The Liverpool Dockers and Reclaim the Streets: Creating Spaces of Solidarity

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the unlikely alliance forged between environmentalist group Reclaim the Streets and a group of Liverpool dockworkers. I propose that excavating historical collaborations between the environmentalist and labour movements offers ways forward for thinking about solidarity. The Liverpool dockers’ dispute was one of the longest running in the history of British industrial relations; however, it has received little academic attention, compared to The Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985, for example. The attention it has received primarily discusses the, admittedly significant, internationalism of the campaign. But the dockworkers’ alliance with Reclaim the Streets is rarely commented on. Using interviews I conducted with activists and dockworkers between 2019 and 2022, and interviews conducted in 2004 by those involved in the dispute, I offer a way of reading this collaboration by attending to its spatial politics and intersections with performance, thereby pointing to the generative character of these political relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Reclaim the Streets
• Liverpool dockers
• protest
• performance
• space

Locked out

In September 1995, 22 dockworkers employed by Torside Ltd, a private agency sub-contracted to the principal company at the Port of Liverpool, the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company (MDHC), were sacked. The following day the sacked dockworkers formed a picket line that the workforce directly employed by MDHC honoured by refusing to cross. The entire workforce of 500 MDHC dockworkers was themselves then sacked and their jobs advertised the next day. Following their dismissal, the dockworkers entered a dispute with their employers to have their jobs reinstated that lasted 28 months from 1995 until 1998. Although commonly referred to as a ‘strike’, it has also been termed a ‘lock out’ because the dockworkers were dismissed by their employers. Initially, the MDHC dockworkers were supported by the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), but the level of involvement from the union varied, and, because the dispute was deemed ‘unofficial’ insofar as the group were protesting an issue not straightforwardly connected to their own employment, from early 1996 it became clear that the TGWU would not formally recognise it.

There is a spatial politics to being locked out of your workplace. To elaborate, the action the dockers took stemmed from an ethical decision: the moral imperative to ‘never cross a picket line’. However, because the industrial action was considered illegitimate, they then found themselves occupying a position in conflict with the terms of their employment contract, and a position that situated them outside the legally authorised sphere of collective bargaining. Because, then, the dockers’ campaign took place largely outside of formal union structures, in material terms, access to the spatial contexts within which they might otherwise organise their campaign, such as union premises, the inside of the port itself and negotiating tables, was severely compromised. Further, lack of official union support meant also that union members in other ports and industries were unable to offer formal support, leaving the Liverpool dockworkers significantly isolated.

Alongside the spatial dimension of a lock-out, there exists a temporal one, too. Despite MDHC working swiftly to replace the sacked dockworkers with replacement hires, locking the dockers out nonetheless caused operations to stop at the port for five days, contributing to MDHC’s loss of revenue that year (Knight and Bradley 2004, 7). For a sector dependent on circulation, to shut down a port rather than accept strike action is significant, and can be understood as pre-emptive: many ports have methods with which to pre-empt ‘disruption by keeping “dangerous” people away from logistics systems’, writes Cowen (2014, 93). The official reason given by MDHC for the dock workers’ dismissal was their taking part in ‘secondary action’, illegal according to the 1980 Employment Act. Castree (2000), however, argues that MDHC’s explanation fails to fully account for why a company enjoying high productivity would sack their entire workforce so unhesitatingly. Despite the Thatcher government’s offensive against organised labour, which saw the abolition of the highly prized Dock Labour scheme in 1989 leaving most dock union representatives de-recognised, Liverpool dockers had fought to keep their union, making them the only port in Britain where the TGWU remained recognised after 1989 (Allen 1997). Castree (2000) and Marren (2016, 215) both suggest that MDHC’s management had plans for further work casualisation at the port and that the opportunity to expunge more militant dockers likely to resist these future proposals was indeed a pre-emptive tactic on their part.

