Trade Union

Before the arrival of industrialization, there were guilds. Guilds were organizations in diverse fields in charge of grouping, training, regulating and defending tradesmen and craftsmen. Beginning in the Middle Ages, people in the arts, trades, and crafts were required to join a guild. In order to become a guild member, people had to serve a long apprenticeship with another member. Members ascended in the guild hierarchy according to their skills and merits. Trade unions initially followed this model. Unions were born as a reaction to problems caused by industrialization, representing people who had become industrial workers and had lost control over their time and labor in the new productive process. Former farmers and tradesmen became industrial workers, unprotected from abuses inflicted upon them by owners, such as lengthy work shifts, low wages, child labor, unhealthy or dangerous working conditions, and firing without cause.

Brief History

The roots of the trade union are the trade guild. Trade guilds were created by merchants, artisans, and traders in order to protect their members against price competition and as a way to control, as a species of group monopoly, the commercialization of their products or work. Members of a guild committed to comply with the guilds’ hierarchy, regulations, and price caps. In that sense, they were closer to contemporary cooperative organizations than to modern unions. In the beginning, workers were former artisans, farmers, and common laborers; they learned from tradesmen and craftsmen the benefits of organizing, and eventually began to organize in order to sell their labor at the best prices without wage competition from each other and be empowered by the possibility of collective bargaining.

Similarities exist between guilds and unions, yet they responded to different economic, social, and historic phenomena. England spearheaded industrialization. The first worker associations were born around the end of the eighteenth century in Britain and were called mutual aid societies. These were originally integrated essentially by artisans who worked in a domestic situation, that is, those who were craftsmen working from home, such as weavers or dyers. Its main objective was to recruit workers in order to achieve better work and payment conditions as well as to provide a kind of insurance for members who fell victim to adversity, such as illness or unemployment.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the British government enacted a series of repressive laws known as the Combination Laws, by which all types of workers’ associations—called "combinations of workmen"—were forbidden. This was aimed at disempowering workers and it effectively rendered their associations illegal, driving them underground. England abolished the Combination Laws in 1824, signaling a flourishing in workers’ associations which began to organize under a system known as trade unions and cooperatives. These organizations flourished worldwide, and came to be associated with social justice and progress.

By the 1830s, in other countries, such as France, mutual aid societies were expanding. During the following decade in France, workers began to gain more rights, such as a reduction in the working shift from 18 or 16 hours to 10 hours a day.

Overview

A trade union is a labor organization constituted to recruit workers in order to defend their rights and gain new ones. Union activists considered union activity to be part of a larger movement of social change. In time, they also encompassed people from some professions, such as teachers and nurses.

The Industrial Revolution had eroded the artisanal economy system; large factory systems rose and international trade boomed, aided by steamship and railroad expansion. One of the phenomena that supported industrialization was the loss of autonomy among workers. For example, legal policies such as the eighteenth century enclosures in England caused many independent farmers to lose their communal lands in favor of powerful landlords. Dispossession impelled the migration of workers to seek jobs in mining and urban manufactories. This led to deplorable conditions and exploitation. Even children were made to work in terrible conditions. Eventually, workers organized to fight for better conditions. Governments responded by protecting the interests of manufacturers, enacting legislation that forbid workers from associating freely. Nevertheless, unions prevailed.

The trade union system as we know it today started in Britain; it was regional and formed by people working in the same trade. Union finances were based principally on membership dues. In time, trade unions expanded beyond region and trade. Some even made international alliances. The first national union, the National Union of Cotton, was created in 1829. In 1834, several unions joined under the Great Trade Union, causing great concern among manufacturers. In consequence, the government proscribed them by establishing the Combination Acts. Workers reacted with stronger methods of pressure, while they incurred in the political arena as well.

The development of the union movement was tied to the growth of the working class and of socialist political parties, as well a sense of class consciousness among the working class, and social revolutions such as the French Communard Revolution (1848) in France. All these events fostered trade union expansion.

Trade unions, tolerated for decades in Britain, were allowed to legalize in 1871. During the following decades unions reached great importance worldwide. They became better financed and organized, and learned to lobby politically for worker-friendly policies and legislation. Despite the expansion of trade unions, the struggle for better work conditions did not abate. In 1911, for example, almost 150 young female workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, because of unsafe work conditions. The catastrophe sparked the development of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, and new legislation requiring better factory safety standards. Often workers had to strike and forgo their wages, and endure brutal treatment by authorities, just to validate their rights.

Unions continued to organize into the post-World War II era, seeking to improve working conditions for all workers, as demonstrated by the creation of the United Farm Workers of America in 1962. The global growth of the labor movement has reversed since then, however, in response to market imperatives and the attrition of labor-friendly legislation. Culturally, the contemporary emphasis on individual rights systematically erodes collective rights. This is particularly difficult for labor organizations. Nevertheless, trade unions may be reviving through grassroots associations worldwide, which continue to organize for collective bargaining in favor of the most vulnerable members of society.

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