In their more than two centuries of history the British trade unions have seen it all before. In every generation the same situations, with variations, have arisen and been dealt with in much the same way. Alternatively, trade union law has been relaxed and then tightened up again; governments and employers have tried to suppress them; they have sometimes depended on their own efforts and at others on those of one or other of the political parties, Tory, Liberal. Labour; their membership has grown enormously over the years but with periodic setbacks, and they have never got much beyond organising half the total wage and salary earners.
Laws fixing wages are centuries old and into the eighteenth century workers were sometimes able to petition the Justices of the Peace about higher wages with some success. An account of this is given in the TUC pamphlet Two Centuries of Trade Unions:
"Parliament, still largely controlled by landowners who disliked the “new rich” manufacturers, not only heeded their petitions, but from time to time ordered wages to be raised, limited new processes and even recommended employers to keep men at work during slack periods. This sympathetic response was short-lived. Industrial development moved so quickly that it became impossible for the old machinery of wage-regulation to cope with the rate of change even if it had been fully restored. The unreformed Parliament, too, showed that it appreciated the interests of the new industrialists and of the landowners, now turned manufacturer. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it had become clear that for the redress of their grievances the members had to rely on themselves alone."
The employers naturally resisted the unions and Parliament passed a scries of Acts prohibiting them. Then in 1799 and 1800, fearful that British workers might be influenced by “revolutionary” ideas from France the Combination Laws were passed making all workers’ organisations concerned with wages “illegal”, under threat of savage penalties. In spite of all this the unions managed to survive and some employers found themselves compelled to have dealings with them.
By 1824 ruling class fears of “revolution” had subsided and Parliament was induced to repeal the Combination Laws. One of the mistaken beliefs of those who pushed repeal through was that, when Unions became legal, most workers would accept the view of economists that trade union action was powerless against market conditions and would therefore leave the unions. But repeal in 1824 was followed by a wave of strikes, helped by a trade boom. In 1825 a new Act took back some, but not all of the concessions of the 1824 Act.
Then the boom collapsed and employers and the government mounted a concerted attack on the unions.
As early as 1830, Peel, the retiring Tory Home Secretary, had pointed out to the incoming Whig, Lord Melbourne, that Trade Unions were a grave danger. In 1832 the Duke of Wellington, as Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, had complained of these dangerous bodies, saying (quite untruly) that half the labourers in the country were Unionists. A closely reasoned report of Nassau Senior, the once famous Whig economist, reinforced the Tory Duke’s appeal and urged the total suppression of the Trade Unions. The Government was merely awaiting a convenient time to strike.(The Common People, Cole and Postgate, p267.)
This was to result in the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Six farm labourers from the Dorset village of Tolpuddle were charged with administering an oath to workers intending to join Robert Owen’s Grand National Consolidated Union. They were not even charged with striking, but were sentenced in 1834 to the savage punishment of seven years’ transportation to the penal colony in Australia. It was a big setback for the Unions (Owen’s Grand National was one of the casualties) but they did not disappear and resumed their growth when trade revived.
Unions are always less effective in trade depressions and always lose membership. They lost over three million members between 1920 and 1926 (from 8,337,000 to 5,219,000) and possibly two million members in the present depression. They were, however, very different organisations in the first half of the 19th century. Unlike the modern permanent bodies the early unions often had only a short existence. Marx and Engels were interested observers of the trade union scene and it is instructive to see how their views changed as unions developed. Writing about the position in 1844 Engels said:
The history of the Unions is a long series of defeats of the working man, interrupted by a few isolated victories. All these efforts naturally cannot alter the economic law according to which wages are determined by the relation between supply and demand in the labour-market. Hence, the Unions remain powerless against all great forces which influence the relation. In a commercial crisis the Union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly, and in a time of considerable increase in the demand for labour, it cannot fix the rate of wages higher than would be reached spontaneously by the competition of the capitalists among themselves.(The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Progress Publishers edition, pages 253-4). Marx put a similar view in Wage Labour and Capital (1849).
