organized labour

Introduction

also called  trade unionism, 

      association and activities of workers in a trade or industry for the purpose of obtaining or assuring improvements in working conditions through their collective action.

Great Britain (United Kingdom), Australia, and New Zealand

Origins in Britain

      British trade unionism has a long and continuous history. Medieval guilds, which regulated craft production, clearly differed in function from trade unions, in that guilds were combinations of both masters and workers while modern unions emerged to serve workers' interests alone. However, aspects of guild regulation—as in matters relating to apprenticeship—were incorporated into the objectives of early unionism, so that some continuity may be discerned between the decay of the one form of organization and the emergence of the other. Examples of the trade-union form of organization are hard to trace before the late 17th century; but during the following hundred years, combinations, as they were known to contemporaries, became widespread, emerging among groups of handicraft workers such as tailors, carpenters, and printers. Their emergence at this period was a result of the development of manufacturing and commerce on a capitalist (capitalism) basis. The number of handicraft workers within the economy was expanding, yet for such workers the prospect of making the transition from journeyman to master was diminishing. Both the rising demand for their labour and their emerging status as permanent employees were essential elements in this early development of labour (labour law) organization. An additional factor, related to the rise of capitalism, was the progressive withdrawal of the state from wage regulation in particular and from labour-market intervention more generally. This was confirmed by the repeal, in 1813 and 1814, of legislation that had provided for the fixing of wages by justices and had stipulated apprenticeship requirements for entry into a trade. The state's withdrawal from labour-market regulation raised with some urgency the issue of the legality of trade unions. Under the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, a general prohibition had been placed upon them, in addition to the restraints imposed by the common law of conspiracy. Such a general prohibition now appeared anomalous and unjust, and it was indeed removed by legislation in 1824 and 1825. Common law impediments remained.

      In the ensuing period, unions multiplied. As in the previous century, they were typically local in scope and craft in composition. Even in the emerging mechanized and factory-based sector, the relatively unsophisticated technology and managerial organization required the employment of skilled tradesmen, and these were assimilated into combinations based on the craft pattern of organization; engineers, boilermakers, and cotton spinners are examples. Yet, at this stage, the structure of unionism was still sufficiently fluid to permit widespread experimentation. During the 1830s there developed a movement toward “general unionism,” directed both at establishing organization nationally and at drawing the various organized trades into alliance with one another. The pioneer in this movement was the cotton spinners' leader, John Doherty, but much of its impetus derived from Robert Owen (Owen, Robert), whose ideal of cooperative as against capitalist production found widespread support. The most ambitious Owenite union project was the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1833–34, designed to embrace the whole of labour though in practice focused on London tailors and shoemakers. Inherently unstable, as were the other broad labour formations of the period, this union did not expire without leaving an enduring legacy. Six Dorsetshire agricultural labourers—the Tolpuddle Martyrs—were convicted and sentenced to transportation to Australia for swearing a secret oath in connection with the union. The union mounted a major campaign on their behalf, and this episode is still cherished by the modern labour movement as symbolic of its early struggle.

Craft unionism in the 19th century

      British settlers brought their customs with them to Australia and New Zealand, and, accordingly, early unions there corresponded closely to the pattern of the home country. The penal character of the settlements established in Australia from the late 18th century was hardly conducive to forming workers' combinations, but the transition from convict to free settlement brought the first signs of union activity. Local societies of craftsmen were operating in the 1830s and '40s, ostensibly for the purpose of providing friendly benefits for their members but in practice for trade purposes as well. Groups involved in these societies included printers, tailors, building craftsmen, and engineers. With the expansion of the economy from the 1850s, such groups formed the basis for permanent trade unions. The emerging pattern was one of craft (craft union) unionism, in which Australian unions, like their counterparts in Britain, sought to restrict entry into and regulate working conditions within their respective trades. In Britain, during the middle decades of the century, a number of such unions developed their organization on a national basis. The most famous were the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, constituted in 1851 and 1860, respectively. In Australia the main impetus to the national organization of trades came later, with the federation of the separate colonies in 1901.

      In both countries, as unions consolidated their organization on independent and sectional lines, collaboration became a means of securing common legislative objectives rather than concerting industrial activity. This was classically the case with the British Trades Union Congress (TUC), an annual union assembly initiated in 1868 with a view to lobbying the legislature through a standing Parliamentary Committee. The model was followed in Australia, where, beginning in 1879, a number of Intercolonial Trade Union Congresses were held, partly with a view to encouraging the formation of parliamentary committees in each of the self-governing colonies. Such political activity certainly achieved a further clarification of the unions' legal status. Legislation removing various remaining impediments was passed in Britain in 1871 and 1875; similar measures followed in all the Australian colonies between 1876 and 1902 and in New Zealand in 1878. Though the three societies differed in many respects, their broadly liberal character had, so far, proved accommodating to trade unionism. In Britain especially, unions had themselves contributed to this effect. As highly visible, stable, and professionally administered organizations, the national craft unions of the mid-19th century contrasted with the more secretive and volatile unions of the preceding era.

The crisis of the 1890s: New unions and political action

      The late 19th century brought major labour upheavals that decisively influenced the further development of unionism in all three countries. In Britain, a tendency for unionism to expand beyond its narrow craft confines, apparent in the early 1870s, was curtailed during the depression of the mid-1880s. In the business upswing of 1888–92, the formation of new unions of less skilled workers was resumed, this time with the aid of socialist activists. The movement received an enormous stimulus through the victory of London dockers in their great strike of 1889, secured in the last resort by Australian financial support—a gesture from the New World to the Old. However, in 1890 employers in the maritime sector counterattacked against new unions of seamen and dockers, and the new union established in the gas industry also suffered major setbacks. Even certain craft unions experienced stronger resistance from employers, who were alarmed by the injection of a greater militancy into union behaviour at a time when they faced increased foreign competition in their established markets. Following a national lockout in 1897–98, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers was obliged to accept the introduction of new machinery and payment systems on employers' terms. In both the maritime and engineering industries, employers had asserted their power by combining in national federations. Perhaps most serious of all for the unions, employer reaction spilled over into the courts, where a series of judicial rulings, culminating in the Taff Vale (Taff Vale case) judgment of 1901, undermined the legislation of the 1870s.

      A crisis in labour relations (industrial relations) was also reached in Australia and New Zealand in 1890. From 1870, the craft character of unionism in those countries had also been modified by the emergence of national industrially (industrialization) based unions in the mining, shipping, and pastoral industries. The most notable examples in Australia were the Miners' Association and the Shearers' Union; these extended their organization to New Zealand, where union development closely paralleled that in Australia. Greater scale and militancy in labour organization, clearly apparent by the late 1880s, drew forth a corresponding response from employers, leading to major confrontations in the early 1890s. The first was the great maritime strike of 1890, involving seamen and wharf labourers in both Australia and New Zealand and also extending to shearers and coal miners. These new unions, however, had embarked on a trial of strength with associated employers at a time when the economy had turned against them, boom turning into prolonged depression. In conditions of heavy unemployment, the maritime strike was broken, and there followed further defeats for the shearers in 1891 and 1894 and for the miners in 1892.

      Industrial defeats led unions to turn to politics with greater urgency than before. In New Zealand they gave their support to the Liberal Party, which won a historic victory in December 1890. The Liberals' social and economic reforms that followed attracted attention throughout the developed world, but they also may have delayed the emergence of labour as an independent political force, since the modern Labour Party (New Zealand Labour Party) emerged as late as 1916 and did not form a government for the first time until 1935. In Britain also the break with Liberalism came slowly, but interest in direct labour representation quickened in the 1890s, leading at the turn of the century to a political alliance between unions and moderate socialist groups. The Labour Party so created remained in the shadow of the Liberals until after World War I, but thereafter it developed rapidly to assume office for the first time in 1924. The link between the industrial defeats of the 1890s and direct union involvement in politics was most clearly manifest in Australia. By 1900, Labour parties (Australian Labor Party) had emerged in four of the colonies, consisting of affiliated trade unions and electorate branches. The federation of the colonies in the following year led to the formation of a national parliamentary party, and by the end of 1915 Labour governments were in office at the federal level and in five of the six states. Despite differences in timing, the experience of all three countries was remarkably similar, with enhanced union interest in politics from the 1890s leading to the formation of Labour parties and, ultimately, Labour governments. However, the outcomes of such political involvement, in regard to the unions' situation within the wider society, diverged widely between New Zealand and Australia on the one hand and Britain on the other.

Compulsory arbitration and union growth in Australasia

      To remedy their industrial weakness, unions in Australasia turned to the state and the law for support, through the installation of systems of compulsory arbitration that would oblige employers to deal with them. It was the Liberal government in New Zealand that enacted the first effective measure. The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894 was drafted by that government's most radical member, William Pember Reeves (Reeves, William Pember), a socialist among liberals. Addressing the problem of employers' noncompliance with arbitration decisions, Reeves devised a system in which participation was voluntary for unions but compulsory for employers. A union that chose to register under the act could bring any employer before the Arbitration Court, whose awards had legal force.

      Following the New Zealand legislation, compulsory arbitration was introduced in Australia at both the state and federal level. The major landmarks were the Acts of 1900 and 1901 in Western Australia and New South Wales, respectively, and the federal statute of 1904. The new system was not installed without a struggle; employer opposition was strong, and it was overborne only by a combination of political forces that included Liberals and the new Labour parties. The New Zealand experiment also attracted attention in Britain. Within the TUC, support came from weaker, newer unions that had not yet achieved employer recognition and saw compulsory arbitration as a means of enforcing it. The temporary operation of such a system in World War I did indeed have this effect, but at the turn of the century most unions were skeptical. Legally enforced collective agreements would entail closer involvement with the judiciary, and British judges were regarded as incapable of delivering impartial rulings on labour issues. Following the 1901 Taff Vale judgment, union support for the Labour Party developed rapidly, with a view to securing maximum freedom from judicial interference. In the 1906 Trade Disputes Act, British unions secured the legal immunities they desired, and the principle of legal abstention remained fundamental to the conduct of British labour relations to the 1970s.

