Our protest is feisty, not deadly

This Saturday I was reading the cracking manuscript of an historical novel written by a friend.

It's set in early 20th-century California; in Los Angeles in particular. America is booming, and nowhere is it booming as it is in Los Angeles. Now connected by rail, telegraph and telephone to the rest of the Union, a part of Los Angeles called Hollywood is fast becoming the film capital of the US.

All over America, building work is going on. Huge, tall office blocks called skyscrapers are growing like Topsy. But just as quickly as the bosses are ordering new buildings to be built, so the workers are blowing them up.

My friend has researched his subject meticulously. Most of his characters are reporters on the Los Angeles Times. They're fictitious but other characters he has taken straight from history. These include the owner of The Times, General Harrison Gray Otis, and a blue-collar construction worker, Ortie McManigal.

McManigal and a chap named Jim McNamara criss-cross the US planting explosive devices at building sites (and this all really happened). They set timers and get on the next train out of town, usually before the thing gets blown sky-high.

They are being paid to wreak havoc and destruction by the International Bridge and Structural Ironworkers Union; in fact, McNamara's brother is the head of the union.

The union is blowing up partially-constructed buildings, iron works, bridges, theatres and factories left, right and centre because of an ongoing, bitter battle it is waging with the National Erectors Association. The union wants a closed shop - it wants the bosses to employ only its members and it wants the employers to pay a living wage.

And so, when the erectors won't listen to reason, the union gets McManigal and McNamara to embark on a spectacular campaign of industrial sabotage.

McManigal and McNamara manage not to kill anyone as they merrily blow things sky-high. Then things go terribly wrong. Early on the morning of October 1 1910, McNamara plants 16 sticks of dynamite in the printing works of the Los Angeles Times. Combined with the combustible vats of ink lying around and a leaking gas supply, the result is devastating - and tragic - and the building is engulfed in flames and ruined. Twenty-one people are killed and more than 100 injured.

On this occasion the bombers are targeting the notoriously and stridently anti-union General Otis. He and most of America are outraged. The paper calls the deadly bombing "the crime of the century".

The other employers are just as furious and they hire a famous private detective to hunt down and bring to justice those responsible.

So it comes to pass that both McNamara brothers and McManigal are arrested, extradited to California and charged with murder. The union hires Clarence Darrow (the still-celebrated civil rights lawyer, he of the Scopes monkey trial) to defend them.

General Otis and most of the erectors want the men to hang for the crime. Darrow realises he has a hopeless case - the men are guilty and the prosecution has all the evidence they need to prove it. But there are political considerations that have little to do directly with the case, and when the prosecution suggests that the men plead guilty in exchange for their lives, Darrow convinces the McNamaras to do so. McManigal gets a couple of years, James gets life and his brother gets 15 years.

As I'm reading the manuscript for the third time on Saturday, I realise that the climax of the story - the sentencing of the McNamaras - happened precisely 100 years ago to the day - November 5 1911. (It's also, coincidentally, Guy Fawkes Day, which commemorates another bit of historical blowing-up).

And on the radio I hear about striking workers rampaging at a five-star hotel/casino complex in Johannesburg. And on Cape Town's Robben Island, ferry workers are intimidating tourists trying to be fleeced for the privilege of getting to the world heritage site.

And I think: when will our industrial relations ever grow up? When will we be able to conduct employer/employee relations in something resembling a grown-up fashion?

But then I think that, while things have come to a pretty sorry pass in this country right now, they're nothing like what the US once went through. We might be at each other's throats, but we're not exactly blowing each other up. With time comes maturity. I suppose we just have to wait. Maybe 30 or 40 years.