The Myths of the ‘New’ Unionism

[May, 1998]

The Trades Unionists of this country [were] a body of men well organised, who paid their money, and were Socialists at their work every day, and not merely on the platform, who did not shout for blood-red revolution, and when it came to revolution sneaked under the nearest bed. [...] With his experience of Unions, he was glad to say that if there were fifty such red revolutionary parties as there were in Germany, he would sooner have the solid, progressive, matter-of-fact, fighting Trades Unionism of England than all the hare-brained chatterers and magpies of continental revolutionists. [1]

I

The year 1889—the year of the great London Docks’ Strike—is seen by many to be something of a climacteric in the history of trade unionism in Britain. The contrast between what obtained either side of this turning point is often described as that between ‘old’ and ‘new’ trade unionism: ‘benefit societies with a craft basis, conservative and self-reliant in outlook—as opposed to trade societies organised on a general basis, with a political aptitude and a fighting outlook.’ [2] One example of this thesis—exuberant but not untypical—runs as follows:

The split between the labour aristocracy of the conservative craft unions and the mass of the unorganised workers began to be overcome with the ‘new unionism’ of 1889 onwards. The decreasing differentiation between workers under the impact of advancing industrialisation, the lifting of legal restrictions on trade unions, and a new enthusiasm for recruiting unorganised occupations [...] precipitated a great surge of organisation which went beyond the confines of narrow trade unionism, gave the movement a revolutionary or socialist leadership and made the factory once again a major class battleground. [3]

Now, it is undoubtedly the case that going into the last quarter of the nineteenth century not only did the membership of the trade unions rise sharply but there was also a shift in the degree to which the trade unions themselves secured an acceptance for their existence and operation within British society. The Master and Servant Act of 1867, the Trade Union Act of 1871 and the Employers and Workmen Act of 1875 created an institutional framework which allowed strikes without imprisonment, legalised peaceful picketing and provided for an operable legal status for the trade unions. It is also a matter of record that the growth of trade union membership over 1889-92 was quite spectacular; and, after a period of retreat, from 1896 both steady and substantial. Overall, trade union membership rose from around half a million in 1875 to over four million by the outbreak of the First World War—a degree of industrial working class organisation unmatched at that time anywhere else in the world. The fifty years or so straddling the turn of the century were punctuated by industrial disputes, some of them of a quite serious nature. The 1880s and early 1890s were also noted for the emergence of a distinct current of ‘socialism’ within the broader British working class movement, with the formation in rapid succession of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1881, the Fabian Society in 1884 and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1893, some of whose leaders and members had close links with both the ‘new’ unions and with some of the most important industrial upheavals. Finally, these developments coincided with the process that was to culminate in the early years of the twentieth century with the formation by the trade union leaders of the Labour Party.

Having noted these developments, however, what follows below rests on the assertion that what we can call the ‘new unionism thesis’ is a fallacy. In other words, rather than establishing some form of break with the past in the 1880s, what marks the character of the British labour movement—including the trade unions—over this period is a quite remarkable degree of continuity. This is not to say that there were not divisions and disputes within the trade union movement between ‘old’ and ‘new’ trade unionists—indeed, the descriptive terms themselves date from their pejorative use by the protagonists in the very debates of the time—but that in a pattern that was to occur repeatedly in the future the structure of the labour movement itself was able to absorb and integrate changes in the composition and outlook of its constituency into a pattern of political operation that had already been long established. The substance of what follows below will be an examination of what this established pattern was, and how this dominant outlook of the broader labour movement was able to accommodate the challenges of the 1880s and beyond into a mode of operation that was to persist for most of our present century.

In order to do this it will be necessary to broaden our sights beyond the narrow confines of a study of the trade unions alone: indeed, if there is a criticism to be made of many of the standard histories of the British trade union movement it is the fact that they unduly compartmentalise what is but one facet of an overall process of development. By this is meant that it is not only necessary to take account of the economic conditions in operation during the period in question—which should brook little argument—but that without placing the evolution of the trade union movement in the context of the overall patterns of development British politics in general and the evolution of the broader labour movement in particular it is not possible to understand either the continuities or discontinuities in the maturation of the trade union movement in Britain.

