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, however, certainly in the United Kingdom and to some extent elsewhere, traditional 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 strike and 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 of laissez-faire policies in general. The British trade-union movement has always been closely tied to the Labour 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 in union politics.
In the USA, in contrast, as few as 15% of workers are still in unions.
Unionism in France, though existing as an underground force from around 1830, was never strong until the post-Second World War years, if then. In part this was due to the low degree of industrialization in France, but also to the syndicalist political views that led them both to eschew formal parliamentary links or co-operation, and to advocate direct general strike action to force social revolution. As in Italy, the split between a communist party-dominated majority and a Catholic-dominated minority wing further weakened French unions. In the USA the union movement was split into two bodies, the American Federation of Labour (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) until the mid-1950s, and although individual unions are important in their own industries, the federal level joint union organizations are of little political importance. The other Western nations with important union movements are mainly the ‘Old Commonwealth’ countries, where Australia and New Zealand follow the British, and Canada the US, patterns.
At least since the late 1970s the phenomenon of trade unionism has been unpopular in British public opinion, with regularly 70% of opinion poll samples thinking they have too much power. (A figure that is not notably different among members themselves.) Unionism tends to be strongest everywhere either in craft or large-scale industry, and weak in distributive, white collar or very unskilled trades. Various attempts are made by governments from time to time (and of all political colours) to restrain union power, but the whole principle of unionization, to establish somewhat more equal bargaining power between employers and employees, is so well-established that, despite the surface unpopularity of unions, little can be done to curtail their major privileges under law. Unions existed, with compulsory membership, in all Soviet bloc countries, but the right to strike was usually withheld, and, with the exception of the Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s, these unions were so totally controlled by the local communist parties as to be mere façades. Perhaps the most important theoretical, as well as practical, question about union membership is the problem of what is known, in the UK, as ‘the closed shop’. This is a system where no one is allowed to keep a job in a factory or other workplace unless they join the relevant union. Although a constant target of criticism by conservatives in both the USA and the UK, it is a practice that employers themselves quite often approve of, if only because it simplifies their own negotiating strategies. The union’s argument is quite simple—the benefits they gain by concerted action should not be enjoyed by those unprepared to share the effort, and it is certainly true that unions operating in a non-closed shop environment tend to be less effective. This, again, is not a phenomenon restricted to working-class movements—some university libraries in the UK, for example, operate a closed shop rule even for academic level staff.
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