Trade Unions and Responsibility

Extract

Pope Leo XIII, in his letter Rerum Novarum of 1891, said the condition of the working classes was the pressing question of the hour; that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade were concentrated in the hands of comparatively few individuals, so that ‘a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than slavery itself.’

In that same year there met in Newcastle-upon-Tyne the twenty-fourth Annual meeting of the Trade Union Congress, over which presided a miner—a Mr T. Burt. That Congress represented a little more than 1,300,000 organized workers. Last year it was my great honour, at the Isle of Man, to preside over the eighty-fifth gathering of the T.U.C. representing over 8,000,000 trade unionists.

The British trade union movement knew only too well the truth of the Pope’s words. Had it not waged for many years before an incessant struggle against the evil social conditions produced by the growth of nineteenth-century industrialism?

When the first T.U.C. met in Manchester in 1868, 34 delegates attended, representing 118,000 members. Barely thirty-four years after George Lovelace, a farm labourer of the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, and five of his colleagues, had been convicted before the High Court for ‘treason’—i.e. administering ‘an unlawful oath’ and endeavouring to form a branch of the farm workers’ union— and transported to Botany Bay in the infamous convict ships of the day. The beginnings of our trade unions are rooted in struggle, hatreds, victimization and oppression. They were outlawed as conspirators, deprived of the right to hold property, handicapped by Governments, and ruthlessly opposed by employers.