The trade union story: 1901-1945 – The rise to power
Over the first two decades of the twentieth century, the trade union movement grew at a faster rate than at any other time in its history and became markedly more militant. Between 1900 and 1920, the proportion of working men and women in trade unions grew from around one in ten to almost four in ten, while the number of working days lost due to industrial disputes each year regularly ran into many millions.
Despite the setbacks of the 1890s, during which many of the new union members brought in during the aftermath of the docks strike melted away, the new century brought with it a period of sustained growth – albeit often from small beginnings. 1904 saw the birth of the Association of Shorthand Writers and Typists (later, in 1912, to become the Association of Women Clerical Staff) – a small straw in the wind of trade unionism among both women and white-collar workers. Two years later, in 1906, the National Federation of Women Workers was created by the amalgamation of some 80 or 90 small unions formed in isolated disputes. Even entertainers joined in, when Marie Lloyd and other leading celebrities of the day led a strike that closed many London music halls for a fortnight in 1907. Five years later, a dispute over pension rights led to the creation of the National Asylum Workers Union, which would later form much of the basis of health service trade unionism, while in the same year a small, Norfolk-based farmworkers’ union became the National Agricultural Labourers and Rural Workers Union and laid the foundations for the first enduring union in the countryside since the 1870s.
THE EDWARDIAN ERA: LEGAL AND INDUSTRIAL BATTLES
Throughout this period, though, the trade union movement came under a sustained legal assault which threatened the many gains made over the final decades of the nineteenth century. Following a successful strike by members of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants for higher wages and union recognition, the Taff Vale Railway Company sued the union for the losses it had incurred. The House of Lords held that the union was responsible for the actions of its members and ordered it to pay compensation of £23,000. This was a devastating ruling which would have made it impossible for any union to take industrial action without the threat of bankruptcy hanging over it. In the five years which followed, unions faced a series of legal actions from employers, until an incoming Liberal Government brought in the Trades Dispute Act of 1906, which restored unions’ immunities once again.
As unions’ political sympathies now began to move to the left, a threat to their political activities emerged from within the ranks of Liberal trade unionism. In 1909, Walter V Osborne, the secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants’ Walthamstow branch and a long-standing Liberal, took the union to court over its use of its political funds to support the new Labour Party. Both the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords held that the union had no right to compel its members to support any political party. This was a particular blow to the Labour Party because the growing number of MPs now being elected in its name generally lacked independent means to support themselves, but it also made it hard for the unions to push through the legal changes they wanted to see to protect their members’ interests. The legal battle led to bitter feuding within the trade union movement. The ASRS wound up its Walthamstow branch and expelled Osborne, who in turn became something of a minor political celebrity, writing a book titled Sane Trade Unionism. Once again it would take some years for this ruling to be reversed by Parliament, but the Trade Union Act 1913 permitted unions to set up political funds as long as members had the right to opt out of payments to it.
But while these political and legal battles were being fought out in Parliament and the courts, the daily experience of trade unionists was mostly focused on an extraordinary outbreak of militancy that spread over the 24 months of 1911 and 1912. This period saw the number of days lost to strikes hit 40 million in a single year – the highest number then on record, and one which has been exceeded only twice more since then. The ‘great unrest’ as it was dubbed, is often attributed to the growth of syndicalist political ideas among trade unionists disillusioned with party politics. Lacking faith that the new Labour Party would improve their lot and often cynical about their own union leaders, syndicalists believed they could achieve their broadly socialist aims through industrial struggle alone. Influenced by the French socialist leader Daniel de Leon and the Industrial Workers of the World (a radical US-based trade union known as the Wobblies), British and Irish syndicalists including the former docks strike leader Tom Mann and the Irish republican James Connolly proselytised their views in the dockyards, coalfields and industrial centres of the country with great effect.
During 1911, a strike by London printers led to the setting up of the Daily Herald, the first pro-Labour newspaper. There were also strikes by railwaymen and transport workers. But for the first time in the twentieth century, 1912 also saw the miners flex their industrial muscle when a national strike by members of the Miners Federation of Great Britain closed down the coalfields for five weeks from 26 February to 11 April.
TRADE UNIONS AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR
The greatest challenge to the trade union movement, however, came with the outbreak of the first world war. There had always been a strong anti-war feeling in the labour movement – in part based on pacifism, and in part influenced by the Marxist political thinking of the Second International, which held that workers had more in common with the workers of another country than with the capitalist class of their own. However, within weeks of the declaration of war the TUC had declared an ‘industrial truce’ and given its support to the military recruitment campaign. Will Crooks, the veteran leader of the dockers in 1889 and now a Labour MP, now became one of the most enthusiastic advocates of the war, travelling thousands of miles and addressing crowded meetings up and down the land at which he urged young men to join up. He would later be made a Privy Councillor for his efforts.
