The Fight for Legal Status

Abstract

THE Webbs’ account of the struggle for legal status and free collective bargaining, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, has been substantially modified. The present writer has demonstrated [32], and Roberts [34] and Coltham [23] have confirmed, that they greatly exaggerated the dominant role of the so-called ‘New Model’ unions and of the ‘Junta’. As we have seen, the alleged ‘New Model’ was by no means the universal pattern of trade-union development in the third quarter of the century : in London, there were many smaller, more militant societies, often opposed to the ‘Junta’, and in the provinces, where the ‘Junta’ had comparatively little influence, there were different organisations, with different policies, among miners, textile workers, etc. It was among these unions that the Trades Union Congress was to originate.