      In a different social setting, Australasian unions believed that compulsory arbitration would work to their advantage, and so it proved. In 1890 there was little to suggest that the propensity to unionize was exceptionally high in these countries, but 20 years later Australia was the most highly unionized country in the world, and union coverage had been greatly extended in New Zealand as well. Apart from a slight drop in the early 1920s, growth in union membership in Australia was virtually unchecked until 1927, the proportion of the work force organized rising from 9 to 47 percent. Compulsory arbitration explicitly recognized and protected unions, and under it even the weakest unions could force employers to have the pay and working conditions of their employees fixed by an arbitration court. This capacity drew in recruits, and in both countries growth was further encouraged by the practice of handing down arbitration awards that conferred preference in employment on union members. In the case of New Zealand, a 1936 amendment to the legislation of 1894 provided for compulsory union membership—a change that led to a dramatic increase in union coverage. In Australia a further crucial development came in 1907, with the Arbitration Court's judgment in the Harvester case. This ruling held that a living wage was a first charge upon industry, and it set a basic wage for unskilled labour at a level substantially higher than existing rates—an approach to wage determination that unions could certainly live with. Within both countries, however, the degree of dependence of unions upon legal support varied. Unions with a small or scattered membership (and there were many such) were almost wholly dependent; but for larger and more concentrated organizations, a real alternative existed in the shape of direct bargaining and strike action.

      In the years immediately before and after World War I, that alternative found increasing support in unions of miners, railway men, and wharf workers, where, as in Britain, the syndicalist (syndicalism) ideology of direct action had acquired some influence. Syndicalist rejection of parliamentary politics, and hostility to the state in all its forms, was given particular edge in the context of compulsory arbitration. In New Zealand a militant Federation of Labour developed in opposition to the arbitration system, and in 1912–13 a violent confrontation occurred in ports and mining towns, but the strikes were broken by employers (now mobilized in defense of arbitration), farmers, and the government. It was significant that the majority of unions valued their registration under the Arbitration Act too highly to affiliate with the Federation of Labour. In Australia, compulsory arbitration also survived an increased advocacy and practice of strike action. During and after the war the idea of the “One Big Union,” which would unify existing organizations and maximize striking power, gained a certain currency. It seems to have delayed the emergence of an Australian counterpart to the TUC, toward which the intercolonial congresses of the previous century had been moving. Eventually hopes of realizing the grander plan faded, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) was formed in 1927. Though some of the impetus behind the ACTU's emergence came from those who saw it as an instrument for the coordination of strike activity, in practice its survival owed much to the function it performed within the federal arbitration system in representing unions in basic wage and other national test cases.

Union expansion under a voluntary system

      In Britain the broadening of unionism's membership base was underpinned by the spread of employer recognition and voluntary collective bargaining procedures, and it was the union leaders' faith in this process that encouraged them to believe that they could dispense with political and legal support. The engineers' defeat in 1898 did not lead to a withdrawal of employer recognition, and by this stage collective bargaining had spread beyond the crafts into coal mining and cotton manufacturing. However, unlike the craft, coal, and cotton unions, those of more recent origin still faced an uphill struggle. In the maritime, railway, and gas industries recognition was commonly denied, but the willingness of the new unions to recruit across occupational boundaries contributed to their survival. During the years after 1910 it was the unions constituted on a general or multioccupational basis that grew most rapidly. Of the three largest unions of the second half of the 20th century, two—the Transport and General Workers Union (Transport and General Workers' Union) and the General and Municipal Workers Union (General, Municipal, and Boilermakers' Union)—were direct descendants of new unions of 1889.

      Though union membership growth was a marked feature of the early 20th century in Britain, as in Australasia, its upward course was less steady and more vulnerable to shifts in the economic cycle. In the full-employment years of 1910–20 it was explosive, accompanied by an escalation of industrial militancy in mining, railways, docks, and elsewhere. As in the former colonies, such militancy was tinged with syndicalism. But growth was halted abruptly in 1920, with membership at 45 percent of the work force, and in conditions of heavy unemployment there followed a long decline into the early 1930s. Though unemployment checked growth in the other countries as well, the contraction in British union coverage, to 22.6 percent, was particularly severe. Despite the shrinking membership, industrial conflict took time to abate, as employers' efforts to force down wages were met with determined resistance. In 1921, with the creation of a General Council, the TUC had equipped itself to coordinate industrial action, and this power was put to the test in 1926 when a general strike was called in support of the Miners Federation. Conflict on this scale inevitably pitted unions against state, and it was this wider aspect of the dispute that in the end caused the TUC, committed as it was to constitutional modes of action, to call the strike off. Government, for its part, having established what it regarded as the boundaries of legitimate action and having confirmed them in legislation in 1927, was not inclined to intervene further to restrict union activity. Nor did employers move to de-recognize unions.

Trade unionism after World War II: An erosion of strength

      In conditions of full employment and inflation following World War II, the respective industrial relations systems of both Britain and Australasia came under strain. In the case of compulsory arbitration, unions that had once clung to the system when they were weak now chafed at its restrictions when their strength was recovered. At an early stage there were confrontations involving traditionally militant mining and wharf unions. With the Cold War then at its height, Communist (communism) influence within such unions called forth drastic countermeasures by governments, and the 1949 coal strike and 1951 wharf strike, in Australia and New Zealand, respectively, were decisively defeated. As in the past, however, the majority of unions were not drawn into open opposition to arbitration. Nonetheless, though the “adventurist” phase of Communist-inspired militancy was over, more general tendencies toward direct bargaining and strike activity persisted in both countries. Established as an alternative to industrial conflict, compulsory arbitration always faced in practice the problem of how to deal with strikes. A crisis was reached in Australia in the 1960s, when unions were fined for strikes with increasing frequency. The imprisonment of a union official in 1969, in an attempt to recover payment, led to a wave of protest and to the tacit abandonment of penal sanctions. The episode was revealing. It was the system's flexibility, its capacity to adapt to variations in the balance of industrial power over time and between different industries, that had contained the unions within it. Indeed, flexibility (and complexity) became such marked characteristics of the system that doubt grew as to its continued usefulness. In the 1980s the Australian government commissioned a complete review, yet the Hancock Report that emerged recommended no fundamental modification. Compulsory arbitration had been woven deeply into the fabric of national life in both countries, and in the process unions had been integrated more completely than in other democracies.

      In postwar Britain, enhanced union power was widely blamed for inflation and for overmanning and disruption in industry. Between 1945 and 1951, when the Labour Party was in government and the wartime ban on strikes continued, integration between state and unions was unusually close. Government acted to break a series of dock strikes, without general union opposition, in a situation that closely paralleled that in Australasia. Through the 1950s and '60s, however, unions and government drifted into opposition. The wartime experiment in compulsory arbitration had struck no deep roots and was abandoned, while the return to purely voluntary bargaining was increasingly perceived as damaging in its economic consequences. Under full employment, shop steward organization spread rapidly through industry and was associated with a growing tendency toward unofficial, or “wildcat,” strike activity. The voluntary institutions of British industrial relations appeared to be breaking down, and they were subjected to searching review by a Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations appointed in 1965. The largely voluntary remedies proposed by the commission did not satisfy governments, which were intent on urgent action. In 1969 a Labour government proposed legal restraints on unofficial strikers, enforceable by fines—a development even less welcome to British unions than to those in Australia. The proposals were withdrawn, but the successor Conservative government introduced a new legal code in the Industrial Relations Act of 1971, which included laws on unfair industrial practices and on legally binding agreements. These and various other provisions were to be enforced by a special Industrial Relations Court—in effect reversing the entire British tradition of legal abstention. Even then, unions refused to be contained within the tight legal framework that had been created, and this government was besieged by a renewed industrial militancy that not only rendered its legislation inoperable but also brought it to electoral defeat on the issue of the enforcement of statutory controls on wage bargaining.

      In all three countries, profound shifts in the structure of the employed population during the later 20th century eroded the traditional membership base of unions. In following these shifts toward white-collar, female, and service-sector (service industry) employment, unions endeavoured to match strides with the rapidly changing composition of the work force—just as, earlier in the century, they had broken through the divide separating skilled from unskilled manual labour. However, though their composition was modified profoundly, with greatly increased representation of white-collar and female employees, they could not keep pace. Union coverage of the work force in Britain recovered to its 1920 level in 1948, then surged forward in the 1970s to pass 50 percent for the first time. From a peak in 1979, however, it fell away. Closer integration with the state may have afforded Australasian unions better protection against the adverse consequences of structural change, but this is uncertain. Australian union coverage peaked at 60 percent in 1954; subsequent decline was checked in the early 1970s, but by the late 1980s coverage may have been as low as 42 percent. Higher levels of unemployment from the 1970s reinforced the trend, associated as they were with a rapid contraction of employment in union strongholds in manufacturing, mining, and the docks. In Britain this contraction was accelerated by a series of union defeats, the most drastic of which was inflicted upon the National Union of Mineworkers in the great strike of 1984–85. Legal restrictions on British unions, attempted in the 1970s, were reintroduced in the following decade. But if the political and industrial climate had turned more sharply against British than Australasian unions, the problem of adaptation to change remained a common one.

John Christopher Lovell

The United States and Canada

Origins of craft unionism

      Trade unionism in North America had its beginnings in a transition during the late 18th century from a mutualist/dependent to a free wage-labour system. As journeymen artisans moved out of what has been called “economic clientage” to master craftsmen, they found their interests in conflict with those of their employers. Only through collective effort could workers enforce the list of “prices” they established for their work and defend their trades against cheap and diluted labour. The first identifiable labour strike dates from 1768, when journeymen tailors in New York City stopped work to resist a pay cut. Sustained labour organization began with the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia in 1794. The first sign of a labour movement—that is, organizational activity exceeding the narrow sectional interests of particular crafts—appeared in Philadelphia, where the various craft bodies joined in 1827 to form the Mechanics' Union of Trade Societies. In Canada, these developments were slower to emerge: the first craft locals appeared in Montreal in 1827 and in Toronto in 1832, and the earliest city central came only in 1871, with the formation of the Toronto Trades Assembly. The first national union of locals in a single trade to survive, the National Typographical Union, was formed in 1852 in the United States. Like other national unions that followed, it chartered locals in Canada as well; this led to its renaming in 1869 as the International Typographical Union—a designation that became common in North American unionism.

