The purpose of this essay is to examine the emergence and development, between 1904 and 1914, of the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions. A main conclusion is that the ATTI, in being mainly concerned with its members' employment interests, was implicitly a trade union despite continual protestations by both officers and members that the Association was a professional body and would not “degenerate into a mere trades union […]. For people of education, like teachers, […] it is wrong to begin at the salary end”. In the first place, therefore, this paper is an investigation into certain aspects of the early history of a white-collar union, in this case the organization whose membership was drawn initially from among a small group of teachers in local authority technical institutes in England at the beginning of this century. Secondly, however, insofar as the technical teachers of this period saw themselves as professional people for whom trade unionism was inappropriate, the case-study also, in passing, illustrates the common conflict over the goals sought by most teachers' organizations at some time during their evolution as to whether they “should be concerned only with professional matters or should also fight for better salaries”.