British Unions Research Articles

The National Union of Journalists and Journalism Education in Interwar Britain

ABSTRACT Are journalists born or made? During the interwar period (1919–1939), the British National Union of Journalists (NUJ) grappled with this question, as the first university course for journalism was founded and more university-educated staff entered newsrooms. This article is the first to consider interwar journalists’ opinions on whether and how British journalists should be educated. Debates on journalism education continued until the 1990s, when university education became the norm for British journalists. This article explores the emergence of this contentious argument. Through the articles published in the pages of the NUJ’s monthly member magazine the Journalist, two strands of the NUJ’s activities on education are explored: the Union’s stance on the University of London Diploma for Journalism and the work of the NUJ’s Education Committee. During the interwar period, the National Union of Journalists developed educational output for its members. Unlike other British trade unions, the NUJ focused on providing its members with education that was directly related to their careers. These activities raised fundamental questions that went to the heart of the profession during a period when journalism’s professional identity in Britain was still evolving.

“A Ceremony of National and Representative Character”: The Four-Nations Politics of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee

AbstractIn June 1887, Britons crowded the streets of London to celebrate Queen Victoria's fiftieth year on the throne. It was an opportunity to publicly revel in the social, political, economic, and imperial progress Britain had made during her historic reign. The Lord Chamberlain was tasked with organizing a formal jubilee ceremony at Westminster Abbey representative of the queen's diverse subjects. But this proved a difficult undertaking for a multinational kingdom with a vast overseas empire. Grievances over seating in Westminster Abbey, jubilee honors, and an absent royal family fostered varying degrees of solidarity and rivalry among the United Kingdom's four constituent nations. The Irish Question and imperial expansion—matters in which Victoria was personally invested—heightened four-nations sensibilities and influenced participation in the festivities. The queen's Golden Jubilee both reflected and inspired four-nations thinking, and it revealed public concerns that the British union might exist as a hierarchy of nations rather than as a collaborative venture among equal members. As the institutional embodiment of tiered society, the Crown became an outlet for subjects to explore questions and modes of belonging within the global British world. A four-nations analysis of Victoria's 1887 jubilee shows that despite its unifying function, the modern British monarchy has struggled to harmonize the United Kingdom's multinational perspectives.

Labour, the Unions and Proportional Representation

AbstractThe Labour Party's support will likely be crucial to any major change of the voting system in the UK. While Labour has supported first past the post for most of its existence, a resolution was passed at the 2022 party conference calling for Labour to include in its manifesto a commitment to change the voting system to proportional representation after the next election. This resulted from an effective campaign by activists to change the party's policy on electoral reform. The position of the trade unions, often perceived to be conservative on constitutional issues, was particularly important. This article focusses on the campaign to change the opinion of the British trade union movement. It outlines the British trade union movement's historic reservations about electoral reform and then analyses the grassroots effort behind this movement, focussing on the organisation of Make Votes Matter, Labour for a New Democracy, and Politics for the Many. The article concludes by offering insights into the potential long‐term consequences of this campaign and its potential impact on the ideological direction of the Labour Party.

Legal Boundaries, Organizational Fields, and Trade Union Politics: The Development of Railway Unions in the US and the UK

AbstractThroughout the nineteenth century, powerful railway unions in the USA and the UK cultivated an expansive system of voluntary sickness, death, unemployment, and superannuation benefits. By the early twentieth century, the movements had diverged: while the British Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants relinquished its commitment to voluntarism in favor of state healthcare and pensions, the American Railway Brotherhoods persisted along voluntarist lines, resisting social insurance in favor of exclusive schemes for their white male membership. What accounts for these diverging orientations? I highlight the importance of organizational forms as a lens for understanding comparative trade union strategy, emphasizing the role of law in designating legitimate forms of working-class association. I demonstrate that governing elites in both countries promoted voluntarism as a benign form of working-class organization throughout much of the nineteenth century. Consequently, I argue, early American and British trade unions adopted benefits in part because they enabled them to mimic the far more respected and legitimate friendly and fraternal mutual benefit societies. Toward the end of the century, the context had changed: while alternative organizational avenues were opened for trade unions in the UK, benefits presented an ongoing organizational lifeline for American unions. In defining and redefining the boundaries of legitimate forms of workers’ associations, legal decisions in both countries shaped not only trade union organizing strategies in the short run but also their positioning in broader social struggles.