      Rooted as it was in the preindustrial trades, this early trade unionism did not lose its essential craft character with the onset of industrialization. Mule spinners, molders, machinists, and iron puddlers and rollers were employing new skills, and they functioned in a factory context, but they had much the same collective concerns as did traditional craftsmen and fitted readily into the emergent trade-union structure. On the railroads, too, the key jobs were defined as operating “crafts.” Even with the quickening pace of industrialism, then, North American trade unionism in the 19th century was overwhelmingly a movement of skilled workers.

      But job consciousness, powerful though it was, by no means constituted the sole, or even predominant, inspiration for collective activity. Historical research on working-class life has demonstrated that labour consciousness was a complex phenomenon, rooted in distinctive structures of culture, community, and ideology as well as in craft identity. American workers of the Jacksonian era adhered to a conception of artisan republicanism, which celebrated producerist values and the republican ideals of the American Revolution. Counter to this vision ran the corrosive impact of emergent industrial capitalism, which, in the view of the Philadelphia Workingmen's Party, created “invidious distinctions [and] unjust and unnatural inequalities” by dividing Americans into “two distinct classes, the rich and the poor.” Beginning with workingmen's parties in the 1830s, a series of labour-reform movements fought a running battle for “equal rights.” In the 1860s, this was the task of the National Labor Union and, after its decline, of the Knights of Labor. On their face, these reform movements seemed to cut athwart trade unionism, insofar as they aspired to the cooperative commonwealth rather than simply to a higher wage, appealed broadly to all “producers” rather than strictly to wage workers, and thought of themselves as broadly inclusive political and educational movements. But contemporaries saw no contradiction here: trade unions tended to workers' day-to-day needs, labour reform to their higher hopes. While the two were accepted as strands of a single labour movement, however, it was well understood that they were strands that had to be kept operationally apart.

      During the 1880s, that functional separation began to break down. The international craft unions (craft union), having by now emerged as the dominant element in the trade-union structure, became less tolerant of challenges to their jurisdictions and internal lines of authority. For its part, despite a robust labour-reform rhetoric, the Knights of Labor began to act increasingly like a rival trade-union movement, carrying on strikes and organizing workers along industrial rather than craft lines. When the Knights rejected a proposal reaffirming the historic separation of trade-union and labour-reform functions, the alarmed internationals joined in December 1886 and formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The immediate aim was to drive the Knights from the industrial field, and, thanks largely to the Knights' own confusion and to employers' counterattacks, this was speedily accomplished. But more important in the long run was the permanent stamp that the AFL made on the American labour movement. This was partly institutional: the AFL legitimized the emergent trade-union structure that gave preeminence to the rule of the internationals. But equally significant was the enunciation of a guiding labour philosophy—“pure and simple” unionism—under the aegis of Samuel Gompers (Gompers, Samuel) and his circle of Marxist trade unionists. Labour reform was thenceforth denied any further role in the struggle of American workers. The weapons in that struggle were to be defined as economic and not political; the participants would be strictly wage workers organized along occupational lines; and the objective of trade unionism became exclusively the incremental achievement of higher wages and better working conditions.

      In Canada these American events had very considerable consequences. Given the sparse settlement and small industrial base, Canadian unions found it difficult to build a national structure of their own. An attempt initiated by the Toronto Trades Assembly in 1873 soon failed. It was also natural, given the colonial (after 1867, dominion) ties to Britain, for Canadian workers to look to English unions, and at least two groups—the carpenters and engineers—in fact built up sizable Canadian memberships after 1850. But the much more compelling links were to the United States, partly because labour markets in many skilled trades ignored the national boundaries and partly because the American unions were the readiest source of institutional assistance. By the end of the 1880s, as many as half the organized workers in Canada were in locals affiliated to internationals with headquarters in the United States. And it was this segment of Canadian labour that was mainly responsible for forming, parallel to the AFL, the Trades and Labor Congress (TLC) in 1886.

      For some years, the TLC followed its own bent. The Knights of Labor had been highly successful in Canada, notably in Quebec. After virtually disappearing from the United States in the early 1890s, the Knights remained a considerable force in Canada, and, although strictly excluded from the AFL, were made welcome in the TLC. As late as 1901, moreover, its president was proposing that the Canadian branches break their links with the internationals, form their own national unions, and turn the TLC into a wholly Canadian movement. But in 1902 just the opposite transpired. The TLC expelled the Knights and adopted the AFL principle of opposition to dual unionism, which meant that the Canadian branches of the internationals gained a virtual monopoly on trade-union representation in the TLC. It became, in effect, the Canadian wing of the American movement. Responding to Canadian political conditions, the TLC was somewhat more flexible than the AFL on issues of independent labour politics and state intervention, but, on the whole, American pure-and-simple unionism exerted the commanding influence on Canadian unionism in these years.

      Only in Quebec did a very different tradition assert itself. Here, following a lockout of boot and shoe workers in 1900, the Roman Catholic church (Roman Catholicism) stepped in and, in accordance with the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), encouraged the unionization of Quebec workers. The result was a vigorous French Catholic movement, the Confédération des Travailleurs Catholiques du Canada, which stands as a unique instance of confessional unionism in North America. Only after World War II did Quebec unionism shed its links to the church and evolve into a secular movement.

Challenges to pure-and-simple unionism

      In the American West, pure-and-simple unionism was challenged in 1905 by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW had two sources. One was the socialist (socialism) left wing, which had concluded that the AFL could not be captured and made over into the necessary trade-union base for socialist electoral politics. The second was a western brand of working-class radicalism forged by a decade of industrial war in the western mining states. The two groups proved incompatible, and the IWW, dominated by radicals from the Western Federation of Miners, drove out the socialists and committed itself to a syndicalist (syndicalism) version of class war, in which political action was excluded. Struggle would centre on direct industrial action and ultimately on the revolutionary general strike, and out of that would emerge a workers' society organized on the basis of industrial unions. The IWW led a number of important strikes in the east between 1907 and 1913, but its main theatre of operations was among western workers, including Canadians, in metal mining, lumber, transportation, and agriculture. During World War I, however, the IWW was violently suppressed, and it never regained the organizational momentum of its peak years between 1914 and 1917.

      The Canadian version of western syndicalism sprang into life in 1919, just as the IWW was expiring. This was the One Big Union (OBU), which had its roots in a postwar labour disaffection from conventional trade unionism that was especially pronounced in western Canada. Structured more along geographic than along the industrial-union lines of the IWW, the OBU had its moment of glory in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, and for a few years thereafter it virtually displaced the TLC as the dominant movement in the four western provinces. The OBU, despite its swift collapse, left behind a significant regional legacy: thereafter, the western provinces would persistently be the site of a more progressive, politically active brand of Canadian trade unionism.

      The syndicalist challenge stemmed, to some degree, from the failing fortunes of pure-and-simple unionism in the early decades of the 20th century. The essence of that formulation had been to locate labour's struggle firmly in the industrial arena. But the struggle for collective bargaining proved to be much harder than Gompers and other trade unionists had anticipated. Where competitive pressures were severe enough, as in bituminous coal mining, not even the most innovative and determined of union efforts at market control proved sufficient—hence the collapse of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in the 1920s. Elsewhere, as in the metal-fabricating industries, the problem was the speed of technological (technology, history of) innovation and, in particular, the perfection of mass-production (mass production) methods, which undercut the role of craft workers. Scientific management (industrial engineering), moreover, demanded strict supervisory control over the workplace and hence posed a profound threat to customary patterns of workers' autonomy in the labour process. When an effort to find common ground in the Murray Hill agreement (1900) between the International Association of Machinists and the National Metal Trades Association failed within a year, the die was cast: a quarter-century of bitter industrial warfare ensued. Labour's fortunes varied at different times and places, but the end result was unquestionably an arrested labour movement, with union penetration settling at roughly 10 percent of the nonagricultural labour force. As welfare capitalism took hold in the New Era of the 1920s, the more advanced sectors of the industrial economy seemed quite beyond the reach of the AFL.

Establishment of industrial (industrial union) unionism

      With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the balance of forces in the United States shifted dramatically. To begin with, national politics became more favourable to organized labour. Partly for ideological reasons, partly because of labour's increasing influence on the Democratic Party, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal proved much more responsive to trade-union demands than had the Republican administrations of the post-World War I era. By now, moreover, key union leaders—most important, John L. Lewis (Lewis, John L.) of the UMWA and Sidney Hillman (Hillman, Sidney) of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America—had defined what the labour movement most required from the state: protection of the rights of workers to organize and engage in collective bargaining. These rights were asserted in principle under Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 and then made thoroughly effective by passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. More commonly known as the Wagner Act, the latter legislation (labour law) prohibited employers from interfering with the right of workers to organize and from dominating the organizations they established. It also defined the procedures by which, through majority rule, workers selected their bargaining agents; required employers to bargain with such agents to the end of reaching contractual agreements; and set up, through the National Labor Relations Board, quasi-judicial mechanisms for enforcement of the law. American employers lost the enormous power advantages they had enjoyed in the struggle over collective bargaining, but in exchange the labour movement conceded the highly prized independence from the state that was a core element of pure-and-simple unionism. Under the Wagner Act, collective bargaining remained “free”—that is, the terms of agreements were not to be mandated by the state—but the framework itself came securely under the aegis of state regulation.

      At the same time, the New Deal moved to mitigate the market pressures that had driven the antiunionism of American employers. The NIRA legislation, through codes of fair competition, was designed to enable industries to cartelize their depression-ridden markets. The exchange was entirely deliberate—granting representational rights to workers as a price for granting market controls to industry. As the basis of New Deal economic policy, this attempt at industrial stabilization lasted only two years, but the underlying linkage of labour rights and market benefits survived invalidation of the NIRA by the Supreme Court in 1935.

