The Creation of the Script 1

Background Information

On 25 September 1995, five Liverpool dockers working for a private contractor were sacked for protesting after being ordered to work overtime for a disputed rate of pay. Within hours, the contractor also dismissed 80 of their colleagues. When the 329 dockers of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company refused to cross the sacked workers’ picket line, they too were immediately sacked. So began a historic industrial dispute that lasted for some 28 months.

During the first year of the dispute, some of the sacked dockers and their partners attended classes organised by the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). Following an article by Jimmy McGovern for the Observer about the dispute, Channel 4 invited the well-known television screenwriter to write a screenplay on the subject. Due to heavy work commitments, McGovern recommended Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting. Welsh, too, was under severe pressure of work. Nonetheless, both writers became more and more interested in the dramatic experiences of the dockers and their families. ‘I came down to talk to them all, but the more I heard the more appalled I became’, reflects McGovern.

The Dock Writers’ Workshop

The members of the WEA classes established a weekly writers’ workshop, with McGovern engaged as their tutor and Welsh also attending regularly to assist him. Channel 4 commissioned a script. Planet Wild, a Liverpool film production company, filmed the classes to produce the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary, Writing the Wrongs.

Dockers was produced by Ken Loach’s company Parallax Pictures in association with the Initiative Factory (IF), a cooperative founded by the sacked dockers. All proceeds were donated to furthering the work of the Initiative Factory. IF members soon discovered that they had further talents that were valued by the film director: they became actors, extras, or members of the film crew and production team. Afterwards they collaborated in producing their own website (http://www.mmm.merseyside.org) and an interactive CD-ROM, ‘Multimedia for the Millennium’. According to their website:

‘The Multimedia for the Millennium project is an European Social Fund Intermediate Labour Market scheme set up with support from the Workers' Educational Association, John Moores University, Merseyside Trade Union Community and Resource Centre, Liverpool and Sefton Employment Zones. The project is providing IT and Multimedia skills to a group of sacked Liverpool dockers and their partners and applying these skills to a real project — the production of a CD-ROM recording the Liverpool Docks Dispute 1995—1998. The beneficiaries have developed skills in using a range of software from Microsoft Office and QuarkXpress to Adobe Photoshop and Premier; by taking a group with little or no computer experience and combining their IT training with a subject about which they are passionate.’

The Initiative Factory was founded to promote community-led initiatives embracing social, educational, economic, employment and environmental concerns. External university accreditation has been secured for their programmes of educational and personal development, particularly in the field of new technology. Partnerships have been established with universities and companies across Europe and North America.