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  • Battles on the Barbican: the Struggle for Trade Unionism in the British Building Industry, 1965–7
  • Charlie McGuire (bio), Linda Clarke (bio), and Christine Wall (bio)

The demands of the Building Workers’ Charter, launched in April 1970, were: £1 an hour basic rate for a thirty-five hour week; three (later four) weeks of holiday plus the statutory holidays; a fully comprehensive pension scheme; total opposition to ‘lump’ labour; decasualization of the industry and the registration of workers; the introduction and rigid enforcement of adequate safety and health regulations; democratization of the trade unions; nationalization and public ownership of the building industry; and a single building union.1 Such a charter was not new: it had surfaced in various forms in the history of the building industry since the repeal of the Combinations Act in 1824, and more recently in 1944 in a pamphlet, anticipating nationalization, authored by Luke Fawcett of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers (AUBTW).2 But why did the Charter reappear in this period and why did its particular demands appeal to building workers all over Britain?

The roots of the 1970 Charter lie in another rank-and-file organization, the London Joint Sites Committee (LJSC), brought to life in 1965 by building workers during a series of long and sometimes bitter disputes on the Barbican redevelopment, which eventually culminated in a year-long lock-out on Phase 4, where Myton was the contractor. These disputes not only highlighted the processes of change that had affected the structure of the industry and the building labour process since the war but also exposed the most pressing grievances of building workers and pointed to the need for a new form of organization if trade unionism in the construction industry was to survive and thrive. A wedge was dug between building-site activists and trade-union officials and the death knell sounded for the federation of craft and general unions that had proved inadequate to adapt to changes in the industry and the emergence of a multitude of new occupations. [End Page 33]


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Fig. 1.

Crane erectors on Laing Barbican site. Photograph by John Steeden, reproduced with his permission.

[End Page 34]

Gaining strength and momentum as a result of this weakness in the formal trade-union structures, the LJSC pushed for fundamental change and anticipated the formation of a single construction-workers’ union, albeit one radically different from that which eventually appeared in 1971. It was centrally involved in a series of other disputes towards the end of the decade and played a seminal role in the founding of the Building Workers’ Charter in 1970. And this, in turn, was critical to the organization of the 1972 building workers’ strike, one of the most celebrated and successful national strikes in construction,3 meticulously organized and largely led by an unofficial network of activists and shop-stewards, many from the Building Workers’ Charter movement.

The Barbican disputes provoked much hostile comment from the media at the time and were eventually the subject of a government Court of Inquiry. In contrast to the 1972 strike, they have tended to slip from historical memory and to be overlooked by virtually all historians of that period, even labour-movement specialists. So too has the 1963 national building workers’ strike, the first for forty years, with its claim for a reduction in hours from forty-two to forty per week and a 1s 6d per hour increase, which brought out 60,000 workers and stopped 800 sites.4 Situated between the two national strikes, the significance of the Barbican disputes in consolidating labour demands for improvement and indeed in providing a vision for the future of how the industry could and should be organized, thus shaping the industrial relations landscape in the ensuing period, has yet to be fully understood. Using a combination of published and unpublished documentary sources, including oral history interviews with building workers who were involved, this article is a first attempt to chart and analyse the reasons for and consequences of the Barbican disputes of 1965–7, and thereby to assess their significance.

Economic and Industrial Relations Context

The mid 1960s...

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