BRICKING IT: FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE BUILDING TRADE

 

Ask anyone to conjure up an image of building workers from the North East and they’ll be naturally drawn to the popular culture of the 1980s TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and the fortunes of the Geordie bricklayers who upped sticks for graft in Germany during a building recession in Britain.

They’ll recall the bleakness of the site huts, the constant putt of the cement mixers, the bottles of Becks in strange boozers and the rolls of Deutschmarks in a wad; they’ll remember the worldly-wise foreman Dennis Patterson, played by Dennis Healy; the green youngster Neville, as portrayed by Kevin Whatley and, of course, they’ll mind the raucous, boisterous brickie Oz. Jimmy Nail’s character was a believable and realistic characterisation and one that you could easily find among the lengths of 4x2, bags of cement or football terraces in Britain at the time. Slapping down compo with his trowel in a brown leather jacket and combat pants while telling dirty jokes, Oz didn’t care much for the gaffers and reflected a sense of machismo that long-lingered in the industrial sectors of the region. What really appealed to the public, however, was the sense of camaraderie that the men displayed in their adversity and monotonous work routine among the cranes and scaffolding. Sticking together may have been the way for the gang to get through, but they were far from being card-carrying unionised workers.

Organising on construction sites has always been a notoriously difficult task. Getting into a bait cabin on a large job and walking among the predominantly male workforce sitting supping on tea from their flasks with hard hats on the tables by their sandwiches and muddy steel toe-capped boots tapping on the floor was never easy. Given the fact that bogus self-employment, or ‘the Lump’ as it was known during the turbulent times of the 1970s, has divided not only trades but gangs of men working on jobs and that many building companies are just one or two-man bands, and you’ve got a real headache for attempting to sell the benefits of collective bargaining.

Health and Safety issues have always been a problem in the notoriously dangerous building game with people working at heights and have long provided an in for unions looking to address the workers with a short pitch from a toolbox talk. But in the main it has just been the larger national jobs and tradesmen employed in housing and local authorities that have enjoyed the benefits of trade union membership in the construction sector.

When you go right back to the days described in the ‘Builder’s Bible’ – Robert Tressell’s famous Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – each trade had its own union and they organised along the lines for benefiting individual sections rather than for the industry as a whole. It was a throwback to the ancient guilds and is a problem that is still being seen today in the construction section of Unite with a rank and file movement of Electricians and Engineers fighting bitterly against a de-skilling of their trades.

The woodworkers were one of the first trades to organise themselves into a trade union with the formation of the General Union of Carpenters and Joiners in 1827, which was itself an amalgamation of a number of smaller bodies. The union embarked on a 53-week strike in Manchester in 1877, then merged with the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, which had been formed in 1861, and eventually became the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers in 1920.

The other trades all had similar evolutions in their history and the members of the Operative Society of Bricklayers, the Friendly Society of Operative House Carpenters and Joiners, the Operative United Painters, the Operative Federal Plasterers, the Operative Plumbers’ and Glaziers’ Society, the Slater’s Society and the Friendly Society of Operative Stonemasons all came together to form the Operative Builders’ Union in around 1833 in an attempt to create a national Federation for construction workers, though a preference for their own guilds seemed to remain among craftsmen.

The little-known Great Builders’ Strike of 1859 in London lasted several months with stonemasons, bricklayers, and plasterers in the main all withdrawing their labour and refusing to sign a document with the gaffer’s organization the Master Builders that they reckoned was ‘an attempt to force the working man into slavery’ and that if they signed it they ‘would be selling away their rights as freemen.’ The trades’ unions then were also operating as benefit societies and many workmen were dependent on them for support in sickness and old age, so they were vitally important for men employed in heavy manual labour during the Nineteenth century. There was another large strike by the Amalgamated Trades in 1872 which demanded a strict adherence to the 9-hour rule with overtime not compulsory, a wage increase to keep up with living expenses and a code of working rules to regulate the working conditions of the building trade.

