Trade Unions
Trade unions are organized groups of working people, usually but not
invariably in industrial and commercial rather than agricultural concerns.
Until relatively recently they have been predominantly of working class, that
is, skilled and unskilled manual worker, membership. Since the 1970s, how-
ever, certainly in the United Kingdom and to some extent elsewhere, tradi-
tional middle-class professions have become unionized. The UK and Germany
have the oldest trade-union organizations of a legal nature, though in both
countries the fight for legal recognition was prolonged. In the UK it was not
until legislation following industrial unrest and violent state coercion at the
beginning of the 20th century that modern legal protection for the rights to
strikeand to picket (absolutely essential ingredients of union activity) were
granted, in 1906. German unions gained similar protection at roughly the same
time, and, except for a period of repression during the Nazi regime, the two
union movements have been very similar.
The main set-back for British unions came with the failure of the only-
once-attempted general strike in 1926, but in the immediate post-war decades
unions were strong, and usually accepted by governments. The attempted legal
restriction of union activities through the Industrial Relations Court set up by
the 1970–74 Conservative government was so violently rejected by the unions
that it was quickly abolished by the 1974–79 Labour government. (Indeed it
was the Conservatives’ conflict with the unions that effectively lost them
power.) A slower, more subtle and more complex attack on trade-union rights
under the Thatcher administration met with greater success. By the 1980s
public attitudes to the unions had shifted independently (accelerated by the
unions’ activities during the ‘Winter of Discontent’ which contributed to
Labour’s losing the 1979 general election), the more moderate white-collar
unions had assumed a more important position and there was an increasing
acceptance oflaissez-fairepolicies in general. The British trade-union move-
ment has always been closely tied to theLabour Party, which it helped set up,
far more closely than unions elsewhere in the Western world are linked to their
left-wing parties. Unions tend to be divided among themselves as much as they
present a common front to the government or industrial leadership, and
Britain’s highly organized and powerful Trades Union Congress (TUC),
organized since 1868, may be unique. Even this body has weakened with
the dwindling membership of many unions, splits leading to the creation of
new non-affiliated unions and the disaffiliation of other existing unions. By the
1990s union membership in the UK had fallen significantly beneath 40% of the
total work-force; although this level remained high by international standards,
it must be remembered that most members are passive, joining either as a
condition of holding their job, or out of social pressure, and take almost no part
Trade Unions