ABSTRACT
The specific economic context of the unionism was the upturn in trade which gave wage labourers a chance to make up for the highly-publicised hard times of the mid-1880s. The fortunes of the gasworkers were in some ways symbolic of those of new unionism in general. A similarly uncompromising dialectic was enacted in provincial ports, most significantly in Liverpool and Hull. J. Havelock Wilson’s National Amalgamated Union of Sailors and Firemen struck twice in Liverpool during the first half of 1889, but failed to win the issue of job control. Tom Mann’s bold assertion of 1890 that ‘no longer can the skilled assume with a sort of superior air that they are the salt of the earth’ proved basically unfounded at the workplace as well as within institutional trade unionism.
