In 2019, after years of mismanagement, the shipbuilding company Harland and Wolff went into administration. With the threat of a corporate takeover refusing to guarantee continued employment, and facing mass redundancies, the unionised workforce at the company’s historic Belfast shipyard occupied their workplace. For nine weeks, workers demanded the re-nationalisation of their industry, a transition to green production, and improved employment security. Below, NFB talks with Joe Passmore, a steelworker and senior shop-steward at Harland and Wolff who played a central organising role in coordinating the occupation.

Could you introduce Harland and Wolff’s history: who are the company and how long have they operated?

Harland and Wolff (H&W) was formed in 1862. At the time there were two shipyards in Belfast, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, H&W was probably the biggest shipyard in the world. We had up to 35,000 people working there, running out two or three ships each year: which is incredible when we think of how long it takes to build a ship nowadays. Health and safety wasn’t a big thing in the past, and I don’t think it was in any ship-building company. Fatalities were taken as normal. For every ship launched there were fatalities. It’s an awful way to be. There was a human cost to every ship. There was also a hierarchy then, when working people were treated with disdain. For bosses – right up until when I started in the late 1970s – you were there to do a job, and they would have just sacked you at the drop of a hat if you didn’t tow the line. So it probably wasn’t a good place to work then, like most industries of the time.

In the Titanic-era (the ship was built between 1909-12), everyone looked at the technology we were using. We led the world. Our techniques were way ahead of everyone else. That continued, after a slight lull following the First World War, and into the Second World War, when so many different warships were coming through Belfast. This made it a prime target for the Luftwaffe, and the scars are still there from that, throughout greater Belfast, particularly east Belfast, because it got pounded. It was because they knew the capacity of H&W and what we could do. So the fame has always been there. It’s a famous brand, and it’s famous because historically we laid the foundations for so many innovations. And we’re still at that, breaking moulds and striving ahead with things.

What was your job exactly? What did it involve?

I started as a steelworker, at sixteen, in 1979. There were 15,000 people working there. The whole of Queen’s Island was H&W’s. We had our own bus service, our own medical centre - which we needed badly, because there were a lot of injuries. It was a real hive. The craftsmen and the people, with the knowledge and skills that were there, it was absolutely incredible. I started working with oxy-acetylene cutting machines, cutting through steel-plate. You had to have a steady hand, and you had to make sure you wore the equipment or else you’d blind yourself. I learned how to caulk (the equivalent of modern riveting). You get a chisel, and use it like a mini kango hammer, and you gouge metal. Hard work, and sore if you don’t do it right. You’d come home with a sore arm every day doing it. And it was loud and deafening. It caused a lot of people to go deaf. Many people had white-finger, caused by constant vibration. It wasn’t easy, but I was an expert by the end of it. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, after only doing it for a few years, it became illegal.

My main job was burning. I was lucky enough to get introduced to the huge burning machines which cut massive steel plates. You don’t learn fast. An old hand taught me, showing me things no one else could do. He’d made up his own tools, creating special applications for semi-automatic machines. He taught me how to make them, how to strip these machines down and rebuild them. I then progressed onto all kinds of gas-cutting machines, and plasma machines. You learned the basics in training centres, but you learn the secrets outside the training centre. You learn specialities. And you don’t even know you’re learning them, until one day someone comes along and you’re the only person they can come to cause you’re the only person who knows how to do it.

I think industry has lost that everywhere. Unfortunately, over the last few decades they’ve stopped doing apprenticeships. There’s a boom and bust cycle that takes place within ship-building: we bring people in, the work dries up, then we have all these skilled workers with nothing to do, so they leave and we don’t get them back. There are skills we’ll never get back, like heat lining, the shaping of plates through heat. These are things needed in modern-day shipbuilding, but we don’t have anyone left who can do it. Some people my age learned some of those skills, but not enough to retain it all. So, particularly with what’s coming at H&W, we’re probably gonna have to bring people from outside to teach us the skills we used to teach to the world.

What is the history of worker organising and trade-unionism at H&W?

When I came in 1979, I went to the convenor’s office. He gave me a union card and got me to sign a form, and I didn’t do an interview or anything like that, and he said, ‘okay, you start next Monday.’ That was it. That was the strength of the union then, and the company just accepted that. They feared trade-unions then. Our terms and conditions were, by that point, becoming among the best in the industry. Unions weren’t held back by current legislation. If a disagreement was coming, they knew unions had the strength and the wit to pull everyone out. The company sometimes used that to their own advantage. There were mind games. And I’m not saying unions didn’t get complacent. In various instances, including in my own, we found that when we relied so much on the union and they had the power to do something, they didn’t do it.

