A Short History of Trade Unions - Part 5: 1900 – 1914
March 2020
This Part covers the period 1900 – 1914 and includes the Taff Vale judgement, The Great Unrest plus The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
1900 – TRADE UNION MEMBERSHIP 1.7 million (out of 17 million workers).
1901 TAFF VALE JUDGEMENT In August 1900, members of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) went on strike for higher wages and union recognition. They settled within a fortnight when the company employed strikebreakers; the workers gained virtually nothing but the company’s promise of reemployment. During the strike the company began legal action against the union, claiming that picketing was in violation of the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act of 1875. The ASRS held that because it was neither a corporation nor an individual it could not be held liable. The judge decided against the union, and in 1901 his decision was upheld in the House of Lords. The verdict, in effect, eliminated the strike as a weapon of organized labour. Workers turned to the Labour Party for redress and so the decision of Lords had the unforeseen consequence of boosting the growth of the Labour Party.
1905 – TRADE UNION MEMBERSHIP 2 million members
1906 THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF WOMEN WORKERS was a trade union active between 1906 and 1921 when it merged with the GMB. It was established by Scottish suffragist Mary MacArthur, on the basis of being a general trade union "open to all women in unorganised trades or who were not admitted to their appropriate trade union." Some of the initial aims of the union were to campaign against sweatshop industries and for a legal minimum wage for women.
1906 TRADES DISPUTES ACT Influenced by the 29 Labour MPs elected in 1906, the Liberal Government passed the Trades Disputes Act. This reversed the Taff Vale judgement and provided unions with complete immunity from liability for civil damages, thereby largely eliminating the jurisdiction of the courts with respect to labour disputes. The Act also provided a degree of immunity to individual unionists and some legal protection for peaceful picketing.
1909 OSBORNE JUDGEMENT The Osborne Judgement (delivered by the House of Lords), held that the law did not allow trade unions to collect a levy for political purposes, specifically, to fund the infant Labour Party's organisational and electoral efforts. The case had been brought by Walter Osborne, a branch secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), and a Liberal Party supporter who objected strongly to his union's political levy, as he was hostile to what he saw as the 'socialist' Labour Representation Committee (LRC).
1909 THE TRADES BOARDS ACT –This created Boards which could set legally enforceable minimum wages in certain trades with a history of low wages due to a surplus of available workers, the presence of women workers, or the lack of skills. At first it applied to four industries: chain-making, ready-made tailoring, paper-box making, and the machine-made lace and finishing trade. It was later expanded in 1912 to mining and then to other industries with preponderance of unskilled manual labour.
1910 – 1914 THE GREAT UNREST The decade or so before the First World War was a period of social and political unrest. Between 1900 and 1909 the number of days lost to strikes was 2.5 to 3 million. However, from 1910 – 1914 over 10 million days were lost per year and it rose to 41 million in 1912. These years were turbulent in many ways with violent struggles in Ireland for independence and the movement for women’s suffrage. In 1911 there was the Liverpool General Transport Strike, a national rail strike, a wave of engineering strikes and 12 South Wales coal strikes. The peak came with a national miners strike of February - April 1912 and the Dublin Lockout of 1913. National union federations were created and consolidated and just before WW1, the formation of the Triple Alliance saw miners, railworkers and transport workers pledge to come to one another’s aid if any sections were attacked.
The 1912 miners strike was the crest of a wave of strikes that rose in the previous years: a 9-month miners strike in 1910-11 which saw riots in Tonypandy and Llanelli and soldiers with machine guns garrisoned in pitheads and a national rail workers strike which saw the armoured battleship HMS Antrim positioned in the Mersey. The Home Secretary who authorised both of these actions was Winston Churchill.
Ernie Bevin, leader of the Transport and General Workers union, said in 1920 “It was a period which, if the war had not broken out, would have been, I believe, seen as one of the greatest industrial revolts the world ever had seen.”