Locally, the stonemasons in the Tyne valley downed tools over a simple request to finish work at 5.30 instead of 6.00 p.m. on a Saturday in 1864. The proposal was accepted by the employers Bulman and Green, but a bull-headed Mr. Dodd refused and threatened to do the work with his apprentices alone, so they walked off the job.

There was a long-running builders’ strike in Newcastle in 1866 which dragged on for eleven months until a resolution was arrived at in the February of 1867. The builders and operative masons of Newcastle and District were in dispute with the masters over ‘accepting £1 l0s for working ten hours a day, or 55 hours a week; or the masters should concede to the men the nine hours per day, or 50 ½  hours a week, at the old wages of £1 7s per week.’ A ballot was held in the Lecture Room at Nelson Street in Newcastle and although there were attempts to limit entrance to ‘master builders and operative stone masons only,’ other construction workers got in and cast their votes in a glass jar on a table. They were handed a perforated strip of paper with ‘9 hours’ on one side and ’30 shillings’ on the other. The vote, from 422 cast, saw 401 go for the nine-hour day, which was met with ‘loud and prolonged cheering.’

Both the builders and the joiners were out on strike in Newcastle in April 1871 and the men refused a proposal from the masters to settle the dispute via arbitration. The painters were also agitating for a strike, and it was reported that several men had been assaulted and many cases of intimidation were taking place. The roof slaters also walked out in Alnwick.

Five years later the stonemasons and bricklayers struck again as their demands for a wage increase weren’t met. The masons wanted their wages to rise from 34s to 38s a week and the bricklayers from 36s to 40s a week. The employers offered 2s a week but refused to make any concessions on the arrangements regarding piecework, which the men refused and there was little sign of either side budging.

Interestingly, around 100 plumbers went on strike in Sunderland in 1874 when their wage increase demands of 3s a week, taking them to 33s a week, were dismissed by the masters, who met in the Crown and Sceptre hotel to discuss the matter. They pointed out that plumbers in Newcastle got no more than 30s a week.

The joiners and house carpenters of Newcastle withdrew their labour in September 1878 against a week reduction of 4s 2d a week as the construction sector maintained a level of wages militancy. The trouble was, however, that the bosses were quick to use scab labour and in another bricklayer’s strike in April 1884, the Jarrow Express reported that the master builders had ‘succeeded in filling the places of the men who have gone out on strike’ and claimed that they could obtain ‘any number of hands.’

The bosses flexed their muscle again in the March of 1899 when the Plasterers’ Union was involved in a 13,000 strong national lock out and men in Sunderland, Newcastle and Gateshead were all laid idle as the Master Builders’ Association closed their doors on them. The dispute centred around the union coercing job foremen to join. Earlier that year the plasterer Alexander McLeod of Newcastle had been summoned to appear at Tynemouth County Petty Sessions charged with ‘unlawfully, wrongly and without legal authority’ attempting to get another worker to join the National Association of Operative Plasterers, but the case was chucked out of court.

The joiners engaged in the building trade were out in dispute again themselves that summer with the Newcastle, North and South Shields and Blyth members of the United Trade Committee of Carpenters and  Joiners wanting an increase in wages from 9 ½ d to 10d per hour. The Master Builders Association tried to go to arbitration but a very large majority of the 700 tradesmen affected refused and walked out. The country joiners at Hexham also considered striking after asking for a penny raise from 8d to 9d.

There was a significant amount of industrial unrest on the North East’s building sites at that time and two months earlier in Sunderland the builders’ labourers came out on strike over their demands for an increase from 6 ½ d to 7d per hour. The Federated employers again told non-union men to scab and that if they remained at work then they ‘promised them support as far as they can.’ 400 men were out on the cobbles as the so-called unskilled workers began organizing themselves. They formed the National Association of Builders’ Labourers that year and it had grown to more than 2,000 members in the first three years, before affiliating to the National Federation of Building Trades Operatives.

