Organised Labour

An Introduction to Trade Unionism

G. D. H. Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429811104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1924. This book provides a balanced picture of Trade Unionism as it was in the 1920s. The study opens with a brief outline of Trade Union history, before examining Trade Unions' structure, its place in government, and the internal issues that Trade Unions faced. Organised Labour will be of great interest to students and scholars of labour and political history.

ORGANISED LABOUR

PART I

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

THIS book does not purport to be a history of Trade Unionism, or to describe the gradual emergence during the nineteenth century of an organised working-class movement for defence and aggression against the dominant capitalist system. That history has been written down elsewhere, and every one who desires to understand Trade Unionism as it is ought to study the manner and the phases of its growth. Mr. and Mrs. Webb’s “History of Trade Unionism,” which the authors have revised and brought up to 1921 since the previous version of this book of mine appeared, is still the indispensable basis of such a study. To it I refer the reader who realises that he cannot hope to understand the present without knowledge of the past.¹

But, since this historical background is indispensable, I must, in this opening chapter, without attempting to write down the history of the Trade Union movement, at least indicate for reference the chief phases of its growth. This chapter is meant, not to save any one the need of studying the history for himself, but to provide certain clues to that study, and to indicate briefly the main turning-points in the career of the movement.

Trade Unions are not a recent growth. They were common in the eighteenth century, long before the period of rapid technical development which is called “the Industrial Revolution.” They can be traced back beyond the eighteenth century, and analogies to them can be found, not, indeed, in the mediasval Gilds, but in many fraternities of journeymen which existed under the Gild system, and often in opposition to the Gild organisation controlled by the masters, and becoming already oligarchic and capitalistic as the Gild system decayed.

But Trade Unionism, in the sense in which we understand the term, was really born in the troublous days of the French Wars and the Industrial Revolution. The earlier journeymen’s societies were mostly short-lived, or were absorbed into, and subordinated to, the official Gild organisation, still supposed to rest on the solidarity of interest and outlook between master and journeyman. Even the Trade Unions of the eighteenth century were hardly Trade Unions in the modern sense, though they called strikes on occasion, and in many cases secured recognition from the masters, and negotiated price-lists and collective agreements on behalf of their members. They lacked, what is an essential element in the rise of Trade Unionism as an organised movement, a sense of class solidarity overpassing sectional boundaries, and manifesting its power in a tendency for Union, or federation, to pass beyond the limits of a single trade and to embrace many different types of workers, all animated by a common idea.

In other words, before the Industrial Revolution there were Trade Unions, but there was no Trade Union Movement, and no common impulse to create a movement. That impulse came with the miseries and disorders, the increase of class-antagonisms, the stirring of new ideas, which accompanied the revolutionary wars after 1789 and the use of steam-power and the factory system. For the first time political and industrial ideas began powerfully to interact; the struggle for parliamentary reform became inextricably interwoven with the desperate fight of miners and factory operatives against the oppression of the new industrial order. Political reformers began, as Cobbett began very definitely in 1816, to appeal to the working masses; workmen began to think politically and to apply their political thinking to their own industrial conditions. The mass of the miners and the textile operatives were, indeed, too poor and too miserable to get much chance of thinking clearly. But the men of the older crafts—tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, millwrights, and many more—were in a better position to drink in the new gospels of the time, and to react against the slavery which they saw around them. Thomas Hardy, of the London Corresponding Society, was a shoemaker; Francis Place, a tailor; Samuel Bamford, a weaver. The handloom-weavers, indeed, displaced rapidly from their old status and pride of craft by the new machines, were a typical and extreme case of men, once fairly prosperous and respected, driven into revolt by the tyranny of the new wealth-creating machine which brought to them only grinding poverty and degradation.

