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Ethnic politics and labourmarket closure: Shipbuilding andindustrial decline in NorthernIrelandNiall Ó MurchúPublished online: 16 Aug 2006.

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Ethnic politics and labour market

closure: Shipbuilding and industrial

decline in Northern Ireland

Niall O Murchu

Abstract

This article examines the interplay of ethnic conflict and economicinterests in Northern Ireland, specifically for the case of the shipbuildingindustry, which received massive state aid despite its terminal decline.Parkin’s theory of dual social closure by members of the subordinate classbut dominant status group to monopolize resources and opportunities isemployed to examine the interests and actions of Protestant workers. Thecontribution of local institutions including Extended Internal LaborMarkets to the salience of Protestant group solidarity is examined from apolitical economy perspective. Political accommodation between Protes-tant labour and the Northern Ireland government, and later Britishgovernment political fears of antagonizing Loyalist workers, facilitatedhuge aid to a failing industry.

Keywords: Shipbuilding; Northern Ireland; political economy; dual closure;

sectarianism.

This article investigates the relationship between ethno-nationalsolidarity and economic interests. It focuses on the history of theProtestant working class in Northern Ireland, and particularlyshipyard workers, and addresses the following puzzle. Economictheories �/ including rising expectations, relative deprivation, internalcolonialism, and split labour markets �/ have been unable consistentlyto explain the onset and maintenance of ethnic conflicts either overtime or comparatively. Yet there are many cases of ethnic competitionover, or ethnic control of, economic resources and rewards, includingunequal allocations of employment and unemployment in NorthernIreland. Simply acknowledging this competition begs the question ofhow economic factors can serve as a ‘catalytic agent, exacerbator, or

Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 28 No. 5 September 2005 pp. 859�/879

# 2005 Taylor & Francis Group LtdISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 onlineDOI: 10.1080/01419870500158893

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choice of battle ground’, in Walker Connor’s terms, for ethnic conflicts(1994, p. 161). Using Frank Parkin’s theory of dual social closure byworkers from a dominant social group �/ class struggle from belowcombined with exclusion from above (1979) �/ this article will explainhow Protestant workers’ ethnic solidarity and economic interests weremutually reinforcing particularly in the shipbuilding industry inNorthern Ireland from 1920 until the late 1980s.

By the mid-1960s the UK shipbuilding industry was falling behindits competitors, and the (Geddes) Committee of Inquiry on Shipbuild-ing recommended closing the smaller yards and consolidating theremainder. Over the next two decades government aid and nationa-lization could not prevent the British industry from slowly dying.Belfast’s Harland and Wolff was nationalized separately from thecreation of British Shipbuilders and received far higher quantities ofstate aid. An important question is why the Belfast Shipyard receivedso much aid relative to other yards. The commonsense ministerialrationale for propping up Harland and Wolff was that the industryand its skilled workforce was central to the Northern Ireland economyand indirectly supported a large number of other jobs. This studyargues instead that the main reasons for higher aid to Belfastshipbuilding can be traced to the political influence of the Protestantworkers directly over the Northern Ireland government and indirectlyover British governments after 1972.

The argument highlights the importance and bases of ethnicsolidarity among Protestant workers. Examining their behaviour asdual social closure highlights the importance of institutions thatallocate jobs as club goods for maintaining group solidarity. Thepolitical economy of the autonomous regime in Northern Ireland isanalysed by focusing on the incorporation of Protestant labour by thedominant party, through the state underwriting corporate bargainsbetween industry and Protestant labour.

The reasons why the Belfast shipyard was favoured for so long canbe traced to the political power of the labour force and to the symbolicimportance of the industry to Protestants. Although British govern-ments were not electorally dependent on Northern Ireland, from 1974they became wary of antagonizing Protestant labour. Additionalfactors facilitated British aid for Belfast shipbuilding, including TradeUnion influence and the socialist politics of Belfast’s Catholic leaders,but the most important was this political wariness of Protestantworkers, whose ethno-national aims and economic preferences re-inforced each other.

This article proceeds in four sections. The first reviews thetheoretical debate on the relationship between class and ethnicconflicts in general and in Northern Ireland, and argues, followingParkin, that class and ethnic solidarities were inextricably linked for

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Protestant workers who combined class struggle against employerswith exclusion towards subordinate Catholics. The second reviews thedecline of UK shipbuilding after World War II and the patterns ofstate aid to the industry, leading to the argument that Britain’smaintenance of shipbuilding in Northern Ireland was politicallymotivated by its wariness of Loyalist labour. The third section traceshistorically the bases of ethnic and economic solidarity amongProtestant workers and the incorporation of Protestant labour intothe autonomous Unionist regime in Northern Ireland from 1920 until1972. The final section examines why ostensibly non-sectarian tradeunions strongly supported British aid to shipbuilding in NorthernIreland, and how moderate Catholic politicians’ socialist idealsneutered their ability to critique a de facto sectarian industrial policy.A conclusion reiterates the theoretical argument and notes that thelegacy of de facto discriminatory economic policies coupled withdeindustrialization is massive social exclusion and alienation amongmembers of both the Protestant and Catholic working classes.

Labour and ethnic group solidarity

Class analysis has proved of limited value in analysing ethnic conflicts.As Walker Connor argued in his rebuttal of economic interpretationsof ethnic conflict �/ including relative deprivation (Gurr 1970), internalcolonialism (Hechter 1975), and resource competition (Olzak andNagel 1986; Olzak 1992) theories �/ the persistence of ethno-nationaldivisions in spite of crosscutting class cleavages suggests that ethnicconflicts cannot be reduced to material causes (Connor 1984, 1994).Although economic factors are apt to exacerbate divisions, Connorthought them far more often rhetorical tinder in claiming ethnicgrievances than causes of conflict (1994, p. 161).

