Variations in Union Political Activity in the United States, Britain, and Germany from the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Our comparative understanding of working-class political activity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is highly skewed to comparison at the national level. Variations in the mass support, strategies, and political orientation of working-class political parties across societies have been explained in terms of equally macro variables, including the timing and character of industrialization, social structure, the openness of the political system, and the duration and intensity of state repression of working-class economic and political rights. But in so far as we widen our view of working-class political activity beyond the political party to include trade unions, a complementary set of questions having to do with variations within, as well as between, societies come sharply into view. In all western societies, unions have formed national organizations that mediate their interests directly in national politics. Thus the AFL-CIO, the British Trades Union Congress, and the West German Union Federation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) represent contemporary unions on broad questions of national policy. But such federations are only one channel of union political activity. In each of these countries, as in other western societies, individual unions themselves pursue policies on a variety of political issues from worker participation and industrial relations legislation to questions of incomes policy, unemployment, and industrial policy. To the extent that we restrict our view of union political activity to union federations, we ignore a vital and fascinating source of diversity, that among individual unions themselves. This concern is all the more important because union federations have rarely been able to compromise the self-determination of their individual union constituents. The American Federation of Labor and the Trades Union Congress were successful precisely because they offered unions the opportunity to join with others to pursue limited but common goals in a way that left their autonomy substantially intact. The first national association of socialist unions in Germany, the Generalkommission, was weakly centralized and had to tread warily in order to avoid committing constituent unions to policies that some of them opposed. In this respect, unions are very different from political parties. Political parties aggregate support, contest elections, and strive for governmental power, and this has led them to create broad-based, usually national, organizations. Their organizational structure is determined largely by the structure of the political system in which they operate. Union organization, in contrast, reflects the structure of labor markets, because it is the labor market that defines the potential membership of a union and provides it with the most direct channel to improve its members' welfare and job control. The existence of numerous segmented labor markets has fostered an extraordinary degree of diversity and sectionalism within union movements.