Trade union

• 1. Introduction

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  A trade union is an organization of workers, and in 1786 a group of Philadelphia printers staged what is recorded as the first labour strike in the United States. They opposed a wage reduction and demanded six dollars per week. That single act captures the heart of what a union is and does. It gathers workers together so they can maintain or improve the conditions of their employment. The aims are practical. Better wages and benefits. Safer working conditions. Complaint procedures. Rules on promotions and just-cause conditions for termination. Above all, greater bargaining power for the people who do the work. But how did such organizations come to exist, and why are they strongest in some countries and barely present in others? Why do governments across centuries swing between banning unions and protecting them by law? And what difference does a union actually make to wages, to inequality, even to how long workers live? These are the questions this documentary will follow, from the burial societies of the Roman army to a confederation of 166 million members today.

• 2. Ancient Collegia

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  A collegium was any association in ancient Rome that acted as a legal entity. Under the Lex Julia, passed during the reign of Julius Caesar between 49 and 44 BC and reaffirmed under Caesar Augustus, collegia needed the approval of the Roman Senate or the emperor to be recognized as legal bodies. Ruins at Lambaesis date the formation of burial societies among Roman Army soldiers and Roman Navy mariners to 198 AD, during the reign of Septimius Severus. In September 2011, archaeologists working at Portus, the artificial harbor in Rome, found inscriptions in a shipyard built under Trajan that pointed to a shipbuilders guild. Rome's La Ostia port held a guildhall for a corpus naviculariorum, a collegium of merchant mariners. The collegium was not only a workers' institution. It also covered fraternities of Roman priests who oversaw ritual sacrifices, practised augury, kept scriptures, arranged festivals, and maintained particular religious cults. These threads, mutual benefit and shared trade, would reappear centuries later in the guilds of medieval Europe.

• 3. Wage Slavery And A New Class

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  Britain ended the practice of serfdom in 1574, yet most people remained tenant-farmers on estates owned by the landed aristocracy. The origins of modern trade unions trace back to 18th-century Britain, where the Industrial Revolution pulled masses of people, including dependents, peasants and immigrants, into the cities. A farmer worked the land, raised animals, grew crops, and either owned that land or paid rent. He sold a product and held control over his life and work. The industrial worker sold something different. He sold his labour and took directions from an employer, surrendering part of his freedom and self-agency in the service of a master. Critics of this new arrangement called it wage slavery, but the word that endured was employment. Workers often had less control over their jobs, with no job security and no promise of an ongoing relationship with their employers. They had little say over the work they did or how it affected their health and their lives. It was in this setting that modern trade unions emerged, a near-century before Marx published the Communist Manifesto in 1848.

• 4. Banned, Then Allowed

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  Trade unions and collective bargaining were outlawed from no later than the middle of the 14th century, when the Ordinance of Labourers was enacted in the Kingdom of England. At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, the government feared popular unrest. In 1799, the Combination Act banned trade unions and collective bargaining by British workers. Repression remained severe until 1824, yet unions were already widespread in cities such as London. Workplace militancy showed itself as Luddism and in struggles such as the 1820 Rising in Scotland, when 60,000 workers went on a general strike that was soon crushed. Sympathy for the workers brought repeal of the acts in 1824, though the Combination Act 1825 restricted union activity to bargaining over wages and working hours. In the United States, unions and unionists were regularly prosecuted under restraint of trade and conspiracy laws, including the Sherman Antitrust Act. British trade unions were finally legalized in 1872, after a Royal Commission on Trade Unions in 1867 agreed that the organizations served the advantage of both employers and employees.

• 5. Building The Federations

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  By the 1810s, the first labour organizations to bring together workers of divergent occupations were forming. Possibly the first such union was the General Union of Trades, also called the Philanthropic Society, founded in 1818 in Manchester. The second name was a disguise, hiding the group's real purpose at a time when unions were still illegal. In 1830, John Doherty established the National Association for the Protection of Labour. It quickly enrolled around 150 unions, mostly in textiles but also among mechanics and blacksmiths, with membership rising to between 10,000 and 20,000 across five counties. To build awareness, it launched a weekly publication, the Voice of the People. In 1834, the Welsh socialist Robert Owen established the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, which played a part in protests after the Tolpuddle Martyrs' case before collapsing. More lasting unions arrived from the 1850s. The London Trades Council was founded in 1860, and the Sheffield Outrages spurred the Trades Union Congress in 1868, the first long-lived national trade union center. Growth followed elsewhere. The Knights of Labor began in the United States in 1869, the American Federation of Labor took its name in 1886, and France saw the Waldeck Rousseau laws of 1884 finally make labour organisation legal.

• 6. Many Shapes Of A Union

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  Unions may organize a particular section of skilled workers, an approach called craft unionism, or a cross-section of workers from various trades, called general unionism, or all workers within a single industry, called industrial unionism. These are often divided into locals and united in national federations, which in turn affiliate with Internationals such as the International Trade Union Confederation. Japan works differently, built around enterprise unions specific to a plant or company, which then join industry-wide federations under Rengo, the national confederation. The way a union operates also varies. The service model focuses on maintaining worker rights, providing services, and resolving disputes. The organizing model relies on full-time organizers who build confidence, networks, and leaders within the workforce, then run confrontational campaigns with large numbers of members. When bargaining breaks down, the result may be strike action, a management lockout, or binding arbitration, and in extreme cases violent or illegal activity. Informal workers face their own barriers, since formal unions recognized by the state and employers often cannot accommodate the categories common in the informal economy, a major threshold to organizing in low-income countries.

• 7. Closed, Union, And Open Shops

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  A closed shop in US terms, or a pre-entry closed shop in the UK, employs only people who are already union members, with the compulsory hiring hall as one example. A union shop hires non-union workers but sets a time limit within which they must join. An agency shop requires non-union workers to pay a fee for the union's bargaining services, sometimes called the Rand formula. An open shop requires no union membership at all, and in the United States, state-level right-to-work laws mandate the open shop in some states. Germany permits only open shops, forbidding all discrimination based on union membership. The legal tide has turned against compulsion. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 outlawed the closed shop in the United States. In the UK, laws introduced during the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher's government restricted closed and union shops, and all agreements requiring a worker to join a union are now illegal. In 2006, the European Court of Human Rights found Danish closed-shop agreements to breach Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, noting that Denmark and Iceland were among the few states that still permitted them.

• 8. What Unions Change

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  Union density has been declining, from an OECD average of 35.9% in 1998 to 27.9% in 2018, driven by a decline in manufacturing, increased globalization, and governmental policies. The numbers vary enormously by country. In 2018, Iceland recorded 91.8% and Denmark 66.5%, while the United States sat at 10.1% and France at 8.8%. Density is highest in the Nordic countries. The academic literature shows substantial evidence that trade unions reduce economic inequality. The economist Joseph Stiglitz argued that strong unions have helped reduce inequality, while weaker unions made it easier for CEOs to increase it. Research from Norway found that high unionization rates lead to substantial gains in firm productivity and in workers' wages, with Belgium showing smaller productivity gains. Other research in the United States found that unions can harm profitability, employment and business growth, and UK research found that union density improved many metrics only up to an optimal point, forming a U-shaped curve. The effects reach beyond pay. In the United States, higher union density has been associated with lower suicide and overdose deaths, and decreased unionization has been linked to a rise in occupational fatalities. Today the largest federation in the world is the Brussels-based International Trade Union Confederation, created in 2006, with roughly 309 affiliated organizations in 156 countries and a combined membership of 166 million.