Madican's Meditations on Life

This Part covers the period 1868 – 1889 and includes the strikes by the London Dockers, the Match Girls /Women plus the formation of the TUC. 

1868 First Meeting of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was held in 1868 in the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute. The fact that the TUC was formed by Northern Trades Councils was not coincidental. One of the issues which prompted its formation was the perception that the London Trades Council (formed in 1860) was taking a dominant role in speaking for the Trade Union Movement as a whole. This was not least because many of the most prominent union leaders of the day lived in London.
 
The second TUC meeting took place in 1869 in Birmingham where delegates discussed the eight-hour working day, election of working people to Parliament and the issue of free education. The 1899 Congress saw a motion "calling for a special conference to establish a voice for working people within parliament”. Within the year the conference had been held and the Labour Representation Committee was established. The LRC was the forerunner of the Labour Party. The major TUC affiliated unions still make up the great bulk of the British Labour Party affiliated membership, but there is no formal/organisational link between the TUC and the party. 
 

1871 Trade Union Act This Act recognised unions as legal entities/corporations and as such they were entitled to protection under the law. It also provided an end to the anomaly (from by a previous court case) in which it was deemed not to be unlawful to abscond with the funds of a union - in this case the Boilermakers. Can you imagine a law being allowed for any other institution on the planet where stealing from it would not automatically be considered as illegal? The question as to whether unions could in practice take effective strike action by picketing the workplace was the subject of much controversy. Interestingly, it was a Liberal government which criminalised picketing, (1871 Criminal Law Amendment Act), and a Tory government which de-criminalised it (1875 Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act). 
 

1874 The Factory Act set a ten-hour limit on the working day. The unions were campaigning for eight. In lots of senses, they still are.
 

1884 Third Reform Act After this Act, all men paying an annual rental of £10 and all those holding land valued at £10 had the vote. The British electorate totalled over 5,500,000. The 1884 Reform Act did not establish universal suffrage. The size of the electorate was increased considerably, but all women and 40% of adult males were still without the vote. NOTE : I have put all these Reform Acts in these articles so you can see just how recent our “democracy” is and how it was arrived at by a slow, laborious and piecemeal process. It was not given away by rich and powerful, patriarchal benefactors who had ordinary working people’s interests at heart.

1888 Strike by the Match Girls / Women The strike was caused by the poor working conditions in the Bryant and May factory in Bow, east London. These conditions included 14 hour work days, poor pay, excessive fines, and the bone-rotting illness called phossy jaw which was caused by the chemicals used in match manufacture. The strike was sparked off (if you will forgive the pun) by the dismissal of one of the workers on 2 July 1888. 
 
Social activist Annie Bessant became involved in the Matchgirls’/Womens’ situation with her friend Herbert Burrows. Bessant published an article about the conditions of the Matchgirls in her halfpenny weekly paper "The Link" on 23 June 1888. Naturally this angered the Bryant & May management who tried to get their workforce to sign a paper contradicting it. Naturally enough the workers refused to do so. This led to the dismissal of a worker, which set off the strike with approximately 1,400 women and girls refusing to work by the end of the first day. The management quickly offered to reinstate the sacked employee but the women then demanded other concessions, particularly in relation to the unfair fines which were deducted from their wages. A deputation of women went to management but was not satisfied by their response.

 

By 6 July the whole factory had stopped work. Meetings were held by the strikers and Besant spoke at some of them. There was much publicity. The London Trades Council became involved. At first, the management was firm, but factory owner, Bryant, was nervous of the bad publicity. Besant helped at meetings with the management and terms were formulated at a meeting on 16 July. The terms stated that fines, deductions for cost of materials and other unfair deductions should be abolished and that grievances could be taken straight to the management. Also, very importantly, meals were to be taken in a separate room, where the food would not be contaminated with phosphorus. These terms were accepted and the strike ended. 

The action taken by these young women had both immediate and long-term reverberations in the trade union movement. They took on the Bryant and May bosses. And they won! This was a key moment in the birth of a vast social movement which would be celebrated in labour and socialist history as the New Unionism that focused on organizing unskilled workers. Ben Tillett (who played a major part in founding the Dockers Union) paid tribute to the Match Workers whose strike he called 'the beginning of the social convulsion which produced the New Unionism'. 
 

1889 London Docks Strike Inspired by the successes of the Match Girls / Women’s strike (and subsequently by the Gasworkers' and Dockers' strikes of 1889), trade unionism among unskilled, semi-skilled, white collar and professional workers spread rapidly. Led by socialists like John Burns and Tom Mann (with Eleanor Marx as secretary to the strike committee), the dockers' struggle captured the public imagination. Their strike, which lasted 5 weeks, was over the issue of casual working. The dockers demanded a minimum of 4 hours per day and for a minimum wage of 6 pence an hour (the 'dockers' tanner). They won their latter demand. Their victory was ultimately ensured by the financial support received from other trade unionists, including a £30,000 donation from Australia which was huge display of solidarity from the aussies.
 

In Part 4 we shall look at the role the unions played in the formation of the Labour Party.
 

Brian Madican
 

May 2019