The National Free Labour Association

1976 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Alderman
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
British Labour ◽  
The Right ◽  
Crucial Part

The origins of the British Labour Party are many and complex. They have formed the subject of innumerable works of historical scholarship and of journalism, for it is possible to tell the story equally forcefully in terms either of political theory or of personalities. But no matter how much weight may be given to the role of political ideas, and no matter how much importance one may attach to the appearance of the “right” men and women at the “rightrd; time, the crucial part played by the trade-union movement cannot be denied. It was the growing support derived from the trade unions which breathed life into the Labour Representation Committee after 1900, and this in spite of strongly-entrenched hostility from within the trade unions to socialism and all its works. The stages by which the unions became reconciled to, and then enthusiastic supporters of, the Labour Party are well known. Self-interest, not socialism, prompted the unions to support separate labour representation in Parliament. Until January 1901 only 29 per cent of those unions affiliated to the Trades Union Congress had decided to back the Labour Representation Committee. In the space of two years that proportion rose to over 56 per cent.

At the crossroads: the Labour Party, the trade unions and the choices of direction for the democratic left

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Wrigley
Keyword(s):  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Comparative Data ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
British Labour ◽  
The Status

Wrigley provides a vital sweeping overview of the path the British Labour Party took during the war. Utilising comparative data highlighting the labour movement across Europe, Wrigley shows how the trade union movement played a key role in the growth of Labour Party in a much needed transnational context. Here we see Labour moving from the status of a client of the Liberals in the summer of 1914 to one where it could meaningfully compete to form a government of its own in under a decade.

scholarly journals The International Trade-Union Movement and the Founding of the International Labour Organization

2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reiner Tosstorff
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
International Labour Organization ◽  
High Expectations ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Union Movement

Accounts of the founding of the International Labour Organization (ILO) usually emphasize the role of social-reformist intellectuals and politicians. Despite the indisputable role of these actors, however, the international labour movement was the actual initiator of this process. Over the course of World War I, the international labour movement proposed a comprehensive programme of protection for the working classes, which, conceived as compensation for its support of the war, was supposed to become an international agreement after the war. In 1919, politicians took up this programme in order to give social stability to the postwar order. However, the way in which the programme was instituted disappointed the high expectations of trade unions regarding the fulfilment of their demands. Instead, politicians offered them an institution that could be used, at best, to realize trade-union demands. Despite open disappointment and sharp critique, however, the revived International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) very quickly adapted itself to this mechanism. The IFTU now increasingly oriented its international activities around the lobby work of the ILO.

scholarly journals Lviv printings general professional assosiation of mutual assistance in 1856-1867. Analysis of activity

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 6-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. R. Berest
Keyword(s):  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Mutual Assistance ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Short Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

The attempt to analyze and show the important role of Lviv printers and to describe their role in the development of Galician society has been made in the article. This attempt has been made on the basis of documents, the principle of historicism, scientific and objective approach. The importance and problematic of the comprehensive study of the oldest history of the creation, formation and development of Lviv printers’ professional co-operation of mutual assistance has been highlighted, and the history and activities of this organization in stages have been described. In general, trade unions emerged as an independent united self-defense organizations and they were formed in the form of workers’ associations and mutual assistance funds. During the first half of the nineteenth century the crystallization of the activities of trade unions happened under the influence of various measures, hold by the administrations, the police and the authorities. This contributed to the further unification of labor and the creation of all-city union of printers in Lviv. It is quite logical that the basis of their actions was their desire to achieve and get the working solidarity, mutual support and assistance. The activities of the trade union were regulated by the statutes. First of all, the purpose of the establishment and operation of the organization was socio-economic, cultural and educational ones. Those purposes were approved by the relevant state authorities and, thus, prevented trade unions from participating in political life.The short period of the 1860-1880s can be considered to be a separate stage in the process of the formation of the mass trade union movement in Galicia. Together with the trade unions of printers, settlers, brokers, masons, carpenters, builders, tanneries, metal workers, doctors, pharmacists, tradesmen, postmen, civil servants, lawyers and many others united and became active partners of the region.The problem, which has been investigated in the article, has a valuable scientific significance as it allows to solve one of the most important issues: to get the historical understanding of activities of Lviv trade union organizations, which have not been thoroughly studied yet.

Activists against “Affluence”: Labour Party Culture during the “Golden Age,” circa 1950–1970

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Fielding
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Social Democrat ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Intimate Association ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Material Interests

