Henry Pelling

The Industrial Relations Act and The Social Contract, 1970–9

It was on 18 June 1970 — one year to the day after Harold Wilson’s capitulation to the T.U.C. over Mrs. Castle’s Industrial Relations Bill — that polling took place in a new general election. On this occasion the Conservatives, under Edward Heath, won a completely unexpected victory with an overall majority of thirty seats. Turnout was lower than since the 1930’s, and it seemed that the Labour Party suffered from abstentions by its regular supporters, perhaps occasioned by the ill-feeling generated by the conflict over union reform. If this was so, the result was to put the unions in an even worse situation. The Conservatives had changed their policy since they were last in office: they now proposed to introduce an Industrial Relations Bill of their own, with the intention of bringing legal restrictions into trade-union affairs far more completely than had been envisaged by Mrs. Castle.

On the Defensive: 1980–91

On taking office in May 1979, Mrs Thatcher appointed James Prior as her Secretary for Employment. Prior had previously been the Opposition spokesman on the subject, and he was inclined to favour a live-and-let-live policy. On the other hand, the events of 1978–9 had convinced him and the whole Tory leadership that something had to be done about secondary picketing—that is to say, the picketing of firms not directly involved in a dispute—and also about the closed shop. In July 1979, therefore, he issued a consultative document which called for the limitation of picketing to employees involved in a dispute and to their place of work, for expansion of exemptions from the closed shop, and for the provision of public funds for secret ballots before strikes and in the election of full-time trade-union officers. A bill along these lines (later the Employment Act, 1980) was introduced to the Commons in December 1979 and obtained the Royal Assent in the summer of the following year. Although Prior began discussions on the bill with the T.U.C., the latter broke them off on 4 March 1980 and called for a ‘Day of Action’ on 14 May—a one-day strike against the government’s policies.

From Taff Vale to Triple Alliance, 1900–14

We have seen that the leaders of British trade unionism ended the nineteenth century with feelings of some concern about the security of their legal rights. It did not take more than a few months of the twentieth century for these feelings to turn into a definite anxiety and an insistence upon political action to remedy the situation. The change was caused by the decision of the House of Lords in the Taff Vale case in July 1901 — a case which had more far-reaching effects for trade unionism than any other which the courts had ever been called upon to decide.

The Formation of a Pressure Group, 1860–80

Until the 1860’s it could not be said that there was any national leadership of the trade unions. The National Association of United Trades for the Protection of Labour, which as we have seen had had a shadowy existence since its foundation in 1845, operated only on special occasions such as when the Molestation of Workmen Bill was being drawn up. We do not know how much support the National Association could claim in the country at large: it can hardly have had very much. But the formation of the London Trades Council in 1860 seemed to put matters on a different footing. Although London was only part of the whole country, it contained a large proportion of existing unionism, and was also the headquarters of a number of the national unions. The full-time secretaries of the latter formed a group which dominated the London Trades Council in its early days, and could claim in some sense at least to be representative of national union opinion.

New Unionism and New Politics, 1880–1900

There is no doubt that the early 1880’s saw a considerable change in the climate of political opinion — a change that was due in part to the effect of the ‘Great Depression’, with its apparent threat to the future of Britain’s industrial supremacy, and in part to the rise of Marxian Socialism on the continent and to the recognition of social problems at home. But the emergence of Socialism in Britain was to begin with on a very small scale, and the movement derived much of its influence from a tiny group of well-to-do supporters in London. Among the organisations founded at this time was the Fabian Society, which never became more than a forum for a few hundred intellectuals, influential though their ideas were to be.

Power with Responsibility, 1939–51

The years from 1940 to 1951 saw the trade-union movement undertaking responsibilities greater than ever before — for the first half of the period in the wartime Coalition led by Winston Churchill, and thereafter in the postwar Labour government of Clement Attlee. But this era of deep involvement in the processes of government was prefaced by the eight months of the ‘phoney war’, when the National Government under Chamberlain prepared somewhat ineffectively for the necessities of the total struggle which was forced upon the country.

