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What Did Unions Do in Nineteenth-Century Britain?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

George R. Boyer
George R. Boyer
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Labor Economies, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14851–0952
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Abstract

The article examines the development of the insurance function of trade unions. It analyzes how such policies worked, and why union benefit packages differed across occupations. It also addresses the impact of insurance policies on union organization. Insurance benefits increased the ability of unions to attract and retain members. They did not, however, significantly increase the power of union leaders relative to employers or union rank and file.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 319 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1988

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References

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5 Data for 1893 from Board of Trade, “Seventh Annual Report on Trade Unions,” Parliamentary Papers, 1895, vol. 107, p. 3. The numbers for unemployment and sickness benefits were adjusted to make them consistent with the 1908 data.Google Scholar

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20 Members of the Yorkshire Miners' Association were entitled to benefits only if 25 percent of the workers at the seam had been unemployed for three weeks. This suggests that work sharing was used during all but the most severe recessions. Including the Yorkshire Miners increases to 25 percent the share of miners eligible for unemployment benefits only when the mine was shut down.Google Scholar

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27 Seasonality also was a problem for skilled workers in the building trades. The fact that these workers commanded occupation-specific human capital explains why their unions were able to provide unemployment insurance while unions of low-skilled workers were not. Still, the high cost of unemployment insurance restricted the provision of benefits. Only one union in the building trades, the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, allowed members to collect benefits for more than 13 weeks per year.Google Scholar

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31 Benefits were not vested. A union member expelled for any reason “forfeit[ed] all claim” to benefits (Webb and Webb, Industrial Democracy, p. 154).Google Scholar

32 Ibid., pp. 161–63.

33 Ibid., p. 158.

34 The prospect of losing sickness and funeral benefits had a much smaller impact on workers' decisions, since such benefits could be obtained from friendly societies.Google Scholar

35 Data on the size of balances of Post Office Savings Bank accounts are given in Johnson, Saving and Spending, p. 101. Assuming that no working-class households had balances larger than £50, the data suggest that the median household balance was less than £4. If balances increased with age, the typical young worker's balance must have been no more than £2–3.Google Scholar

36 Several miners' unions paid an additional ls. per week for each child under 13. Several branches of the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners also paid additional benefits to workers with young children.Google Scholar

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39 The existence of such rules is discussed in Webb and Webb, Industrial Democracy, pp. 164–65.Google Scholar

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42 Quoted in Webb and Webb, Industrial Democracy, p. 160.Google Scholar

43 The adoption of mutual insurance policies by many “new” unions in the 1890s is not evidence that union leaders changed their opinion on this issue. New unions adopted insurance policies in order to attract and retain members (Hyman, Richard, The Workers' Union [Oxford, 1971], pp. 14–16, 34).Google Scholar

44 The average male aged 20 to 29 lost less than one week of work per year due to sickness (Money, L. G. Chiozza, Insurance versus Poverty [London, 1912], p. 169). Young workers mainly needed insurance against unemployment, and strikes generally did not threaten unemployment benefits. According to the Webbs, “[a] Trade Union… gives a preference, in effect, to its Out of Work payments, usually continuing them at the full rate, even when its funds are being rapidly exhausted …”(Industrial Democracy, p. 161). Thus, the expected cost of strikes (in terms of benefits lost) was low for young workers.Google Scholar

45 Ibid., p. 160.

46 It is not possible to determine the proportion of unions in which benefit funds were controlled by the central leadership. In the Amalgamated Engineers, a model for many unions, branches retained their own funds (Webb and Webb, History of Trade Unionism, pp. 220–21).Google Scholar