The History of Trade Unionism: (Revised edition, extended to 1920)Webb, Sidney
History
The History of Trade Unionism: (Revised edition, extended to 1920)
Webb, Sidney
Labor unions -- Great Britain -- History
[206] _Resolutions of the Meeting of Journeymen Broad Silk Weavers at
Spitalfields, April 16, 1829_; in Home Office Papers, 40--23, 24. See,
for this period, Cunningham’s _Growth of English Industry and Commerce
in Modern Times_, 1903, pp. 759-762; and also _The Skilled Labourer_,
by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1919, published too late for us to make use of
its interesting descriptions of the principal trades.
CHAPTER III
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
[1829-1842]
So far we have been mainly concerned with societies formed in
particular trades, nearly always confined to particular localities,
and known as institutions, associations, trade clubs, trade societies,
unions, and union societies. We have by anticipation applied the term
Trade Union to them in its modern sense; but in no case that we have
discovered did they call themselves so. It is in the leading articles
of the newspapers of 1830-4 that we first come upon references to
some great Power of Darkness vaguely described as “the Trades Union.”
We find, moreover, that there was in that day, as there has been
repeatedly since, an Old Unionism and a New Unionism, and that “the
Trades Union” represented the New Unionism, and the trade club, or
Trade Union, as we have called it, the Old. The distinction between a
Trade Union and a Trades Union is exactly that which the names imply.
A Trade Union is a combination of the members of one trade; a Trades
Union is a combination of different trades. “_The_ Trades Union,” the
bugbear of the _Times_ in 1834, means the ideal at which the Trades
Unionists aimed: that is, a complete union of all the workers in the
country in a single national Trades Union. The peculiar significance
of Trades Union as distinguished from Trade Union must be carefully
borne in mind throughout this chapter, as it has passed out of use and
occurs now only as a literary blunder. Our present unions of workers
in different though related trades are usually called Amalgamations or
Federations. But both Amalgamations and Federations, being definitely
limited to similar or related and interdependent trades, are in idea
essentially Trade Unions. The distinctive connotation of the term
Trades Union was the ideal of complete solidarity of all wage-workers
in “One Big Union”--that is to say, a single “universal” organisation.
It is the attempt, on the part of the Trade Union leaders, to form not
only national societies of particular trades, but also to include all
manual workers in one comprehensive organisation, that constitutes the
New Unionism of 1829-34.[207]
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