As well as the spatio-temporal enclosures outlined above, I propose here that the dockers’ campaign faced a secondary form of lock-out, a media blockade that effectively locked their story out of the news cycle. The late 1990s in the UK saw a cultural shift away from the politics of class struggle. This shift was compounded by New Labour, who, when elected in 1997, sought to distance themselves from the trade union movement, dismissing it as an enemy of progress. The selection and reporting of events in the media, including the lack of interest in the dockers’ campaign, represented this cultural change. Chua and Bosworth (2023, 1) argue that scholarship on blockades tends towards analysing them ‘as a de facto progressive form of disruption to the contemporary order’. In this case, however, the media blockade worked to bolster MDHC’s power and support the state’s broader ideological position. In practical terms, the media blockade meant the stereotypical means by which a labour union might have conducted their campaign, via newspaper editorials and television interviews for example, proved largely ineffective for the dockworkers.

My contention is that the specific barriers the dockworkers’ campaign was faced with proved to be generative, insofar as they created the conditions of experimentation from which emergent forms of solidarity action sprang, collaborations that tactically moved beyond formal union structures and into spatial contexts beyond the port. Some of the alliances the dockers made, particularly internationally, and the spatial contexts which facilitated these, such as the internet, have been the subject of significant study (Carter et al. 2003). In what follows however, I focus on an under-examined connection established by the dockworkers in their struggle for reinstatement: an improbable yet innovative collaboration with environmentalist direct action group Reclaim the Streets (RTS). I show how a three-day action, which included occupying the port together using theatrical strategies, successfully forced a way through the aforementioned media blockade, and lent the dispute much-needed vitality, allowing it to continue. But I also consider the effects the collaboration had on the participants themselves. Featherstone (2012, 23) draws on Gilmore, who foregrounds solidarity as a creative practice, usefully arguing that it need not be understood as ‘bearing on either similarity or dissimilarity’ but through ‘practices of solidarity [that] negotiate such questions of difference through political action’. I show here how the solidarity performed between the two groups can be understood as a dynamic and generative process, in which the very act of collaboration actively made and remade the participants, forging new relations and identifications between them. I turn to the content of the collaboration presently but first offer a partial introduction of RTS and an account of how they and the dockers initially negotiated their alliance.

Breaking down barriers

Like many port cities, Liverpool has a history of political radicalism (Mah 2014). The city has a strong working-class identity and was fiercely resistant to Thatcher’s policies of neoliberalism, including at the port, as exemplified by the dockers’ resistance to the abolition of the Dock Labour scheme. During the dispute in question the dockers received considerable local support, but while they held pickets at the port the number of entrances meant sustained mass picketing proved difficult, and it was necessary to supplement local organising with publicising the dispute beyond the city. Dockers travelled on delegation both abroad and around the UK to garner support from different groups, attending meetings and fundraisers in community spaces, pubs and squats. One of the dockers on delegation work stated that their aim was ‘to get through the media blackout. The rank and file needed to know what was going on’ (Renton et al. 2004, 71). The dockers’ alliance with RTS stemmed from one of these delegations.

RTS’s protests emphasised spatiality and theatricality. Initially conceived as an ecologically motivated anti-road movement, underlying many of their demonstrations was the reclamation of space as a collective commons, which they achieved by way of closing off roads to traffic, while opening them up to ‘the art of living’ (Carmo 2012, 110). In one action RTS staged a car crash to block Camden High Street, where they then held a street party. In another, they dumped 40 tons of sand on the pavement, bringing into being the 1968 slogan ‘beneath the pavement, the beach’, and in a further action they hosted a street party attended by 8,000 people on the M41 motorway (Jordan 1998). As well as sharing certain attributes with conventionally understood theatre practice, including the consideration of staging, audience, costume and music, the protests can also be understood temporally as prefigurative performances, in that they sought to model different forms of living in the present.