Leading scholars of Northern Ireland agree with Connor that ‘thosewho emphasized the economic basis of conflict are guilty . . .of ‘‘anunwarranted exaggeration of the influence of materialism upon humanaffairs’’’ (McGarry and O’Leary 1995, p. 358). While McGarry andO’Leary document the economic disparities between Catholics andProtestants and discrimination in employment, they maintain that the‘presence of two competitive ethnonational communities within thesame territory’ is the principal cause of violent conflict in NorthernIreland (1995, p. 356; See also O’Leary and McGarry 1993). Indeed,political economic interpretations of the conflict leave the proximatecauses of actual violence as a blank box, whereas experts onethnonationalism draw on psychology to better explain the power ofethnic identity and the attraction of enmity and violence (Horowitz1985; Kaufman 2001).

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Yet it would be unfortunate if McGarry and O’Leary’s powerfulcritique of monocausal economic, cultural, or religious explanations ofthe Northern Ireland conflict were to foreclose analysis of the waysthat social and economic cleavages interact to condition the ethno-political divide. Since Edmund Aunger’s analysis of religion andoccupational class in Northern Ireland (1975) there has been a strandof research on Catholic economic disadvantages in employment andthe ethnic (and gendered) division of labour in the region (Greenberg1980, pp. 243�/69; See 1986a, 1986b; Rowthorn and Wayne 1988;Smith and Chambers 1991). Aunger showed that the regional economywas segmented along ethnic and gender lines: Protestant men clusteredin skilled industrial employment; Catholic (and some Protestant)women specialized in semi-skilled labour in textiles; and Catholic menpredominated among the unemployed and in casual work (1975).

Understanding how Protestant workers’ ethnic solidarities andmaterial interests complemented each other, and then how thoseinterests helped to shape government policies means examining theinstitutions and actors that maintained an ethnically divided labourmarket. One class-based theory of ethnic conflict, Bonacich’s splitlabour market theory [SLM], postulated that ethnic conflict derivesfrom the displacement threat that lower-priced workers pose to higher-priced labour from a different descent group (1972; 1979).1 SLMhighlights the importance of divided labour markets for skilled(Protestant) and unskilled (largely Catholic) workers for explainingthe history of ethnic antagonism in Northern Ireland. However, criticsof economic explanations argue that the success of the trade unionmovement eroded the economic basis for sectarian antagonism in theprice difference for Protestant and Catholic labour (Wright 1987). Yet,the ethnic stratification of labour �/ Protestant male niches in skilledindustrial employment and Catholic predominance in less secure jobs�/ remained consistent with Bonacich’s account of caste where the‘labor market split is submerged because the differentially pricedworkers ideally never occupy the same position’ (Bonacich 1972, p.555). The theory has also been criticized for tending to assume thesuccess of dominant group labour, and neglecting the importance ofpolitical organization and state institutions for favourably splitting thelabour market (Peled and Shafir 1987). My account of the ethnicdivision of labour in Northern Ireland will explain the maintenance ofethnic working-class solidarity among Protestants both from belowand from above. Specifically, it includes three components missingfrom, or underemphasized in, the split labour market theory: 1)microfoundations explaining the dominant group’s hold on individualworkers; 2) an account of the state’s relationship to dominant andsubordinate group labour; and 3) reasons why employers accept a splitlabour market.

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Frank Parkin’s neo-Weberian theory of social closure offers anuanced approach to the intersections between class and ethnicity indeeply divided societies. Parkin argues that

exclusionary social closure is an aspect of conflict and cleavagewithin social classes as well as between them. That is to say,exclusion strategies aimed at what Weber calls the ‘‘monopolizationof opportunities’’ are frequently employed by one segment of thesubordinate class against another, most usually on the basis of race,sex, ethnicity, or some other collectivist attribute. (1979, p. 89)

In Parkin’s account members of the dominant group but subordinateclass engage in dual closure. As a class they seek to usurp the claims ofthe propertied and credentialed to profit and surplus, but as a statusgroup they seek to hoard opportunities and exclude subordinategroups. Parkin’s examples of groups engaged in dual closure includewhite workers in the United States and South Africa �/ although thelatter verge on being part of the dominant class, he says �/ maleworkers, and Ulster Protestants.

One key instrument of exclusion by ethnically dominant workers isextended internal labour markets [EILMs]. These highly informalrecruitment networks erect social barriers around workplaces andallow local communities to monopolize opportunities, and help toaccount for differential labour market outcomes in Northern Ireland(Teague 1997; see also Windolf 1988). Formal and informal institu-tions including trade unions, the Orange Order, the Ulster UnionistLabour Association, residential segregation, and endogamy allowedthe Protestant working class to operate local labour markets likeclosed guilds which monopolized opportunities for their membersacross generations.2

Parkin’s analysis is supported by Michael Hechter’s theory of groupsolidarity. Solidarity is a product of individual members’ dependenceon the group for jointly produced goods and the control capacityexercised by the group (Hechter 1987a; 1987b). The salience of groupidentity increases with members’ dependence on the group. Protestantsused group institutions to maintain a monopoly on skilled manufac-turing employment, particularly in shipbuilding and ancillary indus-tries. The mechanisms that enable ethnic communities to turneconomic opportunities and goods into club goods foster individualdependence on the group, increasing group solidarity and reinforcingboundaries.