      The Wagner Act contained an explicit economic rationale: collective bargaining would generate the mass purchasing power essential for sustained economic growth. This, in turn, prefigured the Keynesian economic policy that, by managing demand (supply and demand), became the government's way of underwriting the New Deal's collective bargaining system after World War II. With federal macroeconomic policy (as specified by the Employment Act of 1946) responsible for maintaining long-term demand, and price competition firmly controlled by the restored oligopolistic structures of the major industries (or, as in the transportation and communications sectors, by direct state regulation), the market-driven basis for American antiunionism seemed to have run its course in the postwar era.

      Much the same could be said for the labour-process basis for antiunionism in the key mass-production sectors. By the 1930s, the Taylorist crisis over job control had passed; what remained at issue was no longer whether managers had the authority to control the labour process but only how they would exercise it. There were compelling reasons, almost systemic in nature, for the formalization of labour-relations (labour, division of) policies (industrial relations). For example, where tasks were subdivided and precisely defined, job classification necessarily followed, and from that in turn came the principle of pay equity (comparable worth). time-and-motion study—another pillar of Taylorist management—meant objective, testable standards for setting the pace of work. Corporate commitment to this formalized system was imperfect, however, and broke down disastrously in the early years of the Great Depression. Rank-and-file fury over job insecurity and intolerable speedups, plus pressure from New Deal agencies and the labour movement, forced management's hand. Consequently, between 1933 and 1936—before collective bargaining actually began—all the key elements of the modern workplace regime fell more or less into place: specified, uniform rights for workers (beginning with seniority and pay equity); a formal procedure to adjudicate grievances arising from those rights; and a structure of shop-floor representation to implement the grievance procedure. Corporate employers would have much preferred to keep this regime under nonunion conditions. Indeed, it had taken shape in the course of their efforts to implant so-called employee representation plans (i.e., company unions) that they had hoped would satisfy the requirements of New Deal labour policy. But when that strategy failed, managers were prepared to have their workplace regimes incorporated into contractual (contract) relationships with independent unions within the terms of the Wagner Act.

      To fulfill its part in this process, the labour movement had first of all to adopt an industrial-union (i.e., plantwide) structure appropriate to mass-production industry. The problem was that the AFL was committed to a craft structure and, under its constitutional rules, lacked the means to compel member unions to cede jurisdictions they held over craft workers in the mass-production sector to the emerging industrial unions. This impasse was broken only by a split within the AFL in 1935, leading to the formation of the rival Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) under the leadership of John L. Lewis (Lewis, John L.). Even then, once the CIO unions scored their dramatic unionizing victories in rubber, auto, and steel of 1936 and 1937, a second condition had to be met: the CIO unions had to demonstrate their capacity to enforce the contractual provisions of workplace due process and discipline a turbulent rank and file. World War II brought this second phase to completion. Under close wartime regulation, institutional relations between the CIO and corporate industry were solidified, and, after a strike wave tested the parameters of this relationship in the immediate postwar period, there ensued a system of industrywide collective bargaining that endured for the next 40 years.

      The industrial-union struggle spilled over from the United States into Canada. At the insistence of the AFL, the TLC expelled the Canadian branches of the CIO internationals in 1939. The next year these CIO unions joined the remnants of the All-Canadian Congress of Labour, which had formed in 1927 on the dual principles of industrial unionism and Canadian nationalism, to create the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) in affiliation with the American CIO. Only during World War II, however, did organizational realities begin to catch up with these superstructural developments. Although stirred by events south of the border, the Canadian movement did not experience a comparable surge of organization during the Great Depression. Only in February 1944 did the wartime administration of W.L. Mackenzie King (King, W.L. Mackenzie) issue Order in Council P.C. 1003, granting to Canadian workers collective-bargaining rights that American workers already enjoyed under the Wagner Act. The Canadian version, however, allowed for a greater degree of public intervention in the bargaining process. Investigative and cooling-off provisions in labour disputes were already a cornerstone of Canadian policy (going back to Mackenzie King's Industrial Disputes Investigative Act of 1907), and wartime conditions demanded a no-strike provision (linked to the mandatory inclusion of binding arbitration of grievances in union contracts), which likewise became a permanent feature of Canadian labour-relations law (labour law). During the war decade, the Canadian mass-production sector was rapidly organized by CIO unions.

      By the early 1950s the organizational situation was similar on both sides of the border. In both countries, one-third of the nonagricultural labour force was unionized. In both countries, the industrial-union federations peaked at roughly two-thirds the size of their longer established craft rivals. At the onset of the Cold War, an internal crisis over Communist (communism) participation gripped the labour movements of both countries. Although somewhat different in its details, the outcome was identical on both sides of the border—the expulsion of Communist-dominated unions in 1949 and 1950. And when the American unions settled their differences and merged into the AFL–CIO (American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations) in 1955, the Canadian federations followed suit the next year by uniting in the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC). At that point, 70 percent of all Canadian unionists belonged to international unions with headquarters in the United States. The 1950s can be said to mark the apex of this historical tendency toward an integrated Canadian-American movement.

Decline and divergence

      Beginning in the 1960s, the fortunes of the two movements diverged. In the United States, market pressures steadily eroded the postwar collective-bargaining system. In auto, steel, and clothing, the problem was intensifying foreign competition; in communications, trucking, railroads, and airlines, it was federal deregulation in the 1970s; and elsewhere, as in mining, retailing, and meat processing, a host of nonunionized domestic competitors entered the field. Meanwhile, a structural shift occurred toward a service (service industry) economy, narrowing the established union base in the goods-producing sectors: production workers made up 30 percent of the nonagricultural U.S. labour force in 1950 but only 22 percent in 1976. The economic troubles that then set in—declining productivity and a slowing growth rate, inflation, the harsh recession of 1982—had a devastating impact on the American movement. Between 1975 and 1984, four million members were lost, and the unionized share of the labour force shrank from 28.9 percent to below 20 percent. If not for public-employee unions, which added two million members between 1956 and 1976, the U.S. labour movement would have found itself in an even more parlous state, as unionization in the private sector slipped to close to pre-New Deal levels.

      Canada's economy was comparably hard hit in these years, yet unions north of the border fared far better. Indeed, they grew steadily after the mid-1960s, and, with 3.5 million members by the early 1980s, claimed over 40 percent of the Canadian labour force—more than twice the union density in the United States. How is this remarkable divergence to be explained?

      The decline of the American movement occurred within an increasingly hostile political environment. In Canada, on the other hand, a changing party system enhanced labour's place in Canadian public life. In 1961, with the backing of Canadian labour, the New Democratic Party (NDP) was formed as a social-democratic rival to the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties. As it made headway, the NDP changed the landscape of Canadian politics. For its part, Canadian organized labour, by abandoning the nonpartisanship espoused by the AFL–CIO, not only gained political muscle but also became a progressive force in the nation's public life. It assumed the mantle of what has been called “social unionism”—in stark contrast to the political marginalization of the AFL–CIO that followed the collapse of the Democratic New Deal coalition in the late 1960s.

      Beginning with passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 (Taft–Hartley Act), which applied unfair-labour-practice provisions to unions and in a variety of ways weakened their economic and organizational power, labour law in the United States became steadily more burdensome to the labour movement. By contrast, Canadian federal and provincial law retained, and even deepened, its pro-union bias. Nor was there any Canadian counterpart to U.S. President Ronald Reagan's (Reagan, Ronald W.) decision in 1981 to break a strike by federal air-traffic controllers—an act of enormous symbolic importance that legitimized the resurgence of antiunionism in corporate America. Antiunionism gained no such public legitimacy in Canada. Underlying this was a factor emphasized by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset: that collectivist values inhering in Canadian political culture granted the labour movement a legitimacy it never quite achieved in the more entrepreneurial nation south of the border.

      As these divergences became more marked, the “international” character of the North American movement began to wane. Public-employee unionism—even more prominent a recent development in Canada than in the United States—would have sufficed in itself to push the Canadian movement in an independent direction, but Canadian branches in the private sector as well began to break loose, some by seeking greater autonomy within their international unions, but others—including those of communications workers, paper workers, woodworkers, and auto workers—by splitting off and becoming independent. A dwindling share of the Canadian movement—less than 35 percent by 1990—retained ties to the AFL–CIO. Two developments offered some prospect for reviving the integrationist bent of the North American movement: first, the creation of a common U.S.-Canadian economic market and, second, the deepening crisis in Canada over an independent Quebec. But, in the main, events of the 1970s and '80s merely underscored the very different dynamics that were driving the Canadian and American trade-union movements and that seemed to be carrying them farther apart along separate paths of national development.

David Brody

Western Europe

Characteristics of the continental labour movement

      The history of unionism on the European continent differs significantly in several respects from that in Britain and the United States. First, industrial development came later and proceeded faster than in Britain, with plants and enterprises starting on a large scale and often using the most advanced technology. This disconnected European unions from medieval craft traditions and prevented the establishment of a system of craft unions (craft union) representing only workers with a specific skill. Early attempts at craft unionism were soon absorbed into broad and encompassing industrial unions, which organized all workers in an industry or country regardless of skill and employment status. These unions represented primarily the interests of workers in large establishments who had no particular skills to defend and whose employers exercized firm control over the organization of work, or they represented workers in industries such as railways, mining, and electricity supply, in which labour relations (industrial relations) were a matter of public interest and concern. Not being able to monopolize an indispensable skill and thereby realize their interests at the workplace and through the market alone, workers in such industries needed unions capable of mobilizing mass solidarity across occupational boundaries. As a consequence, western European union movements have usually formed strong national confederations capable of representing their affiliates in political bargaining with the government; maintained weak or nonexistent division between skilled and unskilled, and often between blue-collar and white-collar, members or affiliates; contained a small number of large, instead of a large number of small, individual unions; conducted comprehensive industrywide collective bargaining with a tendency to reduce or eliminate wage differentials by sector, employer, skill, or occupation; and pursued a universalistic social policy—on such issues as social insurance, health care, and occupational safety—that takes the place of enterprise- or group-specific “voluntary” regulations characteristically negotiated by more narrowly defined, sectional unions.