A member of the London Support Group for the Liverpool Dockers suggested the dockers meet RTS. The proposed alliance between the groups was not immediately obvious to all involved however, and members of each were mutually suspicious of one another. The dockworkers’ struggle existed in a different temporal mode to RTS’s. Rather than a reimagining of society, the dockers had an immediate, present-tense, demand: that their jobs were reinstated. As such, some dockworkers’ attitude towards RTS apparently resembled one of: ‘We’re trying to defend our jobs. These kids don’t even want jobs! Never worked in their lives!’ (Knight 2004, 37). On paper, the groups certainly appeared to have different starting priorities. The fragmentation of production and distribution of commodities means the commercial shipping industry is, at source, environmentally toxic. Given this the decision to work with the dockers, according to one RTS member: ‘wasn’t without a lot of debate, people were quite confused as to why we were supporting these particular workers.’ (pers. comm., 3 May 2019).

In an attempt to convince RTS to collaborate with them, two dockworkers travelled to London to explain historic points of convergence between the environmentalist movement and the Liverpool dockworkers (Nelson et al. 2004, 74). Trade Unions’ and workers’ engagement with the environmental movement was infrequent in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK. Most obviously, unions engaged with environmental concerns as they pertained to workplace health and safety standards (Hampton 2015), but environmental labour historians have traced rare examples of British unions contributing to non-institutional environmental campaigns, including campaigns in the 1980s against the use of pesticides, and direct action taken against dumping nuclear waste at sea (Mason and Morter 1998). In a similar vein, the Liverpool delegates told RTS of how they too had acted on the advice of environmental organisations and refused to unload radioactive and toxic waste, such as imports of Namibian Uranium Hexafluoride in 1988 (Clark 1988), shipments of highly toxic waste from Canada in 1989, and they told of their support of UK Earth First! demonstrators when they occupied Liverpool docks in protest at the importation of tropical hardwoods from Malaysia (Bowers and Torrance 2001). The presentation did not alleviate concerns about the toxicity of the shipping industry itself but nonetheless showed that the dockworkers refused to cooperate on certain tasks in solidarity with other activist constituencies and that there was potential to make connections between the ecological crisis and the forms of exploitation they were experiencing as workers.

The action

RTS supported the dockworkers’ struggle in numerous ways, attending pickets in Liverpool, picketing the house of the MDHC chairman in London, occupying the offices of scab labour company Drake International, and organising rallies. Here, though, I focus on the one-year anniversary of the dispute that took place in Liverpool. In September 1996, the two groups united to organise a three-day action. Nield’s (2017) work on the London Dock Strike of 1889 shows that dockers’ protests have long utilised floats, banners and theatrical displays. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, UK protest marches had largely lost sight of any such theatre and become tired (Knight 2004, 31), but RTS worked to change this. Heralding tactics that would later become prominent in the alter-globalisation movement, which Graeber (2002, 419–420) would refer to as ‘a new language of civil disobedience’, the first day of RTS action took the shape of a procession through the streets of Liverpool city centre, ending at the quayside where a cultural festival took place. RTS’s attention to the theatricality of protest was evident here. In so far as a demonstration is a declaration of presence, it carries more power with a crowd. RTS succeeded in combining with a previously planned protest against the Criminal Justice Bill, thereby drawing enormous numbers who arrived in Liverpool by the coachload from all over the UK and occupied the city streets with colourful banners, street theatre and fire-eaters. Via both the dockers’ networking and RTS’s connections, the range of campaigns represented at the procession was notable. Union and labour movements including the Hillingdon strikers, railworkers’ unions RMT and ASLEF, over 200 Turkish workers from the north-east London Textile branch of the TGWU, and the Turkish and Kurdish community from the Day-Mer workers’ centre were joined by groups such as the McLibel Campaign, Eco-Trip and Earth First!, the Animal Liberation Front and people associated with the Job Seekers’ Allowance Campaign (Davie and Handyside 2004, 28).

