OUR HISTORY

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: january/february 2025 :: RMTnews 24 In 1799 and 1800 two Combinations Acts were passed into law which were designed to ‘prevent Unlawful Combinations of Workmen’ and prohibited the existence of trade unions and any form of collective bargaining by workers. Under these laws any ‘combination’ of two or more ‘masters’, or two or more ‘workmen’, to lower or raise wages, or to increase or diminish the number of hours of work, or quantity of work to be done, was punishable under common law. The laws were presented as preventing any syndicate or cartel but, of course, no employer was ever prosecuted. In his seminal book The Making of the English Working Class, historian EP Thompson points out that “in the years between 1780 and 1832 most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs”. This sharpening of class interests did not go unnoticed by emerging capitalist elites. The government of William Pitt the Younger believed that workers would take strike action during any political conflict to force the government to accede to their demands. It was clear that the influence of the French revolution of 1789 and the rise of militant Jacobin republican activity had struck fear into the hearts of the British establishment particularly after the success of the American revolution and the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. These events led to an upsurge in radical political thought exemplified by the rather eccentric MP John Wilkes who championed political liberty, Thomas Paine who published The Rights of Man, Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and radical poets such as the visionary William Blake, William Wordsworth and Robert Burns. As a result of these growing political and social tensions, the Combination Acts were designed to reign in working- class power and had the effect of simply driving trade union activity underground. Predictably, the Acts did nothing to prevent the rising tide of anger of working people against low pay, poor working conditions and the high price of food. This crisis deepened after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 which witnessed a severe economic slump, chronic unemployment and harvest failure all worsened by the Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread high. Radical and working-class movements at the time identified parliamentary reform as the solution as only around 11 per cent of adult males had the vote and very few of them in the industrial north. A mass campaign to petition parliament for male suffrage gained three-quarters of a million signatures in 1817 but was flatly rejected by the House of Commons. When a second slump occurred in early 1819, huge crowds were mobilised to force the government to back down. The movement was particularly strong in the north-west, where the Manchester Patriotic Union OUR HISTORY 200 YEARS OF ANTI-TRADE UNION LAWS In 1825 the government re-introduced laws to restrict working people combining to defend themselves CAPTAIN SWING: Agricultural workers took matters into their own hands after Parliament banned trade unionism again in 1825