II

If it is possible to establish a definitive point of rupture in the development of the emerging modern British labour movement it is to be found not in the 1870s or 1880s—or even, as others may argue, in the years immediately preceding the First World War—but in the collapse of Chartism in 1848. As Eric Hobsbawm notes, ‘it is impossible to trace the characteristic patterns of working-class culture as a whole back to the period before 1848.’ [4] The quarter of a century that was to follow was the definitive formative period for the British labour movement, in which the patterns of political outlook that were to persist for at least the next century were to be established.

The general significance of this period—from around 1850 to around 1875—for the overall development of British society was summarised thus by one commentator:

The reason for the extraordinarily formative influence of this period is that in it the exhausted quiescence of the class struggle coincided with the maximum florescence of British society in the world outside. [...] In this unique conjuncture, the British economic revolution was carried outwards successfully while a social counter-revolution triumphed at is heart. [5]

It was during this period that the modern British labour movement—as distinct from a simple and elemental proletarian identity—began to establish itself with a degree of institutional stability and continuity. Over these years what we can define as factory labour proper significantly increased its social weight within the ‘working class’ as a whole, although, importantly for our purposes, it did not at this point reach a level of preponderance. A layer of skilled workers had emerged, enjoying sufficient material and social privileges to separate their outlook from the mass of the labouring population. Average wages rose above the level of previous decades, as the accumulation of capital acquired broader bases in the mid-Victorian boom. At the level of the political system, the Reform Acts of 1867 and then in 1884 extended the suffrage to the relatively more prosperous sections of the working class. By the 1870s most of the characteristic institutions of the modern British labour movement were already in existence; the previous years had seen the widespread establishment of the trades council movement and—in 1868—the Trades Union Congress (TUC). In cotton, coal and iron stable trade unionism and collective bargaining had been established. The engineering, building and craft trades had stable national trade unions which are the direct ancestors of those unions that were to form the core of the British trade union movement in the twentieth century.

The particular conditions and exceptional history of the British economy in this period, within which the British trade union movement in its modern form was born, left a particular stamp on its outlook and operation. The mid-Victorian economy—congenitally resistant to comprehensive modernisation—combined side-by-side the operation of both modern and the most archaic techniques: ‘in 1851 there were more shoemakers than coalminers, two and a half times as many tailors as railwaymen, and more silkworkers than commercial clerks.’ [6] Thus although the particular timing of the emergence of the labour movement in Britain was late in terms of the progress of industrialisation—and as we have seen it immediately followed a significant defeat for the development of independent working class politics—crucially it was early in terms of the development of a modern capitalist economy based on what has been called the ‘second industrial revolution’. In other words, the ‘growth of real power by workers to resist changes and to defend standards coincided with customs and norms that existed before the introduction of mass production techniques.’ [7]

The trade unions that emerged in this context were as a consequence corporatist, conservative and exclusionary. Eric Hobsbawm summarised the conditions within which the unions operated: ‘There were no socialists to dream of a new society. There were trade unions, seeking to exploit the laws of political economy in order to create a scarcity of their kind of labour and thus increase their members’ wages.’ [8] The unions were almost exclusively—in a situation in which the words ‘skilled’ and ‘organised’ were regarded as practically synonymous—based on ‘craft’. The preface to the rules—drafted in 1860—of one of the most important of the new unions, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, for example, declared: ‘It is our duty to exercise the same care and watchfulness over that in which we have a vested interest—i.e. our skill—as the physician does who holds a diploma.’ [9]

The fact that this period was the decisive formative one for the modern British labour movement (in contrast with the Owenite trade unionism of the pre-1848 period—‘all-embracing in its organisation and idealistic in its philosophy’ [10]) established a set of characteristics which were not only enduring but also peculiar and contradictory (and also distinctly ‘British’). As John Saville has noted: ‘the central paradox of [British] domestic politics was the failure to develop an independent working class party.’ [11] The early post-Chartist trade unions emerged almost as a substitute for the development of an independent political voice—as E. P. Thompson commented, once Chartism failed to ‘overthrow’ capitalism the working class then proceeded ‘to warren it from end to end’. [12] It was at the level of the workplace—and the workplace alone—that an independent working class identity manifested itself: ‘In the liberal-labour tradition there was always a central emphasis upon the limited purposes and functions of trade unions. In no other area of life was “independence” so clearly manifested. ... Any threat to the legal status of trade unions, and what were regarded as its traditional rights, always called forth great reserves of militant intransigence and class consciousness.’ [13]