Parkin also corrects the impression Weber conveyed that the type ofstatus cleavage in particular societies appeared arbitrary. Instead, hesuggests that the fact that Protestant workers hoarded opportunitiesfrom Catholics and not vice versa could be traced to ‘a similar policy

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conducted via the state’ (1979, p. 96). The Unionist state sought tomaintain the support of Protestant labour and pre-empt competitionby the Northern Ireland Labour Party [NILP]. Consequently, itunderwrote employment in shipbuilding and engineering industries.For the duration of the local Stormont regime the state elite worked toincorporate Protestant labour, thereby perpetuating the ethno-reli-gious cleavage as the principal axis of social exclusion.

Why employers acceded to a segmented labour market in NorthernIreland can be traced in part to the political exchange between thestate and Protestant labour. The government had a political interest incompensating industry to maintain employment levels. Much of theeconomic cost to business of having a restricted labour pool waspicked up by the state.

Yet it is also important to note the common economic, as well aspolitical, interests between Protestant capital and labour. In sectorswith huge fixed costs, owners and workers may share an interest inlobbying for policies favourable to their industries. In Ulster shipbuild-ing, both main industrial classes depended on state policy to maintainthe returns on their investments. The industrialists had immense sunkcosts in shipbuilding and were extremely dependent on public policiesfor their contracts, and Protestant skilled labour had few options foremployment as well remunerated. In Jeffry Frieden’s terms, becauseowners’ and workers’ asset specificity �/ ‘the cost of moving theirhuman or physical assets to other activities’ �/ was high, Protestantowners and workers depended on favourable public policies (1991, p.21).

The following analysis describes the decline of UK shipbuilding andthe history of controversial aid to Belfast, and traces how ethnicsolidarity and economic interests were mutually reinforcing forProtestant shipbuilders under both the local Unionist rule and thesubsequent direct rule from London.

Shipbuilding’s decline and the politics of nationalization

The UK share of total output fell from 37 per cent in 1950 to 3.7 percent in 1974, a period of worldwide shipbuilding expansion (Glynnand Booth 1996, p. 252). New competitors, including Japan, Brazil,Singapore and Korea, established green field sites and used cheaperlabour to produce large prefabricated vessels. Germany and Sweden,which had more skilled workers and flexible labour practices, securedmarkets for customized high-value vessels. At the same time, Britishcraft unions continued to veto the replacement of semi-skilled workers,slowing the shift from riveting to welding. British shipyards dependedon the domestic market for merchant ships. Yet after 1967, Britishshippers bought between 50 per cent and 85 per cent of their ships

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from overseas. Beginning in 1973 when the Upper Clyde Group wentbankrupt, the government gradually nationalized UK shipyards.

Harland and Wolff had much in common with the rest of the Britishindustry. Despite leading the world in tonnage produced between 1946and 1948, employment collapsed from 23,000 to 13,000 in 1961�/62(Bew et al . 1995, p. 128; Patterson 1996, pp. 123�/4). High energy andtransportation costs disadvantaged Northern Ireland, which had nolocal steel production. After the Geddes Report recommended theconsolidation into regional groupings, the Belfast government pro-vided Harland and Wolff with £25 million to build the two largestcranes in the world and a graving dock (Irish Press, 4 December 1970).However, oil price hikes ended demand for supertankers, just as theyard learnt to build them (Rodwell 1975).

By 1970 the yard was in a paradoxical position. It had both a fullorder book and huge cost overruns. Management may have used theprospect of government aid as leverage to undercut competitors.Contract bids were not indexed to inflation leading to massiveoverruns. Allegedly, ‘[o]nly about £20 millions of an order book worth£70 millions was negotiated with clauses which take inflation intoaccount’ (White 1970).

Shipbuilding in Belfast ran aground for analogous reasons to itsBritish counterpart: international competition, the collapse of thesupertanker market, and unions’ rigidity. (Craft unions’ traditionalwork processes, and the de facto control of hiring by the existingworkforce, blocked the recruitment of new skilled workers. Harlandand Wolff also lost skilled employees to new factories in the 1960s andto shipyards overseas.) Belfast was also hindered by higher energy andsteel costs, and by apparent managerial irresponsibility. Yet Harlandand Wolff received support from successive governments for itsattempts at restructuring.

The British government took majority control of Harland and Wolffon 22 July 1974, and full ownership on 26 March 1975. The yardremained a limited liability joint stock company to keep it apart fromBritish Shipbuilders, the UK yards nationalized in the same period.Minister of State, Stanley Orme’s primary justifications for thetakeover were that Harland and Wolff was the largest single industrialemployer in Northern Ireland and that the government had alreadyspent £68 million on its modernization. He also hoped that byexpanding the apprenticeship programme skills would be sharedmore widely within the community (HC Debates: vol. 877, cols.1061�/2, 22 July 1974). In its rescue package, government committed£78 million over three years to prevent the shipyard closing before theworkers could proficiently use the new graving dock. Despite localpoliticians’ claims that keeping Harland and Wolff separate fromBritish Shipbuilders was a prelude to withdrawing from Northern

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Ireland, Orme maintained that ‘If Harland and Wolff had been fudgedin a United Kingdom context on an economic basis, there would be noshipyard there now’ (Quoted in Irish Times 7 November 1975).

Yet the stated reason for nationalizing the shipyard, its economicimportance to the region, does not hold up to scrutiny. In 1974,Minister of State Stan Orme suggested that the shipyard, whichdirectly employed 10,800, was actually responsible for the employmentof 40,000. Yet when the Northern Ireland Economic Council [NIEC]later estimated the multiplier effect of the shipyard on local employ-ment it produced a figure of 1.33 to 1.44, a figure considered high byjunior minister Peter Viggers (NIEC 1988; HC Debates: vol. 134, col.648, 27 May 1988). Unlike its Queen’s Island counterpart ShortsBrothers, the aircraft manufacturers, Harland and Wolff was not ofstrategic importance to the Ministry of Defence; having beenreconfigured to build large merchant vessels it was unsuitable forbuilding warships (HC Debates: vol. 974, col. 302, 22 November1979).

