Chapter 5 Conclusions
There are a number of conclusions to be drawn from evaluating the effect of the Derby dispute upon the GNCTU and the history of the early labour movement. These show that Derby has been an unjustly forgotten and dismissed episode which deserves further examination to shed light on this period.
Attempts to form a general union were no new thing in 1833 but the GNCTU was a new form of general union with clearly proto-syndicalist objectives and an inclusive policy which included the organisation of women, the unskilled and the previously unorganised. Both of these things set it apart from earlier attempts but it would not have been possible to make this brave attempt without the experience of earlier trade unionism and attempts at trades union. The Derby case shows this with unquestionable solidity of organisation reported by an on the scene (and hostile) local press. If the workers of Derby had not been previously organised they could not have displayed this level of discipline.
The Derby lock-out was centrally important to the GNCTU. Derby’s district lodge published a manifesto of no compromise to the masters. The masters played the part of ruthless capitalists perfectly. It was a model dispute in every sense which led to the foundation of a National Trades Union with objectives which not only supported the Derby locked-outs but which supported their aspirations of ‘doing without the masters’.
The position of women in the dispute was very important. They were not only involved in harassing ‘black sheep’ to such an extent that a number of locked-out women were prosecuted but more importantly many women members of the Trades Union were overlooked by the masters and managed to continue in employment and earning wages and thus funding the dispute until February.
The GNCTU was based in a tradition of trade unionism but social revolutionary objectives were the driving force towards trades union organisation and the cause of the fear and loathing expressed by the masters and government towards it. This failure of the Trades Union path to social revolution led to the working class organising around the universal suffrage objectives of the Chartists. The exclusively Trades Union route would not be picked up again until the advent of syndicalism.
The GNCTU was more based in proto-syndicalism as propounded and developed - through experience of the struggle in Derby - by Morrison, than in Owen’s utopian socialist ideas of masters and workers being on the same side. Owen certainly had influence but it was as destructive in the end as it had been constructive in the beginning. He can be said to have set the GNCTU along its path of socialist aspirations, but the GNCTU developed its own class based conception of society which envisaged the workers taking on the masters in a battle to introduce a working class hegemony through trades union action, something which Owen could not tolerate.
Tolpuddle can best be seen as having two effects. In 1834 it must have stricken fear into the hearts of the Derby locked-outs, because the Dorchester six had merely joined a trades union, while the people of Derby had paralysed a town for five months. For subsequent trade unionists the general public outcry and repeal of the sentences (after two years of pressure), meant that similar recourse to ancient laws would not be used against them and firmly put trade unions into the realm of legally acceptable organisations.
In the final analysis Derby tells us much more about the nature of the GNCTU than had been recognised. Contrary to the position that these were people with short term industrial goals in mind, they were undoubtedly from their words and actions following a social revolutionary agenda. The ideology of the GNCTU and the actions of the locked out in Derby are so intertwined as to be one and the same. So much so that the defeat in Derby can fairly be equated with the defeat of the GNCTU and the proto-syndicalist trades union movement.
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