Trade unions are older than Marx's manifesto by almost a century
A common assumption holds that trade unions sprang from Marxism. In fact the first modern unions appeared in eighteenth-century Britain, nearly a hundred years before The Communist Manifesto of 1848. They grew out of something newer and stranger at the time: the idea of working for a wage under someone else's direction.
The Industrial Revolution pulled peasants, dependants and migrants into British cities. A farmer, whether owner or tenant, sold a product and kept some control over his days. A factory hand sold labour itself and took orders from an employer, often with little security or say over how the work affected health and life. Critics called it wage slavery; the name that stuck was employment. Unions emerged to give these new workers collective weight.
Their purpose is to maintain or improve conditions of work, from wages and benefits to safety, complaint procedures and rules on promotion and dismissal. Members pay dues that fund a head office and legal staff, and elected representatives bargain with employers to reach collective agreements. Unions may organise a single craft, a mix of trades, or an entire industry. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in their 1894 history, framed a union as a continuous association of wage earners, a definition that has dominated since. Marx later wrote that unions aimed to stop the price of labour falling below its value.
Some historians place unions within a far older tradition of mutual benefit. The researcher Bob James links them to medieval guilds, Freemasons, Oddfellows and friendly societies. Ancient Rome had collegia, associations recognised as legal bodies that from Julius Caesar's time needed approval from the Senate or emperor. Soldiers and sailors formed burial societies, and in 2011 excavations at the harbour of Portus uncovered inscriptions pointing to a shipbuilders' guild in a yard built under Trajan.
From Britain the model spread worldwide as wage work replaced subsistence farming. Membership can include professionals, students, apprentices, retirees and the unemployed. The share of workers belonging to a union, known as union density, is highest in the Nordic countries.
Source: Trade union
