TRADE UNIONS, ARE THEY NECESSARY?

TRADE UNIONS, ARE THEY NECESSARY?

Last night's research started out as being something that would perhaps explain why the Government and the Trade Union movement have such a stormy relationship and as a comment about why the West Minster Government is once again, in the same old way, trying to limit what the unions can do. But it became so interesting I was up till nothing made any sense any more at about 1.00am this morning. So much just clicked into place.

You are all probably a lot more clever than I, however, here it is and I welcome all feedback.

The Trade Unions did not come from nowhere.

Before the Industrial Revolution started each district in the UK had Trade and Craft Guilds that protected, to a certain extent, pay and conditions for traders, weavers, potters, furniture makers, silver smiths etc. To a certain extent, the move from a mainly Rural, Agrarian economy to an economy based on Industrial Production in Factories, Textile Mills and Mines eroded the influence of the Trade Guilds as not really being relevant anymore.

Licences to trade in markets and festivals are really laws that came into effect at the time Trade and Craft Guilds were one of the main protections of workers rights and I believe some other of the common laws in effect at that time are still in force today.

If we look, on the surface, at what is going on in our present age, with the growing pains of the technological, environmental, ecological, scientific, philosophical revolution that we are in the process of creating there are some comparisons that can be made with what happened at the end of the Seventeenth, beginning of the Eighteenth Century.

The advancement of the Industrial Revolution caused great hardship. The owners of the factories, mills, mines etc. had all the power and wealth. They, also, were the governing class of the UK. The Government at this time in the 1790s was elected by 3% of the adult population of the UK.

At the same time the value of goods created by all the handcraft industries, including weaving, furniture making, small hand dug mines, metal crafts, etc. started to lessen as the Factories, Mills and Deep Mines with their machines took over.

Change has always been difficult. The owners of industry made the most of the new technology and workers suffered extreme hardship during this period. Long working hours in very inhuman conditions for men, women and children. The workers worked for the owners for extremely low pay, some paying over their meagre wages in the company shop to obtain food, clothes, etc., in order to survive. Nobody in the Western world today would find it easy to live in or accept the conditions workers had to live under during this period. Yet does it not still happen in the developing markets in Asia and Africa?

However, the workforce was not as passive as it would seem, they had the Trade and Craft Guilds in their background. There were a number of trade disputes during the Eighteenth Century where workers came together to resolve one-off problems at work.

The Factory Owners, Government and the Media were hostile to any “combination” of workers to defend their rights. The Combination Acts, passed in 1799 and 1800 (brought into effect by the Whig government) made any sort of strike action illegal. Striking was punishable with up to three months' imprisonment or two months' hard labour.

The Peterloo Massacre 16th August 1819

On 16th August 1819, a meeting of peaceful campaigners for parliamentary reform was broken up by the Manchester Yeomanry, a local force of volunteer soldiers. Between 10 and 20 people were killed and hundreds more injured in what quickly became known as the Peterloo Massacre.

Although estimates differ, it seems likely that around 100,000 people attended the meeting at St. Peter's Fields in Manchester on a sunny August day. Men, women and children came not only from the local area but from the whole of the northwest some walking nearly 30 miles to attend.

Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, increasing numbers of working people in industrialising yet disenfranchised areas like Manchester had become involved in the movement for reform. Under the influence of men like Henry Hunt and the journalist William Cobbett, they began to campaign for universal suffrage.

Despite the seriousness of the cause, there was a party atmosphere as groups of men, women and children dressed in their best Sunday clothes, marched towards Manchester. The procession was accompanied by bands playing music and people dancing alongside. In many towns the march was practised many weeks before to ensure that everybody could arrive in an organised manner.

According to Magistrates, however, the crowd was not peaceful but had violent, revolutionary intentions. To them, the organised marching, banners and music were more like those of a military regiment, and the practices on local moors like those of an army drilling its recruits. They therefore planned to arrest Henry Hunt and the other speakers at the meeting and decided to send in armed forces – the only way they felt, they could get through the large crowd.

From the Government of the day, came an official sanction of the Magistates' and the Yeomanry's actions, and the passing of the six acts, a paranoid legal crackdown on the freedoms of the public, and press. Among this new legislation was the requirement for any public meeting on church or state matters of more than 50 people to obtain the permission of the Sheriff or Magistrate and the toughening of the laws that prevented the publication of blasphemous or seditious material. Many braved the Six Acts, however, to express their anger in print. Percy Bysshe Shelley, on hearing of the news of the massacre while in Italy, called for an immediate response. His poem “the Masque of Anarchy,” encourages Reformers to “rise like lions after slumber in unvanquishable number,” (Stanza 38). He sent the poem to Leigh Hunt in London, who cautiously refrained from publishing it. The Satirist William Hone had no such qualms. His “Political House that Jack Built” (1819), illustrated by caricaturist Cruikshank, neatly sums up the Reformers' grievances in his typically irreverent manner. The piece was widely popular reflecting both the extent of the anger over Peterloo and the cleverness of using a well-known nursery rhyme to make a serious message widely accessible. Radical propaganda often veered between respectability and audacious humour, the latter, of course, being much harder to prosecute in court for fear of provoking hilarity.

