We have called this collection of essays Before the Unions. What exactly do we mean by (trade) unions and what preceded them? Exactly a hundred years ago Beatrice and Sydney Webb defined a trade union as “a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment”. These permanent organizations of wage earners of the same occupation, according to most labour historians, started at a local level and tended to develop into national and sometimes even international unions and they formulated political as well as economic demands.

In 1953 Southern Rhodesia's (Zimbabwe's) only coal mine, Wankie Colliery, was taken over by the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa. The colliery's new owners soon discovered that the elimination of “hand lashing” (shovelling of coal) was the key to better productivity and expanded output. Coal cutting machinery was installed wherever possible, but in the colliery's two oldest shafts existing mining methods were too deeply entrenched and consequently too expensive simply to be swept away. Instead Anglo American attempted to reinforce colonial production relations. Supervision underground was tightened up, and the degree of “self-regulation” enjoyed by lashers in determining the amount of work they did was limited. The introduction of a new mine tub designed to increase productivity precipitated strike action in February 1954 by the colliery's entire black labour force.

Health and pleasure resorts constitute a distinctive, numerous and important kind of industrial town. But they, and the service industries which are central to their economies, have hardly been studied from a social conflict and industrial relations perspective. This paper opens out this theme by analysing a strike in the catering trades in San Sebastián, at the time Spain's largest and most prestigious seaside resort, at the height of the holiday season in August. The course of the strike is charted in its economic and political context, and the reasons for its outbreak, and for an ensuing attempt to escalate it into a local general strike, are analysed. Particular attention is paid to the status in the labour market of the camareros or hotel, restaurant and café waiters who withdrew their labour, and to reactions to the strike among local media who were deeply conscious of the importance to San Sebastián's staple industry of sustaining a carefully-constructed image of tranquillity and security. Comparisons are made with British resort experiences in the turbulent years between 1916 and 1921, and further work on this theme is urged, especially for this important period.

This essay examines the relationship between popular initiatives and government decision-makers during the 1930s. The economic crisis and the reawakening of labor militancy before 1935 elevated men and women, who had been formed by the workers' movement of the 1910s and 1920s, to prominent roles in the making of national industrial policies. Quite different was the reshaping of social insurance and work relief measures. Although those policies represented a governmental response to the distress and protests of the working class, the workers themselves had little influence on their formulation or administration. Through industrial struggles, the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) mobilized a new cadre, trained by youthful encounters with urban ethnic life, expanding secondary schooling and subordination to modern corporate management, in an unsuccessful quest for economic planning and universal social insurance through the agency of a reformed Democratic Party.

The paper examines the role of “nationalist” secret societies among the rapidly growing Irish community in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s. The main port of entry, Liverpool occupied a pivotal role as the two main “Ribbon” societies developed secret networks to provide migrant members with political sanctuary and a range of “tramping” benefits. Through its welfare provision, offered irrespective of skill or trade, Ribbonism engendered a sense of identity wider than that of the familial and regional affiliations through which chain migration typically operated. A proactive influence among immigrant Irish Catholic workers, Ribbonism helped to construct a national or ethnic awareness, initiating the process by which ethnic-sectarian formations came to dominate popular politics in nineteenth-century Liverpool, the nation's second city. This ethnic associational culture was at least as functional, popular and inclusive as the class-based movements and party structures privileged in conventional British historiography.

The paths of historical research resemble the forces in the sea. As some topics surface and rise to ever greater heights, others may be dragged to the depths of silence and cease to affect the beating of the waves. In most western European countries, research on journeymen has suffered this second fate. Along with the decline in interest in guild-based economies, the issue of whether pre-industrial journeymen associations were predecessors (or perhaps adumbrations) of modern trade unions, which had inspired widespread debate during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, faded from the agenda following World War II. This trend does not mean that the new generation of social historians has blithely ignored disputes involving journeymen. Nevertheless, many authors designate such events as crowd movements or view them as obvious forms of traditional resistance.

The respective Jewish policies of Tsarist ministers Witte and Plehve are re-examined through the perspective of their opposing socio-economic policies. The two ministers' rivalry over Jewish policy is considered not to be a reflection of “antisemitic” or “pro-Jewish” sympathies, as that would leave major elements of these policies unexplained; rather, analysis shows it to be a means in their struggle to gain supremacy for their own respective policies regarding the nature and pace of Russia's industrialization. The Russian policy-makers perceived the Jews not only as a religious group; they saw them as a non-monolithic economic entity, and differentiated among the various strata of Jewish society in accordance with the respective influence of each stratum's economic activities on Russian society and economy. Accordingly, the two ministers formulated opposing differential Jewish policies to fit their respective all-Russian socio-economic policies.

This article discusses Stalin's Bolshevism during his Tiflis and Baku periods in the first decade of the century. It focuses on his position in the inner-faction debate between Lenin and Bogdanov. It holds that Dzhugashvili's tactical and organizational views in the years from 1907 to 1909 moved from sympathetic to Bogdanov to a position near Lenin, though remaining somewhat to the left of the latter. Dzhugashvili never belonged to the leftist tendency. He was a typical representative of the “Russian” praktiki, whose main concern was to further conciliation in the Bolshevik faction.