The march, and the diversity of attendees on it, was valuable in itself, insofar as it brought the dockers’ demands into public space and enacted unity and collaboration between different groups. Attendees reported that ‘the extraordinary range […] gave it a buoyancy and an optimism rarely seen before. Something new was happening’ (Davie and Handyside 2004, 28). However, given the march was a symbolic staging of the demand to reinstate the dockers, rather than an action that more intently made real that demand, the march was not an end in itself in terms of RTS’s strategy. Rather, the march was actually instrumentalised as a cover for the occupation that followed it. One RTS member told me: ‘we convinced them [the dockers] the thing to do was to make it look to the cops like we were doing a street party, but we weren’t really interested in that’ (pers. comm., 3 May 2019). In actuality, the march was used as a decoy to realise the occupation, when, before dawn on Monday morning, members of the group blocked Seaforth Container Terminal by gaining entry, climbing onto the roof of MDHC’s offices and up the gantries to stop operations at the dock.

Circulation and stoppage

In occupying the terminal, the groups succeeded in temporarily bringing the operations at the docks to a halt. Here, I unpack the significance of this stoppage a little more. Scholarship from Steinberg (2001) and more recently Campling and Colás (2021) articulates how the ocean is produced as an economic space of globalised capitalism. To elaborate, since the 1970s, the restructuring of logistics has transformed the way commodities are produced and distributed, a reorganisation that includes the introduction of innovative transport technologies such as the shipping container, free trade agreements ensuring goods can move unimpeded across national borders, the planetary reconfiguration of the production line and its restructuring according to ‘just-in-time’ logic, and the restructuring of labour regimes. Importantly however, at the same time as indexing the ‘movement of commodities through space’, what Bernes (2013) terms the ‘logistics revolution’ also refers to a transformation in the structure of capitalist production itself. Logistics, according to Bernes, provides a way to mitigate the risk of investment by ‘aiming to transmute all fixed capital into circulating capital’ (2013). And because, as Cowen (2014, 101) points out, capital at its most basic needs to circulate in order to accumulate, and, further, because the very ways in which it circulates bears on the degree of possible accumulation, logistics becomes a particularly efficacious system for capital accumulation.

Logistics – at once the movement of goods through space and ‘value through its circuit’ (Danyluk 2018, 639) – then, might also be understood as, ‘a suite of spatial practices aimed at facilitating circulation’ (Chua et al. 2018, 618). However, the practices of logistics do not only strive to facilitate circulation but also to optimise it, evident not only in the drive to increase the speed of circulation and thereby the degree of capital accumulation but also in the emphasis states and corporations place on the reliability of the circulation process. As Danyluk posits: the need to ensure the ‘smooth movement of goods has its basis in the need to ensure the uninterrupted circulation of value’ (2018, 637); the system is orientated around ensuring unimpeded, streamlined flows, since everything not in motion, at least not purposefully so, compromises profits.

As is often observed, however, a consequence of a network that relies on the, often swift, circulation of cargo through ‘smooth’ space is its vulnerability (Bernes 2013; Cowen 2014, 56), and one of the logistics’ fault lines lies with the worker. The logistics revolution was facilitated in part by the arbitrage of the labour market, a strategy which continues to perpetuate the exploitation of workers worldwide whose well-being remains subordinated to, in Chua et al.’s words: ‘the imperative of smooth, efficient circulation’ (2018, 622). Nonetheless, the way commodities circulate the globe in a supposedly frictionless way remains inseparable from workers’ labour, and, as this essay demonstrates via the docker’s refusal to handle toxic waste, for example, the dockworker retains the capacity to interrupt capital by staging refusal. The connectivity of ocean commerce is therefore in constant tension with the possibility of disruptive performances.

