Sail, Steam and Emergent Dockers' Unionism in Britain, 1850–1914

Abstract

In a well known study of the building industry written some years ago, Richard Price argued that the institutionalisation of trade unions and general formalisation of industrial relations that occurred during the latter half of the nineteenth century were influences that tended to restrict the capacity of work groups to regulate the conditions of their working lives. Whereas earlier labour historians, from the Webbs onwards, had emphasised the part played by formal organisations in the improvement of working conditions, Price stressed the capacity of informal groups to control the way work was conducted. Price's approach, and that of other writers adopting a similar perspective, has been extremely influential, not least because it accorded well with developments taking place in the modern industrial relations setting of the 1960s and 1970s, where interest was focussed upon autonomous work group activity. In the context of the mid-nineteenth century, however, Price certainly pushed his argument a long way. The capacity of craft workers, possessing a strong corporate tradition, to regulate autonomously conditions in their trade was one thing, but Price suggested that work group formation and activity extended to labourers, in building and other industries. Dock labourers, in particular, were held to have been capable of such regulative activity, “long before unionisation”. If this was indeed the case, then the argument regarding the negative contribution of formal union organisation and collective bargaining must presumably be held to apply even in those sectors of employment where the new unionism of the 1880s and 1890s made its appearance.