Workers Strike
Predominantly Protestant, Belfast engineering and shipyard workers traditionally well organised, staged a three-week strike demanding a ten-hour reduction in the working week. This was done in defiance of the national leadership of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions. The strike was extended to include electricity and municipal gas workers causing large sections of industry and commerce to close down. They began to publish a daily newspaper and a General Strike Committee was formed and began to issue permits allowing only ‘necessary’ production.
Read more about this topic: Ulster Unionist Labour Association
Famous quotes containing the words workers and/or strike:
“In former times and in less complex societies, children could find their way into the adult world by watching workers and perhaps giving them a hand; by lingering at the general store long enough to chat with, and overhear conversations of, adults...; by sharing and participating in the tasks of family and community that were necessary to survival. They were in, and of, the adult world while yet sensing themselves apart as children.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)