Migrants, transcultural memory and World War I commemoration in post-conflict Northern Ireland

This article explores a community memory project on World War I led by first-generation migrants living in Northern Ireland. As a location recovering from 30 years of political violence, debates on commemoration are frequently reduced to the bi-partisan lens of Irish nationalism or British unionism. World War I is one episode often interpreted through this exclusivist framework. Recent immigration, however, raises questions as to how those who are neither nationalist nor unionist can partake in public memory debates. Drawing on the project’s experiences, I argue that incorporating migrants’ worldviews on the past can elucidate important transcultural analysis and positively aid in reframing simplistic ethno-national interpretations. Transcultural methods can illuminate cross-cultural themes and explicate differences and similarities across multiple groups rather than just two historically divided communities. Thus, transcultural approaches offer a novel means of generating holistic dialogue on memory which has transformative potential for a society transitioning from conflict to peace.

How British was Larkinism? Big Jim Larkin and the British Labour Movement, 1907–1914

Born in Liverpool in 1874, Big Jim Larkin always insisted that he was Irish. No historian has ever challenged him on the claim, or seen him as anything other than a uniquely Irish figure. And yet there was a British dimension to Larkin’s outlook. Liverpool gave him a love of soccer and travel, and shaped his interest in socialism and literature. He first went to Ireland in 1907 as an agent of a British trade union and remained keenly engaged with British Labour up to his departure for America in 1914. During the Dublin lockout in 1913, Larkin demanded aid from British workers with a sense of entitlement that no other Irish Labour leader would have entertained. His ‘Fiery Cross’ campaign made the lockout a part of British labour history. Larkinism too should be lifted out of a purely Irish context. It was not only a subset of the ‘Great Labour Unrest’ that shook British industrial relations between 1911 and 1914, but a reflex of international trends in industrial conflict and growing support for syndicalism between 1890 and 1914. Larkin was a changed man after the lockout and never again had the same level of engagement with British trade unionism.

Resilience of cooperatives during global pandemics – Short-term effects of Covid-19 on lending behaviour of British credit unions

Cooperative financial institutions are believed to be less vulnerable to business and economic fluctuations linked to recessions and crises. This paper examines the short-term effects of Covid-19 on the British credit union sector drawing on survey data for 58 credit unions and follow-up interviews with 21 credit union managers. Loan demand, and the volume and value of loans were significantly lower in March and April 2020 after the introduction of government restrictions than in March and April 2019. Bad debt provisioning was also significantly higher in April 2020 than in April 2019. There was no significant difference for loan interest income between April 2019 and April 2020. The findings suggest that credit unions were affected by the pandemic in the same way as other financial institutions. For the majority of the credit unions, the decline in lending may be explained by a drop in consumer demand rather than restrictions put on the supply of credit. It is too early to conclude if the adverse economic conditions caused by Covid-19 will negatively affect the sustainability and ability of the sector to generate surpluses or if the cooperative model will shield the sector from resulting economic fluctuations, as suggested by the literature.

Confluent trust, accountability, procedural justice, British credit unions and regulatory reform after the global financial crisis

PurposeThe relationship between trust, accountability and procedural justice is studied via research into British credit unions (CUs) following regulatory reform to remedy problems exposed by the 2007–2008 global financial crisis.Design/methodology/approachInterviews at 13 case studies of different types and sizes of credit unions in Glasgow, Scotland, are examined using template analysis and abductive theorizing to understand the effects of disproportionate reforms on small credit unions.FindingsSmaller credit unions found three regulatory changes – namely dual regulators, increased minimum reserves and introduction of the Senior Managers and Certification Regime – excessive. Excessive change generated distrust in regulators. Regulators' insufficient attention to procedural justice contributed to this distrust.Originality/valueLinkage of multidimensional confluent trust to a multilevel system of accountability provides an original way of understanding how indiscriminate attempts at trust repair damage some elements of trust in formal regulatory systems. Recognition of the need for procedural justice to enable smaller credit unions to articulate their extant checks and potential exemption from formal regulations provides another valuable contribution. The explanation of the abductive logic employed is also original.

