Trade union growth, structure and policy

Just over two centuries ago as this is written, eighteen Lancashire weavers were prosecuted for their part in what was probably the first substantial and substantiated strike in the industrial history of Britain or for that matter, of any other country. That stoppage was provoked by a refusal of the weavers' employers to recognize a 'combination of their workers. Two hundred years later, during 1959 and 1960, the British textile workers' leaders presided, as joint members of a legally-empowered Board with the leaders of textile employers' organizations, over a state-supported and subsidized re-organization of the United Kingdom's cotton industries them selves.

Despite the historical contrast, some of the demands of the striking weavers of 1758-for increased pay and the control of labour recruitment-would not seem at all unintelligible to wage-earners today. But in other respects the modern trade union's situation is clearly very different. Indeed, it is just this addition to the traditional functions of trade unions of others imposed by the latters' contem porary status and influence to which the modern problems of trade unionism itself can be largely traced.

Many contemporary labour issues seem, in fact, the product of success. Just how far the present century's-and particularly the last generation's-advance in the condition and status of wage earners is due to the growth of union power to extract direct con cessions from employers may be argued. But certainly the economic and social order with which that advance was most associated-the 'full employment', 'welfare state', and 'guided' (if not quite 'con trolled') economy-owes its existence largely to the pressure or presence of a movement to which organized labour has both given the continuing force and indicated the main direction.