But the strength was there. There was nothing to stop them. I was involved in so many strikes over the years, strikes that could be called at the drop of a hat. People walked out over things, sometimes politically motivated, sometimes not, sometimes orchestrated by the company. For example, I recently heard about ‘the orange juice strike’ at H&W. The company provided orange juice and a cooling-off area for welders working on pipes, because the heat was intense. They came along one day and said: we’re taking away your orange juice, we’re taking down that cooling-off tent. So everyone walked out. For every day of strike-action, the company was granted an extra week to fulfil its contract. So, it works both ways: it shows the strength of the union, but sometimes unions can be used.

In 2000, I got paid off. There were lots of redundancies around then. I had a back injury, from working on those machines, and lifting heavy objects. I had to be operated on, and it took about four months before I was permitted to go back to work. I returned around May 2000, and one month later pay-offs came out and they told me: ‘you’re going’. My shop steward initially supported me, but when we met with the personnel manager, he just sat with his head down. I was heart-broken. I’d been there 20 years, and I was about to go. I didn’t know what would happen after that.

So you lose faith in unions. I know I did. I was out of there for almost thirteen years, I had some really good jobs, but I never joined a union. Because I felt let down and I thought - how can you depend on people like that? I was in GMB then. If there is such a thing as demarcation of trades, within unions, it existed then: we were told every steelworker, welder, has to be in GMB. Everyone else was in Unite. When I later returned to H&W, it took me a while to get my head straight. I ultimately thought: ‘I’m gonna have to join a union’. But I decided never will I join the GMB. So that’s when I joined Unite. And, interestingly, when I joined Unite and I started working for people, initially as a Health and Safety rep, I managed to bring half the steelworkers and welders along, and they left GMB. So we broke that monopoly.

Historically, trade-unions were slightly different in this country. The difficulty with Northern Ireland is that unions could get hijacked by paramilitary forces. I know that was the case in H&W. Not for one minute would I ever tell anyone that H&W was not sectarian: when I was there, in the 1970s, it was. Catholic workers were ‘tolerated’, but they were pointed at whenever things went wrong, and that was encouraged by some shop-stewards because some were paramilitaries themselves. You could have said that about this whole country then. People in power like that tended to go that way. It was difficult, and H&W was a microcosm of this whole country. People who shouldn’t have been in power got into power, and held influence when they didn’t. You can understand why a lot of people weren’t going to work in the shipyards then: because of fear. Fear of what can happen. And that was union-driven.

Were there instances of solidarity between Catholic and Protestant workers?

I was there when one murder took place. A worker, Maurice O’Kane, was shot dead in the bottom of a ship’s tank. It was a Loyalist-sanctioned killing. Police were involved, I know the nurse who came down to see to the guy afterwards. It was just blatant: someone brought a gun into the yard, if it wasn’t already there, and shot a guy in the back of his head because he was Catholic. I remember the next day we held a mass meeting and a minute’s silence, and it was speech after speech, coming out and saying ‘we’re meant to be one shipyard, one people, it doesn’t matter what your opinion is but this just destroys us and our community.’ With that hatred going on, and when it gets to that extreme, so many people put the brakes on, and say that’s enough. This is about us, workers, and it should never cross that line again. It quietened down after that, there was a step change. But those old prejudices crept in again from time to time.

I saw workers’ unity when the company reneged on a pay agreement. A ship was due to come out of the dock. The unions didn’t even lead this, this was workers. They realised that if they want to get a ship out of the dry dock, you’re gonna have to move the dock-gate and float it out to the commissioning quay, and there’s money attached to that. Just a few forklift drivers to start with, and then everyone else just gathered on the dock gate and said ‘you’re not moving it while we’re standing here. Where’s our pay rise?’ The company gave in because they were gonna lose a fortune by not taking this ship out. That was solidarity at its finest.

What was the background to the 2019 occupation?

I came back to H&W in 2013. After a few years, the opportunity came up for a safety rep, and I put my name forward. I took it seriously, and people had faith in me. After six months, I got involved in pay negotiations. I realised there was a no-strike clause in a pay agreement. I said I’m not happy with this, I’m not putting my signature near this until it’s removed. GMB, I have to say, turned on me. ‘We’ve been waiting on this raise for a long time, and you’ve blocked it’, they said. ‘Take it out and we don’t have a problem’, I said. Susan, our regional secretary, backed me to the hilt, telling all the Unite people in H&W what was going on. They ultimately removed it. I was able to come back and say ‘fine, that’s okay.’ So I gained a lot of respect out of that.

