The Windrush generation’s invaluable contributions to our movement

In June 1948, the Empire Windrush arrived in the United Kingdom carrying at least 1,027 passengers, around half of whom were seeking employment in the ‘Mother Country’. The ship had picked up passengers in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Mexico and Bermuda and contained a mix of nationalities, class and backgrounds.  

Although not the first ship to bring people from the long-exploited colonies in the West Indies to the United Kingdom, this voyage later became the defining image of post-war migration to Britain. The ship lent its name to the Windrush Generation and, shamefully, the Windrush Scandal, now known as the Home Office Windrush Scandal.   

Of the many fallacies surrounding the Empire Windrush, perhaps the greatest is that the passengers were answering the call of the British government who needed help rebuilding the country after the ravages of the second world war.  

Despite this mythology, the almost 500 West Indian men on board were so desperate to escape poverty in the Caribbean that they ignored the dire warnings of the Jamaican authorities not to travel to the Mother Country because there were no jobs in Britain. There was no ‘call’. But, thank goodness, they still came. 

These passengers had, however, every right to believe they were wanted. About one-third of those men seeking work had previously been to Britain as members of the RAF. They knew Britain needed rebuilding. How, then, could there be no work?   

Although the British government considered ways of turning the ship back to the Caribbean, it reluctantly recognised that these passengers were British citizens with every right to come to work and live in Britain.    

Windrush and trade unions  

In the end, most passengers found work in Britain quickly and easily. Politicians' worst fears – of these passengers negatively affecting British 'social cohesion' - never came to pass.   

While Caribbean workers joined trade unions in large numbers, they were generally not welcomed by the movement, let alone the white British workforce.   

Many in the movement argued that Windrush workers did not integrate and were a threat to the British workers' jobs. Some unions were even reluctant to accept Black members. Although they weren't always welcomed by established unions, Windrush workers often took it upon themselves to become reps and fight for improved rights and conditions.  

They often combined this rank-and-file trade unionism with anti-racism, struggling against – and eventually defeating – the 'colour bar', a pernicious system of racial discrimination that denied West Indian and other Black workers employment opportunities, affordable housing and entrance to certain public premises.   

Not all Britons were hostile to these new arrivals. One senior civil servant in the Ministry of Labour, when warned that a union would need to be consulted before Black workers were introduced, said: “There is no logical ground for treating a British subject who comes of  his own accord from Jamaica to Great Britain any differently from another who comes to London on his own accord from Scotland.” 

By the late 1950s, the numbers of Caribbean arrivals had increased to about 40,000 per year. Most found employment in manufacturing and construction, hospitality and the NHS.  

Support from the trade union movement may not have been immediately forthcoming. Yet these workers wound up being central not just to Britain's post-war reconstruction but also the history – and present – of the British trade union movement.   

Today, we remember the invaluable contribution of Black workers to our trade union movement. They didn't just enrich our unions by making them more democratic, anti-racist and inclusive. Time after time, they improved British workers' lives by leading and powering many cutting-edge industrial and political struggles.