      A second distinction of trade unionism in western Europe emerged in the area of managerial prerogative. Since many continental industries started at new sites and on a large scale, they were less burdened with a legacy of local management and craft autonomy than were British enterprises. Because of the more unitary and centralized organization of European firms, a distinction between management and labour and the right of management to manage were from the beginning more securely established, and shop-floor contestation between management and labour over the organization of the labour process became much less central to European than to British and American industrial relations. Representing both unskilled and skilled workers in large establishments, western European industrial unions were never committed to defending job demarcations among skilled and between skilled and unskilled workers. This enabled especially the more politically powerful union movements to accept managerial prerogative and high flexibility in internal labour markets. In fact, their lack of commitment to any specific division of labour (labour, division of) on the shop floor later enabled European unions to support and promote comprehensive public and private labour-market policies of general upgrading of skills and jobs. And while effective centralized control over the shop floor was ceded to management from the beginning, that control was later available to share with politically powerful unions if and when these were willing to seek legislation on “industrial democracy.” “Cooperative” union participation in management then became possible, because industrial unions had no history of resisting large-scale organization as such, were not beholden to any particular group of workers, and had no principal interest in curtailing firms' internal flexibility.

      A third defining characteristic of trade-union history in western Europe is in the area of political power. Unable to afford the laissez-faire liberalism of Victorian Britain, European states early on took an active role in the regulation of labour markets, often siding with capital in support of rapid accumulation. At a time when the doctrines of voluntarism and state abstention became established in British industrial relations, unions were regarded by European ruling elites as a threat to both national unity and economic progress. In these circumstances, “pure-and-simple” unionism was impossible. European unions had little choice but to define themselves as political movements—at least until conditions for independent, economic unionism had been created—and in fact they typically started out as industrial arms of political parties, usually socialist or Roman Catholic (Roman Catholicism). Where political unionism was of the Roman Catholic kind, it aimed at establishing an autonomous space for cooperative industrial self-governance of workers and employers, free from interference by the modern nation-state. Where the guiding political doctrine was Socialist (socialism) or, after 1917, Communist (communism), the objective was to gain control over the state in order to use its growing interventionist capacities for fundamental social transformation in the interest of workers. Finally, where political unionism was syndicalist or anarchist, its ultimate goal was to replace the state with a political organization based on the workplace and on relations between associated producers.

      Just as craft unionism gives rise to fragmentation by occupation, so political unionism may breed fragmentation along party lines, and by the end of the 19th century almost all continental European union movements outside Scandinavia were ideologically divided. In order to overcome these divisions, unions had to extricate themselves from the control of allied political parties, and European industrial-political unionism became most powerful where unions managed to escape political division, overcome it to form unified organizations, or coordinate their policies. Where organizational unity was accomplished, it enabled political unionism to become an independent economic and political force, continuing universalist traditions of comprehensive social reform without being subservient to any particular party or government strategy. Especially in northern and northwestern Europe, unions became established participants in national politics, functioning in a wide variety of policy areas as recognized quasi-public or para-governmental intermediary institutions.

From World War I to 1968: The institutionalization of unions and collective bargaining

      By the early 20th century western European unions were making slow but steady progress toward expanding their membership, extending the range of collective bargaining, consolidating their organizations, and winning legal and political recognition. The breakthrough, however, came with World War I. Wartime mobilization brought tight labour markets, rapid expansion of mass production, long working days, hazardous working conditions in arms and ammunition factories, and soaring profits for employers. It also ushered in state intervention and economic planning on an unprecedented scale. As the war dragged on, national elites found themselves compelled to include labour leaders in the governance of the war economy as managers of rising shop-floor discontent. Typically, union cooperation was gained in exchange for promises of democratization, union recognition, and redress of social inequities after the war.

      Ironically, the position of moderate union leaders in national war coalitions was strengthened by objection among workers to the war and to the sacrifices demanded of them. All over Europe, autonomous movements of shop-floor workers' councils emerged, continuing labour's prewar tradition of pacifism and internationalism. Workers' councils not only opposed the governments that organized the war and the employers that profited from it but they also rejected the leadership of collaborationist unions and social-democratic political parties. Rather than parliamentary social democracy, their objective was a syndicalist (syndicalism) political order founded on and controlled by councils of industrial workers. Especially toward the end of the war, council movements succeeded in organizing major strikes in a number of countries, and in Russia the Bolsheviks overthrew the tsar with a program of soviet (that is, “council”) democracy (see below Eastern Europe). All of this enabled moderate union leaders to extract more promises and commitments from governments, military leaders, and employers for the time after the war.

      Faced with overexpanded economies, huge national debts, a radicalized and assertive working class, and the threat of revolutionary internationalism inspired and supported by the Soviet Union, employers and political elites after 1918 were eager to close ranks with the moderate labour leaders who had assumed quasi-governmental responsibility during the war. In country after country, unions obtained major concessions, such as universal suffrage and parliamentary democracy, the right to strike, legal support of union organization and industrywide collective bargaining, the extension of industrial agreements to nonunionized firms and sectors, the eight-hour working day, a wide range of social benefits, joint councils of unions and employers to oversee key industries, and works councils to represent workers at the workplace. Often these were conceded as elements of comprehensive social pacts—like the Stinnes-Legien Agreement in Germany—that were negotiated between national organizations of capital and labour and underwritten by the government, apparently foreshadowing a continuing role of unions in the governance of national economies.

      In most European countries, the bulk of the concessions made in the immediate aftermath of the war were withdrawn in subsequent years. Increasingly, the stabilization of western Europe's war-torn economies came to be perceived as possible only at the expense of workers and unions, with the fight against inflation seeming to require wage cuts, longer hours, curtailment of union rights, sharp reductions in public spending, and the resulting high unemployment. As domestic conflicts intensified, the political right found confirmed its old doubts about the compatibility of social order and national unity with democracy and free trade unions, and even the moderate left came again to question the compatibility of democracy and full employment with capitalism. The Great Depression of the early 1930s, in particular, brought large-scale unemployment and made deep inroads in the organizational strength and political influence of unions, in many countries abolishing the fragile postwar gains in the institutionalization of union rights and collective bargaining.

      By the end of the 1920s at the latest, national political systems in Europe began to drift sharply apart. First in Italy and most dramatically in Germany, Fascist or conservative-authoritarian regimes either outlawed unions altogether—often driving their leaders from their countries, incarcerating them, or assassinating them—or turned them into appendages of an ever-more powerful state apparatus. Authoritarian responses to class conflict and economic crisis were encouraged by an international environment that seemed to offer little opportunity for shared economic growth and few if any alternatives to nationalist protection and preparation for renewed military hostilities.

      In Sweden, on the other hand, the electoral victory of the Social Democrats in 1932 paved the way for the first successful attempt to achieve full employment by Keynesian means under political democracy and free collective bargaining within a capitalist economy. After intense industrial and social conflict in the 1920s, the Social Democrats were able to unite their country behind a platform of state-led expansion, an extensive social-welfare policy, social equality, and institutionalized autonomy for responsible, centralized, and comprehensive collective bargaining. In 1938, the peak associations of business and labour concluded the Saltsjöbaden Agreement, in which, while affirming the rights of unions to strike and of employers to lock out in retaliation, they pledged to use these measures only as a last resort and in consideration of their effect on third parties. Swedish unions, having moved into a secure position of industrial strength in which their actions inevitably affected the performance of the national economy, accepted responsibility for economic growth and monetary stability in exchange for a number of concessions: a complementary social and labour-market policy; the cooperation of employers in a reduction of pay differentials; progressive taxation; expansion of employment in the public sector; and equal participation of women in the work force. Given such economic and political strength, Swedish unions were prepared to accept employers' claims to an almost unlimited right to manage. As World War II drew closer, therefore, Germany and Sweden represented opposite ends of a wide spectrum of western European politics and industrial relations.

      It was only after 1945, under the leadership of the two victorious democracies, the United States and Britain, that unions and collective bargaining became firmly established throughout western Europe. In some countries, business and traditional elites were discredited by their collaboration with Fascist regimes or the German occupation. In others, joint resistance during the war had laid the ground for close postwar cooperation. Everywhere, the presence of Soviet Communism as an apparent alternative to capitalism seemed to make it imperative to include moderate labour movements in the reconstruction. And not least, the United States, as the architect of a system of free trade intended to be immune against the nationalism of the interwar years, needed to ensure that competing economies were saddled with the same social costs that it had incurred under the New Deal.

      Modern western Europe thus came to be built on a “historical compromise” between capital and labour. Among the concessions gained by the latter were a firm commitment to parliamentary democracy; a welfare state establishing a basic floor of income and services for all citizens; a commitment of governments, of whatever political complexion, to an active full-employment policy; and the right of unions to free collective bargaining. In return, moderate labour movements pledged to pursue political reform only by constitutional means, renouncing in particular the use of the strike for political purposes; tolerated private property in the means of production; accepted a free-market economy with little or no public intervention in price formation; and agreed in principle to observe the right of management to manage. By the end of the 1950s at the latest, most European unions had, explicitly or implicitly, come to accept the terms of this bargain.

      This second postwar settlement marked the beginning of the longest uninterrupted period of peace and prosperity in European history. Embedded in an international free-trade regime guaranteed and dominated by the United States, it helped accelerate the spread from America to Europe of “Fordist” modes of production and accumulation: the mass manufacture of standardized consumer durables in factories that used Taylorist methods of work organization and were operated by large, vertically integrated, and increasingly multinational corporations. By helping to expand and maintain the purchasing power of mass consumers, European unions also played an important part in the stabilization of economic growth. Moreover, by concentrating their activities on macroeconomic wage bargaining and redistributive social policies at the national level, political-industrial unions left managers the freedom to introduce new technologies and to rationalize the labour process in pursuit of higher productivity and profitability.