The Origins, to 1825

The concept of a separate organisation of employed workers, to determine wages and conditions by negotiation with their employers, had no place in the medieval system of industry. The recognised crafts were catered for by the gilds, which were combinations of both masters and journeymen. The journeymen were skilled workers who had served an apprenticeship to their trade. The gilds had the responsibility of protecting the standards of their respective crafts by defining the terms of service for apprentices, which usually ran for a period of seven years. Furthermore, they could fix the prices for the manufactured product and determine the piece-rate to be paid to the journeyman. The journeymen were of course vitally interested not only in the level of the piece-rate but also in the conditions of their work and in the protection of their status vis-a-vis the unskilled. They were anxious to restrict the number of those who could enter their craft and share their privileges: and to this end they favoured the limitation of the proportion of apprentices to journeymen. But if they combined and went on strike to enforce their views on any of these matters, they risked punishment under the common law of ‘conspiracy in restraint of trade’. The incentive to combine, however, was not present to any great extent in a society where it was quite normal for journeymen to become masters in due course, and where, with skilled workers at a premium, there was a sufficient community of interest between master and journeyman to satisfy both.

High Hopes and Small Beginnings, 1825–60

THE evidence given to the Select Committees of 1824 and 1825 provides us with some idea of the general character of combinations early in the nineteenth century. A few of them were very elaborate in their structure. The West Riding Fancy Union, for instance, recruited textile workers in a wide area of Yorkshire, and had a hierarchy of committees leading up to a General Council, which alone could authorise a strike by any of the local branches. In London, the Tailors had several thousand members and an organisation described by Francis Place as ‘martial’, linking together the local groups at the ‘houses of call’ or public houses where masters could contact journeymen. But most combinations were of a much smaller and more localised type. There were innumerable clubs, each with usually not more than a few dozen members, yet each pursuing an existence which was either completely independent or only very loosely linked to other clubs in the same trade. Among the journeymen brushmakers, to take one example, the so-called United Society was in fact a network of autonomous clubs up and down the country, sharing no more than a mutual undertaking to provide hospitality for a day or two to any club member who might be ‘on tramp’.

On the Plateau, 1951–62

After the victory of the Conservatives in the 1951 election, the General Council of the T.U.C, at once made it clear that it was not going to abandon its close association with the processes of government and administration just because the Labour Party was now in opposition. A statement was issued which declared: Since the Conservative administrations of pre-war days the range of consultation between Ministers and both sides of industry has considerably increased and the machinery of joint consultation has enormously improved. We expect of this Government that they will maintain to the full this practice of consultation. On our part we shall continue to examine every question solely in the light of its industrial and economic implications.

LABOUR AND POLITICS IN CHICAGO

FOR political radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chicago was a focus of hopes and a source of inspiration. The Haymarket explosion of 1886, the Pullman strike of 1894, the foundation of the I.W.W. in 1905-these were merely the most dramatic of numerous events which served to suggest that the city was perpetually on the verge of class warfare. It seemed to many that the great Mid-Western metropolis would take the lead in Socialist revolution; and the impression was heightened by the work of novelists such as Frank Norris, who in The Pit described the extravagances of Chicago financial speculation, and Upton Sinclair, who gave a lurid picture of the stockyards in his propagandist study The Jungle. Furthermore, the city was the headquarters of the Socialist Party of America, which grew to considerable proportions in the first decade of the twentieth century; and it was the home of the principal American Socialist publishing house, C. H. Kerr and Company, who not only ran the monthly International Socialist Review but also put forth a constant flow of translations and propaganda works which revived and expanded the study of Marxism throughout the English-speaking world. It was not for nothing that the British Socialist anthem the ‘Red Flag’ included the words ‘Chicago swells the surging throng’. And yet the promise of Chicago Labour was never fulfilled. Although there were many occasions, even up to the early nineteen-twenties, when it seemed that the city was taking the lead in workers’ political action, by 1930 it was known to the outer world primarily as a haven for racketeers and gangsters. The dreams of the Socialist millennium had given way to the sordid reality of ‘Scarface’ A1 Capone and the ‘syndicates’ of organized crime. How can this degeneration be explained? An answer to the question will be attempted in terms of the local social and political environment of Chicago and of Cook County, Illinois; and such an answer should have significance for the more general problem of the failure of American Socialism and the collapse of hopes for the foundation of a political party based upon organized labour.