1911 PUBLICATION OF THE DAILY HERALD was a daily newspaper, published in London from 1912 to 1964 (although it was weekly during the First World War). It was published in the interest of the labour movement and supported the Labour Party. At times it was very outspoken and took as its motto “STRIKE AND STRIKE HARD” when in May 1912 it said of strikes: “We have considered the matter . We have considered every phrase of it and we say: Prepare your organisation and then strike: STRIKE AND STRIKE HARD.” The paper underwent several changes of management before ceasing publication in 1964.
1913 TRADE UNION ACT – The Osborne Judgement of December 1909 had provoked outrage in Parliament and in the country. It was reversed by the Trade Union Act 1913. This restored the legitimacy of union political funding, but required unions to ballot all their members and to allow individual members to opt-out of contributing to the levy. As the money in the political funds could not be used for anything else, it meant that Labour’s income multiplied overnight. The Liberals had inadvertently bank-rolled the Labour Party.
1914 TUC’S WARTIME “INDUSTRIAL TRUCE” British labour leaders maintained an anti-war stance up until the point, on August 4th 1914, that the government finally declared war on Germany. By the end of August, the Labour Party and the TUC declared an 'industrial truce' for the duration of the war and lent their support to an all-party recruitment campaign. By May 1915, there were three Labour MPs in the Coalition Government, one of them, Arthur Henderson, in the cabinet.
1914 TRADE UNION MEMBERSHIP 4.1 million.
1914 THE RAGGED TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS is a semi-biographical novel by the Irish house painter and sign writer Robert Noonan, who wrote the book under the pen name Robert Tressell. Published after Tressell's death from tuberculosis in Liverpool in 1911, the novel follows a house painter's efforts to find work in the fictional English town of Mugsborough (based on the town of Hastings) to stave off the workhouse for himself, his wife and his son. The original title page, drawn by Tressell, carried the subtitle: "Being the story of twelve months in Hell, told by one of the damned, and written down by Robert Tressell."
The novel is about the struggle between the underprivileged and their oppressors. It concerns a group of housepainters in Edwardian England. They are joined by Owen who tries to demonstrate the hollowness of the capitalist system to his fellow workmates and rouse them from their acceptance of the status quo. Sometimes they laugh at him, sometimes they are frightened and sometimes they listen, but their general attitude is that it isn’t for the likes of them to interfere in what belongs to their betters. Owen is a man of vision and sees what a fair society could and should look like - “What we call civilisation—the accumulation of knowledge which has come down to us from our forefathers—is the fruit of thousands of years of human thought and toil. It is not the result of the labour of the ancestors of any separate class of people who exist today, and therefore it is by right the common heritage of all. Every little child that is born into the world, no matter whether he is clever or dull, whether he is physically perfect or lame, or blind; no matter how much he may excel or fall short of his fellows in other respects, in one thing at least he is their equal—he is one of the heirs of all the ages that have gone before.”
The book has moments reminiscent of Dickens, for instance, two of the newspapers in the book are the Daily Obscura and the Weekly Chloroform.
If you would like to hear Ricky Tomlinson give a glowing tribute to the book then see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByTMddq7ccQ
Tony Benn spoke about Tressell at the launch of the TUC website The Union Makes Us Strong at 8:40 in this clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfxpLZP6bUI
And if you would like a taster of what is contained in the book then see The Great Money Trick at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ12uOvHPHY
This novel is widely regarded as a classic of working-class literature. It has sold over one million copies. George Orwell described it as "a book that everyone should read".
Take Orwell’s advice and beg, borrow or buy a copy of this great book.
Trade Unions are a Force for Good in Society
Wherever trade unions exist you see increases in wages, improved working terms and conditions, extra holiday leave and better safeguards for health and safety. If you are not in a trade union then you should be. Join one that is relevant for your job. There are over 50 trade unions affiliated to the Trade Union Congress (TUC) with a total of about 5.6 million members, and many more unions not affiliated to the TUC. You can join a Unite Community branch if you are not in employment but want to be involved in activism.
Solidarity
Brian Madican
March 2020