State support at Harland and Wolff climbed precipitously andexceeded aid to British shipbuilding and to other manufacturers inNorthern Ireland. During the 1980s, state aid per worker rose from£2,794 in 1981�/82 (HC Debates, vol. 7, col. 477, 2 July 1981) to £3,702in 1987�/88 (HC Debates, vol. 134. col. 647, 27 May 1988) in realprices.3 Harland and Wolff’s trading loss per employee was 12 timesthat at British Shipbuilders in 1981�/82 (NIEC 1988, p. 21). It received£7,263 per employee in 1984�/85 over twice the subsidy of £3,359 perjob at British Shipbuilders (Belfast News Letter 11 November 1985).4

Aid to Harland and Wolff also generally exceeded that to Shorts. In1986�/87, aid per worker was £3,352 in constant (1974) pricescompared to £1,411 per worker at Shorts (HC Debates: vol. 151,col. 324, 21 April 1989). The shipyard and Shorts received respectively6.5 and 2.75 times the annual average subsidy of £513 per manufactur-ing job. The subsequent privatization agreements cost the government£205 million for Harland and Wolff and £115 million for Shorts by1996 (HC Debates: vol. 269, col. 539, 16 January 1996). Shorts wasmore competitive due to Cold War demand for aircraft and missiles.When Bombardier took over Shorts, it managed to secure a niche as asupplier for Boeing. Shorts’ management proved able to recruitCatholic apprentices to protect their business from Irish Americanpressure, and with government and trade union support, faced down astrike over the display of sectarian flags and emblems in the workplace.

Subsidies to Harland and Wolff functioned as a tax on rivalshipyards and British taxpayers, and constrained the policy choicesof the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. In 1966 the NorthernIreland government provided the money to modernize the shipyard,although with the consent of, and at the cost to, the UK Exchequer. In

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nationalizing the shipyard in 1974, Orme maintained that as the yardbelonged to Northern Ireland the rescue would be funded by ‘savingsin public expenditure within the Province’ (HC Debates: vol. 877, cols.1062�/3, 22 July 1974).

From 1978 funds for Harland and Wolff came from the NorthernIreland block allocated using the Barnett formula, linking budgetchanges there to changes in allocations for Great Britain. A fixedproportion �/ 2.75 per cent until 1992 �/ of changes in comparableBritish public expenditure is added to or deducted from the NorthernIreland block. In 1976�/77 per capita expenditure in Northern Irelandwas 35 per cent higher than in England which was roughly in line witha Treasury study’s assessment of need (Twigger 1998, p. 13). Thus,Northern Ireland has had relatively generous public expenditure whichcould not fall relative to Great Britain. While the subsidies to Harlandand Wolff were a minute portion of the UK’s budget, they gave it anadvantage over other yards, and came at the expense of potentialexpenditure in Northern Ireland.

When nationalizing the shipyard the Labour government sought thesupport of its Northern Ireland friends. Catholic socialists like GerryFitt were offered the prospect of new apprenticeships. Orme claimedthat the trade unions were behind his plans for new apprenticeships,and he planned to introduce workplace democracy �/ the board ofHarland and Wolff would be one-third trade union representatives. Itappears the Labour government was trying to woo Ulster workersaway from militant loyalism by making them invested in shipyardmanagement.

Considerable evidence suggests that nationalization and continuousaid were in response to government fear of confronting loyalistworkers. When the nationalization was first announced in July 1974,the Ulster Workers’ Council [UWC] general strike in May had recentlycollapsed the power sharing agreement negotiated at Sunningdale.Although reinforced by paramilitary intimidation, the UWC wasnominally led by a shipyard worker, Harry Murray. When questionedabout the workers’ recent behaviour, Orme said that he hoped that thenationalization would have positive political consequences (HCDebates: vol. 877, col. 1067, 22 July 1974).

The later timing of contracts awarded to Harland and Wolff oftenappeared political. In 1977 when Ian Paisley sought to repeat thegeneral strike, Secretary of State Roy Mason provided a £12 millionsubsidy to clinch a £70 million contract, and two days later thousandsof workers met to oppose any strike (Belfast News Letter 28 April1977). (Mason was the Secretary of State who believed most stronglythat the conflict in Northern Ireland could be solved by economicrecovery combined with repressive security.) He was backed by TerryCarlin of the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of

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Trade Unions [NIC-ICTU] who argued that a strike would jeopardizethe contract (Belfast Telegraph 27 April 1977). One worker askedabout the contract and the prospect of a strike declared ‘I’ll fight anddie for Ulster but I won’t starve for it.’ (O Connor 1977).

Again in 1986 when Ulster Unionists were boycotting Westminsterto oppose the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Harland and Wolff received a£100 million naval contract from the government, which was attackedby its Newcastle rival Swan Hunter as ‘bribery’ (Belfast News Letter24 March 1986). Nick Brown MP for Tyneside called the Ministry ofDefence contract an ‘appeasement of terrorism’ (Looch 1986). Twoyears later the shipyard was locked in negotiations with the Ministryover cost overruns for another contract converting the RFA Argus intoan aviation training ship (HC Debates: vol. 134, col. 647, 27 May1988).

