United We Stand

Abstract

MOST previous discussions of the history of British trade unions, as Alastair Reid says in his opening sentence, ‘have portrayed a unitary figure of “the working class” in either a heroic or a sinister light’. Reid offers instead an approach based on the ‘alternative idea of “working people” who were an integral part of the society in which they lived’. This appears to be admirable; but on closer reading some difficulties arise. First, it is surprising to read that previous work worth taking seriously portrayed a unitary figure of the working class. Disregard Communist and fellow-travelling heroics (and save yourself a lot of reading). Serious histories of working-class politics have always queried how unitary, or otherwise, the British working class was. E.P. Thompson argued unconvincingly that something called ‘the English working class’ was ‘made’ by, at the latest, 1834. It would have been made sooner and more firmly, but for the ‘ritualised form of psychic masturbation’ (The Making of the English Working Class, p. 368) which is Thompson's description of Methodism. Less vivid but more credible historiography is kinder to Methodism and respects the plurality of the working classes into the twentieth century and even the present day. The Webbs; the Coles; Clegg, Fox, and Thompson; and indeed Reid himself in his important contribution to the debate on the redness of Clydeside during World War I: all see the history of Britain's Trade Unions as at best a dubiously united stand. Fundamentally, the interests of a trade union are the interests of those who voluntarily pay membership fees, unless hijacked by somebody else. The interests of (the Amalgamated Society of) Locomotive Engineers and Firemen overlap with, but are not identical to, those of other Rail, Maritime and Transport workers. These divisions survive in the names of twenty-first-century trade unions, even though there are no longer many locomotive firemen in ASLEF. Indeed, Reid immediately, and rightly, qualifies his opening generalisation by reasserting the traditional three groups of craft, industry (Reid = ‘seniority’) and general unskilled (Reid = ‘federal’) unionism, distinguished by different amounts of labour-market power and hence different strategy and tactics. If ‘the working class’ is a straw man whose stuffing has been knocked out by a century of careful historiography, what about Reid's alternative, ‘working people’? The problem is that a history of working people would be a history of everybody except the retired, the unemployed, homemakers, rentiers, and perhaps capitalists. That is not the set of people of whom Reid writes. He goes outside the set to write about the unemployed, and excludes the subset of working people who did not join unions. Maybe the best description of his subject set is ‘people in those social classes who, if male, in 1912 wore flat caps or bowlers, but no ties’, as depicted in the evocative cover picture.