The tactic of spatial occupation at the port brought about a dramatic break in the dockers’ previous protest strategies, like the picket line. But it also produced a moment of stillness in the global movements of commerce associated with the docks. It is important to note that the quality of stillness itself is not of course inherently disruptive. If we understand logistics’ power to lie in choreographing flows in order to realise value, then logistics’ score will also include temporal dynamics other than speed. We can think of the slowing or holding of the production of commodities, for example, to ensure they are produced ‘just’ in time, only when needed, so as not to allow a surplus of fixed capital to amass with the attendant financial risks that carries. Tactics of delay and holding are further instrumentalised to inhibit the supply of commodities such as oil, to increase demand and therefore profits (Mitchell 2011). The occupation of the port by the dockers and RTS differs from the aforementioned temporal tactics insofar as it aimed to inflict economic damage by arresting the circuit of capital, rather than serve a state or corporation’s economic objectives. Even so, as this very dispute shows, companies such as MDHC will sometimes self-inflict economic loss by reducing their labour capacity and therefore production, as in the case of the lock-out, in order to promote a broader ideological war on their workforce. How then is the performed stillness in question different?

Performing stoppage

Simply put, the ideological aims behind the interruptions described above differed. Rather than consolidate a regime of domination, as logistics seeks to, the occupation by the dockers and environmentalists sought to disrupt said regime and draw attention to this disruption (Chua et al. 2018, 625). To expand, the action was insurrectionary because it used stoppage to expose the vulnerability of a system that relies on resilience, as opposed to instrumentalizing stoppage as part of this supposed resilience. Further, the way the occupation was initiated and executed in collaboration with a direct-action group significantly shaped its presentation and the effects it produced. In addition to the theatrical resonances of performing a march as a decoy for the occupation, to initiate the occupation itself the activists utilised explicit tactics of deception akin to theatrical acting. Having used disguises in previous actions, here RTS activists temporarily went undercover as dockworkers in two vans, and, by embodying the behaviours of their hosts, successfully feigned permissions and gained access from dock security to enter the port, from there going on to physically occupy two gantries. The dockers were then keen that some of their cohort also gained access. One RTS activist recounts the cooperation that went into achieving this:

[the dockworkers] rather creatively came up with a way of getting through their fence because they had a picket and they had a tent backed onto the fence, a steel slatted fence, and yeah, a lot of drums in our group enabled them to hide the sound of them hacksawing through the fence. They managed, they hacksawed in rhythm with the drums to make a hole in the fence. Got a few people through.

(pers. comm., May 3, 2019)

The straightforward repetitive sound of the drumming brought a sense of creative unity to the group. However, what is significant here is that the rhythm of the drum was used to mask the sound of the hacksaw cutting through the fence. Rhythm and performance were essentially weaponised against the spatial barrier the group wanted to see destroyed. Having representatives from both groups inside the port, the groups then worked together again, using technical creativity the activists had accumulated from previous actions. The two groups scaled fences and made a human pyramid to climb onto the office roof from where they flew two red, green and black flags, representing the alliance of anarchists, socialists and environmentalists, and hung a banner that read: ‘Sack the bosses not the workers’.

There was a symbolic element to the occupation in that the activists took over the space for nine hours only, but this temporal period represented their demand for the dockers to be reinstated permanently. Further, insofar as the occupiers were a select assembly from both groups, they were taking part in ‘collective appellation – calling a wider group into common appearance’ (Lavender and Peetz 2022, 6). But the occupation also produced material effects. MDHC maintained that normal operations continued throughout the occupation; however, no vessels came in or out of Liverpool that day and the company’s shares fell 14p (Dropkin 1996). Apart from the economic losses the occupation induced, which, as Toscano (2014) argues in relation to blockades are ‘usually nugatory in the broader scheme’, the protest was politically efficacious in other ways. One activist stated the events ‘blasted’ the media blockade ‘to smithereens’ and that from that point on ‘There was no way the media could pretend that there wasn’t that dispute going on’ (Knight 2004, 38), an impression that was immediately evident as local and national newspapers began to report the action (Bradley 2004, 19). Additionally, attendees recounted that the protest was morale boosting and revitalised the dispute, enabling it to proceed into its second year. A member of RTS explained that ‘without the big action on the anniversary they’re [the dockers] not sure the dispute could have carried on […] But following the action there was no question’ (Knight 2004, 37).

