British trade unions,the 1975 European Referendum and its legacy

This paper examines the evolution of British trade union policy relating to the European Union (EU). It focuses upon the 1975 UK referendum on continued membership of the Common Market (latterly the EU), and uses this key event to illuminate the range of the debate within the trade union movement, the rationale why it determined to oppose British membership of the EU and why its scampaigning proved largely ineffective, before considering the consequences arising from the referendum defeat. The paper identifies a number of issues resonant within the labour movement–including the decline in the strength of the left and the concomitant polarisation of opinion concerning the optimality of pursuing predominantly national or super-national economic and social policy–which have resulted in the periodic oscillation in trade union strategy, from opposition to (conditional) support for the European integration ‘project’. It surmises that the inability of the trade union leadership to construct a viable strategy, able to combine full employment with social and labour market protection for vulnerable workers, implies that the questions last comprehensively aired during the 1975 referendum campaign have never been satisfactorily resolved. Consequently, an understanding of the factors pertaining to the 1975 referendum campaign has the potential to inform the contemporary debate.     

The Liverpool Dock Strike, 1995–98: a resurgence of solidarity in the age of globalisation

As the 20th anniversary of the 1995–1998 Liverpool Dockers’ Strike approaches, this case of industrial action should not be dismissed as a reminder of yet another nail in the coffin of organised labour. Rather, this event needs to be viewed more optimistically in hindsight as a symbol that working-class consciousness and systems of solidarity had not vanished entirely from Britain after the crushing collapse of domestic manufacturing and the fall of the miners in 1985. Indeed, the Liverpool dockers invented a fresh campaign of industrial action at this time, led more from the ‘bottom-up’ than most other labour protests in the past. Fuelled by a cognisant awareness of both community and workplace experience within the context of popular historical memory, this industrial action played significant roles in reconfiguring and adapting solidarity in this new era of rentier, global capitalism. It is appropriate we recall working-class militancy in a city whose own historical narrative is often described as ‘exceptional’ when one reflects upon Liverpool’s long entrenched culture of opposition.     

A nexus between labour movement and labour movement: the Knights of Labor and the financial side of global labour history

The rise of global and transnational labour history has revolutionised the study of working-class movements and individuals and the global forces that shaped them. Some of the more mundane considerations of these movements, however, have so far been neglected in this rapidly growing field. One of the most important of these considerations was money, or in other words the financial affairs of transnational movements such as trade unions and political parties. This article is a call to write the financial side of global labour history. It focuses on a global working-class movement that is itself often neglected in the historical literature, the Knights of Labor, and their outposts in Britain and Ireland. It examines the history of the British and Irish Knights through the prism of their financial history, so far as we can reconstruct it from the scanty sources that are available. This article argues that their financial ties with the United States and a series of embezzlement cases became major causes of their decline and, ultimately, their dissolution. Finally, this article draws conclusions from the financial misadventures of the British and Irish Knights of Labor that are relevant to the study of other international working-class movements and to the writing of global labour history in general.     

Love,labour, loss: women,refugees and the servant crisis in Britain, 1933–1939

Between 1933 and 1939, around 20,000 Jewish, ‘non-Aryan’ or politically active refugee women from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia entered Britain on domestic service permits. Their immigration, mostly organised by women in the British voluntary sector, served as a moral response to the humanitarian crisis caused by Fascism in Europe, and a practical response to the ‘servant crisis’ in Britain as working-class women increasingly rejected domestic labour. This paper considers the practical and emotional relationships around domestic service and argues that the acceptance of refugee women into the metropolitan British home was conditional on the tacit expectation they could fill the vacancy left by the working classes, becoming British through their labour.     

Reformers and revolutionaries: the battle for the working classes in Gibraltar and its hinterland, 1902–1921

Abstract

This article examines labour organisation in Gibraltar and its hinterland from c.1914 to 1921. It demonstrates that the traditionally strong links which had existed between organisations in Gibraltar and neighbouring Spain, links based upon a shared belief in anarchist ideas and practices, had, by 1921, broken down due to the adoption of gradualist and constitutionalist politics and industrial relations by workers on the Rock. Two principle agents drove this change. First, in 1919, the British Workers’ Union established a branch in Gibraltar which successfully worked to establish itself as principle negotiator and representative of workers on the Rock. Second, a reforming governor in Gibraltar undertook to open up political spaces in Gibraltar which offered the potential to work with, rather than against, the state in the colony. By the end of the period, anarchism, and anarchist ideas, was not extinguished in Gibraltar, but they would never again serve as the inspiration for industrial and political campaigns on the Rock, much to the delight of both Gibraltarian employers and the British colonial authorities. This case-study invites further consideration of how British style trade union activity in the empire displaced indigenous forms of organising, a subject which has heretofore received scant attention.     