As a model of industrial resistance, the British trade unions stood as an example to the world. Yet on the political plane, through the failure to develop an alternative party to that of Liberalism, this ‘economistic’ outlook of the trade union movement amounted to ‘a form of integration into the characteristic hierarchies of Victorian society, an assimilative process affecting a vital section of the proletariat.’ [14] In Germany, the Social Democratic Party was founded in 1869; in France, the Parti Ouvrier in 1876; in Italy, the Socialist Party in 1884; in Sweden, the Social Democratic Party in 1889. Yet in Britain, the first socialist sect—the SDF—was formed only in 1884; and the first working class party—the Labour Representation Committee—only in 1900. The contrast is striking. This pattern—of exceptionally powerful industrial organisation and exceptionally weak political projection—was deep-rooted, and it was to persist.

III

This was the context into which the ‘new’ unionism was to emerge in the 1870s and 1880s. Yet the word ‘new’ is something of a misnomer: it was not so much that the trade unions were in some sense transformed over this period, but rather that here was an entry into the existing movement of larger numbers and wider layers of working class members.

The reason underlying the expansion of the trade union movement over this period lay in the pattern of modernisation of the British economy and the impact of this on the structure and nature of the working class itself. Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth not only did the working class itself increase both absolutely in size and also in concentration, but there occurred a shift in its occupational structure as well. In terms of its social composition, the working class was becoming larger, more urban and more industrial (as well as more adult and marginally more female as well). In addition, partly as a consequence of the heightened national integration of the British economy, and partly as a result of the growing role of the state, the working class was itself becoming more ‘national’—not only in objective fact but also in terms of its own consciousness. As Hobsbawm reminds us, before around the 1890s, the phenomenon of the national industrial dispute does not even exist as a possibility. [15] The expansion of the trade union movement was a product of this process of ‘class formation’: the emergence of a working class not just as an objective fact but in conditions that facilitated the development of a subjective class identity.

What is really remarkable, however, is not the change in the size and composition of the membership of the trade unions over this period but the degree to which these changes left the essential structure and outlook of the trade union movement so essentially unmarked. What was unique about the emergence of the mass trade unions in Britain compared to the rest of Europe was not so much the sheer scale of the affair but the fact that there was an already existing ‘old’ unionism—to which the ‘new’ trade unionists had little positive alternative. As we have seen, it was only from the 1880s onwards that an independent working class political voice began to emerge; prior to this point, the entire political experience of the British working class had been conditioned by the prior existence of trade unionism. The result was predictable: ‘by and large, the attempts to broaden the old craft unions failed. The TUC did not stay radicalised for long, and the Trades Councils, whose expulsion form the TUC in 1895 marked the end of the radical phase, remained on the margins of trade unionism.’ [16] When the breach in ‘economistic’ outlook of the trade union establishment did eventually come, it was not at the volition of the influx of ‘new’ trade unionists but in response to the government-inspired Taff Vale judgement of 1901. In other words, the trade union leaders only became convinced of the need for independent working class politics when such a step became necessary to safeguard trade unionism itself.

As Eric Hobsbawm has noted, it is interesting that the trade union upsurge of 1911-13 has never attracted a similar recognition as that of the late nineteenth century, even though the former movement was at least as innovative and certainly more radical. [17] It is, however, necessary to challenge Hobsbawm’s preferred view of 1911-13 as a ‘continuation’ of nineteenth-century ‘new’ unionism; rather, the rise of a tradition of syndicalism prior to the First World War was something of an admission that the previous wave of ‘new unionism’ had failed—at least from the point of view of a desire to transform the conservative and craft-dominated outlook of the trade union establishment that existed at the time. The particularly radical nature of 1911-14 upsurge arose directly from the development of trade union rank-and-file movements—especially amongst the miners—which were themselves a product of a reaction of a whole layer within the trade union movement against what was perceived as an opportunist orientation form the labour leaders towards British capitalism. [18] The fact that similarities in rhetoric can be observed between the two periods indicates a general perception that the radicalism of the earlier period had been, if not extinguished, at least absorbed into the prevailing outlook of the union establishment.