From its very foundation, most observers considered the ideas that motivated the British Labour Party to have been essentially empirical. As early as 1929 the German social democrat Egon Wertheimer famously remarked that, unlike his own party, Labour was “completely unencumbered by philosophy, theory and general views of life.” Over sixty years later, this opinion was endorsed by an academic survey of European social democracy that concluded that the party possessed a uniquely “practical brand of ideology.” Labour's apparent peculiarity is conventionally explained with reference to its historic role as the political arm of the British trade union movement and the privileged place held by members of the organized working class within party institutions. This intimate association supposedly gave rise to “Labourism,” characterized by many as a myopic preoccupation with the defense of male industrial workers' material interests. Labour's strong union link is also thought to have promoted a dominant “ethos” that directly reflected the proletarian experience of exploitation. Only in the 1970s, after many working-class members had left and been replaced by more bourgeois and marxist-inclined recruits, did scholars suppose that Labour became, albeit temporarily, more overtly doctrinaire.In challenging this entrenched view of Labour thought, the present article focuses on the period between 1950 and 1970, which began with the lifting of the last vestiges of wartime austerity and ended just before the onset of a world recession. These years have now assumed the glow of, as Eric Hobsbawm has put it, “a sort of Golden Age.”

scholarly journals Εκπαίδευση και συνδικαλιστικές οργανώσεις: όψεις της ευρωπαϊκής εμπειρίας και σύγχρονη ελληνική πραγματικότητα

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nίκος Φωτόπουλος
Keyword(s):  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Scientific Field ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Social Dialogue ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
European Experience ◽  
Union Education

<p>Τrade union education is a developed scientific field in most European countries. The need for a systematic performance of trade union duties was one of the main reasons for the creation of specific trade union education providers in order to strengthen the role of trade unions in social dialogue. This article aims to make reference to the European experience, taking into account the establishment of the Greek Labour Academy, in order to further the debate on the role of trade union education in an era of change for the trade union movement in Greece.</p>

Labour and the Unions: After the Brighton Conference

1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joni Lovenduski ◽  
Pippa Norris
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Communication Strategy ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Electoral Strategies ◽  
British Labour

A Discussion of Last Autumn's Debate over Candidate selection in the British Labour Party and a consideration of the party's links with the trade unions may seem inappropriately provincial in an international journal of comparative politics. However, when viewed as an example of the continued search for political relevance by socialist parties in opposition, the issues raised by Labour's struggle to modernize take on more general interest. During long periods in the wilderness parties characteristically try to revive their fortunes by reforming organizational structures, ideological platforms and electoral strategies. For Labour, this started under the leadership of Neil Kinnock and continued with John Smith. The party has moved cautiously towards the centre ground, streamlined its election machine, modernized its communication strategy, and produced a more unified and moderate image. Labour's reforms of its relationship with the union movement are clearly part of this general attempt to reverse its electoral fortunes.

A Human Rights Analysis of the Viking and Laval Judgments

2008 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 541-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tonia Novitz
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
European Court ◽  
Domestic Labour ◽  
Labour Legislation ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Eu

In 2007, Brian Bercusson observed that: [T]he future of the trade union movement, but also of the EU, may depend on whether on judgment day the European Court of Justice decides that the EU legal order upholds the right of trade unions to take transnational collective action.Previously, deference to domestic labour legislation did not translate into judicial recognition of a right to collective bargaining or a strike. There was only speculation that this should be the case, accompanied by significant opposition from the UK to such a prospect. Judgment day has since come and we have been told that ‘[t]he right to take collective action, including the right to strike, must … be recognised as a fundamental right which forms an integral part of the general principles of Community law’. Indeed, it also seems that such a right extends at least in theory to secondary and transnational action.

The Knights of Labor and the British trade unions, 1880–1900

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Steven Parfitt
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Knights Of Labor ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
British Trade ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Craft Unions ◽  
Set Up

This chapter charts the conflicts that erupted between those unions and British branches of the Knights of Labor. Between 1884 and 1894, an American working-class movement named the Knights of Labor set up more than thirty branches across Britain and Ireland. In that time the Knights organised more than ten thousand members, and contributed to epochal changes in the British trade union movement and in British labour politics. They also faced serious opposition from British unions that resented the Knights’ incursion into their trades and industries. Knights suffered first from battles with craft unions, and then, after the so-called “new unionism” brought large numbers of hitherto unorganised workers into the British union movement, from battles with many of the “new” unions. This chapter argues that the Knights lost these battles because their organisational model, and their reliance on help from an ailing movement in the United States, cut against the sweeping changes that transformed the British labour movement in the late nineteenth century – the growth of national unions and local labour federations in particular. In some cases, the Knights were undone by the very organisations that they had inspired or helped to create.

Party Matters

2009 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hopkin
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
National Party ◽  
Strategic Responses ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Real Picture ◽  
The Relationship

This article addresses the relationship between political decentralization and the organization of political parties in Great Britain and Spain, focusing on the Labour Party and the Socialist Party, respectively. It assesses two rival accounts of this relationship: Caramani's `nationalization of politics' thesis and Chhibber and Kollman's rational choice institutionalist account in their book The Formation of National Party Systems. It argues that both accounts are seriously incomplete, and on occasion misleading, because of their unwillingness to consider the autonomous role of political parties as advocates of institutional change and as organizational entities. The article develops this argument by studying the role of the British Labour Party and the Spanish Socialists in proposing devolution reforms, and their organizational and strategic responses to them. It concludes that the reductive theories cited above fail to capture the real picture, because parties cannot only mitigate the effects of institutional change, they are also the architects of these changes and shape institutions to suit their strategic ends.

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