Peterloo remains a key moment in the history of the suffrage movement, less for the initial success of the meeting, than for the way it allowed the Reformers to gain the moral high ground. It was increasingly obvious that the government could only counter dissent with oppression, while the chorus of angry voices only rose following outrages such as Peterloo.

The Combination Acts were repealed in 1824 and 1825.

The Tolpuddle Martyrs

Labour unrest reached new heights during the 1830s, and the Government responded with draconian measures designed to prevent workers getting together and forming Trade Unions. In March 1834 six agricultural workers got together and formed a Trade Union in the Dorsetshire village of Tolpuddle. They were arrested and found guilty of “administering illegal oaths” in a show trial. Their sentence of deportation to Australia for seven years led to a mass campaign. This mass demonstration led to the sentences of the six workers being dropped. The harsh treatment of the “Tolpuddle Martyrs” did for a brief period slow down the growth of the unions, however, in the improved economic conditions of the 1850s and 1860s membership of Trade Unions grew from 100,000 to around 1 million by 1874.

A Brief Outline of The Trade Union Movement 1870-1926

The 1871 Trade Union Act (brought into effect by the Liberal Government led by Gladstone), recognised unions as legal entities entitled to protection under the Law. However, it was only in 1875 that it was legal for Trade Unions to take effective strike action by picketing (stopping entry and exit from the site where the strike is taking place), Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875.

Engineers, miners and agricultural workers formed new national or regional organisations. The Trades Union Congress (TUC), a national forum for co-ordinating Trade Union demands, was founded in Manchester in 1868.

The economic slump of the late 1870s and 1880s brought new challenges. Labour leaders such as Thomas Mann, one of the chief organisers of the successful London Dock Strike 1889, argued that the Trade Union movement needed to become far more open and inclusive. “New Unionism” reached out to the many unskilled workers in Britain who lacked union representation. The first women's trade societies started to come together during this period. The strike by female workers at the Bryant & May Match Factory in the East End of London in1888 highlighted the expansion of Trade Union activity in the UK.

By the early Twentieth Century, Trade Unions were larger and more influential than ever before. After the formation of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1893 the Trade Union movement developed a close relationship with the political left. This bond was strengthened by the Taff Vale Case (1900-1901), in which the House of Lords supported the right of the Taff Vale Railway Company to sue members of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants for striking in 1900.

The Labour party grew from the labour and Trade Union movement.

The General Strike of 1926

The 1926 General Strike in the United Kingdom was a general strike that lasted 9 days from 4 May 1926 to 13 May 1926. It was called by The General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in an apparently unsuccessful attempt to force the British Government to act to prevent wage reduction and worsening conditions for 800,000 locked-out coal miners. Some 1.7 million workers went out, especially in transport and heavy industry. The government was prepared and enlisted middle class volunteers to maintain essential services. There was little violence and the TUC gave up in defeat. In the long run, apart from making the government think, there was little impact on Trade Union activity or industrial relations.

When researching the General Strike of 1926 I came across quite a few similiarities between the actions taken then and similar actions taken today:

  • Then: Mine owners wanted to maintain profits even during times of economic instability, which often took the form of wage reductions for the miners in their employ. Coupled with the prospect of longer working hours, the industry was thrown into dissaray. The miners' pay had gone down from £6.00 to £3.90 in the space of seven years.

  • Now: Corporations, Governments in order to maintain and increase profits/reduce deficits even during times of economic instability, cut work forces, keep wages low and use any feasible method to keep productivity going and efficient (Austerity!!!), capitalism. 

  • Then: The leaders of the Labour Party were scared of revolutionary elements within the union movement and damage association with them would do to the party's newly established reputation as a party of government and were unhappy about the proposed general strike. During the next two days frantic efforts were made to reach an agreement with the government and the mining industry representatives.

  • Now: The Labour Party, through fear, because of recent past bad press, mistakes made, and the apparent wipeout at the 2015 General Election apear to be going against some of their founding principles and agreeing with some extremely severe Government policy. 

