Being a one thousand word attempt to explain how Unions arose.
by Tarquin O’Faherty
Trade Unions had been heavily legislated against in the 18th Century. Various ‘Combination Acts’ absolutely forbade membership of these organisations which were seen to be a threat to ‘Free Trade’. There was also in this the very British notion of ‘knowing one’s place’. That there was a ‘natural order’ to how people lived, and that there was something distinctly ‘unnatural’ about the idea of trying to move out of one’s ‘place’ or as they said, “above one’s station’. The new ‘middle’ class took this mediaval notion of ‘knowing one’s place’ to it’s heart and used it to be just as repressive, just as exploitative as the old merciless Tory Party had been.
John Doherty, an Irish spinner, arrived in the North of England in 1871. Doherty did not ‘know his place’. He was hugely influenced by Robert Owen and believed that the only way he and his fellow spinners could improve their lot was by forming unions.
There is no doubt about it, John Doherty thought big. As the 1820’s wore on, and having suffered defeats in his various campaigns to stop wage reductions, he finally established a Spinners Union (1829) which covered all of the UK. It was called the Grand General Union of all the Spinners of the United Kingdom. But this union was only for spinners. Doherty wanted more. By early 1830 he had established the National Union for the Protection of Labour which was designed to cover every trade in the country, and also included the unskilled.
Employers were not happy. This was beginning to look a tad dangerous. So in a tactical move, they closed their factories down and waited. Meanwhile the economic situation worsened. More people were put out of work. Eventually, the men gave in (because they were starving) and went back to work at the old starvation rates. The Spinners Union survived this crisis but its power was reduced enormously.
The astonishing thing here was that despite the Spinners’ defeat, the National Association for the Protection of Labour just grew and grew. It began to include miners, textile workers, Potters, etc. Other groups, declining to join, instead formed their own unions, rather than give up what they saw as their independence to a central body. From London to Scotland trade Unionism, industrial Trade Unionism, was waking up to the fact that governmental reform was a real possibility.
It was a very different matter for farm labourers. Since 1815 and the depression that followed the end of the war, vast steam and water-driven factories had robbed the cottagers of the traditional opportunity to supplement their labouring income by weaving and spinning in their own homes during the winter. Villages had been razed to grow wheat for the War. This demand slowed and grazing animals replaced the wheat. The absence of the old way of life, of a mixed farming economy further deprived farm labourers of income. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars, less and less of this labouring class had enough land to either grow vegetables or keep a pig which was the way they had provided for them selves for centuries. Country people took exception to this greed and exploitation and began to object. The only person to write seriously about this was William Cobbett. Cobbett was appalled at the conditions that countryfolk have been reduced to. Villages were obliged to provide for the needy and they did this in such a niggardly way that people simply died of malnutrition.
There were riots not because of shortage of food, but because people had NO food. (Read about this in Cobbett’s first hand account of this misery in his book ‘Rural Rides’. It is still in print.) The people were being exploited by the Church, their landlords and the government. The people objected to being treated like this and rioted. In the early 1830’s every county in southern England experienced rioting. Machinery was wrecked, hay stacks burned, fences torn down, bad landlords taken out and thrashed, crops destroyed, sheep and cattle driven off.
Famously there was a lad in his late teens named Henry Cook, who took it upon himself to knock the hat off a Home Counties grandee with the illustrious banking name of Baring. Henry Cook, along with several others, were hanged for this. This hanging,these executions, were carried out to appease both Whigs and Tories and assure them that the country was still in safe hands. Peasants didn’t matter.
What must be constantly kept in mind here is that old Tory families like Baring regarded the peasantry as being beneath contempt, as serfs, and deserving of nothing. The Whigs had precisely the same attitude. Nevertheless, there was real fear amongst the ruling classes of revolution. The possibility of an English equivalent of the French ‘Terror’, where institutions were overwhelmed and aristos summarily executed loomed large in the ruling class mind. The Whigs, much earlier than the Tories, began to side with the idea of reform because they realised quicker than most the power of the rising industrial middle class. Make concessions to the new ‘middle’ class and revolution might be averted.
By 1832, Doherty’s National Association for the Protection of Labour had run its course, but the idea of trade unionism was by now fixed in peoples’ minds and various unions, in various guises kept up the pressure which would eventually result in shorter working days and better conditions.
Jeremy Bentham (1741-1832), the advocate of Utilitarianism which promoted the principle of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number of people’ was a long time supporter of what were considered at the time to be ‘lunatic’ causes; equal rights for women, separation of church and state, decriminalisation of homosexuality, the right to divorce, and the abolition of both the death penalty and slavery. Robert Owen was a great admirer of Bentham and went out of his way to promote his Utopian ideas. During the first thirty years of the 19th century Owen set up ‘New Lanark’ type communities in Ireland, England and in the US to promote his essentially Utopian ideas. Most of these ventures failed, not because the ideas were wrong, but simply because even Utopia needs good managers. The single success of this venture was in the town of Ralahine, in County Clare in Ireland which survived for almost four years and was only driven to the wall by the proprietor’s gambling. By 1828 Owen was living in London and his ‘co-operative’ ideas were now being taken up by trade unionists in a much more positive way. Owenite societies had been formed, during and after the Napoleonic Wars with real, influential membership. Owenite Cooperative Societies were springing up all through this period, 300 or more of which were in operation by 1830. These co-ops would employ striking or laid-off workers in Co-Op owned warehouses and shops. The whole idea was to point out that there was an alternative to the exploitation that workers experienced every day in sweat shops and factories. Owen preached co-operation, not exploitation, and his ideas were hugely popular.
TO BE CONTINUED