Stoppages that consolidate regimes of domination are usually achieved in an unsensational manner. The stoppage in question, however, mobilised aesthetic forces that share attributes with traditionally understood performance practices, to transmit and amplify its effect to those watching, including the media. The narrative work of suspense and climax produced by the scaling of structures, and the loosely proscenium-like framing of the protestors atop the triangular roof of the offices, while port security, police and other spectators watched the action from below, worked to intensify the emotional and visual drama of the action. Similarly, the attention paid to the use of space atop the offices worked as proxemic groupings on stage might. The central figures at the apex of the roof flying flags in the wind created an image not unlike the wedge configurations of protestors found in artistic representations of revolutionary insurrection like Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People, itself echoed in scenes from stage adaptations of Les Misérables. The spectacular spatial arrangement seized the spectators’ attention and made the dockers’ dispute legible to the public in a way it had not been before.

Spaces of solidarity

Nield usefully moves beyond mere detection of theatrical elements in performances of resistance and instead, using Lefebvre, probes the ‘forms of space they materialise’ (2006, 53). Nield’s thinking resonates here with Chua and Bosworth’s recent warning against fetishising ‘the material fact of interruption’ as ‘a politics in itself’ (2023, 4–9). The thinkers instead advocate analysing the seizure of infrastructure as ‘a conduit for social struggle’ and looking at the ‘modes of relation built through it’ (2023, 4–9). The dockers and RTS introduced one another to different modes of political activism. The dockers were initiated into internal non-hierarchical organising practices and shown how an emphasis on direct-action could operate. The dockers, for their part, emphasised the significance of class struggle and solidarity with RTS (Knight 2004, 54). Crucially, however, it was in overlaying the two groups’ struggles and modes of organising that new spaces of relation were materialised.

As highlighted above, the temporal and ecological frames of both groups’ concerns appeared to be at odds. The struggle to protect jobs in a hugely environmentally toxic industry existed in tension with the prefigurative project of modelling different forms of sociality as an alternative to socially and ecologically destructive capitalism. However, in bringing a direct-action mode of organising to the dockers’ dispute, and through the groups’ collective work, both parties were enabled to recognise their struggles as imbricated. As well as the accounts of friendship, trust and mutual protectiveness the alliance engendered, interviews with dockers following the action demonstrate the collaborations’ actively politicising effect, and the overlaying of the two groups’ concerns as a common struggle. One shop steward stated: ‘What binds us together is a sense of injustice, against scab labour, environmental damage, casualisation of labour, etc.’ and in responding to an interviewer who suggested the dockers were unable to ‘go back to the old compromise’ of ‘welfare, secure employment and the state’s regulation of the capitalist economy’, the same shop steward declared that, after working with RTS:

‘I don’t particularly want a politics centered on “the right to work at all costs”. I don’t want to see my kids struggling for crap jobs. […] [O]f course, how do you live after that? But then that is the challenge. It’s a revolutionary challenge’.

(Kennedy et al. 2001, 224)

Returning to Gilmore’s thinking on solidarity, then, it is evident here that organising together served to forge new identifications and constitute new knowledges.

Conclusions

One interpretation of the dispute’s legacy emphasises the far-reaching effects of the collaboration. Both Liverpool dockworkers and RTS activists suggest their coalition in 1997 was a precursor to the progressive alliances formed in the transnational alter-globalisation movement (Knight 2004, 58–59). Specifically, the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’ protest against the World Trade Organization, where, notably, trade unions and environmental activists organised together under the banner ‘Teamsters and Turtles’ and the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU) broke with their official Trade Union march to join environmentalists (Fraser and Lichenstein 2000). Liverpool dockers explicitly describe how they, in their organising work with the ILWU, reported on their alliance with RTS and advocated ILWU forming similar (Nelson 2004, 75). There are numerous origins to the coalitions found in the alter-globalisation movement of course, and the significance of each source is difficult to quantify, but certainly the dockers’ dispute heralded a period of extensive and diverse protests that were marked by broad alliances and creative direct-action tactics.

