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Trade Unions: The First Workers’ Organizations

The trade union movement is the oldest permanent institutional form of working-class organisation in Britain. Its history in the Industrial Revolution is the story of skilled workers learning to combine, of state attempts to suppress combination, of the long legal and political struggle for the right to organise, and — in the second half of the nineteenth century — of the consolidation of “new model” unions that became the model for modern trade unionism in Britain and around the world.

From Guild to Combination

The trade union movement has its deepest roots in the medieval craft guilds of the towns and cities, and in the journeymen’s clubs that broke from the guilds as the guilds closed against new entrants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The spinners’ clubs of the Lancashire woollen and cotton trades, the journeymen tailors’ clubs of London and Westminster, the masons’ lodges of Scotland, and the smiths’ and fitters’ clubs of the Birmingham and Sheffield metal trades were the direct ancestors of the early trade unions. They were local, often secret, sometimes religious or convivial in their outward form, and almost always illegal.

The Combination Acts of 1799–1800

The Combination Acts, passed in 1799 and amended in 1800, made it a criminal offence for workers to combine “to obtain an advance of wages, to lessen or alter the hours of work, or to regulate the mode of carrying on any work, or to prevent the employment of any person or to control any person in any manufacture.” The Acts were the response of a frightened Pitt government to the trade-union organising of the 1790s and to the perceived political threat of Jacobinism. The penalties were stiff: up to two months’ imprisonment for a first offence, three months for a second, and transportation for a third. Joseph Arch, the agricultural trade unionist of the 1870s, called the period the “thirty years of penal servitude” for the trade unions.

The Acts were poorly enforced and the unions continued to exist; but the law mattered, and a strike in which a worker was convicted of combination could end in transportation. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, the agricultural labourers transported to Australia in 1834, are the most famous victims of the system (see below).

The Repeal of the Combination Acts, 1824

The Combination Acts were repealed in 1824, after a sustained campaign led by the radical MP Joseph Hume and the radical press of London. The repeal came after a Royal Commission (1824, chaired by James Nassau Senior) and against the better judgement of the government, which feared a wave of strikes. The Commission’s 1824 report is one of the founding documents of British labour history, and is a remarkable example of early political economy applied to the conditions of labour.

The prediction of widespread strikes proved correct, and a backlash produced the Combination Act 1825, which re-established the legal right of combination but imposed fresh criminal penalties for the use of threats, intimidation, and molestation in industrial disputes. Trade unionism was therefore legal after 1824, but most of what a union would actually do — picketing, calling a strike, refusing to work with non-unionists — remained illegal until well into the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Tolpuddle Martyrs, 1834

In 1834, six agricultural labourers of the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset — James Brine, James Hammett, George Loveless, George’s brother James Loveless, Thomas Standfield, and Thomas’s son John Standfield — were convicted of administering unlawful oaths under the Unlawful Oaths Act 1797 (the Mutiny Act), and sentenced to seven years’ transportation to the Australian penal colonies. Their offence was to have formed a “friendly society of agricultural labourers” — a trade union — in February 1834, and to have administered the customary oath of secrecy.

The Dorset labourers’ union is best understood as an attempt to resist the seventh successive cut in wages in the agricultural depression of 1830–34. The sentence of transportation was disproportionate even by the standards of 1834, and it produced one of the great popular protest movements of the early Victorian period: a mass meeting on Kennington Common in April 1834, a national petition, the support of the Whig opposition under Earl Grey, and a wave of public sympathy that eventually persuaded the government of Robert Peel to commute the sentences in March 1836. The men returned from Australia in 1837–38 to find themselves minor folk heroes. The Tolpuddle Martyrs are the founding myth of British trade unionism: the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival, held in Dorset since 1924, is the largest trade union gathering in Britain.

