ABSTRACT
The four newspaper articles in this chapter cover the Great London Dock Strike of 1889. Dock work came to epitomize the casual labour problem in the late nineteenth century, and social reformers like William Beveridge, Beatrice Webb, and Charles Booth looked to the docks in their studies of the relationships between unemployment and underemployment. The liability of London to social “scares,” which arise immediately upon any temporary hitch in the conditions of labour or traffic, in the relations of “employers and employed,” as well as from the rumoured distress of the “unemployed,” is due partly to the want of accurate knowledge of special circumstances, particularly those of the main industrial operations carried on at “the East-End.” The dock labourers are often in evidence before the public, but not as men who are prepared to throw themselves out of work. At the Mansion House short speeches were delivered by those who had taken prominent parts in events connected with the strike.
