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.

British Trade Unions and European Union Integration in the 1990s: Politics versus Political Economy

2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Strange
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Economic And Monetary Union ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
British Trade ◽  
Careful Assessment

This article evaluates the changing assessments within the British trade union movement of the efficacy of European Union integration from the viewpoint of labour interests. It argues that there has been a marked further ‘Europeanisation’ of British trade unionism during the 1990s, consolidating an on-going process which previous research shows began in earnest in the mid 1980s. A shift in trade union economic policy assessments has seen the decisive abandonment of the previously dominant ‘naive’ or national Keynesianism. While there remain important differences in economic perspective between unions, these are not such as would create significant divisions over the question of European integration per se, the net benefits of which are now generally, though perhaps not universally, accepted. The absence of fundamental divisions is evident from a careful assessment of the debates about economic and monetary union at TUC Congress. The Europeanisation of British trade unionism needs to be seen within the context of an emergent regionalism, in Europe and elsewhere. It can best be understood as a rational response by an important corporate actor (albeit one whose national influence has been considerably diminished in recent decades) to globalisation and a significantly changing political economy environment.

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.

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.

Knights Across the Atlantic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Parfitt
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Knights Of Labor ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Industrial Landscape ◽  
British Labour ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Wage Earners

The Knights of Labor became the first national movement of American workers between 1869 and 1917. They also established branches of their movement across the world. This book explores the history of the Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland, where between 1883 and the end of the century they organised upwards of 50 individual assemblies (branches) and 10,000 members across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It treats the Knights as an important but under-recognised part of the great changes taking place within the British labour movement at the end of the nineteenth century, whether in terms of the growth of labour politics (and ultimately the Labour Party) or the transformation of the trade unions from the movement of a minority of wage earners to a majority of them. This book looks at the approaches that British and Irish Knights took to politics, industrial relations, race, culture and gender, drawing on and making comparisons with the well-established historiography of the Knights in Canada and the United States, and shows how British and Irish Knights tried and ultimately failed to make their American movement a permanent part of the British and Irish industrial landscape.

scholarly journals Trade-Unions in an Age of Pluralism and Structural Change : The Response to the Irrepressible Demands of the Common Man

2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 801-828 ◽  
Author(s):  
Solomon Barkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
The Common ◽  
New Situation

Reviewing the industrial unrest of the last three years in Western Europe and the United States, the author describes and analyses the new trends in the trade-union movement to cope with such a new situation.

scholarly journals Manufacturing Consensus? New Zealand Press Attitudes Toward the Labour Movement in 1890

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
James Keating
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Press ◽  
National Significance ◽  
Transformative Impact

<p>This thesis investigates the attitudes of New Zealand newspapers to the social and economic tensions exacerbated by the emergence of a newly assertive labour movement in 1890, culminating in the August-November Maritime Strike, and the 5 December General Election. Through detailed analysis of labour reporting in six newspapers (Evening Post, Grey River Argus, Lyttelton Times, New Zealand Herald, Otago Daily Times, Press) this thesis examines contemporary conceptions of New Zealand society and editors’ expectations of trade unions in a colony that emphasised its egalitarian mythology. Although the establishment of a national press agency in 1880 homogenised the distribution of national and international news, this study focuses on local news and editorial columns, which generally reflected proprietors’ political leanings. Through these sites of ideological contest, conflicting representations of the ascendant trade union movement became apparent. While New Zealand newspapers sympathised with the striking London dockers in 1889, the advent of domestic industrial tensions provoked a wider range of reactions in the press. Strikes assumed a national significance, and the divisions between liberal and conservative newspapers narrowed. To varying degrees both considered militant action by organised labour a threat to the colony’s peace and prosperity – sentiments that pervaded their reporting. The New Zealand Maritime Strike confirmed these prejudices and calcified the perception of organised labour’s malevolence. Despite the year’s upheavals, this thesis contends that the press struggled to comprehend labour’s political ambitions, ignoring the unprecedented mobilisation of thousands of new voters, shifting public opinion, and the transformative impact of electoral reform. Distracted by the mainstream political obsession with land reform and convinced that public prejudices, stoked by their own reporting, would obviate a labour presence in the new parliament, the victory of the Liberal-labour coalition confounded the publishing establishment.</p>

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