British MPs for shipbuilding constituencies resented aid to Harlandand Wolff. British Shipbuilders’ trading loss per worker only reachedBelfast’s level after the Conservative government privatized theprofitable defence operations. In 1988, Brown asked in Parliamentwhether Harland and Wolff would ‘continue to get unfair advantagesdespite EC sixth directive limiting shipbuilding subsidies to 28 percent’ (HC Debates: vol. 128, col. 433, 25 February 1988). In 1990,Frank Field complained that Cammell Laird, after losing an order toBelfast, would have to shed 800 jobs. Belfast’s bid was £22.5 millionlower than Cammell Laird’s, a difference Field attributed to unfaircompetition (HC Debates: vol. 170, cols. 183�/90, 26 March 1990).

Northern Irish journalists held that Protestant workers saw the yardas an untouchable sinecure. Ed Moloney claimed that ‘mainly out offear of the consequences of throwing thousands of Protestant workerson the dole, successive British governments have bailed the shipyardout of trouble’ (1980). Fionnuala O Connor wrote ‘the workforce hadbecome one of the few sacred cows in Britain’s dealings with NorthernIreland. It was just accepted that the shipyard must be protected orfloods of angry unemployed Loyalists would swamp precariousBelfast’ (1980).

With hindsight the nationalization of the Belfast shipyard looks likean economic disaster. The September 1989 privatization initially costthe government between £65.5 and £94 million (HC Debates: vol. 163,col. 113, 4 December 1989). (Paying to privatize the shipyard wasarguably a political concession to Protestants to balance the new FairEmployment Act.) Under nationalization, management still woncontracts through underbidding, and the government covered losses.Even if the workers had not seen their jobs as a Unionist sinecure,there were no career rewards for working particularly hard at theshipyard, given the weak world market, a globalized industry, andEuropean restrictions on subsidies. At the time of privatization the

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state had spent more than £500 million on the shipyard (HC Debates:vol. 163, cols. 113�/4, 4 December 1989).

In order to explain the origins of the institutional and economiccontext in which the British government pumped so much aid intoBelfast’s shipyard, the next section traces the historical solidarity ofthe workforce and its relationship with the Northern Ireland govern-ment the UK inherited after 1972.

Loyalist labour and Ulster unionism

In analysing sources of unequal achievement by Catholics andProtestants, Paul Teague notes that ‘EILMs operated by the shipbuild-ing firm, Harland and Wolff, and the engineering firm, Shorts, in thepredominantly Protestant areas of east Belfast have been frequentlycited as examples of how Catholics were discriminated against in theregion’ (1997 p. 564). When Belfast industrialized in the nineteenthcentury, Protestants clustered in the east where shipbuilding becamethe major industry. Catholics who migrated to Belfast tended towardsthe west, where women obtained employment in textiles. EILMsdeveloped and reproduced a male Protestant workforce in shipbuildingand engineering and a female, largely Catholic, workforce in textiles.The small size and large number of textile firms coupled with an erraticbusiness cycle and frequent layoffs impeded the development of unionsin the linen mills and the power of female workers to hoard skills andopportunities. Protestant male jobs in heavy industry were relativelywell remunerated, but Catholic men were underemployed.

The 1920 expulsions of Catholics from Belfast’s shipyards suggestthat intimidation and the threat of violence were crucial politicalingredients in closing local labour markets. The expulsions coincidedwith the Irish war of independence which fuelled ethno-nationalviolence in Belfast over Northern Ireland’s fate. Yet it is alsoimpossible to disentangle the workplace expulsions and subsequentviolence from the post-war recession in linen and engineering,unemployment among demobilized Protestants, and the employmentof Catholics at Harland and Wolff.

According to Bew, Gibbon and Patterson, in early 1920 ‘growingunemployment in the engineering and linen industries and the largenumbers of demobilised soldiers still out of work were creating frictionwithin the Protestant bloc’ (1995, p. 48). The Ulster Unionist LabourAssociation [UULA] ‘identified the unemployment problem, especiallythat of Protestant ex-servicemen, with the alleged ‘‘peaceful penetra-tion’’ of Belfast industry during the war by ‘‘tens of thousands’’ ofCatholics from the south and west’. The UULA began to sponsorindignation meetings at the shipyards to protest against the displace-ment of loyal workers, who had been at war risking their lives for king

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and country, by Republicans seeking to undo Ulster’s six counties’position in the United Kingdom. When riots followed the expulsion ofseveral thousand workers, the UULA established loyalty bandscomprised of ex-servicemen to protect Protestant areas, and vigilancecommittees to keep Catholics from returning to work. A central tropeused to justify the expulsions was the link made between Catholicemployment in the shipyards and unemployment among demobilizedProtestants. Henry Patterson quotes a contemporary report of aspeech by Alexander Boyd of the Independent Labour Party:

At the beginning of the war orders poured into the shipyards andfoundries and the labour which was required came largely from theSouth and West �/ men who did not do their duty in the trenches.They came to fill the places of those brave lads who went to the frontand Belfast employers have not acted fairly to the ex-soldiers whowere formerly in their employment. . .He contended that on theirdischarge from the army they should have been reinstated no matterwho was dismissed. (Belfast Newsletter 2 August, 1920; cited inPatterson 1980, p. 134)

The effect of the expulsions was to shift the economic burden of post-war depression in engineering and linen on to the Catholic population.

The official history of Harland and Wolff claims that, despite severalviolent incidents and the refusal of the joiners’ union to reinstate theirCatholic members, the expelled returned after almost a year (Moss andHume 1986, p. 225). The authors say the only seeming ‘permanentloss’ was of 120 Catholic apprentices. Yet the apprentices’ exclusionunderlines the importance of the expulsions. By successfully expellingCatholic apprentices, loyalist workers removed the danger of religiousintegration of the firm’s workforce, effectively reinstating their prewarstranglehold on transmitting jobs from father to son or uncle tonephew. The informal labour market from which the companyrecruited was not simply the geographic community of ProtestantEast Belfast, but also a kinship network.