Marx and Engels based their pessimistic view on the belief that in a depression, with the unemployed competing for jobs, nothing could prevent wages falling. But when, in 1892, Engels wrote a new preface to his book, surveying the changes that had occurred in the intervening half-century, he noted: “the remarkable improvement in the condition of the workers in the great Trade Unions". The change was brought about by the ability of a well-organised union to prevent, or at least curb, the competition of the unemployed from depressing wages. Helped by trade union unemployment benefit, unemployed members did not offer to take jobs at less than the union rate. The change was illustrated by what happened in the Great Depression. Industrial Relations, published by HMSO in 1961, had this to say:
A period of trade depression followed the year 1875 and lasted almost twenty years. During this period Trade Unionism lost some of its strength. Strikes were common and were almost invariably unsuccessful (Page 6).
This is correct, but misleading. If, during the depression, unions made claims for a wage increase and did not succeed, it would be registered by the Government Department concerned as an unsuccessful strike. But it happened that prices were gradually falling: in twenty years a fall of 28 per cent, so that though the average of all money rates rose by only 5 per cent, there was an increase of real wages of over 40 per cent in twenty years.
But wages did not take the same course in 1920-21. Following the Government’s decision to reverse war-time inflation prices were brought down, not over twenty years, but suddenly and drastically (a fall of 34 per cent in eighteen months) and wages went down by almost the same percentage. With such a drastic cut in company income there could be no question of employers continuing wages at the old level, let alone raising them.
Prices continued to fall after 1922, though more slowly, and wages had stabilised by 1925, in which year the Government decided to revert to the pre-war gold standard. In 1926 the General Strike took place, when some two million workers stopped work for nine days in support of the miners. The Baldwin government had given a nine-months subsidy to the coal owners, who were in financial difficulties over falling sales and falling prices, and in the meantime a Commission was studying the coal industry. Like other workers the miners had had to put up with big reductions of pay since 1920 during the fall of the cost of living, but with the end of the subsidy the coal owners asked for a further wage reduction and some increase in the hours of work. The miners stayed out for another five months but eventually had to admit defeat.
The General Strike had a sequel in the passing of the 1927 Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act. remarkably like the restrictive trade union laws of the Thatcher Government. It declared illegal any strike which had any object other than, or in addition to, the furtherance of a trade dispute “within the trade or industry”, in which the strikers were engaged and also illegal if it was designed or calculated to coerce the government, either directly or by inflicting hardship on the community. The Act restricted picketing, compelled Civil Service unions (including the Post Office unions) to sever their affiliation to the TUC and Labour Party and international trade union organisations. It replaced the existing law, which required a union member who did not wish to pay political levy to contract out, by requiring those who wished to pay to contract in (this to hit at Labour Party funds). It also compelled Local Authorities to abandon closed shop agreements with the unions. The 1927 Act was repealed by the Labour Government in 1946 and the Labour Party is pledged to repeal the measures introduced by the Thatcher government.
While union membership has grown more or less continuously the number of unions has been steadily reduced by amalgamation. The 1,576,000 trade unionists in 1892 were in 1,233 unions. The number fell to 1,024 in 1938 and to a present figure of about 500. The extent to which unions get involved in strikes depends of course on external factors, but the evidence suggests that strikes occur less frequently and do not last as long as they used to. In the six years 1897-1902 the average annual loss of working days through strikes was 6,487.000 with a trade union membership of about 1,750,000. In the six years 1921-1926 with a membership of about six million the average annual loss of working days was over 49 million. In the six years 1977-1982 the average number of days lost per annum was just over 12 million; out of a membership double that of 1921-1926 and eight times that of 1892-1902.
Looking back over the long history of the unions prompts the questions, where are they going?; and indeed, whether they are going anywhere. It was an issue raised by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in their History of Trade Unions. In the first edition in 1894 they defined a trade union as a “continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment”. In later editions they altered “of their employment” to “of their working lives”. They gave as reasons for the change that the first wording implied “that trade unions have always contemplated a perpetual continuance of the Capitalist or wage-system” and. on second thoughts, the Webbs accepted that “trade unions have, at various dates during the past century at any rate, had aspirations towards a revolutionary change in social and economic relations”. In the present trade unions there is little evidence of development of aspirations towards a revolutionary change in society. They still accept capitalism.
Edgar Hardcastle
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