EMPLOYER UNIONS

Employer Unions

Employer Unions

Introduction

Labor unions are a product of the advent of capitalism and of the industrialization of production in Western Europe and, as such, are not regarded by labor historians as an outgrowth of the medieval guild system.

While unions evolved into mass organizations with members that tried to negotiate collectively the highest possible price for their work, guilds were directed by elite “worker-owners” who monopolized the available pool of skilled labor in a given profession, often exploiting journeymen or apprenticed workers in the process. Unions originated from localized social protest movements and ad hoc workers' organizations in western Europe (particularly the United Kingdom, France, and Germany) that had sprung up in response to the poor pay and working conditions of factories during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. These protest groups agitated for such things as an eight-hour workday and the abolition of child labor. As conflicts between employers and workers became more frequent and industrial production spread, the worker associations, which often were no more than temporary and hastily formed strike committees, began to build permanent roots.

Discussion

The origins of the modern labor union can be found among miners and textile workers in Great Britain in the 1860s, culminating in the formation of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) as the first umbrella organization to represent and formulate policy for all the unions in the country. The TUC successfully fought against the Combination Acts (acts of parliament that made illegal the formation of collective organizations to protect the interests of workers) that had made unions illegal for much of the nineteenth century, and eventually it obtained the legal right to organize under the Trade Union Act of 1871. The British labor movement was further enhanced through its alliance in 1893 with the Independent Labour Party, the forerunner of the modern British Labour Party, whose core philosophy was a reformist variant of democratic socialism called Fabian Socialism.

European Labor Unions

While British labor unions were craft oriented in structure and politically allied themselves with the moderate, reformist socialist Labour Party, unions in the rest of Europe tended to be organized along industrial lines, were more closely allied with political parties, tended to be oriented toward radical-left parties, and in some cases were factionalized by sectarian divisions. Unions in continental Europe were also exposed to more determined resistance from employers and repressive states. In Germany, a flurry of union activity was sparked by the revolutions of 1848, but it was sharply repressed by the reactionary government installed in Prussia. The independent labor movement grew again in Germany before and after World War I and played a prominent role in the interwar Weimar Republic as an ally of the Social Democratic and Communist movements. The rise of Nazism, however, ended autonomous unions in Germany, and the Nazis imposed a statecontrolled workers' organization called the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front), which all industrial workers in the Third Reich were legally required to join.

In France, unions were not legally recognized until 1884, and they became closely tied ...