The incentives to Protestant workers of monopolizing skilledemployment were apparent. Skilled wages in Northern Ireland wereclose to those in Britain, because of Ulster workers’ access to theBritish labour market and the power of the amalgamated craft unionsto command British-level wages. By contrast, wages for semi-skilledand unskilled labour were on average 80 per cent of British levels. Byeffectively restricting the labour supply, skilled Protestant workerswere able to maintain their bargaining strength vis-a-vis their employ-ers. In Parkin’s terms, ‘[b]y monopolizing the market in skills[Protestant labour] was better placed to conduct the usurpationarystruggle against employers, even though the bargaining capacity of

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other workers might be diminished as a result’ (1979, p. 92). Yet, whydid skilled Protestants choose to maintain an exclusionary labourmarket regime instead of making common cause with semi-skilled orunskilled workers in a class struggle against employers and the state?And how, given higher energy and transportation costs, could localcapital afford to pay a regional premium for its skilled labour and yetremain viable? The answer to both these questions lies in the politicsand policies of the Unionists who governed Northern Ireland from1920�/1972.

The question of why skilled Protestant labour engaged in dualclosure �/ class struggle or usurpation against employers above andexclusion against subordinate Catholics below �/ instead of in trans-ethnic class politics raises an interesting counterfactual: whetherProtestant workers would have been materially better off if they hadmade common cause with Catholics against capital and the state. Theanswer for Marxists is yes, of course, but their vision was clouded bythe illusion that ethnicity is more important than class (Farrell 1980;McCann 1980). For the ethno-national school the choice of ethnicover class solidarity suggests that the appeal of ethnicity outweighsmaterial considerations. Parkin’s theory suggests a different answer.He argues:

Workers who opt for closure against a minority group can hardly bedeclared guilty of irrationality in choosing to retain the provenbenefits of exclusion in preference to the uncertain or doubtful payoff resulting from combined usurpation. . . . It probably alwaysrequires considerably less expenditure of political energy to effectexclusionary social closure against a visible and vulnerable minoritygroup than to mount collective usurpationary action against apowerful dominant class. (1979, p. 95)

Protestant workers had a choice between the Unionist Party and thenon-sectarian but basically unionist Northern Ireland Labour Party[NILP] and tended to prefer the former. Supporting the governingUnionist Party was in skilled workers’ material and ethno-nationalinterests, largely because the Unionists were able to set the rules of thepolitical regime in Northern Ireland in order to co-opt the support ofProtestant labour.

Faced with rising support for the NILP in the 1920s, the Unionistgovernment replaced proportional representation with a pluralityelectoral system, effectively turning every election into a referendumon the national question (Devlin 1995). In return for Protestantworkers’ votes the Unionist government subsidized the shipbuildingindustry to maintain high levels of employment. In effect, the localstate absorbed the extra energy and transportation costs that Northern

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Ireland’s industrialists faced so that they could afford to pay British-level wages to skilled workers. The local regime was in turn subsidizedfrom the UK treasury, but without political oversight it had arelatively free hand in regional policy.

The policy of the Stormont government was to mediate an intra-Protestant class compromise in the shipbuilding and engineeringsector. Firms, especially Harland and Wolff, were encouraged tomaintain employment levels for Protestant workers in return forsupport from the state. Meeting the sectoral demands of theshipbuilder and its workers provided popular support in the Protestantcommunity to the Northern Ireland government. The social base ofthe Northern Ireland regime was a three-way bargain between thegoverning Unionist party, industrialists, and Protestant workers.Workers’ key interests were maintaining high levels of well-remuner-ated employment in manufacturing employment and preserving anethnic monopoly over the transmission of jobs. The management andowners of the shipyard desired to maintain output and profitability,using that term loosely, in the shipyard.

The state employed several measures to support the Belfastshipyard. It enacted the Loans Guarantee Act in 1922, backing loansto the shipyards, allowing the yard to borrow capital and gainadvantage over its competitors in securing orders (Moss and Hume1986, p. 231, Patterson 1996, p. 122). The inner directorate of Harlandand Wolff in the 1930s included a representative from the NorthernIreland Ministry of Finance and one from the United Kingdom as wellas three from the banks (Bew et al . 1995, p. 71). The Loans GuaranteeAct kept the shipyard afloat in the 1930s despite the threat of a hostiletakeover bid from a rival Scottish shipbuilder who resented unfaircompetition.

The £25 million that the Stormont government spent on moderniz-ing Harland and Wolff from 1966 was a response to the surge insupport for the NILP in the early 1960s, which was itself a directresponse to the massive layoffs at the shipyard in 1961�/62. The Belfastgovernment’s rejection of separate bids to buy Harland and Wolff byFred Olsen and Aristotle Onassis in 1966, and again in 1970, shouldalso be viewed as an effort to maintain employment.