Organizing women. Gender equality policies in French and British Trade Unions by CécileGuillaume. Bristol University Press, 2021, 212 pp., ISBN: 978–1529213690, Price GBP 80.00, h/b

Organizing women. Gender equality policies in French and British Trade Unions by CécileGuillaume. Bristol University Press, 2021, 212 pp., ISBN: 978–1529213690, Price GBP 80.00, h/b

Социально-экономические проблемы современной Великобритании и антироссийская политика её правительства

The article examines the socio-economic problems of contemporary Britain after leaving European Union, that had a negative impact on the British economy. Attempts to ensure economic growth and prosperity have not given results. The coronavirus pandemic and the present energy crisis have been superimposed on the economic downturn that has begun in the country. The Conservative government was not ready for this, and the socio-economic consequences of the recession hurt the well-being of ordinary Britons. The author draws attention to the rise of prices for energy, food, housing, utilities. The situation was aggravated by the UK's accession to anti-Russian sanctions after the start of the special military operation in Ukraine. The author comes to the conclusion that the anti-Russian orientation in the activities of the British government was not random, what is confirmed by official documents. It is shown that as the socio-economic problems deepened, citizens' dissatisfaction with the falling standard of living increased. However, the conservatives attributed their failures to the Russian factor and the need for large-scale assistance to the Nazi regime in Ukraine. The article examines various forms of social protest – from the creation of the Don't Pay UK movement to numerous strikes and demonstrations organized by British trade unions.

British trade unionism in the 1980s reassessed. are recurring assumptions about union membership and strikes flawed?

ABSTRACT This article questions the hypothesis, put forward by several historians and IR academics, that the 1980s decline in British union membership and strike frequency, was driven by major industrial defeats, a cultural shift away from collectivism, and the adverse effects of the Conservative Government’s anti-union legislation. In contrast, this paper argues that international economic developments, most notably the globalisation of manufacturing production, along with the British Conservative Government’s economic policies, which resulted in mass unemployment in heavily unionised areas of the economy, were the principal reasons for the declines in union membership and strike frequency during the 1980s. In support of this theory, my article draws upon extensive contemporaneous research, which I conducted when I worked in the Industrial Relations Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the late 1980s. This research illustrates how strike frequency and union membership fell in the early and mid-1980s, before membership stabilized, and the frequency of strikes relative to the number of unionised workplaces increased, during the short-lived economic upturn of the late 1980s.

Knowing the Maghreb in Stuart Scotland, Ireland and Northern England

AbstractTunis, 1612: Scotsman William Lithgow visits notorious English‐born corsair Murat Rais at his sumptuous palace. Baltimore, 1631: Corsairs from Algiers and Salé carry away over 100 villagers. Tangier, 1680: 400 soldiers arrive from Ireland in the nick of time to a colony under Moroccan siege. London, 1682: Moroccan ambassador Mohammed ben Hadou entertains dignitaries from as far afield as York. Algiers, 1709: The Isabella of Kirkcaldy is captured at sea, triggering a year‐long diplomatic dispute around the complexities of British union. Throughout the Stuart era, Scottish, Irish, and northern English merchants, sailors, soldiers, captives, and travellers encountered the Maghreb in as varied ways as their southern English counterparts, yet accounts of relations between ‘Britain’ and the Maghreb usually become mainly accounts of the south. By the late seventeenth century, not only did many individuals from Scotland, Ireland, and the North encounter the Maghreb in person, but extensive news networks, both mediated through and independent of London, brought robust, detailed, and up‐to‐date intelligence on events, movements, and demographics in the Maghreb, and educated readers accessed longer accounts from numerous sources. This paper, focusing particularly on locally printed news and publications from Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Newcastle, examines for the first time in detail the Maghreb's reputation in Stuart Scottish, Irish, and northern English urban thought. Using quantitative and qualitative methods in comparison to London‐based equivalents, I argue that these regions developed their own idiosyncratic impressions of this distant and dangerous land, confronting the disjunct between new diplomatic realities and ancestral prejudices as they moved rapidly towards the assurance of British naval power and imperial authority.

Working-Class Women and the Progressive Era Development of Public Administration: The Case of Margaret Bondfield

Using a case study of British trade union organizer Margaret Bondfield, this article begins the task of adding a working class perspective to accounts of women’s participation in Progressive era urban reform and expansion of public policy while also showing how international networks of support among trade union women undergirded American reform efforts. The narrative expands the consideration of intersectionality and positionality in analyzing women’s role in developing public administration.

Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher (eds), The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution

This book is one of a small number of volumes in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series that is dedicated to a theme or a historical event (broadly understood) rather than a single text or author. It squeezes a Special Subject into one set of soft covers by making available extracts from thirty-one texts, most of which will be familiar to specialist readers. Extracts from book-length studies, notably The Framework of Home Rule (1911) by Erskine Childers, are joined by more occasional pieces, including short essays, speeches, and journalism that testify to the centrality of the popular press and public demonstrations to early twentieth-century Irish politics. Iconic political texts, since given the status of books, were often first read in serial form. Among those included by key nationalist thinkers and leaders are extracts by John Redmond, the leader of the Home Rule Party, Eoin MacNeill, the civic republican and joint progenitor of the Irish Volunteers, and Patrick Pearse, the revolutionary separatist. Most conspicuous are seven extracts from the corpus of the socialist republican James Connolly, a bounty that runs the danger of diminishing returns, though, of all the texts assembled here, they are probably the most influential today. Wherever Green is Red, as Mick Lynch recently reminded us, there is Connolly. The diet might have been varied with selections from P. S. O’Hegarty and Aodh de Blácam, who both wrote about post-1916 nationalism and are subject to excellent recent analyses by, respectively, Frances Flanagan and Sean Donnelly. British and Irish Unionism is represented by extracts from the writings of Leo Amery, Edward Carson, Ronald McNeill and, most importantly, A.V. Dicey. Of the seventeen authors included, four are women, all nationalists, including the historian Alice Stopford Green and the socialist republicans Constance Markievicz (née Gore-Booth), Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, and Louie Bennett. All are supported by good biographical summaries. The absence of language and/or cultural nationalists, the subject of much historical work, is striking. No W. B. Yeats. Given that the History of Political Thought is a relatively new field in Irish history, it would have been helpful if the introduction had explained these choices.

Activists in international courts: Backlash, funding, and strategy in international legal mobilization

Activists in international courts: Backlash, funding, and strategy in international legal mobilization

What makes an international institution work for labor activists? Shaping international law through strategic litigation

AbstractStudies on international legal mobilization often analyze the mobilization efforts of activists at a single international court. Yet we know little about how activists choose among multiple international institutions to advance social justice claims. Drawing on comparative case studies of Turkish and British trade union activists' legal mobilization efforts and case law analysis, I show that activists, guided by their lawyers, probe multiple avenues to identify the legal institution with the highest judicial authority and is most responsive to activists' claims. Once they identify their target institution, the iterative process between a responsive court and activists' strategic litigation can build a court's jurisprudence in a new issue area, even if the court provides limited de jure rights protections. Activists primarily use international litigation strategy to leverage structural reforms at the domestic level and to set new international norms through precedents.

From monopoly to voice effects? British workplace unionism and productivity performance into the new millennium

AbstractBritain has featured prominently in debates about unionism and productivity. This article suggests a recent revolution in the productivity effect of British unionism. A thorough review of extant evidence at various levels of aggregation indicates that whatever the broader cost to employee welfare and well‐being, the hollowing and erosion of workplace unionism under Thatcherism delivered a one‐off productivity dividend. However, by the turn of the millennium, extant Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) analysis shows that workplace unionism, where it remained, was no longer robustly linked to poorer productivity performance. Our private sector analysis of WERS2011 confirms this, while our analysis of the WERS2004–2011 panel indicates that stronger workplace unionism now positively promotes private sector productivity. A thorough contemplation of the shifting concomitants of modern British unionism suggests a variety of processes which may underlie our striking panel findings, underscoring the suggestion that there has been a revolution in British unionism's productivity implications, but also indicating mechanisms which may underlie positive productivity effects of joint regulation already apparent in other countries.