The New Model Unions, 1851–1875

The 1850s and 1860s saw the rise of the “new model unions” — large, centralised, well-financed, bureaucratic organisations of skilled workers, led by paid full-time officials and run on a mixture of trade protection, friendly-society benefits (sick pay, funeral benefits, unemployment relief), and political influence. The most important of the new model unions was the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE), founded in January 1851 by a merger of several older craft unions under the leadership of William Allan, a Scottish millwright. The ASE’s rules — long-term contracts with employers, machinery for collective bargaining, the closed shop, the high membership subscription — became the template for new model unions in the carpenters, the ironfounders, the bricklayers, the cotton spinners, and the boilermakers. By 1869 the new model unions represented perhaps half a million members.

The political position of the new unions is captured in the Sheffield Outrages of the late 1860s, when unionised sawyers and grinders attacked non-union rivals and “blackleg” labour. The Liberal government’s Royal Commission on Trade Unions (1867–69), chaired by Frederic Harrison, was a watershed: it established the principle that trade unions were lawful combinations of workers and that their funds were not liable for civil action in tort, but it failed to resolve the question of how to prevent the abuses of union “discipline” that the Sheffield outrages exemplified.

The legal position of trade unions was put on a firmer footing by the Trade Union Act 1871, which formally legalised trade unions, and the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1871, which clarified the boundary between lawful and unlawful acts of picketing. The trade union movement had, by 1875, achieved the legal right to organise, to strike, and to picket peacefully — a body of rights the Chartists had demanded twenty-five years before.

The Effects of Trade Unionism

Trade unionism had important effects on the British economy and on the lives of British workers. The unions were able to negotiate significant improvements in wages, hours, and conditions for their members, although the size of the improvement is contested. The standard of living of British workers between 1815 and 1850 is the subject of the famous standard-of-living debate in economic history — Hartwell’s 1961 “case of the industrial revolution” revised the older pessimistic view of the “Hungry Forties” (Hammonds, Hobsbawm), and later work by Feinstein, Lindert & Williamson, and Allen has revised the revision. By 1900 the better-paid skilled-worker unions had won, in the cotton and engineering trades, a working week of about 54 hours and a real wage perhaps 60–100 percent above the 1820 level; the unskilled workers, the majority, were not organised in the new model unions and were not in a position to bargain.

Trade unions were also important for the development of the British political system. The new unions were the backbone of the Labour Representation Committee (1900), which became the Labour Party in 1906, and they helped to shape the policies of the party in the twentieth century. The trade unions remain the financial and organisational core of the British Labour Party to this day.

The Continuing Question

The unresolved historical question about British trade unionism is whether the new model unions of 1850-1875 were a kind of working-class aristocracy, or the real basis of a working-class politics. The traditional answer, going back to the Webbs’ History of Trade Unionism (1894) and given its modern form in the standard labor-history accounts, is that the new model unions were the foundations of the modern British labor movement: they organized the skilled workers, they negotiated better wages and conditions, they built the friendly-society and self-help infrastructure that held working-class communities together, and they created the political base for the Labour Party. The revisionist answer, developed in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and given a more pointed form in the recent work of labor historian Robert Taylor, is that the new model unions were a sectional aristocracy of skilled workers whose real effect was to divide the working class: the skilled workers got wage gains, the unskilled workers (the majority) did not, and the gap between the two is one of the reasons that the British labor movement was less politically radical than the Continental European labor movements of the same period. The interesting current question, raised in the work of economic historian Robert Allen and developed in the recent literature on the British industrial decline, is whether the new model unions’ sectionalism was a net positive (because it produced a more efficient industrial-relations system than the Continental syndicalist alternative) or a net negative (because it slowed the political mobilization of the unskilled and contributed to the long-run British industrial decline). The honest answer, given the comparative data, is probably: both, in different proportions in different industries.

Selected Sources

  • E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Victor Gollancz, 1963)
  • Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Penguin, 1963)
  • E. J. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984)
  • R. H. Tawney, The British Labour Movement (Yale University Press, 1925)
  • Robert Taylor, The Trade Union Question in British Politics, 1945–2000 (Clarendon Press, 2002)