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The labour movement is the collective organisation of Working class to further their shared political and economic interests. It consists of the trade union or labour union movement, as well as political parties of labour. It can be considered an instance of class conflict.
The labour movement developed as a response to capitalism and the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, at about the same time as socialism. The early goals of the movement were the Unionization, the Suffrage, democracy, safe working conditions and the 40-hour week. As these were achieved in many of the advanced economies of Western Europe and North America in the early decades of the 20th century, the labour movement expanded to issues of welfare and social insurance, wealth distribution and income distribution, Public service like health care and education, social housing and common ownership.
The Elizabethan Apprentice Laws lasted in England until the early 19th century, but were becoming increasingly dead letter by the mid 18th century. Consequently, from 1760 on, real wages began to fall and food prices began to rise giving increased motivation for political and social agitation. As the guild system became increasingly obsolete and parliament abolished the old medieval labour protections, forswearing responsibility for maintaining living standards, the workers began to form the earliest versions of trade unions. The workers on the lowest rungs found it necessary to organise in new ways to protect their wages and other interests such as living standards and working conditions.
Strikes and riots by miners and framework knitters occurred throughout England over the course of the 18th century, often resorting to machine breaking and sabotage. In 1751 wool-combers in Leicestershire formed a union which both disallowed hiring non-members and provided aid for out-of-work members. In the Spitalfields area of London, weavers went on strike and rioted in 1765, 1769, and 1773 until parliament relented and allowed justices in the area to fix wage rates. Artisans and workers would also create small craft clubs or trade clubs in each town or locality and these groups such as the hatters in London, shipwrights in Liverpool, or cutlery in Sheffield could use their clubs to unionize. Workers could also use the ubiquitous Friendly society, which had increasingly cropped up British society since 1700, as cover for union activities.
In politics, the MP John Wilkes used mass appeal to workers through public meetings, pamphleteering, and the popular press, in order to gain their support as he advocated for an increase in the voting franchise, popular rights, and an end to corruption. When he was imprisoned for criticizing King George III, his followers protested and were fired upon by the government at the Massacre of St George's Fields in 1768, which resulted in a round of strikes and riots throughout England. Other notable radicals at the time included John Jebb, Major Cartwright, and John Horne. With the advent of the French Revolution, radicalism became even more prominent in English politics with the publication of Thomas Paine The Rights of Man in 1791 and the foundation of the working-class focused London Corresponding Society in 1792. Membership in the society increased rapidly and by the end of the year it may have had as many as three thousand chapters in the United Kingdom.
Fearful of this new English Jacobinism, the government responded with wide-scale political repression spearheaded by prime minister Pitt the Younger. Paine was forced to flee the country after his work was deemed to be sedition, booksellers selling Paine's or other radical works were arrested, the Scottish reformers Thomas Muir, Rev. Thomas Fyshe Palmer, Joseph Gerrald, and Maurice Margarot were transported, and, in 1794, the leadership of the L.C.S was arrested and tried. Speech and public gatherings were tightly restricted by the Two Acts of 1795 which made certain words acts of treason, limited public gatherings to fifty people or fewer, and enforced licensing for anyone who wanted to speak in a public debate or lecture hall. In 1797 the L.C.S was outlawed by parliament, temporarily crushing the British labour movement. Additionally, forming unions or combinations was made illegal under legislation such as the 1799 Combination Act. Trade unionism in the United Kingdom illegally continued into the 19th century despite increasing hardship. Determined workers refused to allow the law to entirely eradicate trade unionism. Some employers chose to forgo legal prosecution and instead bargained and cooperated with workers' demands.
The United Kingdom saw an increasing number of large-scale strikes, mainly in the north. In 1811 in Nottinghamshire, a new movement known as the Luddite, or machine-breaker, movement, began. In response to declining living standards, workers all over the Midlands started to sabotage and destroy the machinery used in textile production. As the industry was still decentralized at the time and the movement was secretive, none of the leadership was ever caught and employers in the Midlands textile industry were forced to raise wages.
In 1812 the first radical, socialist, pro-labour society, the 'Society of Spencean Philanthropists', named after the radical social agitator Thomas Spence, was formed. Spence, a pamphleteer in London since 1776, believed in the socialized distribution of land and changing England into a federalized government based on democratically elected parish communes. The society was small and had only a limited presence in English politics. Other leaders such Henry Hunt, William Cobbet, and Lord Cochrane, known as Radicals, rose to the head of the labour movement demanding the lowering of taxes, the abolition of pensions and sinecures, and an end to payments of the war debt. This radicalism increased in the aftermath of the end of the Napoleonic Wars, as a general economic downturn in 1815 led to a revival in pro-labour politics. During this time, half of each worker's wages was taxed away, unemployment greatly increased, and food prices would not drop from their war time highs.