Breakup of the postwar settlement: Inflation, neocorporatism, and restructuring

      An inherent problem of the post-World War II settlement was that, with governments guaranteeing full employment and free collective bargaining, inflation could be contained only if unions resisted using their artificially increased bargaining power to win wage gains in excess of productivity increases. This required, at the minimum, effective control of national unions over the shop floor. While European industrial unions were much more successful in this than their British counterparts, by the end of the 1960s even their hold on their members began to slip. In part this was caused by a general rise in inflation imported from the United States. When unions continued to exercise wage restraint in increasingly overheated national economies, a new generation of workers that had not lived through the Great Depression and had never experienced unemployment turned against their leaders. All over Europe, massive waves of unofficial strikes occurred in 1968 and 1969, organized from the shop floor in defiance of national union policy and throwing moderate “income policies” into disarray. More subtle factors also contributed to this outbreak. By concentrating on macroeconomic matters during a period of aggressive rationalization and fast productivity growth, industrial unions had left workers with little protection at the workplace. Growing discontent with an ever more perfect Taylorist organization of work, workers found no official representation in an industrial-relations system that had accepted managerial prerogative in the workplace in exchange for the recognition and political status of unions, full employment, growing wages, and a comprehensive welfare state. Remarkably, such discontent emerged strongly even in countries, such as Italy and France, where unions were weak and the shop floor was ruled by employer paternalism, and Germany and Sweden, where union distance from the “qualitative” issues of the workplace was part of a general union strategy of economywide solidarity and egalitarianism.

      During the 1960s it had come to be widely believed in Europe that worker militancy was a matter of the past and that strikes in particular were withering away. This made the shock of 1968 and '69 all the more profound, and in the immediate aftermath employers and national governments accepted high wage increases and inflation rates in order to avoid further confrontations with workers. This lasted well into 1973 and 1974, the years of the first oil crisis, when governments continued to assign high priority to full employment without touching unions' right to free collective bargaining. Instead, economic stabilization was sought by bringing unions still further into the centre of policy making, increasing rather than curtailing their power and responsibility and helping them strengthen their organizations so that national union leaders could manage shop-floor discontent more effectively. This brought about a new political configuration that came to be known as “neocorporatism.”

      Essentially a tripartite social contract involving government, business, and labour, neocorporatism sought to restore full employment through moderate wage demands (often entailing losses in real wages and distributive position), in return for which unions were granted influence over policies relating to subjects such as unemployment insurance, employment protection, early retirement, working hours, old-age pensions, health insurance, housing, taxation, public-sector employment, vocational training, regional aid, and subsidies to declining industries. In addition, governments and employers agreed to a variety of means to help industrial unions strengthen their workplace organizations so they could better absorb worker discontent. One important means was legislation on industrial democracy. “Codetermination,” as it was called in Germany and Sweden, provided workers with quasi-constitutionalized shop-floor representation on nonwage matters, such as work organization, that industrial unions had been unable or unwilling to address before 1968. Thus, in order to prevent a return of the representation gap of the 1960s and channel the energies of workplace unionists into economically innocuous activities, governments in a number of countries allowed industrial democracy to make significant inroads into managerial discretion. For this and other reasons, neocorporatism increasingly alienated European employers, but unions, backed by and working through the new or expanded institutions of industrial democracy, often succeeded in increasing their membership density during the 1970s.

      The second oil shock in 1979 heralded fundamental changes in European economic policy and industrial relations. Faced with persistently high unemployment, an increasingly integrated world capital market and a rapid loss of competitive position to Japan, European governments gradually abandoned their attempts at bargained national accommodation with organized labour and gave preference to supply-side policies of competitive restructuring. An important factor in this restructuring was the advance of microelectronic technology. Unlike the dedicated technology of the Fordist period, microelectronics allowed for a variety of alternative, “flexible” ways of organizing production in response to different product strategies, local organizational structures and cultures, and available work skills. For unions to play a role in the reorganization of productive relations that was made possible (and necessary) by the new technologies, they had to decentralize their organizational and political capacities and create a strong union presence in the workplace.

      Other factors also militated toward the decentralization of unions and industrial relations. As the work force became increasingly heterogenous, its interests were less easily subsumed under the blue-collar egalitarianism that had dominated union policies since the interwar and immediate postwar years. In particular, during the 1960s and '70s pay differentials had been reduced to the point where many skilled and white-collar workers were no longer willing to be represented by comprehensive, “solidaristic” collective bargaining. Class-based solidarity was further attenuated by growing employment in the public sector—often under privileged conditions that in the leaner 1980s were perceived by private-sector workers as coming at their expense. As a result, national unions found it more difficult to unite their members behind common demands. Where centralized wage bargaining did not actually break up—as it did in Sweden—union leaders came under pressure to give groups inside their organizations greater freedom to express and pursue their special interests.

      During the 1980s most western European unions came to realize that the survival of the high-wage and high-welfare economies that they had been so instrumental in creating depended less on political bargains with the government and national employers' associations than on participating in this restructuring toward a flexible, highly skilled, innovative economy capable of producing customized and quality-competitive goods and services. This seemed to require cooperative workplace relations, flexible internal labour markets, extensive training and retraining of workers, and a fundamental reorganization of work. This last involved a blurring of the distinction between conception and execution or between indirect and direct, nonmanual and manual, and managerial and nonmanagerial work; decentralization of decision making; flatter hierarchies; and broader and overlapping job descriptions and skill profiles.

      Never having depended for their strength on job control, European unions found it easier to adapt to the “post-Fordist” forms of industrial organization than did their British or American counterparts. Still, adaptation required that unions decentralize their organizations and insert themselves into the workplace in a way that jeopardized neither productive cooperation nor their own independence. For this, industrial unions (industrial union) that could avail themselves of established systems of industrial democracy and codetermination seem to have been particularly well placed. Indeed, German and Scandinavian (Scandinavia) unions in particular may actually have contributed to the quality-competitive restructuring of their economies by, on the one hand, foreclosing employers' options of hiring low-wage and low-skill labour and, on the other hand, exerting pressures and creating opportunities at the workplace for the de-Taylorization of work organization and the general upgrading of production. Especially important in this context were the unions' roles in labour-market policy and vocational training.

      By adjusting to the requirements of productive flexibility at the workplace, then, most Scandinavian unions increased their membership density, while Belgian, German, and in part Italian unions maintained their strength. In France, Spain, and to an extent The Netherlands and Austria, on the other hand, unions were left behind by rapid industrial modernization and went into precipitous decline.

Wolfgang Streeck

Eastern Europe

      Trade unionism in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe developed in close relationship with political parties, usually revolutionary parties. Because the autocratic Russian state prohibited public organization of any sort, especially trade unions, autonomous workers' movements often shared common interests with revolutionary parties and tended to cooperate with them. Moreover, revolutionary Marxist parties grew simultaneously with an industrialized, urban labour force, so that political ideas—especially revolution and Socialism—helped to give definition to workplace struggle. Russian and Polish labour movements will serve as examples here.

Russia

      The earliest Russian labour organizations emerged among artisans in the form of legal guilds, which were not autonomous or spontaneous institutions but rather subject to close state supervision. Late in the 19th century, these were joined by mutual-aid societies (friendly society), which spread among the more skilled and literate craftsmen in capital cities and among Jewish artisans in the western part of the empire. Particularly among the latter, such societies sometimes evolved into illegal organizations for struggle with employers, but by and large their function was to provide mutual support and cultural self-help. The earliest mutual-aid societies were begun by printers in Warsaw (1814), Riga (1816), and Odessa (1816), but their real expansion came in the late 1880s and the 1890s. Meanwhile, the population of factory workers grew outside of the artisanal tradition, finding recruits among peasants and children of hereditary factory workers in state-owned military enterprises. Traditions of solidarity among factory workers were based on ties with fellow countrymen and on informal collective living arrangements called artels.

      The growth of industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries gave rise to a factory proletariat and to labour unrest, but government repression prevented intermittent strikes from leading to permanent forms of organization. Agitators from Marxist Social-Democratic groups attempted to organize strikers, but they were hampered by frequent arrest and imprisonment and by the reluctance of workers to entrust their struggle to the hands of outside intellectuals. In 1901, however, the Russian government embarked on a unique experiment and organized its own police-supervised unions to channel worker protest and preserve loyalty to the tsarist regime. Led by the chief of security police in Moscow, Sergey Vasilyevich Zubatov (Zubatov, Sergey Vasilyevich), such unions quickly emerged primarily among skilled factory workers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, Vilnius, and Minsk. While the experiment soon lost favour with the government, it gave workers new experience with collective bargaining and grievance procedures, and it led to their demands for the right to choose shop-floor representatives and to strike.

      The unrest that led to the Russian Revolution of 1905 grew out of this movement among factory workers, and in October of that year the tsar conceded to workers the right to organize trade unions. From their foundations in mutual-aid societies, police unions, and the independent strike councils (soviets) that had emerged during the revolution, new trade unions multiplied in October and November of 1905. In St. Petersburg, 30,000 workers joined 41 unions in just six weeks. In Moscow, 56 unions were created in this period, embracing about 25,000 workers. In both cities, tradesmen employed by small shops were the first to organize; metalworkers and textile workers, employed primarily in large plants, were slower to join unions, in part because their individual factories were big enough to offer by themselves the advantages of organization and solidarity.

      The wave of union organizing continued into 1906 and 1907 with the publication of the Temporary Laws of March 4, 1906, legalizing the formation of public organizations. Union activists attempted to organize nationally, but before an all-Russia trade-union congress could take place, the union movement succumbed to a wave of reaction set off by the dissolution of the second state Duma (parliament) in June 1907. Police found unions in violation of some regulation or another (organizing strikes remained illegal, for example) and ordered them closed. The resulting precarious legal status of unions frightened prospective members, and union fortunes waned. Between 1907 and 1909, police closed 350 unions and arrested many of the most important labour leaders. By 1910, union membership had fallen to 60,000, compared to 250,000 members in January 1907. Beyond these legal members, there remained, in the underground or in exile, dedicated cadres of Social-Democratic activists who would become important leaders when unions' fortunes revived.

