Consider what a world without unions would be like, whether in the past, the present or the uncertain future. This is perhaps the most powerful argument there is for being a trade unionist. In writing this short book, I’ve set out to demonstrate why people today should be trade union members. It is told through my personal experiences, as well as through a study of the history of trade unions and of the work they have done, and are doing, to make our workplaces and society fairer. This is work that is rarely portrayed positively by the press, if at all. The history of trade unions – of when and why they emerged in the UK as democratic organisations giving a voice to working people, and of why opposition to them developed – is fundamental to making the case for trade unionism today.
But trade unionism is not just about pay and conditions. It’s about diversity, putting equality at work and in society front and centre stage; it’s about community, politics, internationalism and much more. I believe strongly in rebuilding the traditional, if at present weakened, links between trade unions and communities. Being a trade unionist is as much a political as it is an industrial role. This is why the historic links between the labour movement and the Labour Party matter.
This book is intended as a bold reminder of how trade unions have achieved justice through their collective, united strength. It is also a call to arms for the struggles that lie ahead.
The labour movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress.
Martin Luther King Jr
In a time when our children learn little more history than Kings and Queens in school, the working class must tell its own story. In August 2019 we marked the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, the moment when our journey to working-class representation and respect began, when working-class people stood up for democracy and economic political freedom, and were brutally crushed for their proud defiance. Eighteen peaceful protestors were killed by the cavalry troops who swept into St Peter’s Field with their sabres drawn. Some were trampled by the stampede, others were shot by muskets fired indiscriminately into the crowd.
Mike Leigh, the film director who made the 2018 film Peterloo, tells of how he went to school within ‘spitting distance’ of St Peter’s Field in Manchester. Yet even he and his school mates didn’t learn about the atrocity. Today, as they did then, the ruling class would prefer to sweep Peterloo, and all other such brutal injustices against working people, under the table. This is precisely why we must teach our own history and fight for our own justice.
What that history tells us is that progress for working people has only ever been achieved by the collective self-empowerment of organised labour, not through the accumulation of individual rights alone, however worthy they may be.
Employers have always been effective at working together to control labour. As far back as medieval times, the masters organised themselves into guilds to regulate prices, quality standards and their workers’ wages, even imposing sanctions on workers for coming up short. There was no voice then for those they employed. Then as now, workers were legislated against in order to keep them down. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Combination Acts, passed during the Napoleonic wars, made any sort of strike action illegal. Workers could be imprisoned for up to three months or sentenced to brutal hard labour if they broke the new laws.
Despite the Combination Acts, workers continued to press for better pay and working conditions, and trade unions grew rapidly. The Acts were finally repealed in 1824–5, but the repression of trade unions and trade unionists during the industrial revolution continued. This was the fate of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in the 1830s, but they were not alone.1
It was the Chartist movement of the 1840s that laid down the foundations of our modern labour movement. The Chartists coalesced around a People’s Charter that set out six electoral reforms aimed at extending the franchise and enabling working men to be elected to Parliament. The Chartists also did much to organise non-unionised workers, holding regular mass demonstrations and instructing uneducated people in the basics of organising meetings and campaigning.
Such protests steadily improved the conditions of working men and women. The 1847 Ten Hours Act restricted the working hours of women and young workers in textile mills, though this was not extended to adult men until 1850. It was a long-fought-for victory that galvanised the unions into further organisation, leading to the formation of the Trades Union Congress in Manchester in 1868, the legalisation of unions through the 1871 Trade Union Act, and the start of campaigns for the eight-hour day, the repeal of anti-union laws, extension of the franchise, and the unionisation of the railways. It also led to the establishment of many new unions, including the National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers Union (the first dock workers’ union in the UK) and the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, as well as the emergence of unions within Jewish immigrant communities working in the baking and clothing trades.
There were early interventions by women trade unionists too. In 1872 a National Union of Agricultural Workers was set up in Warwickshire. The following year a group of sixteen women from Ascott-under-Wychwood demanded that their association be represented. They were imprisoned in 1873 for picketing in support of male agricultural workers, and were only pardoned following an appeal to Queen Victoria. Only recently have these brave women workers, the Ascott Martyrs, begun to be honoured in our collective trade union memories.
The history of our movement is also the history of the struggle by the left to secure for working people the unions and the leaders they need and deserve. In the 1880s, what became known as ‘new unionism’ emerged in reaction to the perceived ineffectiveness of the TUC, which was hostile to a model of industrial unionism in which all workers in an industry are organised into the same union, regardless of their skills. New unionism was undoubtedly a turning point that saw trade unions reaching out beyond the skilled and craft elite of the working class.
The London ‘match girls’ strike of 1888 was a key moment in new unionism, involving working-class women and teenage girls, uneducated and starving, slogging long hours for Bryant and May on slave wages, physically and mentally abused by their bosses, and exposed to lethal white phosphorus that rotted their jaw bones and led to horrific deaths.2 They became determined fighters and trade unionists, and by walking out on strike and closing the factory for sixteen days, they secured improvements in their working conditions, including recognition of their union.
Tom Mann was a key figure in the new unionism movement, and one of the chief organisers of the 1889 London dockers’ strike for union recognition, the abolition of contract work, and a minimum wage of sixpence an hour (the ‘dockers’ tanner’).3 For me, the dockers’ strike and the Taff Vale Railway strike of 1900 were among the key moments in our history that gave the unions greater confidence to organise and fight.4 The dock strike involved thousands, and, as Terry McCarthy says in his short history of the British Labour movement, the strike leaders won over the public with their shrewd tactics.5 There were no slogans about overthrowing the state, and no violent protests; instead, the trade unions took the people with them, and won. Furthermore, for the first time, the new unionism focused on workplace issues beyond hours and conditions, including the huge deductions imposed on women clothing workers for things like the use of cooking facilities and, extraordinarily, the use of steam power, even if they were working from home.
The Taff Vale strike also ultimately convinced the trade unions of the need for a Labour Party to give workers a voice in Parliament. In the South Wales valleys, determined members of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), a forerunner to today’s RMT, resisted their employers and unjust laws. Nevertheless, the bosses took the ASRS to court for lost earnings and won a staggering £42,000 in damages – the equivalent of well over £2 million today. It was this travesty, decided in the House of Lords, that persuaded the unions they needed representation in the House of Commons in order to pass legislation that would