Further attempts to grow the national union, which was comprised of around 25 local labourers unions, saw them try to merge with the United Builders’ Labourers Union, the United Order of General Labourers of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Navvies, Bricklayers’ Labourers and General Labourers Union, which proved unsuccessful.

The Labourers were a militant bunch and recognized the need for the craft sections to join together for a more powerful voice for building workers. ‘The workers of each and every occupation must combine or starve, and the trade unions of all must federate or die. Just as the coal-dust of the miner is as honorable as the type-dust of the printer, so the hod-carrier and the navvy, with their few paltry pence per hour, are at least as important social and industrial factors as the grasping and over-paid contractor or employer,’ wrote an official of the organisation.

Their recruitment material was no less incendiary and a man covered in lime and brick dust, his arms and back aching from heavy lifting all day, might sit down and look at the heavy block caps on a sheet stating: ‘Our motto is ‘Union — no dogs or blacklegs need apply’; our programme is ‘Less work, more money, and better securities of life, limb, and labour. ORGANISE, AGITATE, ACT!’

They listed the reasons for joining and ended with the statement that: ‘If all this does not seem to your mind sufficient reason why you - yes, YOU! — should join the Union or give it (whether openly or secretly we don’t care) your support at once — why, then, you are either a capitalist, a fool, an enemy, a blind mole, an old fossil, or a BLACKLEG!’

In the April of 1900 the builders’ labourers held a meeting in the Chancellor’s Head Inn on Newgate Street in Newcastle to debate the actions of some of the Associated Master Builders in not giving them a proposed minimum wage of 7d per hour. The packed pub decided to stop work on the Monday as they were also seeking a change to the codes in the working rules by abolishing the system and practise of apprentices carrying for bricklayers and plasterers, and also to do away with stone carrying on ladders – later amended to have all stone carrying by manual labour abolished. Around 300 men weren’t getting the rate and were to come out, while a similar number who were receiving 7d an hour were to remain on the job.

The building industry was at crisis point by that September when the bricklayers also came out and the employers threatened a general lock-out throughout the Northern Federation if they did not return to work.

A similar situation occurred five years later when the Master Builders in Newcastle, Gateshead, Gosforth and Wallsend reduced wages by a penny an hour and looked to make changes of their own to the working rules. Despite attempts to reach an agreement in Newcastle, no settlement could be found and over 1,000 men from all trades, except the joiners whose notices had not expired, were affected. Bricklayers, masons and plasters in the district all went on strike over the wage reduction, and they were joined by the labourers who had been deducted a halfpenny an hour. The newspapers reported that the local building trade was crippled with ‘several hundreds of men being idle’ but the Northern Builders Federation stood firm and again bragged of their union-busting tactics by stating that there were plenty of men to get at reduced wages, though they again offered arbitration.

To give an idea of the strength of the construction unions pre-World War One, the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners had a membership of 80,755 nationally in 1913 but they were not only employed in house building as a good number of joiners, and plumbers, were employed in the North-East shipyards.

 

While a series of mining strikes due to pit closures were bringing serious unrest in the country by 1925, a situation arose in the construction unions which caused a big split from the National Federation of Building Trade Operatives. Both the Bricklayers and the Plasterers withdrew from both the union and the National Wages and Conditions Council in a row over pressing for ‘wet time’ on an individual rather than a joint basis. The NFBTO was another attempt at creating one single union for the building trade, formed in 1918, and was comprised of the Amalgamated Slaters, Tilers and Roofing Operatives Society, the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, the Manchester Unity of Operative Bricklayers’ Society, the National Association of Builders’ Labourers, the National Amalgamated Society of Operative House and Ship Painters and Decorators, the United Builders’ Labourers’ Union and the United Operative Plumbers and Domestic Engineers Association of Great Britain and Ireland.

