Rioting was one way of drawing attention to problems in crisis years. During more ordinary times in the eighteenth century prosperous workers had formed insurance schemes to provide death and other benefits. Journeymen formed defensive, sometimes violent, groups. In the nineteenth century a variety of worker associations for mutual aid among groups of producers, employees, or consumers became more numerous. Popular associations, whether peaceful or violent, were feared by ruling elites. In France the liberal claims of the Declaration of Rights of 1789 were gainsaid by the Civil Code which put any association larger than twenty under the scrutiny of the prefect. Craft and the mutual-aid insurance associations might be tolerated, but a vague whiff of politics or violent action brought in the army. In 1834 even associations of under twenty were banned.
In Britain the right of workers to negotiate wages was denied in 1799, although from 1825 they were permitted to associate and collect funds. Robert Owen attracted considerable artisan support for the co-operative ideal in the 1820s and by 1830 500 societies with 20,000 members had been formed. In Britain, France, and the German states mutual-aid insurance associations and producer and especially retail co-operative associations took off, often harmonizing existing craft formations with the ideas of socialists such as Buchez, Blanc, and Proudhon as well as Owen. In these years small artisan formations did best. They usually began, like the Rochdale Pioneers, as self-sufficient primitive communist communities and, if they became successful, developed into profit-making concerns. By 1872 in Britain there were nearly one thousand groups with 300,000 members and sales of ?10 million a year.
Specific trade unions, distinct from producer or consumer cooperatives, developed from earlier artisan trade associations. In Britain Owen planned a Grand National Consolidated Union in 1834, which very briefly attracted support among tailors and shoemakers. Unions were the self-defence schemes of the better-paid crafts, the ‘labour aristocracy’ as they were regarded by less skilled workers. Individual trades organized many tiny local unions. In 1842 over 100,000 men belonged to separate small mining unions in Britain. In return for a small weekly fee members obtained death and limited unemployment benefits, but unlike mutual-aid or friendly societies, unions also tried to impose collective bargaining on merchants or, in a factory situation, on employers.
Strikes could result. The French silk weavers’ strikes of 1831 and 1834 were crushed by government troops, but in north-east England miners organized large-scale strikes in 1844 and 1863 and Lancashire cotton weavers were active in 1878. Large unions were also successful in collective bargaining; in 1853 a 20,000-strong strike of Preston weavers settled rates of pay and won middle-class support and cash donations. In the 1860s Boards of Arbitration emerged in England and in 1868 a Trades Union Congress was formed. In 1871 unions were recognized and four years later the peaceful negotiation of trade disputes permitted. In France in 1864 the right of unions to engage in peaceable bargaining was acknowledged.
Despite the formation of unions and socialist parties, worker organization remained embryonic compared with that of the landed, commercial, and industrial elites, who were associated by education, marriage, and common economic interests. They could operate in formal and informal pressure groups in and out of parliaments and through institutionally powerful industrial cartels and money markets, both to control and to override government policy.
World History