      Economic recession and political repression combined to depress trade-union activity until 1912. Those unions that remained legal could offer little to their members besides cultural activities and fellowship; collective bargaining, strikes, political activity, and intercity contact were all forbidden. During this period, differences between the approaches of Menshevism and Bolshevism, the two wings of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party, became more pronounced. Mensheviks (Menshevik) believed in service to the working class and focused on consumer cooperatives, schools, libraries, and clubs. Bolsheviks (Bolshevik) tended to engage in political and strike activity, trying to force a revolutionary situation. When union activism revived in 1912, unionists agitated for legal shop-floor representatives and collective labour contracts. Strikes increased in the period 1912–14 but remained outside the union sphere. Modest gains in labour legislation gave encouragement to a reformist wing of the union movement, but continued government harassment forced many activists to adopt a more revolutionary ideology (communism).

       World War I propelled hundreds of thousands of new workers—women, youths, and peasants—into Russian factories, diluting the old skilled cadres and creating new pressures on work culture. As a result, when the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought an immediate freedom to organize, trade unions had to compete as centres of organization with less cumbersome factory committees and urban soviets of workers' deputies. The main concerns of factory committees were local grievances, representing their factory to larger bodies, and adjudicating disputes among workers themselves, but, as trade unions failed to organize quickly enough to deal with problems of wages, hours, control, and regulation, factory committees began to join in citywide conferences to deal with many of these problems. Simultaneously, unions formed administrative structures, recruited members, and began to coordinate economic bargaining with employers. By the end of 1917, more than 2,000 unions had formed in Russia, with a reported membership of 2.7 million workers.

      When the Bolsheviks (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) came to power in November 1917 (October 1917, Old Style), much of Russian industry was at a standstill. Workers in many idle factories assumed the responsibility of restarting the plants, usually through their factory committees, but gradually, between 1918 and 1920, central and local government agencies took over. Most trade-union leaders agreed that, under Socialism, the primary task of unions was to facilitate production and that workers' interests were now identical to state employers' interests. Trade unions assumed more state functions, serving as military recruiting offices, centres of supply, providers of social services, and judicial organs. A minority of independent union leaders argued that the interests of workers and managers would always conflict, even under socialized industry, and that the task of unions was to defend workers first. A syndicalist minority within the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were renamed in 1918) believed that independent trade unions should manage the state economy. By 1921 a compromise was reached, pressured by widespread factory discontent: trade unions were thenceforth to have a “dual function” of helping to raise productivity while guaranteeing workers' legitimate rights against overbearing managers. As a “transmission belt” between the Party and the working rank and file, they would serve as a “school for Communism” and teach workers that their interests were identical with those of the state.

      During the 1920s trade unions worked closely with state agencies in setting wages, providing unemployment relief and social services, and raising productivity. With the rapid industrialization drive of 1928–32, they became little more than administrative cogs of decreasing relevance to the interests of workers on the factory floor.

Poland

      Poland regained statehood in 1918, and a divided trade-union movement united. Trade unions had first developed in Galicia, in Austrian Poland, in the 1870s, where unions were legal. German trade unions had organized Silesian workers in the western part of German Poland, and in Russian Poland, as in Russia, unions were illegal. With independence, local unions combined into a powerful movement under the general influence of the moderate Polish Socialist Party, although the union movement maintained an official policy of party neutrality. Another group of Christian trade unions organized separately.

      Poland in the early 20th century was still an agrarian country, with 61 percent of the population engaged in agriculture in 1931. Moreover, under a severe economic crisis after 1918, the labour force was very fluid, with workers moving in and out of industry. Union structure was based not on skill but on industry, and even unemployed workers were incorporated. The biggest unions, like the railway workers' union, supported extensive cultural activities, including clubs, libraries, and a secondary boarding school. Union membership in the 1930s fluctuated between 900,000 and 950,000 in spite of efforts by the government under Józef Piłsudski to split and weaken union solidarity. This figure represented about 18 percent of the working class of five million, including agricultural labourers and domestic servants.

      Under the Communist government of Poland, the working class grew rapidly between 1947 and 1958. At the same time, trade unions became interlocked with management and government organs, losing their independent function. Wages were set centrally, and unions were relegated to administering social-welfare activities within the workplace. Even here, as the Polish economy began to decline in the late 1970s, unions faced challenges when they were unable to deliver these services, such as housing and holidays. At the same time, a shift in the social composition of the Polish working class created a less docile union membership. By 1972, only one-third of economically active Poles worked in agriculture; new recruits to industry came predominantly from proletarian backgrounds, and these were relatively young. The rapid mobility from blue-collar to white-collar jobs characteristic of Poland's earlier Communist years had now slowed. These structural characteristics, combined with economic stagnation and the inability of trade unions to respond, produced a wave of strikes (strike) in 1980 and the rise of new trade unions to challenge the old. To settle the strikes, the Polish government in August 1980 agreed to recognize new, self-governing trade unions, authentic representatives of the working class whose task would be to defend the social and material interests of workers. Within weeks, new independent locals had federated into a national independent union, named Solidarity. Old trade unions were simultaneously reconstructed to become more independent from the state, but their membership plummeted from 12 million to 4 million by the end of 1980. Solidarity was declared illegal in December 1981, so that trade unions continued to be more fragmented than before 1980, but this pluralistic trend contributed to the revival of Solidarity and the defeat of the Polish Communist Party in elections in the summer of 1989.

Diane P. Koenker

Japan

      After Japan's surrender in 1945, Allied occupation reforms spurred a spectacular spread of independent trade unions, which had been eliminated during wartime. Until it was halted in 1949–50 by sharp deflation, revision of labour laws, and a purge of leftists, unionism enlisted 6 million members—almost half of all workers. Unions resumed steady growth after 1955 as industrial employment leaped upward with Japan's economic “miracle.” Organized labour peaked in 1975 at 12.6 million members, one-third of all eligible workers, becoming the third largest movement among the industrialized democracies. As economic expansion slowed following the 1973–74 oil crisis and subsequent industrial restructuring toward hard-to-unionize services, union membership leveled off to one of every four workers.

      Backed by new constitutional rights to organize, bargain, and strike, in sharp contrast to prewar years, Japanese unions made notable achievements as they increasingly emphasized industrial activity. Genuine union-management negotiations and wide-ranging joint consultation at enterprise (business organization), industrial, and national levels became well institutionalized. Also established was comprehensive legislation for labour standards and social security. Unions provided the principal support for such “progressive” political parties as the Socialists, Democratic Socialists, and Communists, in opposition to the conservative Liberal-Democrats, who reigned continuously after 1948. However, unions were faulted for severe ideological disunity, undue employer influence, and a narrow focus on their members' interests to the neglect of unorganized workers and the wider society.

      A chief feature of Japanese unionism is its decentralized “enterprise-level” structure. Numbering more than 70,000, most basic union organizations form inside, not across, large-scale private enterprises and government agencies. Democratically run, well-financed, and self-staffed, the typical enterprise union actively represents only workers “permanently” employed in the firm—blue- and white-collar together and also foremen. This rank-and-file choice reflects the influence of fundamental economic, technological, and sociopolitical forces in Japanese society. Some theories explain it as the legacy of Japanese feudalism or as part of a system of employer “paternalism,” but most important has been what can be called a labour-market “dualism.” This evolved as Japan rapidly industrialized with sharply separated work forces for the relatively few large-scale, technologically advanced oligopolies on the one hand and for the millions of less secure small- and medium-size firms on the other hand. Considerable differentials in wages, benefits, working conditions, and employment security have long favoured the larger firms, so that a major reason to unionize within such enterprises lies in shared motivations among permanent workers to protect their advantages while simultaneously avoiding harm to their company's competitive strength.

      In order to obtain and preserve gains and to avoid divisions, most unions seek coordination and guidance through industrywide federations and national centres. Upper-level organizations, although less well-financed, gradually have gained influence over enterprise unions despite decades of severe ideological rivalry, which began in the 1920s and revived with Japan's defeat in World War II. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Sōhyō, the Socialists' backbone, and Dōmei, the Democratic Socialist mainstay, fiercely competed, but, along with two lesser centres, they finally achieved unity in 1989 with the founding of Rengō (Japanese Trade Union Confederation), embracing almost eight million members. Rengō potentially offers a broadened role for organized labour. It aims to shift union power from the enterprise to upper levels by merging the numerous industrial federations, embracing millions of unaffiliated union members, and organizing the unorganized in cross-enterprise union structures.

      In 1955 Sōhyō successfully coordinated union demands by launching the first shuntō (“spring offensive”); this has since been continued annually for the bargaining of general wage and benefit increases in April, when Japan's fiscal year begins. Shuntō counters the tendency toward disparate settlements at the enterprise level, where union–management negotiations formally occur, and also spills over into nonunion sectors, thus resembling an “incomes policy” mechanism. Shuntō subject matter has gradually broadened to include issues such as work hours, pensions, and housing, as well as large wage bonuses paid once or more each year.

Solomon B. Levine

The developing world

      Unionism in the developing regions, or Third World, has been largely shaped by the structure of their economies. From the turn of the 20th century, there was a gradual decline in the proportion of Third World workers engaged in agriculture, but even so, until World War II fully three-quarters of the active population was engaged in farming. The numbers engaged in manufacturing increased from 26 million to 46 million between 1900 and 1960, but as a proportion of the labour force they represented a mere 8 percent. During the same period, the number of workers engaged in extractive industries increased threefold, reflecting the importance of these activities during the colonial period, but as a proportion of the working population they represented a mere 1 percent. Service-sector employment also increased threefold between 1900 and 1960, but in this case it embraced a considerable 18 percent of the work force and a massive absolute number of 92 million workers. Across these sectors of employment, trade unionism developed unevenly, and in various phases of history one or the other was dominant. In all cases the objective economic determinants of trade unionism—i.e., whether prevailing conditions were favourable or not to its development—would prove crucial, and they set the context in which labour organized.

