A Short History of Trade Unions - Part 2: 1832–1867
April 2019
This part covers the period 1832 – 1867 and includes the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the emergence of unions, the first General Strike and the Reform Acts.
The 1832 Reform Act For many years people had criticised the unfair electoral system. Some boroughs, such as those in the rapidly growing industrial towns of Birmingham and Manchester, had no MPs to represent them at all. At the same time, there were notorious 'rotten' boroughs, such as Old Sarum at Salisbury, which had 2 MPs but only 7 voters! The Act abolished 143 boroughs creating 130 new seats in England and Wales. The Act also increased the electorate from around 366,000 to 650,000, which was about 18 per cent of the total adult-male population in England and Wales. The majority of the working classes, as well as women, were still excluded from voting and the Act failed to introduce a secret ballot. The working classes felt betrayed by an Act which made no real difference to their lives.
1833 Grand National Consolidated Trades Union was an early attempt to form a national union confederation.
1834 The Tolpuddle Martyrs were six men from Tolpuddle in Dorset who founded the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers to protest against the gradual lowering of agricultural wages. They were arrested for, and convicted of, swearing a secret oath (under the Unlawful Oaths Act 1797) as members of the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers. In March 1834, the Tolpuddle Martyrs (James Brine, James Hammett, George Loveless, George's brother James Loveless, George's brother in-law Thomas Standfield, and Thomas's son John Standfield) were sentenced to penal transportation to Australia. In England a petition of 800,000 signatures was collected for their release and presented to Parliament. Their supporters organised a political march, one of the first successful marches in the UK, and The Martyrs were pardoned in March 1836.
1838 – 1857 Chartism took its name from the People's Charter of 1838 and was a working-class movement for political reform in Britain. The Charter called for reforms to make the political system more democratic and reduce bribery and corruption. These reforms included votes for all men over 21 years old, a secret ballot, payment of MPs (so workers could stand), equal constituencies and annual parliaments.
1842 General Strike also known as the Plug Plot Riots because workers (on their way out of a factory) would take the plugs out of boilers so they wouldn’t work. During the summer of 1842, colliers in Staffordshire walked out over proposals to reduce their wages, and, for the first time, demands for shorter hours and better pay began to be linked with a demand that the People’s Charter be made the law of the land. The unrest spread, and in July began to centre on South East Lancashire, where in response to demands for a wage cut of 25% the mill workers of Ashton, Stalybridge, Dukinfield and Hyde called meetings to formulate their demands for a return to the wage levels of earlier years and to plan their next steps. The strike spread to involve nearly half a million workers throughout Britain and represented the biggest single exercise of working class strength in 19th century Britain. But the strike grew into something far more than that as workers took up the political demands espoused by Chartism, leading to confrontation not just with employers but with the state. In many cases, mill workers went back with some element of their demand for a return to earlier wage levels met – or, at the very least, employers’ demands for wage cuts abandoned.
1847 Factory Act / Ten Hours Act restricted the working hours of women and young persons (13-18) in textile mills to 10 hours per day.
1848 The Communist Manifesto is a political pamphlet by the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It was commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London. The Manifesto was later recognised as one of the world's most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and then-present) and the conflicts of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production. The Communist Manifesto summarises Marx and Engels' theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely that in their own words "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism.
The Manifesto is divided into a preamble and four sections, the last of these is a short conclusion. The introduction begins by proclaiming: "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre". At the end, the authors declare “The proletarians have nothing to lose, but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”
In 2013, The Communist Manifesto was registered to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme along with Marx's Capital Volume 1. It is difficult to overestimate the significance and effect that The Communist Manifesto has had on society. In 2003, English Marxist Chris Harman stated: "There is still a compulsive quality to its prose as it provides insight after insight into the society in which we live, where it comes from and where it’s going to. It is still able to explain, as mainstream economists and sociologists cannot, today's world of recurrent wars and repeated economic crisis, of hunger for hundreds of millions on the one hand and 'overproduction' on the other. There are passages that could have come from the most recent writings on globalisation".
If you have not already read The Communist Manifesto then I heartily recommend that you beg, borrow or buy a copy of it and do so.
1850s New Model Trade Unions (NMTU) were a variety of trade unions prominent in the 1850s and 1860s in the UK. The term was coined by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in their History of Trade Unionism (1894). In contrast to the consolidated unions (such as the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union), NMTUs tended to cover individual trades. These were generally relatively highly paid skilled trades allowing the unions to charge comparatively high subscription fees. Their leadership tended to be more conservative, with an emphasis on negotiations and education rather than strike action and this led them to be viewed as more 'respectable'. This was partly because since they represented skilled workers, there was not a large source of labour for their trade which employers could draw upon in the event of a strike. Akin to earlier Friendly Societies, members of New Model Trade Unions received benefits in times of need, such as during periods of illness, injury and unemployment.
1860 London Trades Council was formed in 1860 as a result of a building workers' dispute. It brought together many of the London based leaders of trade unions and became the de facto national leadership of the trade union movement.
1867 Master and Servants Act was an Act of Parliament which sought to criminalise breach of contract by workers against their employers. Under the terms of this act, strikers could only be prosecuted for breach of contract, but criminal action could still be brought for what was described as "aggravated cases".
1867 2nd Reform Act Before this Act, only 1 million of the 7 million adult males in England and Wales could vote; the Act immediately doubled that number. Most men and all women still had over 50 years to wait before they were allowed to vote.
Inevitably I am only scraping the surface of trade unionism in these articles, I hope that you will delve further into some of the generic titles and dates I have used. You will be rewarded by finding out more about our collective heritage of the rich history of trade unions and the heroic men and women who played a role in forming this great movement.