Opinion in the dockyards and factories over the merits of war would doubtless have been as divided as those at the top of the trade union movement. But there was a sharp divide on the issue of an industrial truce. In 1915, munitions factory workers on Clydeside defied the leadership of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers to go on strike, leading to the creation of a rank-and-file Clyde Workers Committee chaired by the British Socialist Party (later Communist Party) activist Willie Gallagher. Other industrial centres including Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham followed the lead set by the ‘Red Clydesiders’, and while the number of strikes undoubtedly fell during the war, there was never at any time what might be called an ‘industrial truce’. For the long term, one of the most important developments to emerge from this divide between union leaders and the shop floor was the shop stewards movement – independent rank-and-file activists who would continue to be an important source of radical local leadership for more than half a century, until unions moved to recognize and incorporate them within their formal structures.
The 1914-18 period also saw a huge influx of women into the workforce. In 1914, 90% of trade union members were men, and 90% of women workers were not trade union members. On the outbreak of war, many women were thrown out of work when middle class families economised by cutting back on domestic staff. But it soon became apparent that they would be needed in other industries as men left for the Front.
Around 1,600,000 women joined the workforce during the first world war. They worked on public transport, in post offices and government departments, as land workers and in factories. By 1918, munitions factories alone employed 950,000 women workers. But despite the best efforts of women trade union leaders such as Margaret Bondfield and Mary Macarthur to gain union membership rights and equal pay for women war workers, the arrival of a vast number of new workers who were often satisfied with lower rates of pay frequently served to undermine union influence in the workplace. By 1920, the number of women trade unionists had risen to an impressive 1,342,000, but this still represented jus one in four of the female workforce.
THE 1920s AND 1930s: MILITANCY AND DEFEAT
With the war over, all pretence of peace on the shopfloor was swept away. Even the most unlikely groups of workers became involved in strike action, with London barbershops closed over the winter of 1918 when hairdressers downed scissors for seven weeks in pursuit of a pay claim. A massive strike organized by the Clyde Workers Committee in 1919 was followed by further stoppages in the coal mines and in the transport and print industries. Belfast, too, was paralysed by a wave of strikes. There were even strikes in the police force which saw tanks brought on to the streets of Liverpool to restore order and Royal Navy battleships rushed back from Scapa Flow. Some 35 million working days were lost that year to industrial disputes. In the wake of the Russian revolution, the fear of a workers’ revolt hung heavily over Britain – no more so than during 1926, when a ten-day general strike brought the country to a halt.
THE GENERAL STRIKE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
In 1925, the British coal industry was in crisis. The richest coal seams had been heavily depleted by the war effort a decade earlier, and productivity was at a low ebb. With Britain now back on the gold standard, making exports expensive, and German producers allowed to re-enter the international coal market, mine owners sought to safeguard their profits by cutting wages and introducing longer working hours. Under pressure from the TUC, however, the Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin intervened to introduce a nine-month subsidy to support miners’ wages and set up a royal commission. Although hailed at the time as “Red Friday” – a victory for the unions – in reality it merely put off the start of a major conflict.
When the commission reported in March 1926, it recommended an end to the miners’ subsidy and the restructuring of the industry, but rejected nationalisation. The mine owners’ response was to demand wage cuts of between 10% and 25%, the introduction of regional pay negotiations and longer working days. It also threatened a lock-out if the terms were not accepted by 1 May. On that same day, a conference called by the TUC called a general strike in defence of the miners, to begin on 3 May.
In the days that followed, millions of workers downed tools. Newspapers ceased to publish, trains and buses stopped running and building sites fell silent. In all, an estimated 2.5 million people went on strike on the first day, leaving a further 16 million to find their way to work on foot or bicycle. The government was in many ways better prepared for the conflict than the trade unions, which had to set up committees and structures to deal with communications and to authorise the continued operation of essential services from scratch. All over the country, trades councils transformed themselves into central strike committees or councils of action. Meanwhile, the authorities declared a state of emergency and began to mobilise the armed forces in case the worst should happen. Long queues of middle-class men formed outside the Foreign Office to volunteer their services in opposition to the strike, while at the gentlemen’s clubs in Pall Mall and St James’s, the upper classes signed up as special constables. For the government, Winston Churchill commandeered the presses of the Morning Post and began publication of the British Gazette as an anti-strike propaganda tool. The TUC responded with the British Worker.
As the strike wore on, the government began to get the upper hand. With army protection, food lorries began to leave the London docks. Some leading members of the TUC became concerned that there would be a drift back to work, while others feared that control of the strike was moving out of the hands of the unions’ leaders and coming under the control of move militant local activists. The worst blow came from within the trade union movement, when Havelock Wilson, the maverick leader of the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union, sought a court injunction preventing the TUC from calling his members out on strike without a ballot. The judge, former Liberal MP Sir John Astbury not only agreed to the injuction, but also declared the strike itself illegal – laying the TUC open to potentially devastating claims for damages.
Throughout all this, negotiations both formal and informal had been going on. Exhausted, fearful and uncertain, by 11 May the TUC general council was willing to reach agreement. Although the leaders of the Miners Federation of Great Britain rejected the proposals outright, members of the general council visited 10 Downing Street the following day to announce that the strike would be called off. They had hoped to receive assurances in return that there would be no victimisation of those who had been on strike, but even this was denied them.