‘Belles from Bristol and Bournville in New Surroundings’: female confectionery workers as transnational agents, 1918–1928

ABSTRACT

In existing histories of the development of multinational business, women are usually absent. Yet when the British confectionery companies of Cadbury, Fry and Pascall took the bold step to build an entirely new factory in Tasmania in the early 1920s, women workers were important, and mobile, actors. This article draws on business history archives and genealogical material, from both Britain and Australia, to explore how a select group of British women became the ‘pioneers’ of the Cadbury-Fry-Pascall company. It examines why women were key to the formation of an Australian subsidiary, how they influenced, and sometimes challenged, the creation of workplace culture and practice, and the consequences of this mode of female labour migration.     

Historical tradition and community mobilisation: narratives of Red Clydeside in memories of the anti-poll tax movement in Scotland, 1988–1990

Contemporary scholarship has shifted focus from a ‘labour history’ focused on industrial movements to a more comprehensive ‘working-class history’, encompassing the broader social parameters of protest with community and industrial struggles unified in material interest and consciousness. This article locates the poll tax non-payment campaign of 1988–1990 on Clydeside, a major expression of working-class mobilisation which contributed to the demise of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, within this international historiography. The analysis is based on oral history interviews with twelve activists who represented all the major political trends from the non-payment campaign. The anti-poll tax movement was embedded in traditions of community mobilisation shaped by a moral economy of housing and amenities, which had roots in the First World War era ‘Red Clydeside’ struggles, and developed through the post-Second World War predominance of public sector housing. The analysis demonstrates how activists constructed narratives of their own resistance in the anti-poll tax movement within a powerful cultural circuit, where the collective memory of past mobilisations and the consciousness associated with the moral economy of housing and amenities informed contemporary perspectives and political activity. The campaign was not politically monocultural. Differences between political groups involved in the non-payment campaign are analysed showing that the need of composure (of memories) led to contrasting interpretations of Red Clydeside. These were influenced by geographical distinctions between traditional working-class areas with strong tenants’ organisations and the peripheral estates where such organisation was weaker. The impact of deindustrialisation and the welfare policies of the Thatcher government created a popular resentment in these areas. This strengthened moral economy opposition to the poll tax, whilst the traditions of community mobilisation provided effective means of harnessing this through non-payment and direct action against sheriff officers.     

“Buying brains and experts”: British coal owners,regulatory capture and miners’ health, 1918 – 1946

This article examines British coal owners’ use of medical and scientific knowledge of occupational lung diseases in the mining industry to resist regulatory changes between 1918 and 1946. It explores the strategies deployed by coal owners in response to scientific and lay debates over the hazard to workers’ health presented by dust, and legislation to compensate miners for pneumoconiosis and silicosis contracted in the nation’s collieries. In particular, it investigates coal owner deployment of the views of notable scientists, especially the eminent physiologist John Scott Haldane (1860–1936), who insisted on the harmlessness of coal dust, in order to avoid costly compensation payments, as well as capital investment in ameliorative measures to reduce miners’ exposure to such hazards. In so doing, the article provides new insights by illustrating how coal owners influenced mining education programmes, deploying the arguments of Haldane and others, with direct implications for health and safety in British mines. This contributed to the mounting public health disaster wrought by coal dust on Britain’s mining communities. This process is viewed as part of the broader political activities of the coal owners – and their industry body, the Mining Association of Great Britain – in its attempts to influence the regulatory process in a period of dramatic change in the political economy of coal.     

Deconstructing Whiteness: Irish Women in Britain

The Irish are largely invisible as an ethnic group in Britain but continue to be racialized as inferior and alien Others. Invisibility has been reinforced by academic treatment. Most historians have assumed that a framework of assimilation is appropriate and this outcome is uncritically accepted as desirable. Sociologists on the other hand have excluded the Irish from consideration, providing tacit support for the ‘myth of homogeneity’ of white people in Britain against the supposedly new phenomenon of threatening (Black) ‘immigrants’.Focus on the paradigm of ‘colour’ has limited the range of racist ideologies examined and led to denial of anti-Irish racism. But an analysis of nineteenth-century attitudes shows that the ‘Irish Catholic’ was a significant Other in the construction of the British nationalist myth. Despite contemporary forgetting, hostility towards the Irish continues, over and above immediate reactions to recent IRA campaigns. Verbal abuse and racial harassment are documented in London and elsewhere, but unacknowledged.The masculine imagery of ‘Paddy’ hides the existence of Irish women in Britain, although they have outnumbered men since the 1920s. In America, by contrast, there is a strong stereotype of ‘Bridget’ and her central contribution to Irish upward mobility is recognized. But invisibility does not protect Irish women in Britain from racism. Indeed, they are often more exposed since their productive and reproductive roles connect more firmly to British society. Moreover, women have played a key role in maintaining Catholic adherence, which continues to resonate closely with Irishness and difference.     

