Reid - United we stand : a history of Britains trade unions

PART ONE
The 1770s to the 1820s

PART TWO
The 1820s to the 1870s

PART THREE
The 1870s to the 1920s

PART FOUR
The 1920s to the 1970s

Most previous discussions of the history of trade unions in Britain have portrayed a unitary figure of the working class in either a heroic or a sinister light, implying that its members came from somewhere different from the rest of the population and may indeed have been not quite human. What follows in this book has been informed instead by the alternative idea of working people who were an integral part of the society in which they lived. Each of the main chapters therefore begins with an individual life story, subject to its own combination of local influences and its own unanticipated twists and turns of events. Similarly, the analysis of patterns of collective behaviour assumes that groups in different occupations and different parts of the country had their own distinctive experiences, attitudes and expectations. British trade unionists were not a uniform army marching towards a single goal under a disciplined leadership, but rather a cross-section of the working population attempting to meet their immediate needs by whatever means lay at hand, and consequently acting in different ways and at different times.

Within this diversity it is possible, at the risk of some oversimplification, to identify three main types of occupational experience, each producing its own outlook and form of organization. The first of these types consists of those workers mainly concerned with assembling products from a number of components, for example in the medieval making of clothes, in the early-modern printing of books or in the modern building of machinery. Such workers needed an accurate idea of the final product, consequently tending to be better able to read plans and instructions, and generally better educated. They usually lived in long-settled urban areas and were well paid and individually mobile. On this basis they were able to support their own welfare funds and a distinctive type of organization usually referred to as craft unionism, confident of looking after most of its members interests without any outside assistance. In some contrast, the second type consists of workers who were mainly concerned with processing a single raw material through a variety of stages, for example in the mining of minerals, in the smelting of metals or in the spinning of textile thread. These workers needed only a mastery of the particular process for which they were responsible, picked up their skills and gained seniority by observation on the job and could be replaced relatively easily by anyone else who had the opportunity to observe them. They usually lived in concentrations of recent housing around the plant in which they worked, were relatively poorly paid and found it more difficult to move between employers. They therefore found it hard to maintain welfare funds and permanent trade unions, giving rise to a distinctive type of organization which in this survey will be called seniority unionism, usually dependent on government intervention to achieve anything lasting. The third main type consists of workers who performed general manual labouring tasks, basically variations on fetching and carrying on roads and quaysides, or inside other workplaces. These workers needed only to be strong, willing and minimally observant, and were not only easy to replace but often employed on very short-term contracts, by the day or even by the hour. They were usually recent migrants from the countryside, receiving the lowest pay and living in the worst housing. This highly vulnerable situation gave rise to a distinctive type of organization which gradually evolved into what here will be called federal unionism, always dependent on outside assistance either from better-off sympathizers or from massive national organizations.

Given this view of trade unionism as a response to occupational circumstances, it would seem reasonable to expect significant continuities within each of the types outlined. And indeed, although there was also some adaptation to changing times, much of the outlook and behaviour of engineers, coal miners or transport workers in the 1970s would have been quite familiar to their forerunners in the 1870s or even in the 1770s. The engineers and other craft unions mainly wanted to be unimpeded in looking after their own affairs, which gave them a strong commitment to what has come to be known as a voluntarist system of industrial relations, in which employers and employees were largely left to sort out their differences among themselves. In contrast, the coal miners and other seniority unions constantly found themselves weaker than they would have liked in such free collective bargaining and so tended to press for measures of government intervention in their industries, culminating in the nationalizations of the 1940s. The transport workers and other federal unions were equally in need of outside support but were not usually concentrated in single industries, so their pressure tended to be for government regulation of the national labour market to secure reasonable minimum standards of working hours and wages. Partly because of this diversity of aims, and partly because the organizations of the assembly workers were older and stronger, it was their model of voluntarism which became the basic underpinning of wider labour politics in Britain. Indeed, even the forms of state intervention favoured among the process and general workers can be seen as having a marked voluntarist quality, for they were the result of pressure from particular unions rather than of coherent central planning, and they varied between cases according to government assessments of the balance of forces in particular industries at particular points in time. Thus it will be less surprising to find that well into the twentieth century the mainstream of trade-union involvement in politics in Britain was connected not with socialism but with forms of progressive liberalism.