The collaboration between the dockers and RTS and its legacy should not be idealised, however. For one, it is worth troubling the framing of the alliance as unlikely. As much as the two groups’ tactics diverged, both groups were largely made up of white, male participants (Carter et al. 2003, 299; Taylor 1993), critiques also levelled at the alter-globalisation movement (Featherstone 2012, 199–200; Mohanty 2003). In this respect, the alliance was unremarkable. Further, the alliance did not wholly endure. Participants have expressed how tensions arose among them during actions following the anniversary demonstration, and Knight recounts that eventually some dockers, as they began to organise around the prospect of a Labour election victory, distanced themselves from RTS’ strategies (2004, 48–49). Moreover, the dockers ultimately ‘lost’ their dispute with their employers.

Although the coalition this essay discusses should not be idealised, it should not be ignored either. A subsequent dispute that revealed the valence of environmentalists for workers’ struggles was the 2009 campaign against mass redundancies at Vestas wind turbine manufacturing plant on the Isle of Wight (Hampton 2015). This struggle was distinct from the dockers’ and RTS’ coalition in that it presented a much clearer confluence of labour struggles and issues around environmental sustainability, although it operated similarly in that, by working collectively, workers and radical environmentalists succeeded in showing how a local fight can be turned into a larger battle about jobs and, explicitly in this case, the environment. Further, the Vestas dispute demonstrated the continued and increasing importance of shaping media and societal narratives around inter-movement struggles and showed that imaginative direct-action tactics are effective tools with which to raise the profile of disputes, but also effective tools with which to envision and demand structural change beyond that expressed by union bodies. It is not only the issues in question that need to be made visible by activists, however, but the very instances of solidarity themselves that can work as galvanising tools, as seen by Greta Thunberg’s public invitation for Glasgow’s striking refuse workers to march alongside her at COP26 in 2021 (B.B.C. News 2021). The examples of more recent inter-movement solidarity presented here nonetheless remain relatively homogenous. But, if the kinds of solidarity actions this essay discusses were extended to more intersectional compositions of organisation in the UK, which are arguably actively marginalised by some of the organising practices discussed (Featherstone 2012, 200), then this might usefully uncover, and make public, the differential impacts of environmental degradation and oppressive labour conditions on diverse players.

There is a maritime saying: ‘red and green should never be seen’. It is a warning phrase thought to originate from night shipping. The running lights on ships are traditionally green on one side and red on the other: if you can see the same colour on yours and another’s vessel you are passing in different directions, but if one is red and one green then you are potentially on a collision course. I end here by suggesting that, in so far as these colours can be taken to symbolise the environmentalist and worker movements, it is in fact necessary to overcome their perceived separation in order to address ongoing crises. Looking back at historical instances of collaboration between these movements might then reanimate this imperative and help in imagining novel constellations through which to work against common enemies at this current time.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Fred Carter and Daniel Eltringham, the editors of Green Letters, and the peer reviewers for significantly strengthening this work. Thanks also to my supervisors, Tariq Jazeel and Andrew Harris, for their guidance, and to the Black Hearts Marxists for clarifying discussions. Thanks, also, to the anonymous interviewees.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ESRC ES/P000592/1.

Notes on contributors

Emilia Weber

Emilia Weber is an ESRC PhD candidate at University College London researching the relationship between politics, performance, and space. She has an MSc in Urban Studies from UCL and previously worked as assistant director and researcher for theatre company Untitled Projects based in Glasgow.