with it, that Dublin employers did not pay trade union rates of wages, and sweated their employees.
If I may refer to my own record as an employer, Mr. Larkin cross-examined me for more than two hours regarding my whole career, and he was unable to elicit a single instance of underpaid or harshly-treated employees, or of any indisposition on my part to employ trade union workmen and treat with trade unions, until I was attacked by his organisation, which has no more claim to the title of trade union than the crew of a pirate ship if they were registered under the Trades Union Act.
The public memory is so short, and so many lies have been disseminated, that it is desirable to recall the fact that the origin of the present trouble was the attack made by Mr. Larkin on the Tramway Company, of which I am chairman. This attack commenced long before the actual calling out of the men, and was in pursuance of a policy of ‘breaking Murphy’s heart’ publicly announced by Mr. Larkin. The crime for which my name has added a new word to the dictionary is, that having an objection to allowing my heart to be broken I prepared to resist Mr. Larkin’s attack, and inflicted a defeat on him from which he will not recover, even with the help of the cheap martyrdom bestowed on him by the Government. The claim, as I understand it now, of those who speak for trade unionism is that while the union leaders are entitled to attack an employer and destroy his business whenever and however they like, an employer commits a high crime and misdemeanour if he takes any measures to defend himself, no matter how unjustifiable the attack may be.
The action of Mr. Larkin in attacking the Tramway Company was not due to the fact that the men were underpaid, for he admitted subsequently that he did not know the good wages they were receiving, nor was it due to the slums of Dublin, which are supposed to be the root of all the discontent. These men were well paid, and they lived mainly outside the slum areas in the suburbs of the city, many of them in houses at cheap rents provided by the Company, close by the car depots where their day’s work begins and ends.
The sole reason for this audacious attempt, with less than a fourth of the men in his union, to paralyse the tramway traffic in the busiest week in the year was the colossal vanity and vaulting ambition of Mr. Larkin, who thought to make himself the unquestioned labour dictator of the city.
I would, therefore, respectfully suggest to my friends of the Labour Party that it was unwise and unfair to make trade unionism an issue in this dispute, when the real question at stake was the personal supremacy of Mr. Larkin.
While leaders of trade unionism are just now denouncing Mr. Larkin’s proposal to ‘raise the fiery cross’ in England, is it not rather cynical that he should be enabled by the support of these same people to keep this city in a state of turmoil for months and to do here what they will not permit him to do on their own side of the Channel? The employers of Dublin are really fighting the battle of sane trade unionism, for if by any chance Mr. Larkin achieved success here, the successful missioner could not be restrained from going on with his fiery crusade in Great Britain.
As it is, he has, notwithstanding his boasts and histrionics, got a bad fall from which he will not soon recover. He has, it is true, been successful in getting a great many men out of their employment, but he has not got one of them back again, and he has been the cause of introducing a large amount of additional labour into a city where even in normal times there was not enough work to go round.
WM. M. MURPHY.
Dublin, 15th November, 1913.