This article discusses the defensive actions taken by a group of weavers in the rural eastern Netherlands in response to changing economic conditions; in particular, how they successfully re-established their weavers' guild to protect them against aggressive local merchants who were out to lower payments for woven cloth. A guild, by organizing many individuals into a group, could wield much more power than separate weavers on their own. But that was not all. Local weavers were aware that economic circumstances had changed, and that a new charter would have to be adapted so that it addressed the problems they faced. Hence, the charter they drafted provided for a guild that had the outward appearance of the old form of craft organization. However, in addition to the usual regulations it contains clauses that are more reminiscent of a trade union than a guild. The result was an organization that the weavers could use effectively to fend off their growing dependence on and subordination to merchants.

The process by which journeymen became masters and came to run printing houses of their own was seriously undermined in Europe from the sixteenth century on. As a rule, there was a concentration of a few printing presses in a handful of urban workshops. These were dominated by several fairly well-known families which encouraged the development of state control. This was a period of religious and political turmoil, particularly in England and France. Few studies on the early history of the printing industry are as thorough and illuminating as Natalie Zemon Davis's work on Lyons. In this large and prosperous French city, the rapidly expanding sixteenth-century printing industry employed many male immigrants who often spent all their adult lives as wage earners working as pressmen or compositors in a trade that was very different from that of their fathers. Both government and guild intervention contributed extensively and almost continuously to the expansion of this urban body of permanent journeymen in the capital-intensive Printing trade before the Industrial Revolution. Looking back on his career as a journeyman and foreman in the mid eighteenth-century Parisian world of printing, Restif de la Bretonne presumably articulated a widespread opinion when he wrote in his autobiographical writings that among printers “un ouvrier ne devient jamais maitre […] les maîtres engendrent des maîtres, et les compagnons des compagnons et ainsi de génération en génération.” In fact, the position of foreman in a printing establishment was the pinnacle of a lifetime of waged labour. The Dutch journeyman and overseer David Wardenaar in his manual Beschrijving der Boekdrukkunst (1801) described the journeymen (knechts) together with other wage earners as being without alternative prospects (“arbeiders […] bedongen loon […] om dat hij geen ander uitzicht heeft”) and as the workers of an unpayable craft (“gezellen de beärbeiders zijn van het nut […] door deze onbetaalbare kunst”).

A series of artisan revolts in the London corporations between 1635 and 1659 found both radical ideas of individual liberty and the guild ethos of fraternity relevant to their aims. The apparent paradox of democratic demands combined with calls for stricter economic regulation can be explained only by examining the participants' concrete grievances and specific demands. The protesters were neither rising industrial capitalists nor a new wage-earning class, but small masters attempting to restrain competition, the use of cheap labour, and the enlargement of enterprises. Their concerns had something in common with those of the Levellers, but the movements diverged in significant ways.

This article challenges the militant and industrial unionist version of British coal mining trade union history, surrounding the Miners' Federation of Great Britain and the National Union of Mineworkers, by considering, for the first time, the case of the colliery deputies' trade union. Their national Federation was formed in 1910, and aimed to represent the three branches of coal mining supervisory management: the deputy (or fireman, or examiner), overman and shotfirer. First, the article discusses the treatment of moderate and craft traditions in British coal mining historiography. Second, it shows how the position of deputy was defined by changes in the underground labour process and the legal regulation of the industry. Third, it traces the history of deputies' union organization up until nationalization in 1947, and the formation of the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS). The article concludes that the deputies represent a mainstream tradition of craft/professional identity and industrial moderation, in both the coal industry and the wider labour movement.

Symbols and rituals held high status in East German public life.2 They allowed, as is now stressed, state socialism to bind the people to the ruling system, while also affirming the links between this system and the traditions and programmes of the pre-stalinist and pre-communist labour movement and pointing to a future in which the red banners would no longer be used to conceal dilapidated facades. Moreover, they represented a society which tried to compensate its members for what they lacked materially with non-material gratification; or put another way, it replaced the struggle to distribute economic capital by a struggle for social and thus symbolic capital.

Both historically and actually, there is a complex interrelationship between the existence of unfree labour and the process of class formation and struggle in the course of agrarian transformation. However, much current writing about rural labour in the Third World is based on three interrelated assumptions. First, that labour market imperfections are always the fault of peasants resisting the attempts of capital to proletarianize them; second, that capitalist penetration of agriculture always transforms peasants into proletarians, in the full meaning of the latter term; and third, that where these exist (non-urban contexts, backward agriculture, and/or underdeveloped countries), unfree relations are always unproblematically pre-capitalist forms of production destined to be eliminated in the course of this process. In the marxist approach which follows, it will be argued that each of these three assumptions is wrong.

There exists no such thing as a single mode for the social organization of proto-industrial iron production, but a number of alternative ways. In the following article the dominance of one or another mode is viewed as dependent on its societal context, and not least on the social relations of the rural world. Each mode of organization had its own peculiarities and generated its own contradictions and conflicts.

Many studies on proto-industrialization have followed Franklin Mendels' work, and virtually all concern cottage industries in rural areas. Occasionally, authors are also interested in urban proto-industries, which are correctly considered home industries here. This production method (aside from traditional manual labour) has certainly been decisive, both in supplying expanding markets during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in raising capital for commercial production of goods. Cottage industries were the prevailing form of industry at the start of the Industrial Revolution (and during the preceding periods) and were consequently a direct prerequisite for it.