In this atmosphere of violent economic upheaval modern Trade Unionism was born. The old-fashioned Trade Club, half a rudimentary friendly society and half a journeymen’s fraternity, began to give place to the Trade Union, formed primarily as a fighting organisation for the protection of economic interests. The French Revolution, and the Terror following it, had scared the governing classes, in Great Britain as elsewhere, into a mood of savage and irrational repressiveness. Every working-class organisation, no matter how moderate its purpose might be, was suspected of violent revolutionary designs. Police spies permeated all the factory districts, often inciting the workers to the acts of violence they were supposed to prevent. Working-class combination, tolerated hitherto and even encouraged by many of the masters as a convenient means of settling terms of employment, was now repressed with the full force of the Government. In 1799 and 1800 were passed laws making all forms of industrial combination illegal. Political societies among the workers were suppressed with still greater violence.

The Combination Acts remained in the Statute Book until 1824, by which time the renewed fears of revolution, excited by the working-class movements following the Peace of 1815, had begun to subside. During this quarter of a century, many Trade Unions continued to exist, and many more were founded, only to be broken up or speedily dissolved. The Combination Acts could not be so rigidly and universally enforced as to prevent all Trade Union activity, and the rigours of persecution were greater in the new factory and mining districts than among the craftsmen of the older towns. But any Union was liable to dissolution at any moment, and every man who was active in Trade Union organisation might at any time find himself denounced and imprisoned, or even transported. Stable organisation and open combination on any considerable scale were impossible under such conditions.

When at length, in 1824, Radical agitation, and the ingenuity of Francis Place and Joseph Hume, secured the repeal of the Combination Acts, there was an immediate outburst of Trade Unions in many trades. This led to the placing of fresh restrictions on Trade Union liberty in the following year; but there was no re-enactment of the repealed laws as a whole. Trade Unions remained lawful bodies, though the law remained swift to repress those who were too eager to use the weapon of combination. Many a Trade Union leader was still to be gaoled for conspiracy or other offences under the common law.

The period of rapid growth, which began in 1824, continued for ten years, and culminated in the great Trade Union struggles of 1834. These years were a time of intense activity among the working-class Radicals. The political reform movement was gathering force for the great contest which ended in the Reform Act of 1832. Robert Owen, already ostracised by the governing classes, to whom he had made his earlier appeals, was speaking now directly to the workers, and Owenite Societies and doctrines were rapidly permeating the younger working-class leaders. Cobbett was at the height of his immense popularity. Hodgskin, Thompson, and other writers were developing, on a basis of inverted Ricardian economics, a theoretical basis for working-class economic claims. Co-operative Societies, intended to undertake co-operative production and lead to co-operative communities on the Owenite model, were being founded in many towns. All these, and other streams of influence, combined to create among the workers a new solidarity and a new consciousness of rights and claims. And when, in 1832, the Whigs threw over their working-class allies, and the Whig Reform Act left the workers without any share in political power, it was natural that the rejected of politics should take up their other weapon of industrial organisation, and try to strike with it a blow in support of their claims to social equality.

The sensational rise of Trade Unionism between 1832 and 1834 was the sequel to working-class disillusionment over political reform. The Potters’ Union, the Builders’ Union, the Spinners’ Union, and many others enrolled members in thousands. And the talk, heard more than once before, but only now issuing in a popular movement, of a “General Union” to embrace all trades and link up all workers of every trade and calling in a single body, suddenly took shape in the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, which in a few weeks enrolled, it is said, a million members. These were not, of course, all new recruits; for the “Grand National” was largely taking over existing small societies of workers in particular trades. But its growth was astounding, even when allowance is made for this.

The fall, as rapid as its growth, of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union must be studied in the histories. Here, I can say only that behind its imposing façade was no real strength or stability. Before it had time to sort out the members it enrolled, it was engaged in half a dozen serious conflicts with bodies of employers determined to crush this new menace to capitalism before it had a chance of arraying its forces in order of battle. The Government joined in the work of destroying it, reviving in the sentence passed on the Dorchester Labourers the brutalities of pre-Reform Act times. By the end of 1834, “the Trades Union” had vanished, leaving behind it only an increased number of local Trade Clubs and a few national Trade Unions on a craft basis which held together after the general collapse. The lock-out and the “document”¹ had forced the working class to its knees.

