Today in 1913, the five-month-long Dublin lockout began, involving 20,000 workers. Often wrongly categorized as a strike it was a callous attempt by Ireland's capitalist class to starve workers into submission and prevent them from joining the growing Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU). Impoverished workers living in some of Europe's worst conditions were locked out of their workplaces while British and Irish strikebreaking workers or "scabs" replaced them.
The story is a pioneering attempt at building working-class unity and one big union representing all workers as a step towards overthrowing capitalism and establishing a workers' republic in Ireland. After betrayal by Britain's trade union leadership, Irish workers would lose this battle. But out of its ashes, a growing trade union movement and the Irish Citizen's Army were born, which would lead the first major challenge to British rule three years later.
#IrishHistory #ClassStruggle #WorkersUnite
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