At a meeting of the Blyth Trades Council in 1926, just three months after the General Strike, an allegation of undercutting was raised as a member of the Shipwright’s Society was ‘going about the countryside doing painting work and undercutting members of the painters’ organisation.’ The secretary said that a number of complaints had been lodged and that the fella had served his time as a driller and had just recently taken up the brush, so wasn’t eligible for membership of the painters’ union.  The painters were especially susceptible to rogue elements doing their work.  Back in 1904 the Hebburn District Council were visited by a deputation from the Painters Trade Union who complained that painting in a park had been sub-let by the contractor to a labourer. Demarcation was important for trades like the painters in their white bib and braces, splattered in colours and smelling not unpleasantly of gloss and turps while other trades also had jobs that were specific to them – the cutting and fitting of glass in houses was long the occupation of plumbers before it was transferred across to the joiners.

So it was important to bring all of the trades together under one umbrella and an attempt was again made at the conference of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers at Edinburgh in July 1931 when the executive was urged to ‘continue their efforts bring about one union for the building trade industry.’ The scheme had been proposed to 13 unions and was to be put to the membership by the General Secretary George Hicks, who was also the MP for Woolwich East and had been a bricklayer prior to that. He had also been instrumental in helping organise the General Strike.

Former Socialist Party of Great Britain member Hicks was part of the Labour Government which brought about a construction boom after the Second World War as a programme of rebuilding and mass housing projects were undertaken.

But while there was plenty of work, there was also a militant edge about the tradesmen as they struggled to defend their position as skilled workers with an influx of de-mobbed squaddies looking for graft themselves. By the January of 1947 the Blyth branch of the AUBTW was refusing to take on any more Government trainees as a trade dispute was brewing. The men were irate at working alongside the trainees on a housing scheme in Blyth after they’d served five or six year apprenticeships and the others were being handed jobs ‘via the back door.’

The 1950s however saw a steady rise in wages for construction workers as negotiations with the National Joint Council for the Building Industry proved an effective means to regulate the sector, and there was also a rise in solidarity on site.

The AUBTW annual conference at Whitley Bay in 1952 saw a wide call for the abolition of the bonus payments incentive scheme and a national control of all incentive schemes. Local member T.W. Urwin of Houghton-Le-Spring told conference of the wide variation in schemes in his district and gave an example of a Sunderland Corporation housing estate where several contractors were employed.

‘The target set by three contractors for a similar job was 650 man hours. 570 man hours, and 510 man hours respectively. When the matter was taken to the Regional Incentive Advisory Panel, the operatives were advised to give the scheme a month’s trial. The employers’ federation then told its members that the target figure should be 510 man hours,” he said. An Edinburgh member called J.S. Currie said that in one firm in his area, a man had to lay 2,300 bricks a day to make a £3 bonus.

Fellow Scot A. McKinlay of Glasgow told the conference that some employers were ‘exploiting the bonus system by introducing systems which the men could not understand.’ “It would take a Philadelphia lawyer to work out some of the schemes - this is with a view to complicating the issue to the men,” he said, as he moved for their abolition.

Two years later 139 bricklayers and 23 labourers, all members of the AUBTW, came out in the North East on a one-day sympathy strike with their colleagues employed by Wimpey at Crawley in Sussex. The dispute was over a failure to give 14 men their jobs back following a strike over a bonus scheme. The men halted jobs at Fawdon, Gateshead, two sites at Felling, Peterlee, Aycliffe and Middlesbrough as they downed tools. A similar level of support was shown in 1963 when 100 building workers grafting on a further education college in Elswick threatened to strike unless a dismissed foreman was reinstated. Six scaffolders and three labourers were also dismissed in another row over bonus payments. The foreman was told by the site agents that he had been dismissed because they were not satisfied with safety precautions on site, and he counteracted by saying there should have been a health and safety officer on site, and that the men, members of the T&G construction section, had been struggling for 8 months to get bonus money due to them from the site agents.

The Painters Union weren’t happy when Jarrow Council reduced the time to paint two semi-detached houses from the agreed 52 hours to 44 in 1966. William Youll, the area organiser for the Amalgamated Society of Painters, told The Journal that: “We are prepared to compromise. We realise the councillors are in a difficult position and they are looking after ratepayers money.” Some confusion between councillors, officials and the union led to a delay in painting around 200 houses as when the council first offered direct labour painters the 44-hour contract, it was turned down.

