National Unemployed Workers’ Movement
A collection of pamphlets and papers by and about the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, held in the library has particular resonance today.
The National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) was formed in 1921 by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It campaigned for better support for the unemployed and against the Means Test.
Significantly one of its aims and objects was “To create the united front of employed and unemployed workers against all attempts of the employing class to use the unemployed to lower working class standards and conditions …”
During the depression of the 1930s it organised hunger marches, the biggest of which took place in 1932, when around 3000 marchers converge on London from throughout the country
Locally the Salford NUWM organised a march in 1931 which resulted in mounted police baton charges on the crowd and the imprisonment of the march’s leaders, including Eddie Frow, one of the founders of the WCML. Ewan MacColl was one of the marchers as was a local Labour Party activist, Walter Greenwood. The battle outside the town hall became the climactic event in his famous book Love on the Dole.
As unemployment declined towards the end of the 1930s the movement’s work was scaled down and it was formally disbanded in 1946.