The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill K D Ewing (bio) and Lord John Hendy KC (bio) The British government has launched yet another attack on British trade unions. At the time of writing, the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill is currently making its way through Parliament. The Bill will impose, for the first time, minimum service levels ("MSLs"), to be observed in strikes in six sectors of the economy: health services, fire and rescue services, education services, transport services, nuclear decommissioning, and border security. Introduced in response to high levels of industrial action by public service workers in particular, the Bill has been widely condemned. In this article we address three aspects of the Bill which attracted adverse criticism: its form, its content, and its incompatibility with human rights obligations of the British government. But before addressing these questions, it is to be emphasised that the Bill is not to be seen in isolation, but in the context of a wider attack on workers' rights and political freedoms. As put succinctly by a senior Labour MP: the Bill is part of a longer term, anti-democratic trend, and part of a raft of anti-democratic legislation passed by the Government. It is a trend of transferring power away from workers and citizens, and eliminating their limited rights and freedoms in the workplace and across society Constitutional Objections A remarkably short measure of a page and a half plus one appendix of four pages, the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill replaces the now redundant Transport (Minimum Service Levels) Bill (introduced only months ago) which in contrast ran to 19 pages, despite applying to a single sector. Yet the new Bill extends to five additional sectors. The reason why the current Bill is so short is because it proposes to delegate to ministers the power to set out all the relevant law in regulations. It is true that regulations have to be approved by Parliament in the normal way. But Parliament is not permitted to amend draft regulations, which receive only the most minimal scrutiny. So it is government – not Parliament – which will make regulations "to determine the levels of service in relation to strikes as respects minimum services" in each of the various sectors. Furthermore, it is government, not Parliament, which sets by regulation the boundaries of what is included in each of the very broad sectors. There is no guidance in this skeleton Bill about how ministers are to use these extraordinary powers. The sectors are open-ended, as is the power to set the minimum level of service required. Is it 20 percent normal services? Or 50 percent? Or 90 percent? This is for ministers alone to determine. It is obvious that by reserving the sole authority to ministers to set the MSLs, they can be set at such a high level that any strike will be rendered largely ineffectual. It is a point well made by many trade unionists that whilst the government proposes to impose MSLs on workers and their unions, MSLs for normal times in public services are usually lacking and where they do exist (on the railways and for the ambulance service), are constantly breached – without penalty. There is a real possibility that MSLs will be set in some sectors at a level higher than the service usually provided. Extraordinarily, the Bill also proposes that ministers should have the power (by regulation) to "amend, repeal or revoke provision made by or under primary legislation". So primary legislation passed by Parliament can be amended by secondary legislation drafted by the minister without full Parliamentary scrutiny. This is what lawyers call a "Henry VIII" power, a power which usurps the function of Parliament. The use of skeleton Bills with Henry VIII clauses has been unsurprisingly the subject of excoriating criticism by two important committees of the House of Lords in recent reports, the titles of which speak for themselves: Democracy Denied and Government by Diktat. But it gets worse. The primary legislation which ministers can amend or repeal is defined to include an Act of the Senedd in Wales or the Scottish Parliament. Pause there. What is being proposed is that ministers in the United Kingdom government...

“Unity is strength?”: Representing unions at the British national coal museums

Coal mining was central to the disputes between the British government and unions in the 1980s; a heritage recalled today in the national coal mining museums of Great Britain. Unions were long a social bedrock for British mining communities. After the National Union of Mine Workers’ strike contributed to an election loss for the Conservative Party in the 1970s, it was a prime target of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's anti-union efforts in the following decade. The 1984–1985 Strike was a pivotal moment for British unionism, with violent clashes between strikers and police transfixing the country. The end of the once dominant coal industry in Britain is inextricably linked with the 1984–1985 strike and wider union conflict. This paper explores representation of unions and related issues at the Big Pit National Coal Museum in Wales, National Coal Mining Museum for England, and the National Mining Museum Scotland. It analyzes the discursive themes about unions revealed in interpretive material, reflecting on the reasons for similarities and differences between the museums. Visitor reactions to the museums are investigated using user-generated content on TripAdvisor. The implications of a significant disconnect between the prominence of union heritage in museum narratives and audience engagement are considered.

The World in Blocs: Leo Amery, the British Empire and Regionalist Anti-internationalism, 1903–1947

AbstractA new liberal international order was born in 1918. Many rejected this regime embodied by the League of Nations and attempts to restore free trade. Among the critics were a host of European ‘regionalists’ who envisioned a world organized into federal super-states. They feared that geopolitical hegemony would soon belong to territorially contiguous super-states, such as the US and the Soviet Union. If the historiography has focused on the varieties of interwar internationalism, it has underplayed the extent of this regionalist challenge. This paper proposes to take seriously the dialectic between internationalist and regionalist visions of world order by charting the half-century political career of British imperialist and statesman Leopold Amery: from his lifelong campaign for British imperial economic union organized around preferential tariffs, through to his fervent critique of both the League and post-1945 American internationalism. Amery’s exploits demonstrate that one of the most significant revolts against the liberal international order originated not only from the revisionist powers—the USSR, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan—but also from the supposed heartland of liberal internationalism itself: the British Empire.