At that time, H&W was put up for sale. A Newry firm, MJM, came saying they were going to bring cruise ships into H&W. We were suspicious because this company had cruise ships in before. They used their own workers: foreign workers, brought in from overseas, and they weren’t allowed off the ships. We know they were on very poor wages. Our view was that this was providing absolutely nothing to the local economy. It’s not doing H&W or our community any favours. Now these are the people wanting to buy us and bring in their own cruise ships, and we thought: are our jobs in danger here? Is this what they’re thinking? To get rid of us and ship foreign workers in and treat them like slaves? Cause that’s what it looks like.

Anyway, they played the game. They should have made an offer by June. In the middle of July they said - look, we’ve dropped our asking price from 7m to 2m, and we’re not bringing the original workforce across. So we got politicians and various agencies round the table to resolve this. By this stage the company was heading for administration. The politicians all had their own agendas. These involved ‘okay mate, we’ll make sure you get proper advice for your new jobs’, things like that. That’s not what we wanted to hear. We were never going to accept redundancies. We wanted to fight redundancies. We wanted a change in Harland.

How did the occupation emerge as a strategic action, and how was it coordinated?

When MJM let us down, we decided - okay, we’re gonna do something about this. Now, it wasn’t difficult, because everyone had seen it heading in this direction, and we’d been having regular meetings about the situation. I have close friends in Ford Visteon, who, ten years before this, had occupied their plant in west Belfast over pensions. I’d been hearing their stories about their situation and what they did. So this was lodged in my head. And of course Susan said to me - did you hear what happened on the Clyde in the 1970s? So she egged me on, but I’d already had the thought because of my friends. And I thought that was the way to go. It was that bloody-mindedness, thinking - what have we got to lose? Why should we just give up and put our heads down?

We started organising what we called the original ‘cobra committee’, like the government’s COBRA committee: a council of war. This involved electricians who looked after the electronic gates, joiners, and riggers and heavy machinery operators: just everyone who had any influence. We set out an agenda at each of these meetings – which we had in front of everyone at our canteen, so everyone could see what was going on, so no workers were isolated. We said - ‘here’s what your job is going to be’, and we listed what had to be done, because at that stage we knew that if we were going to take a stand, we had to make the preparations. If this goes to the wall, we’re gonna be ready for it.

So, for example, the heavy machinery operators. To take control of the place, we needed to have access to an entrance that we controlled. So all the heavy machinery operators were prepped to move concrete blocks near to the other entrance gates, days before anything happened. We got our painters and joinery people to create the biggest banner they possibly could to hang over our giant cranes – to let Belfast know that we were taking a stand. We had electricians putting small fixes into electronic turnstiles, so that we could access them, and so we couldn’t be locked out. We had secret back doors into the yard, as we got our joinery department to change the locks. We talked this through and worked out this agenda in front of everyone. We worked out how we would treat the press. We worked out provisions: who was going to look after and manage these. We had staff on notice to make sure people were there around the clock. We used all the skills available to us to make it effective.

I’d had meetings with Susan in the Clayton Hotel in Belfast. It was like cloak and dagger stuff. We decided to occupy on the Monday ahead of administration. Our idea was that if we wait until administration, we’d be on the outside looking in. The power had to be in the hands of the workers: if we hit before administration, and we control it, then we’re on the inside looking out.

So, that Monday lunchtime, I went to the CEO, and said: ‘can you tell me if MJM have changed their mind and are going to bring over our workforce? Or do we have another bidder?’ He said no, we don’t have any of that, and we’d be going into administration the Thursday of that week. So I told him we’ve no other choice - ‘from a union perspective, we’re going to take things into our own hands.’ I left and went straight to our canteen. I had already called a mass meeting, we had staff, absolutely everyone, senior management and all. I said - ‘look, I’m not about to give this shipyard up easily, and I don’t think any of you are either. I wanna take a stand. You know what that stand involves. I’m ready to do it, are you ready to do it?’ The place erupted and everyone walked to the gate.

Right from the start, we told the security guys - you can do your checks, your business, whatever you’re going to do. But we control this site, and we say who comes in and who doesn’t. We more or less policed it. Our original thought was to barricade the gate. We don’t want any vultures coming in to asset-strip the yard. We created a big list of people who were not getting in. But we also thought - you know what, we don’t want to make this place locked down. When anything promising and serious came along, we arranged a tour around the yard ourselves to show our facilities.

