The General Workers Unions

Skilled workers defended themselves effectively after 1848, and enjoyed a steadily increasing standard of living thanks to the ‘new model unions’ they built, all of them organised at a national level, with full-time officials and control over their trade exercised by means of strict union discipline and a mo- nopoly of skilled labour. The Trade Union Act of 1871 and the Criminal Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act of 1875 made it legal for workers to organize trade unions. The Electoral Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 had broadened the franchise, but lower- paid men and all women were denied the vote until 1918, and women under 30 did not get the vote until 1928. The progress of the industrial economy coupled with the expansion of the British Empire allowed the British middle class to accumulate vast wealth, out of which it was able to satisfy the demands of the organised skilled workers, but this left behind a mass of absolutely impoverished unskilled workers. In 1883, Frederick Taylor had carried out his first exercise in “scientific management” at Bethlehem Steel. Taylor redefined what could be meant by “productive labour.” Taylor taught that about 25% of employees in large-scale industry ought to be engaged in the science of work: observing, measuring, supervising and directing the work of others. Taylor turned on its head the idea universally held by capitalists at the time that only those who actually work with their hands could be counted as productive workers, and profitabil- ity depended on working them as hard and as long as possible, paying them as little as possible, and having the minimum of overheads. Taylor enumer- ated seventeen different roles in a manufacturing workshop that were formerly performed by a single gang-boss or the ‘productive’ workers themselves. He proposed that a specific department be established for each of these functions, employing one or a number of functional bosses. Most of these new positions were filled by promotion from the shop-floor, and participation in the new form of management brought wage increases of at least 30%, provided you did not belong to a union. Pay increases were financed by productivity levels up to ten times what they had been previously. The pay of every worker would be set individually according to their level of productivity and responsibility. The result of this revolution in real political economy was fragmentation of the working class into numerous, relatively distinct strata, and these new strata to a greater or lesser extent shared their boss’s social standpoint. Taking a social position between the workers and the bosses brought with it a share of the surplus value extracted from the labour process. Together with the skilled

The General Workers Unions 107 workers organised in craft unions, and the workers engaged in retail or home- based shops, the professional and supervisory classes blunted the sharp divi- sion of society between propertyless workers and property-owning exploiters, and the professional and small-business petit-bourgeoisie, far from disappear- ing as some had supposed, actually grew. The binary world of the Chartist years was gone forever. But there remained a growing mass of absolutely impoverished workers whose conditions of work had hitherto made it impossible for them to organ- ise and gain control of their work. In the late 1880s this situation exploded in a series of great strikes which brought an entirely new section of workers into the trade union movement. These were the personifications of what Marx had called ‘abstract labour’ and in organising themselves in new General Unions, they restored the majoritarian principle to the place it had enjoyed in the Chartist days, albeit among a more limited section of the population at the very bottom of the heap. In June 1888, the Matchgirls working in the Quaker-owned Bryant & May factory in Bow went on strike against cruel conditions which exposed them to poisonous white phosphorus and a system of fines for trivial ‘offences’ which reduced their wages to starvation level and created unbearable pressure of work. They formed their own union with their own leadership and won very considerable concessions. On 27 July 1888, the inaugural meeting of the Union of Women Match Makers was held, and by October, 666 members had been enrolled. By the end of the year, the union changed its name, and became the Matchmakers Union, open to men and women. This set off a series of big strikes which brought all low-paid, unskilled workers into General Unions over the next decade or so. Next was the Beckton Gas Workers just down the road from Bryant & May, when workers were laid off in March 1889. Gas workers from all over London held a protest meeting on Sunday, 31st March. One of the speakers at the meeting, an illiterate gas worker from Birmingham, Will Thorne, suggested that the gas workers form their own union, saying: “I pledge my word that, if you will stand firm and don’t waver, within six months we will claim and win the eight- hour day, a six-day week and the abolition of the present slave-driving meth- ods in vogue not only at the Beckton Gas Works, but all over the country.” Will Thorne, Ben Tillett and William Byford formed a three-man committee and that morning recruited over 800 members to what became known as the National Union of Gasworkers & General Labourers. Elections were held and Thorne defeated Tillett for the post of General Secretary. Thorne argued that “the eight-hour day would not just mean a reduction of four hours a day for the workers then employed, but that a large number of unemployed would be