Trade Unions and Revolutionary Politics

Abstract

For much of the nineteenth-century, trade union organization in Britain was dominated by craft workers in exclusive craft associations. Unions in the craft industries were built on apprenticeship and on customs which had persisted from before the Industrial Revolution.¹ Craft societies built on custom to delimit a preserve of craftsmen’s work, defined sometimes by the material, sometimes by the tools and machinery and sometimes by the product. This preserve was defended against the unqualified, against changes in the organization of production or techniques and against encroachment by other crafts.² Craft rules occasionally led to conflict but widespread conflict and bargaining with employers were untypical of craft unionism. It was craft unions’ contention that craftsmen should regulate ‘what we alone have a right to regulate, the value of our labour’.³