Labor Movements and Trade Unions in the Industrial Revolution

The labor movement was one of the defining social developments of the Industrial Revolution. The new industrial working class, with its own conditions of work, its own culture, and its own political demands, organized itself into trade unions, political movements, and social organizations that challenged the power of the employers and the state. The article on labor movements and unions describes this important history in more detail.

The Origins of the Labor Movement

The labor movement had its origins in the new industrial working class created by the Industrial Revolution. The new working class, composed of men, women, and children who worked in the new factories, mines, and workshops, faced a common set of problems, including low wages, long hours, dangerous conditions, and the absence of any legal protection.

The Trade Unions

The trade union was the most important institution of the labor movement. The early trade unions were local organizations of skilled workers, often based on a particular craft or industry, and they were formed to protect the wages and conditions of their members. The article on trade unions describes the development of trade unions in more detail.

The trade unions faced strong opposition from the government and the employers. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made collective bargaining and the formation of trade unions illegal, and the trade unions were forced to operate in secret. The Combination Acts were repealed in 1824, and the trade unions were able to operate openly for the first time.

The Chartist Movement

The Chartist movement was the first mass working-class political movement in British history. The movement, which was active from 1838 to 1857, demanded the implementation of the People’s Charter, which called for universal manhood suffrage and a series of related political reforms. The article on Chartism describes the development of the movement in more detail.

The New Model Unions

The new model unions were based on particular industries rather than on particular crafts, accepted members of all skill levels, and were more centralized and more disciplined than the older unions.

The Expansion of Trade Unionism

The trade union movement expanded rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “new unionism” of the 1880s and 1890s, which was based on the organization of unskilled workers, was an important development, and it led to the formation of large unions in the docks, the railways, and other industries.

The Effects of the Labor Movement

The labor movement had important effects on the British economy, the British political system, and the British way of life. The trade unions were able to secure significant improvements in wages, hours, and conditions for their members, and they helped to establish the principle that the state had a responsibility to protect the rights of workers.

The Combination Acts and the First Trade Unions

The first combination of British workers into permanent trade unions was the subject of the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, which made collective bargaining and the formation of trade unions illegal. The Combination Acts were passed in response to the Owenite trade unionism of the 1790s, and in particular to the activities of the London Corresponding Society and the Manchester Constitutional Society, but the Acts had the unintended consequence of pushing the unions into secrecy. The repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824, in a speech by Joseph Hume of the Radical wing of the Whigs, was followed by a wave of strike action in the spring of 1824, including a strike of the cotton spinners of Lancashire that paralyzed the industry for several weeks. The Combination Act of 1825, which replaced the 1799 and 1800 Acts, allowed trade unions to exist but did not protect them from prosecution for conspiracy. The unions remained, throughout the 1820s and 1830s, local organizations of skilled workers, and the most important early unions — the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834, the Operative Cotton Spinners of 1829, the Friendly Society of Iron Founders of 1809 — were based on a particular craft or industry.

Chartism: The First Mass Working-Class Movement

The Chartist movement of 1838-1857 was the first mass working-class political movement in British history, and it was a defining moment in the development of British working-class politics. The People’s Charter, drafted in 1838 by William Lovett and the London Working Men’s Association, called for six points: universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, equal-sized constituencies, payment of MPs, annual parliamentary elections, and the abolition of the property qualification for MPs. The movement was organized at its peak in 1842, when perhaps 5 million people signed the three National Petitions, and it drew support from a wide range of working-class organizations, including the trade unions, the cooperative societies, the Owenite communities, and the political radicals. The movement’s high point was the 1842 General Strike, in which perhaps 500,000 workers walked off the job in the Staffordshire coalfield, Lancashire, the West Riding, the Potteries, and South Wales. The strike was broken by the government, the Chartist leaders were arrested or transported, and the movement gradually subsided in the late 1840s and 1850s. The five points of the Charter (apart from annual elections) were eventually adopted as law between 1867 and 1884, but not as a result of the Chartist movement.

The New Model Unions and the TUC

The 1850s and 1860s saw the development of a new kind of trade union, the “new model union,” which was organized on industrial rather than craft lines. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE), founded in 1851 under the leadership of William Allan, was the prototype; the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (1860), the Amalgamated Ironworkers’ Association (1861), and the United Society of Boilermakers and Iron Shipbuilders (1864) followed. The new model unions were based on particular industries rather than particular crafts, they accepted members of all skill levels, and they were more centralized and more disciplined than the older craft unions. The new model unions formed the core of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), founded in 1868, which became the principal coordinating body of the British labor movement. The 1871 Trade Union Act, passed by the Liberal government of William Gladstone, gave the unions legal status and protection for their funds.

The New Unionism and the 1880s Revival

The “new unionism” of the 1880s and 1890s was a major development in the British labor movement, and it marked the entry of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers into the union movement. The matchgirls’ strike of July 1888 at the Bryant and May factory in Bow, organized by Annie Besant and the Ladies’ National Repeal Association, was a key moment. The London dock strike of 1889, led by John Burns and Tom Mann and supported by the Catholic priests of the East End, was the more famous of the new union struggles: it produced the formation of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union, which by 1890 had 30,000 members. The new unionism of 1889-1890 was followed by a wave of organization in the coal mines, the cotton mills, and the railways, and by 1900 the trade union movement had perhaps 2 million members, twice the number of 1880. The new unionism is the subject of Henry Pelling’s A History of British Trade Unionism (1963) and of Eric Hobsbawm’s Worlds of Labour (1984).

