The trade union movement

For most of British history, a working man or woman bargaining alone with an employer had little power. The history of the trade union movement is the story of how working people learned to combine — to face employers and governments collectively rather than singly — and of the long, often bitter struggle to make that combination legal, respectable and effective. It runs from six Dorset labourers transported for swearing an oath, through the founding of the Labour Party, to the great miners’ strike of the 1980s.

From illegality to the Tolpuddle Martyrs

Early attempts to organise faced the full weight of the law. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made it a crime for workers to combine to bargain over wages or conditions, effectively outlawing unions. Even after their repeal in 1824-25, organising remained dangerous. The most famous early case is that of the Tolpuddle Martyrs: in 1834 six farm labourers in the Dorset village of Tolpuddle formed a friendly society to resist cuts to their already meagre wages. Unable to convict them for unionising as such, the authorities used an obscure law against swearing secret oaths and sentenced them to transportation to Australia. A huge public campaign won their pardon, and the Tolpuddle men became an enduring symbol of the right to organise.

Respectability and recognition

By the mid-nineteenth century a more stable form of unionism emerged among skilled craftsmen. The New Model Unions, such as the Amalgamated Society of Engineers founded in 1851, charged high subscriptions, offered friendly-society benefits like sickness and unemployment pay, and cultivated a moderate, respectable image. This approach helped win legal security, and in 1868 the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was founded as a national federation to coordinate and represent the movement.

The character of unionism widened dramatically in the late 1880s with New Unionism, a wave of organisation among less-skilled workers. The 1888 strike by the match girls at Bryant and May and the 1889 London Dock Strike drew unskilled and semi-skilled workers into unions for the first time, giving the movement a more militant, mass character and far greater numbers.

Founding the Labour Party

Unions soon concluded that defending workers required a voice in Parliament, not just at the factory gate. In 1900 the TUC and socialist societies set up the Labour Representation Committee, which in 1906 became the Labour Party. The unions supplied much of the new party’s membership, money and organisation, and remain formally affiliated to it today — one of the most consequential developments in modern British politics.

Two court cases sharpened the unions’ political turn. The Taff Vale judgment of 1901 made unions financially liable for losses caused by strikes, threatening their very ability to act; it was reversed by the Trade Disputes Act of 1906. The Osborne judgment of 1909 restricted unions from funding political activity, until the Trade Union Act of 1913 again allowed it under rules. Both episodes pushed unions toward securing friendly legislation through Labour.

The General Strike and the postwar peak

The movement’s confidence met a hard check in the 1926 General Strike. When coal miners faced wage cuts and longer hours, the TUC called millions of workers out in solidarity. For nine days in May 1926 much of the country stopped, but the TUC, fearing the consequences, called the strike off without winning the miners’ demands. The miners held out longer before being forced back on worse terms. It was a sobering defeat.

The movement’s high-water mark came in the decades after 1945. In the postwar consensus era, unions were powerful institutions, consulted by governments of both main parties and closely involved in managing the economy. But by the 1970s a rising tide of strikes — culminating in the “Winter of Discontent” of 1978-79, when widespread stoppages disrupted public services — convinced many voters that union power had grown excessive and unaccountable. This perception helped bring Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives to power in 1979.

The miners’ strike and after

The decisive confrontation came in the 1984-85 miners’ strike. When the National Coal Board announced pit closures, the National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthur Scargill, called a strike to defend jobs and communities. Thatcher’s government, having prepared coal stocks in advance, was determined not to back down. The dispute lasted a year and was marked by mass picketing, violent clashes such as the confrontation at Orgreave, and deep hardship and division within mining communities. The strike ended in 1985 in defeat for the miners.

Alongside this, the 1980s brought a series of Employment and Trade Union Acts that required secret ballots before strikes, restricted secondary action and mass picketing, and abolished the closed shop. Supporters argued these reforms restored balance and protected ordinary members and the wider economy; critics argued they tilted the law against workers and weakened a vital counterweight to employers. Combined with the defeat of the miners and the long decline of heavy industry, the result was a steep fall in union membership and influence from which the movement has never fully recovered. Yet unions remain a significant force in British working life, and the rights they fought to establish — to organise, to bargain collectively and to strike — are now woven into the fabric of the country.