This led to the council advertising the job for tenders, which went against the council policy of always employing direct labour on a casual basis, and the union threatened to ‘black’ the job in a display of strength.

Hospital electricians in Newcastle, Gateshead and Northumberland withdrew their labour in 1969 and although their union offered to maintain an emergency service for life or death cases, the men refused to do it because of a previous dispute. The electricians were in dispute with management over a ‘special skills’ payment.

Don Edwards, the area secretary of the Electrical Trades Union, commented that the men’s refusal to stand for emergency duty was ‘really an extension of the grievances by the men in breach of the undertaking by the union.’

But unemployment was on the rise in the trades and later that year and a joiner’s union official who was considering imposing an overtime ban to help men get back into work realised it was pointless as hardly any extra hours were being worked. George Wylie, the district secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers, said: “It is the most remarkable situation that I can remember, and that includes the so-called hungry Thirties. We have had to bear a load of heavy unemployment even during the summer months, and now there is apparently a possibility of apprentices losing their jobs in the building industry.”

The Tyne district of the ASW had 7,000 members employed in both the shipyards and building sites. 300 joiners were on the dole and the situation was so dire that building trade employers and unions had to meet the Northern Economic Planning Council to discuss the problem of unemployment. This led to proposals to nationalise the construction industry within the Ministry of Works, which would be revisited again ten years later by the Labour Party.

 

In 1971 the AUBTW merged with the ASW (Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers), the ASPD (Amalgamated Society of Painters and Decorators), and the ABT (Association of Building Technicians) to form UCATT (Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians) in yet another attempt to organise the building workers into one strong, united body. The new union faced an early challenge as the builders came out on their first national strike in 1972 with demands for a minimum wage of £30 a week and the abolition of ‘the Lump’ – officially called the Lump Labour Scheme – which encouraged casualisation, paid cash daily rates, and offered little or no on-site rights. ‘Lumpers’ were regarded as fly-by-night operators by the union who said they ‘relied on tax evasion rather than union organisation to keep up their take home pay’ and reckoned that they were a threat to site health and safety as they had only one interest – ‘to take the money and run’ – so they weren’t bothered about things such as securing ladders or observing legal standards on scaffolding.

In an industry where employment had always felt precarious and the threat of the pay-off or lay-off was ever-present every winter, more casualisation and latterly bogus self-employment where men worked for the same employer without receiving holiday or sick pay, or pensions contributions, in return for what appeared to be better wages, the Lump was a major threat to organised labour in a construction setting as it pitched worker against worker to price for jobs and led to more undercutting, rigged pricing and other unsavoury practices in the game.

The bitter 12-week strike is best remembered for the arrest and subsequent unlawful imprisonment of Dessie Warren and Eric ‘Ricky’ Tomlinson at Shrewsbury. 22 other pickets were also lifted by the police on that day of conspiracy, violence and intimidation against trade unionists by the State.

The strike was no less heated in the North East and local UCATT officials were incensed by what they saw as blatant provocation by the bosses, just three days after the Shrewsbury incident, on the 9^th September. A half page advertisement in the local newspapers was taken out by 15 of the leading construction employers in the region urging strikers to return to work immediately and asking them: ‘why carry on this wasteful strike which is costing you money?’

The response was to step up picketing in retaliation and Thomas Welch, the chairman of the Newcastle building workers’ joint action committee said: “This advert must have cost hundreds of pounds to put in. I am glad they can afford it. It could pay for a month’s picketing. In fact, they could have sent a bus load of pickets to Spain on holiday for that.”

Speaking to the Evening Chronicle, Mr. Welch continued: “Their statement that a national agreement would be honoured is ridiculous. The reason we have come out on strike is that there is no national agreement signed. As for being a wasteful strike, of course it’s costing us money That’s what strikes are all about. The Newcastle strike committee is to answer this statement by stepping up picketing in military terms and to winkle out every person working on sites at the moment and defying union policy. There is some evidence of a trickle back to work on some smaller sites and we aim to stop this.”