But, while it lasted, the movement of the ’thirties was a great seeding-time of working-class aspirations, still for the most part to be harvested. The Builders’ Union and the “Grand National” did not restrict their aspirations to shortening the long working day or raising the low weekly wage. Inspired by Robert Owen and his followers, they dreamed of superseding capitalism altogether, and replacing the competitive system by a system of workers’ co-operation and self-employment. The Builders started a National Guild: other groups started, through their Trade Unions, producing societies, and tried to exchange their products mutually without the intervention of master or merchant. Socialism was conceived as an immediate thing, to be achieved by one great revolutionary effort. With the “Grand National” and the other great Unions perished these hopes. The producers’ societies died, or languished. Trade Unionism was reduced to impotence; and the main stream of working-class activity passed back to the political agitation which took shape in the Chartist Movement. The Owenites, however, continued their work on a less ambitious scale, and gave birth, almost against their will, to the modern consumers’ Co-operative Movement. The Rochdale Pioneers, seeking to lay the foundations for an Owenite community, started their shop in 1844.

Not till the Chartist wave had begun to ebb did Trade Union organisation revive on a national scale. The surviving Trade Unions had, indeed, been slowly consolidating their position; but the new unionism of the Victorian age really emerged with the foundation, in 1850–51, of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, which was the model for a long series of powerful craft unions formed during the next twenty years. The new unionism of 1850 was very different from the old. All thought of revolutionary activity was put aside; and, while the new Unions were prepared to fight hard battles on occasion in defence of the rights of combination and collective bargaining, they sought to ensure stability and strength by acting as friendly societies no less than as Trade Unions. High rates of contributions and benefits gave the members a stake in the organisation, and made for conservatism in action. The new policy also resulted in the almost complete exclusion from the Unions of those who were less skilled or paid less than a living wage; for only the better paid workers could afford to pay the high contributions required. Trade Unionism ceased to aim at including all the workers. Its leaders openly dismissed the less skilled grades as incapable of stable organisation. The movement, save for a few exceptions, shrank up into a narrow protective organisation of a limited number of skilled crafts, making no challenge to the capitalist order of society, and seeking only, by negotiation and rare use of the strike weapon, to improve the wages and conditions of its own members.

This, indeed, was not true without reserve, or of all trades. The rise of new organisations in the ’sixties among the miners and textile operatives brought into the movement groups among which the division between skilled and unskilled was less clear and sharp than among metal workers, wood workers and workers in brick and stone. Mining and textile Trade Unionism, moreover, at least among the newly organised sections, both stood pre-eminently for political agitation, with the object of securing protective laws. Their influence modified the narrow outlook of the “Amalgamated Societies,” but did not prevent it from giving to Trade Unionism its predominant character.

It was this narrow craft unionism of the Amalgamated Societies, aided by the miners and the cotton operatives, that fought, with both power and subtlety, the struggle for legal recognition in the late ’sixties and early ’seventies. An accumulation of adverse legal decisions, menacing both the right to strike and the security of Trade Union funds, forced the Trade Unions into political agitation in their own defence. Under the leadership of the “Junta,” the heads of the great craft Unions, they fought this battle not, save in an isolated case or two, by putting up candidates for Parliament, but by lobbying, giving evidence before Royal Commissions, and the indirect use of political pressure. They emerged triumphant, having secured both the legal security of Trade Union funds and a much fuller recognition of the right to strike and of peaceful picketing.

This period of conflict brought into being, mainly as an instrument for use in the struggle, a central organisation for the Trade Union movement as a whole. There had long been, in some of the larger towns, local Trades Councils linking up the branches of the various Trade Unions and the purely local societies in the district. Many of these led a discontinuous existence, arising as joint “trades movements” in support of some local strike, dying out in periods of tranquillity, and arising again on a recurrence of immediate need. But by the late ’sixties a number of them had become permanent bodies, and it was to the initiative of these Trades Councils that the creation of the Trades Union Congress was mainly due. But not till, at the height of the legal struggle, the leaders of the Amalgamated Societies decided to use the Congress as an instrument of agitation did it rise to importance or attain to a really representative character.