      The first stable trade unions in many Third World countries were located within the export sector. By the beginning of the 20th century, railroad workers, dockers, and miners had formed strong labour organizations. These workers, who were integrated into the outward-oriented economies typical of the colonial division of labour, held considerable bargaining power through their ability to disrupt a major economic activity. For example, when in 1885 Hong Kong workers refused to unload a French warship, their action spread to coolies, boatmen, and rickshaw pullers. The strong group consciousness of dockworkers in African countries made them among the first to take collective class action. Railway workers, too, were as important in Ghana as they were in Argentina in organizing the early labour movement. And miners, for example in Chile and South Africa, have retained a considerable political influence through their strong and stable union organization in spite of their reduced numbers in relative terms. Once industrialization spread beyond these “enclaves” of the export sector, wider layers of workers, such as those engaged in textiles, began to organize.

      A new international division of labour that emerged after World War II led to the consolidation of a significant manufacturing sector in a number of Third World countries. From the textile industry to automobile manufacturing and electronics, large factories and a transformed labour process created the conditions for a new wave of union organization. In Brazil during the 1970s, for example, organization within the workplace led to a powerful labour movement spearheaded by the metalworkers' union. In South Africa, likewise, the rise of new black trade unions in the 1970s was reflected in an increased level of organization at factory level. Similar processes could be discerned in South Korea and the Philippines. As opposed to the early government-controlled trade unions, this “new wave” of unionism had much deeper roots in the workplace. Nevertheless, the role of trade unions in the Third World has remained predominantly defensive, organizing work forces that have been created by the international division of labour and seeking through collective effort to defend living standards and improve working conditions. Their success in so doing is sporadic and very uneven across countries.

      The public sector is relatively well organized in many Third World countries, either in spite of or because of government attitudes. Freedom of association for agricultural workers has also been achieved in most countries, although this is more readily achieved in big plantations with a stable labour force than in the traditional subsistence-farming sector. In the newly industrializing countries of East Asia, there are growing numbers of organizable workers owing to the economic modernization that has taken place there, although in general (with the exception of South Korea) labour organization has stagnated. In Africa, some countries such as Tanzania have promoted rural trade unions in particular, but in general the potentially organizable labour force in large enterprises is but a small minority of the working classes. In the huge “informal” sector, which is so prevalent in the Third World, unionization is even more difficult. In some countries, such as India, there have been some moves by industrial workers to extend their organization to cover unregistered casual and rural workers. The sheer size of this sector and its role in the economy mean that it has genuine bargaining power and can indeed force the pace for trade unions, which tend to neglect the smaller industrial units and the nonpermanent work force.

      There is a close link between the level of socioeconomic development and the degree of labour organization in the Third World. Thus, Argentina has a degree of unionization approaching 40 percent, whereas the Dominican Republic has less than 10 percent trade-union membership. Likewise, Singapore has a far greater proportion of trade-union members than Papua New Guinea. Overall, there emerges a picture of incomplete unionization in the Third World, with only a handful approaching 40 percent, and most countries falling below 20 percent. Such quantitative analysis has its limits, however. It is equally important to assess the level of control that each trade-union movement has over the labour market. In addition, it is the distribution of the labour force across different occupational categories that sets the framework in which a trade-union movement develops. Exactly how it operates within these constraints depends on a range of political factors not considered here.

Ronaldo Munck

Additional Reading

Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand

Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism, rev. ed. (1920, reprinted 1975), is the pioneer work in British trade union history. This classic study has been revised and carried forward to the 1930s in a standard work, H.A. Clegg, Alan Fox, and A.F. Thompson, A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889, 2 vol. (1964–1985). A more popular, though also comprehensive, account is provided in Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism, 4th ed. (1987). For the earlier phases of union history, see John Rule (ed.), British Trade Unionism, 1750–1850: The Formative Years (1988); and E.H. Hunt, British Labour History, 1815–1914 (1981). There is a valuable discussion of the relationship between British trade unions and the law, including the compulsory arbitration issue, in Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain, 2nd ed. (1979).British and Australian union developments are compared in the valuable Henry Phelps Brown, The Origins of Trade Union Power (1983). Studies of the modern period of Australian union developments are offered in Ross M. Martin, Trade Unions in Australia: Who Runs Them, Who Belongs, Their Politics, Their Power, 2nd ed. (1980); and D.W. Rawson, Unions and Unionists in Australia, rev. ed. (1986). A detailed account of early Australian unions is J.T. Sutcliffe, A History of Trade Unionism in Australia (1921, reprinted 1967). Keith Sinclair, William Pember Reeves, New Zealand Fabian (1965), provides a biography of the architect of compulsory arbitration in New Zealand, and the same author's A History of New Zealand, rev. ed. (1980), is valuable in setting union development in a broad historical context. See also H. Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand Past and Present (1973).John Christopher Lovell

United States and Canada

The best historical survey of the American movement is Foster Rhea Dulles and Melvyn Dubofsky, Labor in America, 4th ed. (1984). The findings of much recent scholarship on the 19th century are presented in Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (1989). The 20th century is summarily covered in James R. Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth-Century America (1980); Robert H. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, 1920–1985 (1986); and David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (1980). Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, 2nd ed. (1988), is a standard work on the organization. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (1987), is fundamental on the period it covers. On the role of American labour law, the leading modern interpretation is Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (1985). Harold A. Logan, Trade Unions in Canada: Their Development and Functioning (1948), is a standard work; it can be supplemented for the modern period by Stuart Jamieson, Industrial Relations in Canada, 2nd ed. (1973); and Alton W.J. Craig, The System of Industrial Relations in Canada, 3rd ed. (1990). John Crispo, International Unionism: A Study in Canadian-American Relations (1967); and Gad Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics (1968, reprinted 1977), explore two of the main themes of Canadian labour history. Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.), Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century (1986), contains important comparative essays and also surveys later developments.David Brody

Western Europe

Walter Kendall, The Labour Movement in Europe (1975); and Hans Slomp, Labor Relations in Europe: A History of Issues and Developments (1990), are introductory surveys. Gary Marks, Unions in Politics: Britain, Germany, and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1989), explores the logic of political unionism. National differences in industrial work organization and their relations with unionism are discussed in Marc Maurice, François Sellier, and Jean-Jacques Silvestre, The Social Foundations of Industrial Power: A Comparison of France and Germany (1986; originally published in French, 1982). The emergence of the “postwar settlement” is analyzed in Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (1986). The events of 1968 are documented and placed in perspective in Colin Crouch and Alessandro Pizzorno (eds.), The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe Since 1968, 2 vol. (1978). Country studies of postwar unionism from the perspective of post-1968 developments are collected in Peter Gourevitch et al., Unions and Economic Crisis: Britain, West Germany, and Sweden (1984); and Peter Lange, George Ross, and Maurizio Vannicelli, Unions, Change, and Crisis: French and Italian Union Strategy and the Political Economy, 1945–1980 (1982). The two main works on neocorporatism are Gerhard Lehmbruch and Philippe C. Schmitter (eds.), Patterns of Corporatist Policy-Making (1982); and Philippe C. Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch (eds.), Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation (1979). John H. Goldthorpe (ed.), Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1984), analyzes the role of unions in the European political economies of the 1970s. For a comprehensive descriptive study of modern West European unions, see Jelle Visser, In Search of Inclusive Unionism (1990).Wolfgang Streeck

Eastern Europe

Jan F. Triska and Charles Gati (eds.), Blue-Collar Workers in Eastern Europe (1981), presents essays—some thematic, some by individual country—by leading experts on the topics of politics and economics of workers and unions in communist states. Union developments from the 1917 revolution to the post-1945 period are analyzed by an expert on Soviet political and economic affairs in Isaac Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labour Policy (1950, reprinted 1973). Victoria E. Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 (1983), places union development in a comparative European framework. Analysis of the role of unions in the later Soviet political structure is offered in Blair A. Ruble, Soviet Trade Unions: Their Development in the 1970s (1981). Feliks Gross, The Polish Worker: A Study of a Social Stratum (1945), is a sociological and historical study embracing the whole of the 19th century and the pre-World War II period of the 20th; Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity (1991), analyzes more recent developments.Diane P. Koenker

Japan

Taishiro Shirai (ed.), Contemporary Industrial Relations in Japan (1983), is a collection of authoritative analyses by leading Japanese scholars, including the editor's insightful study of enterprise unionism. Kazuo Koike, Understanding Industrial Relations in Modern Japan, trans. from Japanese (1988), portrays internal labour markets and their effect on unions and other labour institutions. Taishiro Shirai and Haruo Shimada, “Japan,” pp. 241–322 in John T. Dunlop and Walter Galenson (eds.), Labor in the Twentieth Century (1978), offers a highly useful summary of historical and statistical materials up to the 1970s. Kazuo Okochi, Bernard Karsh, and Solomon B. Levine (eds.), Workers and Employers in Japan: The Japanese Employment Relations System (1973), covers all major aspects of the postwar system, including unions, prior to the 1973–74 oil crisis. Analysis of union, employer, and government relations in the decade following the oil crisis is found in Koji Taira and Solomon B. Levine, “Japan's Industrial Relations: A Social Compact Emerges,” pp. 247–300 in Hervey Juris, Mark Thompson, and Wilbur Daniels (eds.), Industrial Relations in a Decade of Economic Change (1985). The English-language publications of the Japan Institute of Labour are an important source of information.Solomon B. Levine

The developing world

Rosalind E. Boyd, Robin Cohen, and Peter C.W. Gutkind (eds.), International Labour and the Third World: The Making of a New Working Class (1987), examines class formation and the labour movement in various areas. Robin Cohen, Peter C.W. Gutkind, and Phyllis Brazier (eds.), Peasants and Proletarians: The Struggles of Third World Workers (1979), focuses on forms of labour organization and strategies of working class action. World Labour Report (irregular), issued by the International Labour Office, provides systematic coverage of key issues of organized labour. Ronaldo Munck, The New International Labour Studies (1988), offers an overview of the field as applied to the Third World. Roger Southall (ed.), Trade Unions and the New Industrialization of the Third World (1988), examines the relationship between the “new international division of labour” and labour organization. Immanuel Wallerstein (ed.), Labor in the World Social Structure (1983), presents a collection of papers from a Soviet-American symposium, covering various aspects of labour's role in the Third World.Ronaldo Munck

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