Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labor Movement
288 pp, $28.95 cloth, ISBN: 9781583674345
By John Tully
Reviewed by Ronald Paul
“…The importance of revisiting past strikes lies not only in recovering the often hidden memory of working-class mobilisations, but also in revealing the dynamics of those strikes—whether victorious or not—so as to draw conclusions for future collective action. This is clearly the purpose of John Tully’s study of the great strike of labourers at the Silvertown rubber and electrical factory in London in 1889. Not only is this strike a forgotten chapter in the history of the New Unionism that ultimately gave rise to the modern British labour movement; in addition, the tactics first developed by the employers at Silvertown also ‘became a blueprint for British union busters to follow.’…”
Read the review in Socialism and Democracy online
Comments are closed.