There had been, since 1834, other attempts to unite the Trade Unions into a single body for common action on matters of general concern. But it needed the crises of the late ’sixties to bring success. The political agitation leading to the Reform Act of 1867, which for the first time enfranchised the urban workers, and the contest of Trade Unionism with the law, changed the situation, and provided the basis for united working-class organisation. Labour representation in Parliament began with the return of two miners’ leaders in 1874; but these and their successors allied themselves with the Liberals. It took another twenty-five years to bring the Labour Party into being.

Having achieved their limited purpose of securing legal recognition, the leaders of the Amalgamated Societies were quite content, and Trade Unionism fell back into the old grooves. The rise of the Socialist Movement from 1880 onwards found the Union leaders actively hostile, and made in the early years little or no impression on the established societies. But, indirectly, Socialism was destined before long to revolutionise the Trade Union movement. The Socialists, inspired by the idea of class-solidarity, could not rest content with a movement which virtually excluded from participation all the less skilled and worse paid members of the working class. Young workers, inspired by Socialist ideas, went outside the established Unions, and began to organise new Trade Unions, catering directly for the excluded sections. Unions of dockers, seamen, general railway workers, gasworkers and general labourers sprang into existence, and came forward with demands for higher wages, improved conditions, and recognition of the right to combine. The great Dock Strike of 1889 was the expression of this new movement.

Trade Union membership went up by leaps and bounds, and strike followed strike in rapid succession. There were notable victories; but the leaders of the older Unions shook their heads, and affirmed again that no stable combination was possible on the new lines. Friendly benefits and high contributions seemed to them the necessary cement of union; whereas the new Trade Unions were organised as fighting bodies, with low rates of contribution and few or no benefits save in case of strike or lockout. The wave of the “New Unionism” reached its crest in 1892.

To some extent the old leaders were right; for after 1892 began a decline. The Seamen’s Union vanished altogether. The Dockers’ Union sank from 23,000 to 9,000; the Gasworkers’ from 36,000 to 23,000. But the “New Unionism” had come to stay, and, when the wave receded, it left a different and a far wider Trade Unionism behind. There were not many more than half-a-million Trade Unionists in 1880; there were never less than 1,400,000 after 1892. The total membership had more than doubled, and the new recruits included a large reinforcement from the less skilled and worse paid grades.

When the wave of industrial unrest subsided, the new movement took on a political shape. The period of unrest had given the Socialists a strong foothold in the Trade Union world. They now began to work energetically for the creation of a Trade Union political party. The centre of gravity shifted from the Marxian Social Democratic Federation, the pioneer body of British Socialism, to the less dogmatic Independent Labour Party, founded in 1893 mainly by the “New Unionist” leaders. And it was mainly the pressure of the I.L.P. that finally, in 1899, pushed the reluctant Trades Union Congress into the formation of a working-class political party. The Labour Representation Committee, which became the Labour Party in 1906, was formed in 1900 as the result of a Trades Union Congress decision.

The rise of the “New Unionism” did not leave the older Trade Unions unaffected. In them also the new ideas made headway, and the Trade Union movement gradually consolidated itself on a new basis. The “Old Unionism” in turn reacted on the new. The newer Unions lost much of their militancy, and, in part, assimilated themselves to the older bodies, though the necessity of keeping contributions low prevented them from developing large friendly benefits of the type paid by the “Amalgamated Societies” of skilled workers. The fusion of attitude between the two kinds of societies is not, even now, complete; but they have long reached the stage of ready collaboration on general issues, and the rise of new societies of intermediate types has also blurred the distinction.

From the early ’nineties up to about 1910, although the industrial movement made some progress in both members and organisation, the chief developments were in the sphere of political action. About 1910, however, disappointment with the results of political action and the failure of wages to keep pace with rising prices, led to the great movement of industrial unrest and developing indus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Note on Books
• Part I.—Historical Introduction
• PART II.—The Structure of Trade Unionism
• Part III.—The Government of Trade Unionism
• Part IV.—Internal Trade Union Problems
• Part V.—Trade Unions at Work
• Part VI.—Trade Unionism and the State
• Statistical Appendices
• Index