Trade union and Catholic contradictions

Although one of Northern Ireland’s first trade unions was the BelfastProtestant Operatives (Devlin 1995), by the early twentieth centurymost shipbuilding workers belonged to amalgamated British unions.The unions struggled to balance their organizational interests inopposing sectarianism and maintaining class solidarity among Britishand Irish workers with Ulster Protestant members’ desire to segment

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their labour market.5 On the ground, unions were disinclined to facedown their loyalist members on Catholic exclusion. As O’Connorargues ‘The self-protective myth that the secular model of trade unionorganization transcended the divisions of the northern working classwas a conceit. It served to camouflage sectarian discrimination, excusethe Protestant working class from confronting the reactionary contentof its own politics, and patronize and circumscribe the wishes ofProtestant workers’ (1992, p. 206). Any non-sectarian impetus in theofficial trade union movement had been chastened by the expulsionsof 1920, when up to one quarter of those expelled were left-wingProtestants who had put class politics before ethnic.

Moss and Hume credit the ‘restraining influence of the majority ofshop stewards’ and ‘a voice of moderation . . . from the NorthernIreland trade-union officials’ with preventing a repeat of the 1920s’sectarian violence in the shipyard when the modern troubles began in1970 (1986, pp. 449, 450). Yet Catholic leaders from trade unionbackgrounds were dismayed by the unions’ passivity when Catholicswere again expelled in 1970 and 1972. Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlinblamed ‘Paisleyites’ for the 1970 expulsions. Devlin told the Irish News‘The trade unions. . .have a responsibility to secure for those membersthe right to accept employment and protection against any attack orintimidation by other members’ (Irish News 1 July 1970). In 1972Devlin claimed the trade unions were insufficiently critical of theexpulsions because they feared the formation of breakaway loyalisttrade unions. ‘[Catholic workers] remember appealing to Senior UnionOfficials for help, and being told that they could do nothing with theextremists because they were willing to break with the current TradeUnions and start another Union more suitable to their ‘‘sick’’ needs’(Devlin 1972).

The trade unions, then, appeared afraid to antagonize their loyalistmembers for fear of losing numbers, organizational status andpower. Their support for nationalization and their opposition tooutside takeover were also evidence of their overriding goal tomaintain their membership. As early as 1961, a delegate from theUULA, the labour wing of the Unionist Party, called on thegovernment to nationalize Harland and Wolff. It would then havebeen politically impossible for the Northern Ireland government tohalve the workforce. The 1970 bids for the yard prompted lettersto the papers and calls from trade unionists demanding that the yardbe nationalized, several citing the danger of selling treasured heirloomsto foreigners. At a lunchtime meeting 4,000 workers ‘unanimouslypassed a resolution calling on the Government to bring Harlandand Wolff under full public control’ (Belfast Telegraph 1 December1970). The workforce opposed selling the yard to Olson or Onassisfor fear that they were simply bidding for the yard’s order book

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and had no commercial incentive to maintain employment (Irish Press

4 December 1970). The unions pushed nationalization by claimingthat poor management was responsible for the yard’s cost overrunsand other problems. When the government once again bailed thecompany out and Onassis withdrew, the Sunday Times reprinteda prayer offered in a small mission hall off the Newtownards Road:‘We give thee thanks oh Lord that the hand of the foreigner has beentaken from the throat of Ulster, and that our shipyard shall remainalways Protestant. Amen’ (Hanna 1971). For shipyard workers,economic interest and ethno-religious nationalism were virtuallyidentical.

Under direct rule the trade union movement enjoyed good relationswith successive British governments as ‘Labour-state relations wereand are friendlier in Northern Ireland, where the government’s chiefenemy has been the paramilitaries’ (O’Connor 1996, p. 50). TheNorthern Ireland Office liked to point to the unions for evidence ofnormality and opposition to sectarianism and violence. As one of theBritish government’s few friends in Northern Ireland, NIC-ICTU hadthe ear of government ministers, enabling the amalgamated unions tolobby for shipbuilding employment.

Belfast Social Democratic and Labour Party [SDLP] leadersadopted a contradictory attitude towards the shipyard, on the onehand demanding that state aid to the yard be conditional on Catholicemployment and on the other defending the gains of the shipbuilders’trade union militancy. But their non-sectarian socialism failed tounderstand the historical accumulation of structures excluding Catho-lics from the industry, and Protestant workers seeking to defend theirshrinking patrimony rejected their overtures.

After the 1970 expulsions SDLP leader Gerry Fitt opposed ‘furtherfinancial assistance to Belfast shipyard unless. . .the work-force wasemployed on a non-sectarian basis’ (Irish News 1 July 1970). Again inMay 1972 as the Secretary of State, prepared an aid package, Fittdemanded meritocratic hiring practices at the shipyard (Irish News 5May 1972). The Irish News echoed Fitt, ‘It is beyond argument thatthis disproportion [300 Catholics out of a force of 10,000] is notbecause Catholic skills are any less than those of Protestant workers,but because those who rule the work force oppose their employment’(Irish News 13 December 1972). Loyalist politicians and workersresented this proposal. The Vanguard Coalition accused the Ministerof State, David Howells, ‘of ‘‘blatant discrimination’’ against theProtestant people’ for planning to employ more Catholics (Belfast

Telegraph 31 January 1973). Shipyard worker Sammy Balfour told areporter that

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it’s only fair to say that one of us Prods could work rings arounda Catholic whether he be from Belfast or anywhere else in theNorth �/ or the South for that matter. They’re lazy. They’d prefer tobe on the brew with their big families than working here. I supposethey make more that way. . . Don’t think that we haven’t got troublesof our own. It’s been very bad here for the past few years what withthe threats of layoffs and everything. Even as it is, we don’t know ifour jobs are going to last. Isn’t that bad enough without having towork beside murderers, bombers and gunmen who would cut yourthroat at the first chance they got. (Quoted in McConnell 1975)