The Historians’ Debate: The British Working Class

The interpretation of the British labor movement has been a major site of historical debate since the publication of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson’s book, written in the late 1950s and published in 1963, argued that the working class was not simply a structural product of industrialization but a self-conscious social and political actor, made in the period 1790-1830 by the experience of the factory, the trade union, the political radical, and the Methodist chapel. The book was an immediate success, and it shaped the agenda of social history for the next two decades. The principal critics, including Hugh Cunningham in The Challenge of Democracy (1980) and Robert Gray in The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1981), have argued that Thompson overstated the unity and the political consciousness of the working class, and that the “making” of the working class was a much longer and more uneven process. The most recent literature, including Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches (1995) and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure’s work, has tended to return to the Thompsonian view, but with a more nuanced attention to gender, region, and religion.

The International Context: The First International and the Socialist Parties

The British labor movement was closely connected to the European labor movement, and the International Workingmen’s Association (the “First International”), founded in London in 1864, was the principal international organization of the working class. The First International, with Karl Marx as one of its leading figures, organized a series of congresses in Geneva (1866), Lausanne (1867), Brussels (1868), and Basel (1869), and it was the first international organization to bring together the British trade unions with the continental socialist parties. The International split in 1872 between the Marxist and the Bakuninist wings, and it was dissolved in 1876. The successor organization, the Second International, was founded in Paris in 1889, and it brought together the mass socialist parties of the Second Industrial Revolution — the German Social Democrats (1875), the French Socialists (1905), the British Labour Party (1900), and the Russian Social Democrats (1898). The development of the mass socialist parties was the principal political consequence of the Second Industrial Revolution, and the British Labour Party, founded in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee, became one of the two major political parties in Britain by 1922.

The Post-War Settlement: The British Welfare State

The long campaign of the labor movement produced the British welfare state of the post-1945 period. The Beveridge Report of November 1942, with its “five giants” of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness, was the blueprint for the post-war settlement. The 1944 Education Act raised the school-leaving age to 15, and the 1947 National Health Service Act created the National Health Service on July 5, 1948. The 1946 National Insurance Act and the 1948 National Assistance Act created the modern social security system. The 1948 Factories Act consolidated the factory legislation of the 19th and early 20th centuries into a single statute, and the 1961 Contracts of Employment Act established the modern employment contract. The post-war settlement was the political expression of the labor movement’s long campaign, and it was the foundation of the British welfare state until the Thatcher reforms of the 1980s. The post-war settlement is the subject of Paul Addison’s The Road to 1945 (1975) and of Hugh Heclo’s Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (1974).

The Long View: 1780-2020

The British labor movement, considered over the long run, is one of the great success stories of modern political history. From the Combination Acts of 1799-1800 to the Trade Union Act of 2016, from the Luddite machine-breaking of 1811-1812 to the miners’ strike of 1984-1985, the labor movement has been the principal organized opposition to the discipline of industrial capitalism. The campaign that began in the 1830s with the Sadler Committee and the Ten Hours movement produced, by 1948, the National Health Service, the modern system of social security, the right to organize and bargain collectively, the right to strike, and the right to vote. The labor movement was not the only force in the development of the welfare state — the Fabians, the Liberals, the Christian Socialists, the trade union leaders, and the two World Wars all played important roles — but it was the most consistent. The decline of the labor movement in the post-1979 period, the subject of Andrew Adonis’s 5,000 Days (1990) and of Peter Mandler’s The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997), has been a major political event, and the question of whether the labor movement can recover its political influence is one of the open questions of British politics in the 2020s.

Key Dates in the Labor Movement

A short chronology of the principal dates in the history of the labor movement:

1799-1800 — Combination Acts make unions illegal
1811-1816 — Luddite movement
1824 — Combination Acts repealed
1830 — Swing Riots
1834 — Grand National Consolidated Trades Union
1838-1857 — Chartist movement
1842 — General Strike; 500,000 workers
1851 — Amalgamated Society of Engineers founded
1867 — Reform Act extends franchise
1868 — Trades Union Congress founded
1871 — Trade Union Act legalizes unions
1884-1885 — Miners’ Federation of Great Britain
1888-1889 — Matchgirls’ and dock strikes
1900 — Labour Representation Committee founded
1906 — Taff Vale case
1918 — Representation of the People Act
1926 — General Strike
1942 — Beveridge Report
1948 — National Health Service

For More on the Labor Movement

The articles linked below provide more detail on the development of the labor movement. The article on trade unions covers the most important institution of the labor movement. The article on Chartism covers the first mass working-class political movement. For the broader context, see the overview of the social impact of the Industrial Revolution and the overview of the Industrial Revolution.

In this section

Chartism The story of the Chartist movement, the first mass working-class political movement in British history, and its demands for universal male suffrage and political reform. Trade Unions The history of trade unions, the first workers' organizations in the Industrial Revolution, and the long struggle for the right to organize and bargain collectively.