After the passage of the Corn Laws there was mass rioting throughout United Kingdom. Many working-class papers started being published and received by a wide audience, including Cobbet's " Weekly Political Register, Thomas Wooler's The Black Dwarf, and William Hone's Reformists's Register. In addition, new political clubs focused on reform, called Hampden Clubs, were formed after a model suggested by Major Cartwright. During a speech by Henry Hunt, a group of Spenceans initiated the Spa Fields riots. This outbreak of lawlessness led to a government crackdown on agitation in 1817 known as the Gagging Acts, which included the suppression of the Spencean society, a suspension of habeas corpus, and an extension of power to magistrates which gave them the ability to ban public gatherings. In protest of the Gagging Acts, as well as the poor working conditions in the textile industry, workers in Manchester attempted to march on London to deliver petitions in a demonstration known as the Blanketeers march, which ultimately failed.
From this point onward the British government also began using hired spies and agent provocateurs to disrupt the labour movement. The most infamous early case of government anti-labour espionage was that of Oliver the Spy who, in 1817, incited and encouraged the Pentrich Rising, which led to the leadership being indicted on treason charges and executed. In spite of government suppression, the labour movement in the United Kingdom continued, and 1818 marked a new round of strikes as well as the first attempt at establishing a single national union that encompassed all trades, led by John Gast and named the "Philanthropic Hercules". Although this enterprise quickly folded, pro-labour political agitation and demonstrations increased in popularity throughout industrial United Kingdom culminating in 1819 with an incident in St. Peter's field, Manchester, known as the Peterloo Massacre. The British government responded with another round of draconian measures aimed at putting down the labour movement, known as the Six Acts.
In 1819 the social reformer Francis Place initiated a reform movement aimed at lobbying parliament into abolishing the anti-union Combination Acts. Unions were legalised in the Combination Acts of 1824 and 1825, however some union actions, such as anti-Strikebreaker activities were restricted.
Chartism was possibly the first mass working-class labour movement in the world, originating in England during the mid-19th century between 1838 and 1848. It takes its name from the People's Charter of 1838, which stipulated the six main aims of the movement as:
Eventually, after Chartism died out, the United Kingdom adopted the first five reforms. The Chartist movement had a lasting impact in the development of the political labour movement.
In the United Kingdom, the term "new unionism" was used in the 1880s to describe an innovative form of trade unionism. The new unions were generally less exclusive than craft unionism and attempted to recruit a wide range of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, such as dockers, seamen, gasworkers and general labourers.
The movement gained major impetus during the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the Catholic Social Teaching tradition which began in 1891 with the publication of Pope Leo XIII's foundational document, Rerum novarum, also known as "On the Condition of the Working Classes," in which he advocated a series of reforms including limits on the length of the work day, a living wage, the elimination of child labour, the rights of labour to organise, and the duty of the state to regulate labour conditions.
Throughout the world, action by labourists has resulted in reforms and labor rights, such as the two-day Workweek, minimum wage, paid , and the achievement of the eight-hour day for many workers. There have been many important labour activists in modern history who have caused changes that were revolutionary at the time and are now regarded as basic. For example, Mary Harris Jones, better known as "Mother Jones", and the National Catholic Welfare Council were important in the campaign to end child labour in the United States during the early 20th century.
Historically Labour economics have often been constrained by national borders that have restricted movement of workers. Labour laws are also primarily determined by individual nations or states within those nations. While there have been some efforts to adopt a set of international labour standards through the International Labour Organisation (ILO), international sanctions for failing to meet such standards are very limited. In many countries labour movements have developed independently and represent those national boundaries.
In 1891, localised labour parties were formed, by trade union members in British colonies in Australasia. In 1899, the Labour Party for the Queensland briefly formed the world's first labour government, lasting one week. From 1901, when six colonies federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia, several labour parties amalgamated to form the Australian Labor Party (ALP).
The British Labour Party was created as the Labour Representation Committee, following an 1899 resolution by the Trade Union Congress.
While archetypal labour parties are made of direct union representatives, in addition to members of geographical branches, some union federations or individual unions have chosen not to be represented within a labour party and/or have ended association with them.
Black and white dockworkers also cooperated during protracted labour strikes, including the general levee strikes in 1892 and 1907 as well as smaller strikes involving skilled workers such as screwmen in the early 1900s:
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