  • Then: The Government had prepared for the strike over the nine months in which it had provided a subsidy, creating organisations such as the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, and did whatever it could to keep the country moving. It rallied support by emphasising the revolutionary nature of the strikers. The armed forces and volunteers helped maintain basic services. The Government's Emergency Powers Act – an Act to maintain essential supplies – had been passed in 1920.

  • Now: The Government appears to have used news media as propaganda demonising various groups in society, causing divisions where there were none, and through negative media enforcement making extremely harsh, divisive policies appear reasonable. The Government has also, in recent past, brought in the army and public volunteers to keep the country going during a strike. For example the Petrol Duty strikes.

The General Strike of 1926 failed because the TUC were insecure about the effect it was having and gave up just as the strike was becoming successful. They were fearful of Government reprisals. Stanley Baldwin called the strike illegal and used propaganda to enforce the Government's point of view. 

Aftermath of the Conflict

The miners maintained resistance for a few months before being forced by their own economic needs to return to the mines. By the end of November most miners were back at work. However, many remained unemployed for many years. Those that were employed were forced to accept longer hours, decreased wages and district wage agreements. The strikers felt as though they had achieved nothing.

The effect on the coal-mining industry was profound. By the late 1930s employment in mining had fallen by more than one-third from its pre-strike peak of 1.2 million miners. But productivity had rebounded from 200 tons produced per miner to 300 tons by the outbreak of the Second World War. The split between miners that resulted from Spencerism, and the agreement of the Nottinghamshire miners to return to work against the policy of the Miners Federation of Great Britain divided the coal miners as a national bargaining force and was only resolved by the establishment of the National Union of Mineworkers.

In some mining areas, strikebreakers were ostracised in their communities for the rest of their lives, and some were still being referred to as scabs at the time of the 1984-1985 strike.

The Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act of 1927, among other things forbade sympathetic strikes and mass picketing.

It was the only General Strike in British History, for Ernest Bevin – who co-ordinated the strike – considered it a mistake. They decided that action through political parties was a better solution.

The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 saw the Trade Unions become instrumental in keeping the country. Joint Production Committees in every workplace accepted the vital role of workers' representative bodies for the first time. The herculean struggle against Facism during the 1930s was presented as a fight for democracy.

In 1945 the Labour Party won a massive majority and proceeded to introduce the National Health Service, public ownership of the railways, coal, gas and electricity, free education and fairer National Insurance, welfare and unemployment benefits. Labour's mandate was to introduce the Welfare State that would protect every person from the cradle to the grave. These were enormous gains for working people. Nationalisation was initially seen by many working people as a step forward. But the form public ownership took was bureacratic and mirrored private industry. Most nationalised concerns have never changed. The worry that capitalism could not run at a profit and still deliver proper public service.

Trade Unions stabilised and grew phenominally as part of the fabric of civil society in the long period of what was largely a post-war consensus on industrial relations from around 1947, the start of the Cold War.

Increasing problems relating to major restructuring of the UK economy saw, from the late 1960s onwards, Governments seeking to minimise the power that a Trade Union movement of between 11 and 13 million members had gained. Trade Unions fought off many attempts to cripple them. Indeed, struggles to retain free Trade Unionism dominated the period from 1968 to 1974.

In 1979 a general industrial strike of 1.5 million workers in engineering resulted in a settlement containing an agreement for a 39 hour working week that was adopted by other industries and is now the recognised “normal working week” throughout the UK.

The biggest disputes over recent times have been co-ordinated action over public sector pensions.

Although Trade Union Membership did go down between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. Membership at this point in time is beginning to rise again.

The important points to take from this history, as I see it, are that:

  • The Trade Unions are there to represent all working people of this country, they allow people to have a voice and protect the rights of working people. They provide a buffer against rampant capitalism.

  • Trade Unions, although much maligned by Government have adapted to change and do seek to represent their members effectively. In doing so, there are very often run-ins with Government policy but can I ask you, how would it be if they were not there? 

  • Although the Government never see eye to eye with the Unions, the Unions have played a very important role in the creation of a working state. 

  • We are in a period of great change at present. It is important to learn from the past. It is important for workers to fight hard to keep the rights their predecessors fought so hard for. We do have to adapt and change, however lets take the Trade Unions with us?

One important point I have noted in my research is that the UK Government has been accused of 15 violations in respect of Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, an Article it did not ratify, THE RIGHT OF ASSEMBLY as late as 2010.  What do you think? 

 

Greig K.

Regional Organiser, UNISON Scotland

9 年

Nice piece. Worth mentioning the current Conservative Government attacks via the new trade union bill. It is the biggest attack on unions since the 1980s.

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