UNION BREAD
Larry Wayne
Bagels, Platzels and Chollah: The Story of the London Bakers’ Union
This book was originally written in 1984 and was published in 2009, for the first time, twenty-five years on. It is the first study of the London Jewish Bakers’ Union - and indeed the first detailed account of any of the Jewish trade unions. These were part of an important and hitherto unwritten chapter in the full story of the trade union movement - that of the ethnic or “religious” unions. Working alongside their sisters and brothers in the struggle for social justice, these unions sought also to meet the special needs of particular cultural and ethnic groups with their different traditions, dietary laws and religious practices.
Amongst these often tiny groups struggling to reconcile progress and tradition, none stand out more than the Jewish bakers with their aim to provide good, cheap, wholesome bread, baked in hygienic and humane working condition, by proper union labour. These issues of identity, language and cultural difference serve today, just as in the 1930s or 1880, as an essential “leaven” in the rising of the Labour movement. The union’s brave attempts at co-operative production and distribution, and its pioneering use of their union label are a part of the great history of co-operation.
UNION BREAD is a story both of division and solidarity. There were bitter divisions between Jewish and non-Jewish bakers over the issue of Sunday baking, and between the journeymen and the masters. But there was also great solidarity with many of the other tiny “immigrant” unions - the Mantlemakers, the Tailors, and the Tobacco-cutters, and the history of respected affiliation to the TUC. Though frequently repudiated by the mainstream of Establishment Jewry and sometimes underrated by the British Left, these unions all played their part fighting for justice at home and abroad in the early years of the 20th century.
The book unflinchingly depicts the appalling working conditions which persisted in the bakeries from the 1840s until World War 2, the entrenched anti-Semitism from both the establishment and sometimes from within the Labour movement itself, the ups and downs of the pioneer co-operative bakeries, and the first attempts to unite production and distribution of a staple (bread) through the introduction of a union label (”Union Bread for Union Workers”).
The book marks the union’s association over the years with many famous names - John Burns, Keir Hardie, Rudolf Rocker, Charlotte Despard, Eleanor Marx. It also brings to light new material on the great strike of 1913 - one of the longest and bitterest in the history of this country - and follows the union into the years after world War 2 when it was the only Jewish trade union inexistence outside Israel.
ISBN 978-0-9555138-3-1
The Jewish Socialists’ Group
In association with the Socialist History Society
SHS Occasional Paper No 26