When British Workers Stood Against the Pinochet Coup
A rally organized by the Chile Solidarity Campaign, addressed by the widow of Salvador Allende, in Trafalgar Square, London, September 1974. (PA Images via Getty Images)
When Chile’s generals overthrew Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, Britain’s Tories welcomed the coup as good news for investors. But British trade unions worked to block trade with the newly empowered Chilean fascists.
by OWEN DOWLING
For British interests . . . there is no doubt that Chile under the junta is a better prospect than Allende’s chaotic road to socialism, [and] our investments should do better.” Writing ten days after the military coup against Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile, UK foreign secretary Alec Douglas-Home provided an optimistic assessment of general Augusto Pinochet’s putsch and the bloody reassertion of capitalist hegemony. But if Douglas-Home spoke for many in the British ruling class, his country’s labor movement did not share his attitude toward the new junta. As organized labor saw things, its “interests” were aligned not with investors but with the working-class Popular Unity supporters who now faced torture and murder in the Pinochet regime’s prisons.
Indeed, the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, and its aftermath, as the new US-backed regime acted upon its declared intent to “eradicate” the “Marxist cancer,” horrified many in Britain’s trade-union movement — helping to stir a campaign of practical solidarity with the people of Chile. The reaction was all the more heartfelt because Allende’s government had pursued a democratic socialist program, and many of those persecuted following the military takeover were fellow activists in left-wing parties and trade unions. Labour MP Eric Heffer, who had met Allende on a 1972 delegation to Chile, “wept unashamedly” upon receiving news that the attempt he had witnessed “to achieve socialism through the Parliamentary process” had been “murdered.”
The hurried organization of a Chile solidarity movement in the UK exasperated the efforts of successive British governments to maintain relations with the junta. Abhorrence at Pinochet’s atrocities in Britain was not limited to the socialist left — many liberals and church groups came to oppose the regime on humanitarian grounds. But it was the distinctly left-wing Chile Solidarity Campaign (CSC), with its founding leadership associated with the Communist Party, that constituted the foremost anti-Pinochet voice in British civil society, through its broad-based work among the labor movement.
Trade unionists who engaged with the CSC throughout the 1970s and 1980s helped build an impassioned culture of international solidarity. This also meant practical demonstrations of support for the Chilean people: rallies and conferences, boycotts of Chilean goods and work on Chilean equipment, support for refugee resettlement, and union delegations to the country. The campaign’s organization among the labor movement worked to associate the contemporary struggle against Pinochet’s dictatorship with the proudly claimed traditions of British socialism, notably transnational working-class solidarity and struggles against fascism.
The effect was a highly emotive discourse around the Chilean cause that resonated with trade unionists in Britain — and inspired them to take collective action in support of a people thousands of miles away.
Class Feeling
The CSC was founded shortly following the coup, amid the alarm and condemnation of news from Santiago that echoed throughout the British left. From the outset, it was conceived as an overtly political organization. It was differentiated from the contemporarily established NGO-run Chile Committee for Human Rights by its espousal of socialist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist perspectives, speaking in the language of solidarity and struggle.
Trade unions were involved with the CSC from the beginning, with trade unionists holding leading positions on the campaign’s executive committee, and many labor movement branches coordinating with CSC organizers locally. By its fifth year, the campaign boasted thirty national trade union affiliates, and counted union leaders including Jack Jones, Joseph Gormley, and Hugh Scanlon among its sponsors. The ten-thousand-strong demonstration in London to mark the first anniversary of the coup was one significant mobilization: featuring over two hundred union banners and headed by a vanguard of labor leaders, the march was described by the Morning Star as “like a roll call of the British labour movement.”
The plethora of both local and national demonstrations of solidarity with Chile throughout the following years can be seen as a product of the feeling of working-class internationalism that CSC-attached trade unionists helped encourage throughout the labor movement.
Jimmy Symes — a representative for a combative group of workers in his role as chairman of the Merseyside Docks Shop Stewards’ Committee — addressed the CSC’s 1975 trade-union conference in fiery tones:
The torch of socialism, once having been ignited, will never die. But it is the responsibility of us, as a labor movement, as socialists, as internationalists, to support the people of Chile in their struggle.
The class feeling which had animated Liverpool dockers in their mass strikes for improved pay and an end to casual conditions was also evidenced in the repeated actions that they, along with other working-class communities, took in solidarity with Chileans. Many trade unionists identified the imprisonment, torture, and murder of union representatives, the abolition of collective bargaining rights, and the undermining of wages, conditions, and employment by Pinochet’s junta as oppressions faced by Chilean workers as workers — a class offensive against labor, which traditions of internationalism and obligations of class solidarity demanded the British trade-union movement oppose. Such was the case of veteran trade unionist Jack Jones, the left-wing general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Having recently returned from a union delegation to Chile where he had met with families of executed trade unionists, he impressed upon the 1974 Labour Party conference the British labor movement’s “personal responsibility” to the Chilean working class.
British trade unionists’ solidarity efforts often found expression in their own workplaces — with the Chilean military’s reliance upon British engineering to maintain much of its equipment offering workers an opportunity to throw a wrench in Pinochet’s death machine. Famous among such interventions was the “blacking” of Chile-bound fighter-jet engines by shop stewards at an East Kilbride Rolls-Royce factory. They held back the engines from Pinochet’s air force for five years in a display of trade union internationalism characterized by one of its protagonists as “one of the greatest episodes in the history of Scottish socialism.” Engineering workers in Newcastle, Rosyth, Glasgow, and elsewhere also refused work on Chilean warships, while dockworkers in Liverpool, Newhaven, and Hull variously boycotted handling goods from or for Chile. The decision of six hundred unemployed Liverpool seamen to forgo work aboard a freighter bound for Chile, in order to uphold their national union’s policy, was celebrated throughout the solidarity movement.
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