The features of the dominant ideology within the British working class movement as it was forged in the decades following the eclipse of Chartism have been outlined above: ‘On the one hand, an “economist” class consciousness continuously renewed from within the industrial sector; but on the other, a pervasive sense of collaboration in political affairs.’ [19] The totality of this outlook—in a word, what we can call ‘labourism’—reflected the absence of an independent political tradition outside of the confines of trade unionism pure and simple during the formative period for the British working class movement. It indicated the degree to which—for good or ill—British capitalism had been successful in integrating popular discontent and the working class movement into a framework that did not challenge the overall operation of capitalist relations: while working class resistance remained tied to the corporate trade-unionist—rather than the broader political—stage, working class discontent was always able to be assimilated into a framework that the broader operation of society was able to accommodate. As Perry Anderson has noted, the very name of the traditional party of the British working class—established by the trade union movement itself—was alone of the major European working-class formations called neither a Social Democratic nor a Socialist nor a Communist—but a Labour—Party: ‘a name which designates not an ideal society, as do the others, but an existent interest.’ [20] The fact that this state of affairs persisted until well into the twentieth century indicates that the ‘new unionism’ of the 1880s—along with the subsequent upsurges of militancy and organisation that were to follow—was unable to fundamentally alter the preponderant reality of this adamantine and corporate social consciousness that had been developed by the British working class after 1848.

Notes

[1] Report of Ben Tillett speaking at the 1893 Bradford conference which was to establish the Independent Labour Party. Quoted in G. D. H. Cole, British Working Class Politics, 1832-1914 (London, 1946), 141. Tillett was at the time speaking against the proposal to name the new organisation The Socialist Labour Party.

[2] A. E. P. Duffy, ‘New Unionism in Britain, 1889-1890: A Reappraisal’, Economic History Review 14 (1961-2), 307. It should be noted that Duffy’s article is an attempted refutation of the argument of others that the 1880s marked such a sharp break with previous developments.

[3] Tom Clarke, ‘Introduction’ to Tom Clarke and Laurie Clements, Trade Unions Under Capitalism (London, 1978), 12.

[4] E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Formation of British Working-Class Culture’, Worlds of Labour (London, 1984), 181.

[5] Tom Nairn, ‘The Fateful Meridian’, New Left Review 60 (March-April 1970), 5.

[6] E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Making of the Working Class 1870-1914’, Worlds of Labour (London, 1984), 196.

[7] A. Kilpatrick and T. Lawson, ‘On the Nature of Industrial Decline in the UK’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 4.1 (March 1980), 86. The authors also—correctly—emphasise the subsequent and unique evolutionary continuity of British trade unionism, uninterrupted by any equivalent of fascism, foreign occupation or American plan.

[8] E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London, 1990), 126.

[9] Quoted by James Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement 1867-1974 (Brighton, 1983), 2.

[10] Tom Nairn, ‘The Anatomy of the Labour Party-1’, New Left Review 27 (September- October 1964), 40.

[11] John Saville, ‘The Ideology of Labourism’, Robert Benewick, R. N. Berki and Bhikhu Parekh (eds.), Knowledge and Belief in Politics: The Problem of Ideology  (London, 1973), 214.

[12] E. P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, The Socialist Register 1965, 343.

[13] Saville, ibid., 216-7.

[14] Nairn, ‘Anatomy of the Labour Party’, ibid., 41. This view of the trade union movement having an assimilative function with regard to bourgeois society has an obvious similarity with the theory of ‘negative integration’ with regard to the labour movement in Germany. For a discussion of this point, see Richard J. Evans, ‘Introduction’, to Richard J. Evans (ed.), The German Working Class 1888-1933 (London, 1982), 18-24.

[15] See an analysis of these developments in Hobsbawm, ‘The Making of the Working Class 1870-1914’, 196-199.

[16] E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The “New Unionism” in Perspective’, Worlds of Labour (London, 1984), 164.

[17] Ibid., 152.

[18] For a succinct analysis of the emergence of British working class syndicalism prior to the First World war—with particular emphasis on the miners’ union—see Michael Woodhouse, ‘Syndicalism, Communism and the Trade Unions in Britain, [1910-1926’, Marxist 4.3 (1966), 47-51.