By the end of that week, Britain was returning to normal. For some time, however, some train workers held out, seeking promises that there would be no victimisation, and the miners themselves fought on for six long months before being starved back to work, their resources exhausted and the union itself split. By the end of November, employers had succeeded in all their aims and more.
Over the course of the year, Britain had lost a record 162 million working days to strike action – a figure which has never been approached since. In the period of anti-union feeling which followed, the government had little difficulty passing the Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act of 1927. The new law forced civil service trade unions to disaffiliate from the TUC, introduced the practice of ‘contracting in’ rather than ‘contracting out’ of political funds, clamped down on picketing and outlawed secondary or sympathetic strikes. Trade union membership fell by more than half a million in 1927 alone, and there would never again be a year in which strike days totalled even one-fifth of the number for 1926. Chastened and more than a little scared by their experiences of the nine-day general strike, the leaderships of many unions now moved significantly to the right, pursuing a course of conciliation with employers while simultaneously moving against militants within their ranks by banning known Communists from holding union office.
REORGANISING AND REGROUPING
Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, the trade union movement went through a period of substantial reorganisation. In 1921, the TUC created a new General Council to replace the Parliamentary Committee which had previously run its affairs. The General Council had broader powers and was to focus more closely on industrial rather than political and lobbying activities. At the same time, it took over the work of the Women’s Trade Union League, and created two reserved seats for women trade unionists.
The most significant development, however, was the emergence of a number of new giant unions and the beginning of a process of rationalisation that has drastically reduced the number of unions over the past 100 years. Union legislation passed in 1917 had reduced some of the legal barriers to amalgamations and mergers. The first union to take advantage of this was the old Amalgamated Society of Engineers, which in 1920 merged with nine other organisations to form the Amalgamated Engineering Union. It was swiftly followed in 1922 by the Transport and General Workers Union, based on a number of unions that had emerged from the docks strike thirty years before, and by the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, some of whose component parts could also trace their histories to the New Unionism of the late 1880s.
The creation of the NUGMW also gave a new home of the National Federation of Women Workers. In many instances, however, trade union attitudes to women in the workplace remained decidedly hostile, and campaigns for equal pay were quietly forgotten. Although many unions sought to recruit women into membership, they also often sought to restrict the numbers of women able to take jobs in their industries by demanding the introduction or stricter enforcement of rules forbidding married women from employment. In 1935, the Union of Post Office Workers went as far as to issue a straightforward demand for a total block on women’s employment. It would take the social upheaval of a second world war to change such attitudes.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR: INTO GOVERNMENT
As in 1914, the outbreak of war in 1939 proved difficult for trade unions. There was still a strong pacifist tendency within the labour movement, and the Communist Party of Great Britain remained hostile to the war effort through until 1941, when Hitler’s Germany invaded the Soviet Union and the party became the most vociferous supporter of “the war on fascism”. The efforts of its industrial activists now switched from organising strikes and denouncing the government to active involvement in the joint production committees set up by the wartime coalition government.
As in 1914, leading trade unionists were brought in to government. In May 1940, Ernest Bevin, the general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, was made Minister of Labour and National Service. Bevin adopted a conciliatory approach to trade union demands during the war, but he also came armed with legal powers as draconian as any yet seen. Strikes and lockouts were banned under Order 1305 and the Essential Work (General Provisions) Order of 1941 allowed Bevin to direct skilled workers to wherever they were most needed while also permitting employers to use less skilled workers in previously protected jobs. In 1942, the government would use these legal powers to prosecute more than a thousand miners over a strike at the Betteshanger colliery in Kent. Three union leaders were imprisoned, and many more were fined.
Despite this, the number of strikes continued to rise. In 1943, 12,000 bus workers – many of them members of Bevin’s own TGWU – stopped work, as did dockers in Liverpool and Birkenhead. When a total of 3,714,000 days were lost to strikes the following year, the government tightened up the law and with the support of the TUC introduced Defence Regulation 1AA, which outlawed incitement to strike.
Though operating under strict legal controls, the trade union movement managed rapid growth during the second world war – helped by the government’s refusal to award public contracts to companies that failed to comply with union-set minimum standards. Between 1939 and 1945, trade union membership increased from 4.5 million to 7.5 million, and many of these were women – who were once again summoned out of the home and into factories and offices to replace men called up by the armed forces. This time round, even the Amalgamated Engineering Union was forced to reconsider its ban on women workers, and in 1942 it allowed women to join for the first time.
By 1945, with the war all but over and a majority Labour government in power, the position of trade unions in society had been utterly transformed. The century had begun with a relatively small minority of working people in membership, hostility from employers and constant legal threats. Less than a working lifetime later, trade union movement was at the centre of public life – a ‘fifth estate’ deeply tied up in the newly emerging tripartite bodies representing employer, worker and government interests in the corridors of power and numbering among its leaders cabinet ministers and peers of the realm. Could trade unionists ask for anything more?