The trade union movement in Britain is at a critical juncture. While 2024-5 saw the country buck the OECD-wide density decline with a 0.4% rise, a long-term prognosis raises multiple causes for concern. Participation in Unite and Unison leadership elections has dropped to and below 10% respectively, while recent strike ballots across education, health, and the civil service have failed on low turnout. Even the TUC’s blog from this August celebrating the ‘record-breaking’ rise in membership acknowledged some of the foremost, palpable long-term threats: the proportion of members under 35 nationwide has sunk from a third to a quarter since 1995 in the same time that private-sector density has halved. 

Considering new legislative overhauls, there is cause for the TUC’s optimism. Among other things, electronic balloting, lower thresholds for action in the public sector, and the protection of strikers could certainly even the odds for a trade union renaissance. Yet the impact of these measures will be restricted without the modernisation and opening-up of the unions themselves, particularly older, established unions with their foundations in the ancien régime of closed-shop heavy industry.

The recent success of IWGB and other ‘indie unions’ is owed to their dynamism and initiative facing a neoliberal economy in constant revolution. This has allowed them not just to tiptoe into the fraught private sector but to galvanise some of its most disenfranchised workers, among them cleaners, couriers, and domestic workers. It is these constituencies of workers who will be most key to unions’ survival, but many have found established unions at best ‘slow to respond’ to their issues, and at worst exclusionary. As Daniele Palmer recently warned in Tribune, if unions fail to adapt to workers’ needs, ‘they will be pressed, reshaped, and, when necessary, taken over’. 

Unions must adapt their approach as quickly and robustly as labour exploitation changes. To do so successfully, an appraisal of the history of the international movement throughout centuries of social and economic upheaval is vital. This year, GLI has published The Story of our International Labour Movement, a book by Dan Edmonds that seeks to use this history to encourage contemporary debate and discussion. 

The book’s chronology begins in mediaeval Europe, but as Edmonds states, it could have begun in ancient times. Trade unionism grew alongside heavy industry, which allowed it the privileged position of its 20th-century heyday; this has provoked fears over the past decades that without industrial work, there can be no workers’ movement. Yet unionism predates the Industrial Revolution and has no reason to fade away in post-industrial society. Over centuries, a common thread of resistance has been shaped by constant upheaval within industry and labour, and it is this thread which must be tightly clutched as the movement faces new challenges.

Under what Thompson termed the ‘equilibrium of paternalism and deference’ in pre-industrial Britain, different forms of union originated the social and economic roles that modern trade unions would later inherit. Guilds, organised by trade, sought to maintain their members’ monopoly of labour by representing masters and apprentices jointly. While successful in establishing protective statutes through direct petition to the government and local authorities, their internal contradictions exposed their insufficiency. 

Even before industrialisation’s restructuring of labour, journeymen (skilled workers) organised into their own associations, stifled by the vertical, master-dominated guilds. Journeymen’s associations advocated for workers against their masters, using strikes, industrial sabotage, and blacklisting to force negotiations. Unleashing the worker as a political actor, independent of the oligarchy of their trade, set the stage for 19th-century labour relations. As enclosure and machination pushed forward capitalism’s development, the workers’ movement revolutionised itself to meet the needs of the workforce.

Capitalism’s reorganisation of labour and the development of trade unions were duelling actors in a dialectical process. Supporting a cyclical view of labour history, the alienated, laissez-faire employment that capitalism requires was ‌in fact a regression for workers. The capitalists’ ‘conquest of social power’, as Marx wrote in Capital, required the removal of ‘the fetters they [guilds] laid on the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man’. Following the days of artisanship, with its self-management and enshrined protections, waged employment more closely resembled the mediaeval relationship between lord and serf, or even the status of Rome’s plebeians. This analogy forged the language of the era that remains in use today: ‘proletariat’ (from the lowest class in Roman society), and of course, ‘wage slavery’.

The working class in Britain and across Europe had been, Marx continues, ‘suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and “unattached” proletarians on the labour-market’. Without the protection of masters or guilds, workers therefore had to organise themselves in a new way, maximising their efficiency under boss- and state-led repression. Edmonds outlines succinctly how, at the dawn of the 19th century, the capitalists had laid the groundwork for their own enemies:

More and more, the production of goods was being done by large numbers of people working together in a single site or place. Mass workers’ action was becoming a powerful reality.

The threat of spreading radicalism posed by the French Revolution, combined with organised pressure from powerful employers, led the British government to pass the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, universally outlawing trade unions, collective bargaining, and strike action. This repression unwittingly bolstered the movement. Unable to organise in the open, trade unionists went underground, and the threat of repression drove them to create more robust ‘societies’ that eventually grew to unite different industries. As history marched on, these structures would adapt and eventually formalise, shaping the organisations that compose the established union movement today.

While many official trade union histories have neglected the prehistory of guilds, journeymen, and clandestine societies, the situation today demonstrates the lasting value of these lessons. The problems of post-industrial Britain mirror that of laissez-faire early capitalism: the gig economy’s denial of workers’ rights through subcontracting and self-employment has left four million workers ‘missing out on key statutory rights, including parental leave, redundancy pay and protection against unfair dismissal’. While the traditional unions have made efforts at the national level to bring change in employment law, some of which have been successful, their ‘rigid and hierarchical organisational structure[s] makes it difficult to reorient their strategies’.

Just as the oligarchy of the guilds gave way to the independent networks of journeymen, the vigour and adaptability of new organisations will be key to cutting a new path for the movement. Trade unionism must move forward with a push from below, branching into and across a working class in constant revolution. 

Building on its longstanding partnerships with national and international trade unions, the Global Labour Institute (GLI) is developing a political education programme around the publication of The Story of Our International Trade Union Movement. Through events, workshops, educational resources and digital content, the programme will help trade unionists and labour activists understand the history of the international labour movement and connect it to today’s organising challenges. It is aimed at both newer activists and experienced trade unionists interested in exploring the historical roots of current debates.