The occupation hit headlines. It gathered momentum. We got administration pushed back. And we had objectives: to keep the vultures out, pressurise the government, and ‘re-nationalise.’

There were also demands around green re-tooling?

One of the last projects we worked on prior to the occupation involved ‘jackets’: the base for off-shore wind turbines. We previously worked on oil-drilling platforms. Huge trenches, huge holes, were dug in the seabed to anchor these. It was someone from H&W who came up and said, ‘if you put a cup upside down in water you can create suction, if you get this down there and blow all the air out of that, it’s going to stick to anything.’ So we did that, we invented that, we got it so that you put these huge suction cups down to the seabed, and then blow all the air from the outside-in. You’re doing nothing but using the earth and suction to hold it down. They’re all over the world now. We did them first.

There is nothing stopping us from doing this again, these innovations based on shipbuilding. It wasn’t all about ships, about oil, it was about how to make it greener, how to make it work better. And we were doing that. We took what existed there and we changed it for a better environment. To have those facilities to be able to do that, to have those huge cranes, to have that massive dry dock (the biggest in Europe), and not use it for that? That is ludicrous. Such a waste. That’s why we had colleagues with a similar outlook from around the world who see the value of H&W and what we can do, and what we can change. So during the occupation green re-tooling was an aspiration, but we’d already laid the foundation for that aspiration to become serious.

What did day-to-day organising inside the occupation look like? What was your strategy?

After that first day of the occupation, we saw the success we had across the news, and that the occupation was having an impact internationally. We created a new cobra committee to discuss strategy. We met every day to plan what we were going to do next. One idea was to get ourselves on the news every single night. Let’s get everyone talking. We used social media to extremes. I was coming out with messages on social media that were reaching 35,000 people every day.

We marched to Stormont. There was an incident there with an Irish-language campaign group. We’d been there, alongside different groups, to protest Boris Johnson’s visit. There were all these shipyard workers, and in front of us there were all these Irish language activists who did not want to be politically associated, who had their own thing, and didn’t want political parties getting involved. I went up to one of the girls there, and I asked: ‘what’s “save our shipyard” in Irish?’ She told me, and I spoke to the rest of the guys, and then we started chanting and shouting ‘save our shipyard’ in Irish [sábháil ár longchlós!].

A BBC journalist spoke to me after and asked, ‘have I just seen a change in the politics of Northern Ireland?’ Because we were still perceived by some as some kind of loyalist bastion.¹ So that was momentous, because it moved from people thinking ‘there’s those Protestants making a load of noise again’, to ‘Jesus, they’re fighting for workers’ rights here’. Chanting in Irish was a really powerful, unifying moment, where we had the whole community behind us. If you look at the news from that night, it wasn’t even about Boris Johnson. It was about shipyard workers and it was about the Irish language.

We also had Belfast Pride in the middle of the occupation. We had a fleet of flags brought down by Unite, including Pride flags, and a picture of me tying the Pride flag to our gate went everywhere. The Pride march had a banner leading it with ‘support Harland and Wolff’: because we made one small action with that flag.

What did the occupation achieve, and what does H&W’s future look like?

It was tense right up to the end. We’d been there for nine weeks. What we did in the end was make that shipyard work again. We ultimately got another buyer, who agreed to bring across the workforce. This provided five years’ work that we would not have had if H&W were to close.

Now, ultimately, it was the wrong people we got in. The business model put us in crisis again. They tried to build a corporation from the shipyard, when the shipyard had to grow first. The news about administration in 2024: it’s the PLC. Millions wasted on a whole corporate entity within London, which the four yards are now dealing with. A lot of the company’s debt came from there, from tiers upon tiers of ridiculous job titles, and directors of this and that. We even had a director of vending machines. That’s how ludicrous it got. No matter how much I hate it, we have been open five years, we have expanded the workforce, and I am grateful for that.

We’re currently at a stage now where we’re on the verge of getting taken over by a Spanish yard. They’re state-owned, so have avoided much of that boom and bust cycle where we fell behind. They’ve embraced modern technology that we let go by us.

I think it will be a smooth transition. If we’d gotten bad news recently, then we would have blockaded those gates again. I would have had the keys out for back-doorways into the yard. I would have had everyone there down at that gate. We will always have a way in. And when one door closes we will always find another one.