The secretary of the Newcastle strike committee, Jack Bews, said: “There could be a settlement but men in this area are determined to stick it out for £30-a week guaranteed minimum and a 35-hour week.”

UCATT regional organiser Andy Affleck reckoned that there was no doubt that the industry could afford the wage claim. “The employers have had their eyes on a pot of gold and we want a share of the bonanza,” he said. Just a week later, on the 15^th September, the strike ended as the bosses capitulated and the builders secured their biggest pay increase ever recorded.

The industrial militancy continued and ten construction worker pickets were arrested in Newcastle in January 1975 at Eldon Square but none of them were convicted. Robert Henderson of South Shields was cleared of assaulting a police officer on the picket lines outside the shopping centre and complaints that Henderson had been punched himself and was denied quick access to a solicitor at Market Street nick had to be investigated. That Eldon Square development, along with the Freeman Road hospital site and the Inland Revenue Building in Washington, had endured a nine-week strike by 100 electricians in May 1974 who eventually agreed to a 15% bonus deal, while in April 1975 council electricians, who were also members of the Electrical and Plumbing Trades Union, caused chaos throughout the North as the came out on strike demanding a basic wage of £48 a week. Around 400 men hit Newcastle, Sunderland, South and North Tyneside, Gateshead and Newcastle airport with the stoppage. One striker told the Evening Chronicle that: “Our basic is now £29.50. The rest you have to make up on bonus. On the basic you are lucky to take home £24. The average take home pay with the bonus is £35. We have had an offer of £37 which would give us only £4 more than the labourers.” The sparks were out again the following year in a token strike against Post Office cuts for orders in telecommunications equipment which threatened to put 15,000 out of a job. By 1977 230,000 building workers were on the dole and the number was rising as the sector was again in serious recession.

 

Years later I was working at a tiny rural building firm and we had to line up at a small office window with canvass bait bags slung over our shoulders to collect our wages in a brown paper pay packet on a Friday afternoon. There was a transparent sticker in the corner of the glass, a little yellowed and faded, with a pair of hands in shackles holding a trowel and the words ‘No To Building Nationalisation’ issued by the Builders’ Federation.

Although the sticker was long defunct, it contained a sentiment then echoed by large numbers of the men by then as it was around the time of Harry Enfield’s notorious brash, in-your-face comedy plasterer TV character Loadsamoney in his shellsuit waving wads of notes and driving a flash motor. Dosh. Wonga. Maggie Thatcher’s day-glo nightmare creation – the working-class Tory voter revved up on Right To Buy and a massively inflated and unrealistic housing market. Boom and bust. The construction industry was changed forever as more and more employees shunned job benefits and security for the promise of a quick buck on attractive self-employed day rates that completely undermined any collectivism on site.

This was just after the period when the lads portrayed in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet had gone abroad in the search for graft though the sense of transience remained; packing bags to head off for London and chase the cranes around the city skyline, moving from job to job, site to site, picking up a few months here and there. That, of course, is where the great challenge to construction organising is posed; to be able to provide better wages, safer and better working conditions and some sense of stability and security with the ever-present threat of sudden pay-offs or lay-offs among trades riven with factionalism and employers that have been proven to maintain blacklists.

After a number of years of slow decline the final solely dedicated construction union UCATT merged into the giant general union Unite on the 1^st January 2017 and you have to wonder where the future lies from here. Because although Oz may have pinned a picture of Arthur Scargill up alongside the page 3 girls in his locker with his spirit level and dart board, getting him to pay union subs when he may only be on site for a few weeks or has gone off to become self-employed would always pose a challenge. It would be worth it, however, just to watch him sticking the head on some gaffer’s lackey like Big Baz. Full employment rights and job security or cash in hand off a chancer like Ally Fraser, anyone?

Jon Tait 5,054 words ENDS