Fitt’s hope that more state aid could address Catholic unemploy-ment and past discrimination proved illusory, as Harland and Wolffbecame less viable. Yet his colleague Paddy Devlin’s socialist principlesmade him attack critics of state support. In March 1975, Derry lawyerIvan Cooper, the SDLP’s most prominent Protestant member, argued‘Pouring money into ‘‘lame ducks’’ like the Belfast shipyard should bestopped and the investment directed towards employment black spotswhere it can be used to greater effect to create employment’ (BelfastTelegraph 8 March 1975). He suggested that if the British wanted touse economic policy to reduce political tensions they should target theareas of greatest social exclusion west of the Bann rather thansubsidizing a moribund industry in Belfast, where other employmentexisted. The Belfast Telegraph reported that an angry Devlin ‘said itwas with ‘‘deepest horror’’ that he read of a member of a socialist andlabour party like the SDLP condemning, by implication, shipyardworkers who by their union militancy over the years had created aliving wage for themselves’ (Belfast Telegraph 7 March 1975). He laterdescribed Cooper’s comments as ‘dangerously sectarian’ (BelfastTelegraph 10 March 1975).

As Loyalist shipyard workers had used violence, intimidation, andexpulsions to control employment in the shipyard, socialist leaders’faith that the workers had secured their position through trade unionmilitancy, and that state aid would translate into more Catholic jobsseems naıve at best. (Ironically, one reason for the shipyard’s failurewas a lack of skilled or relatively cheap labour from West Belfast. Theabsence of Catholic labour stemmed from a dearth of industrial skillformation and fear of taking jobs in East Belfast �/ both partialproducts of Protestant male control of employment.) By not criticizingsubsidies for Harland and Wolff, the Belfast SDLP helped thegovernment in parking several thousand Protestants in the shipyardwhile it confronted militant Catholic insurgency. Devlin’s commitmentto non-sectarian socialism led him to defend a policy that reproducedProtestant workers’ advantages.

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Conclusion

This article traced the shipyard’s endurance to the political signifi-cance of its workforce, as Protestant workers’ closure of local labourmarkets was an important part of the conflict in Northern Ireland.The analysis drew on three points from modern political economy.Following Parkin, Protestant workers’ behaviour was examined as aform of dual social closure �/ usurpationary class struggle from belowcombined with status group exclusion from above �/ highlighting theimportance of local and union institutions such as EILMs andapprenticeships in closing labour markets. Second, viewing jobs asjointly produced club goods distributed within a closed communityhelped to explain individual dependence on the ethnic group. Third,because labour and capital had a joint sectoral interest in lobbyinggovernment for favourable policies, workers’ and managers’ interestscoincided, creating a further economic barrier to interethnic classsolidarity and class-based politics. Sectoral interests became anadditional economic foundation for ethnic cleavages.

The economic policies of the British state in Northern Ireland,including huge subsidies to defunct industries but also the expansionof security force employment, cushioned many in the Protestantworking class from the local manufacturing economy’s collapse. Publicsector expansion and the gradual erosion of discrimination in the civilservice also gradually expanded the Catholic middle class. But theregion is still marked by high rates of unemployment among marginalCatholic men. Deindustrialization has hurt many Protestant men tooand intensified the zero-sum game over employment between lessaffluent Protestants and Catholics. During the troubles, working-classCatholics and Protestants were at far greater risk of violence (McGarryand O’Leary 1995). In the past few years Belfast has been markedagain by riots, many initiated by disaffected and economicallymarginal Protestants. Unless some means are found to give working-class men, Catholics and Protestants, an economic stake in society,street violence and disorder are likely to persist indefinitely, deepeningthe problems of future generations.

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was supported by the Bureau for FacultyResearch at Western Washington University, the Harry Bridges Centerfor Labor Studies at the University of Washington, and an Interna-tional Dissertation Field Research fellowship from the Social ScienceResearch Council funded by the Mellon Foundation. I would like tothank Yvonne Murphy of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast for help inusing the Northern Ireland Office Press Cuttings Collection housed at

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the library. A previous version was presented at the 2003 annualmeeting of the Western Political Science Association. I would like tothank Miki Caul Kittilson, Finbarr Lane, Jennifer Seltz, Jeff Purdue,and Phil Shekleton, and particularly the two anonymous reviewers forEthnic and Racial Studies for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Scholars of Israel’s political development have used Bonacich’s theory to explain the

development of kibbutz movement and the history of the Histadrut trade union federation

(Shafir 1989; Shalev 1992).

2. Mancur Olson argued that guild like discrimination caused caste and racial divisions

and retarded economic growth in India and South Africa (1982, pp. 146�/80).

3. The index used as a deflator is the UK Office for National Statistics CDKO Long Term

Indicator of Consumer Goods and Services (Jan 1974�/100). The nominal figure for 1981�/

82 was £7,587 and for 1987�/88 was £15,000. The nominal average subsidy per manufactur-

ing job in 1986�/87 was £2,000.

4. Each of the newspaper sources cited is from the Northern Ireland Office Press Cuttings

Collection donated to Belfast’s Linen Hall Library. The articles cited can be found in the

following folders: LHL 567/H&W 1; LHL 568/H&W 2; LHL 570/H&W 4; LHL 572/H&W

6; LHL 573/H&W 7; and LHL 575/H&W 9.

5. Unlike British amalgamated unions, 19th Century US craft unions actively discrimi-

nated against Black and Chinese workers (Olzak 1992), and in Palestine the Histadrut forbad

Arab members (Shalev 1992).

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NIALL O MURCHU is Assistant Professor of Political Economy atFairhaven College, Western Washington University.ADDRESS: Fairhaven College MS 9118, Western Washington Uni-versity, WA 98225-9118, USA. Email: B/Niall.Omurchu@wwu.edu�/

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