Agrarian political economy and modern world capitalism: the contributions of food regime analysis

This paper provides a selective survey of food regimes and food regime analysis since the seminal article by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael in 1989, and further traced through their subsequent (individual) work. It identifies eight key elements or dimensions of food regime analysis, namely the international state system; international divisions of labour and patterns of trade; the ‘rules’ and discursive (ideological) legitimations of different food regimes; relations between agriculture and industry, including technical and environmental change in farming; dominant forms of capital and their modalities of accumulation; social forces (other than capitals and states); the tensions and contradictions of specific food regimes; and transitions between food regimes. These are used to summarise three food regimes in the history of world capitalism to date: a first regime from 1870 to 1914, a second regime from 1945 to 1973, and a third corporate food regime from the 1980s proposed by McMichael within the period of neoliberal globalisation. Questions of theory, method and evidence are noted in the course of the exposition and pulled together in a final section which criticises the ‘peasant turn’ of the ‘corporate food regime’ and the analytical and empirical weaknesses associated with it.     

Labour Left Out: Canada's Failure to Protect and Promote Collective Bargaining as a Human Right,by Roy J. Adams

The international labour movement's campaign to fortify the International Labour Organization's (ILO's) core labour standards by way of a World Trade Organization (WTO) social clause failed in the 1990s. Many purported beneficiaries of such a clause conceived of the proposal as a proverbial ‘terrorist’ rather than a ‘freedom fighter’. Reappraising debates in India and the USA, this paper understands the failure in terms of discursive struggles played out both within national contexts, and in the transnational domain. It is argued that previous attempts at unpacking the debate have employed too simplistic discursive schema and paid insufficient attention to its transnational dynamics. The international union movement can only advance the ILO–WTO linkage idea by acknowledging, coming to terms with and addressing the concerns of a pervasive counter-hegemonic discourse.     

Organizing for partnership: the influence of the American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organisations on the British Trades Union Congress 1995–2005

The influence of the ‘organizing model’ of trade unionism developed in America by the American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) on strategies to rebuild British trade unionism is often remarked. Scholars typically distinguish between adversarial organizing and collaborative partnership with employers as competing roads to union revitalization. This article demonstrates that the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) borrowed organizing principles, techniques and animating aphorisms from America, but not a model of trade unionism. The novelty of organizing lay more in its orchestration and recycling of familiar ideas than in its originality. In the hands of conservative leaders, organizing and partnership are not necessarily distinctive approaches. In Britain, as in America, organizing was proposed as a means to achieve partnership, not to prosecute conflict between capital and labour or create more democratic unions. It proved unsuccessful because of lack of resources, employer resistance and New Labour's unwillingness to provide a sufficiently pro-union public policy.     

A victor's history: a comparative analysis of the labour historiography of Indonesia's New Order

Some observers have identified a common pattern in developing countries whereby unions are transformed from a political force valued for their contribution to the struggle for independence to a state-sponsored ‘tool of development’. A less well-explored question concerns the harnessing of labour historiography to justify such transitions. As this article shows, Suharto's New Order (1966–98) undertook a conscious and purposeful rewriting of Indonesian labour history in support of a single vehicle of labour representation organized around a narrative of the dangers of political unionism and designed to control and harness the industrial workforce in the name of economic development.     

An ethnography of global labour migration

An ever more aggressive anti-migration propaganda war is being waged by the majority of British media, where migration in any form is consistently portrayed on the basis of forming and consolidating a response to a security threat. While tens of thousands of migrant workers are exchanging their sweated labour for meagre wages in the 3-D jobs – dirty, dangerous and degrading – in Britain's food-processing, electronic manufacturing, catering, cleaning and hospitality industries outside any mechanism of labour protection, Britain today is still declining to at least ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their Families in effect since last year. In the post-Morecambe debate on migration and demand for regularizing gangmasters, policing and immigration raids are seen as the quick cure for migrant labour exploitation. The argument sounds as if the only way to get rid of employers' violation of minimum labour rights is to get rid of migrant workers. Britain has forgotten to ask – who are the migrant workers? They are the ones who sweep British roads, clean British supermarkets and serve you food in restaurants in every high street. They are the ones who sew the clothes you wear, put together your microwaves and process the British salads that you have on your dinner table everyday. Migrant workers are people you don't meet everyday but upon whom you depend. To find out about the chain of exploitation in which migrant workers live and the impact of British immigration controls that are fundamental to their lives, I lived undercover among the Chinese workers from whom I learnt a great deal.     

Gendering the union: imperial feminism and the ladies’ land league

The Act of Union of 1800, establishing Westminster control over Irish affairs, had important repercussions for the development of feminism within nineteenth-century Ireland, as well as contributing towards adifferentiation of Irish from British feminism. Feminism within Ireland was shaped by class, religion and racial identification: one strand followed theBritish model of Protestant philanthropy, while the other was concerned with asserting women's right to take part in nationalist political struggle. ‘Imperial’ feminists in Britain and Ireland, concerned with establishing their right to take part in the affairs of the ‘nation’, perceived those Irish who rejected British imperial rule as uncivilised, reserving sympathy for those whose economic position was threatened by the activities of those who campaigned against the landlord system. The period of the Land War of 1879–82 illustrates these conflicting discourses. The subsequent decline of imperial power in Ireland can be traced through a gradual change within Irish feminism from an initial support for the Union to a later embrace of nationalism, as young middle-class women, many from Catholic backgrounds, became involved in the movement     

Permanent precarity: capital and labour in the Central African copperbelt

Abstract

This article provides a new history of mine capital and labour in the ‘Central African Copperbelt’ – the cross-border mining region of the Zambian copperbelt and Haut Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It doing so, it seeks to overcome the limitations of earlier structurally minded analysis rooted in modernist notions regarding the transformative capacity of mining capital and a ‘new’ African working class. Building on post-structuralist challenges to such assumptions, the article demonstrates the precarity, unevenness and uncertainty of the actually existing copperbelt economy and society. The comparison of the two copperbelt regions enables consideration of differential outcomes as a way of rethinking apparent inevitabilities. Analysis of how ideas about these mining societies were generated and circulated helps explain how dominant ways of understanding copperbelt capital and labour relations became established and continue to inform nostalgia for a ‘golden age’ of mining-fuelled prosperity at odds with historical reality.     

Public history and popular memory: issues in the commemoration of the British militant suffrage campaign

Drawing on Raphael Samuel's work on the construction of historical knowledge, this article argues that British militant suffrage feminists had a strong sense of their role in history. Once the vote was won, militants became the first public historians of their own suffrage history by collecting ‘relics’ of the campaign and commemorating suffrage events. The work of curators, especially at the Museum of London and National Library of Australia, Canberra, also enabled wider access to the movement's ephemera. Subsequent generations have ‘remembered’ suffrage in different ways, including depiction in fiction, film, local histories and the physical landscape. An exploration of such depictions might help us start to understand the continuing fascination with this aspect of women's history.     

The domestic ideal and the mobilization of womanpower in world war II

This paper begins with an examination of domestic ideal in Britain at the beginning of World War II. The war saw a great increase in the number of women in the paid workforce, lead to the temporary dispersal of many families, and saw the State taking over some domestic labour, by the establishment of British Restaurants and of nurseries. Thus there was an attack on some elements of the domestic ideal, as women were encouraged to join the workforce and to cut down on housework.However, the domestic ideal was not abandoned during the war years. Rather it structured and influenced the development of labour policies to bring more women into the workforce. The way in which some women were brought into the workforce, and some were allowed to choose to remain out, and the way in which some women were designated as ‘mobile’ and others as ‘immobile’ workers, was very much mediated by domestic ideology. Through the development of and application of the womanpower policies, the state can be seen virtually prescribing what constitutes a ‘home’, and what should be the roles of people within it.The womanpower policies were also mediated by class and have been shown to have had a different impact upon women according to their economic circumstances.     

New Heroines for New Causes: how provincial women promoted a revisionist history through post-suffrage pageants

The selection and promotion of powerful role models was a major source of inspiration during the suffrage movement, with figures such as Joan of Arc invoked as justifying women’s rights. This research shows the tradition continued post-1914, but with a different focus. Well over a hundred amateur pageants of noble women were staged with a changing pantheon reflecting women’s new roles and aspirations. These events were staged by both religious and secular groups throughout Britain, but were most common in the small industrial towns of the Pennines, the South West and North East where Nonconformity was strong. The pageants varied from a couple of dozen performers to 1000, with newspapers frequently praising their elaborate costumes and historical accuracy. Though certain formats and characters appeared regularly, narrative choices often reflected the organisers’ tastes, sometimes introducing local heroines or reclaiming the Bible as a source of inspiration for powerful women.