The Golden Era of trade unions
The 1871 Trade Union Act made trade unions legal. Trade unions are organizations of workers meant to defend their interests. In 1900, the Labour Representation Committee was founded, in order to gain parliamentary representation for the trade unions in Westminster. In 1906, the Labour Representation Committee managed to get 29 MPs elected. They then changed their names to the Labour Party. The working class got increasingly better represented over the course of the next decades with trade union membership increasing. Union membership reached its peak (over 50 % of all the workforce) in the 1970s during the Labour government of Jim Callaghan (1976-1979). This meant that the Unions and not the Cabinet decided the Labour Government policy.
A shift after the Winter of Discontent
The power dynamics shifted at the turn of the 1980s, in the winter of 1978 remembered as the Winter of Discontent, after a line from Shakespeare’s Richard III. Jim Callaghan wanted to impose a 5 % pay cap on public sector salaries while inflation was above 20 %. Severe unrest followed in all sectors, such as hospitals, schools, railways, energy, which eventually made Callaghan capitulate. The Labour government failed in the 1979 general election, which placed Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. Thatcher wanted to "smash the unions", in her own words, because they deemed them too powerful and dangerous for the British economy. One of her most resounding victories was against the National Union of Mineworkers in 1985, when she managed to overpower the strike and close the coal pits. Thatcher next managed to gradually reduce the power of trade unions by passing 6 acts of Parliament in the 1980s.
Trade Union membership has been on the decline ever since because of anti-union laws, the decline of traditional industries which were highly unionized, the increase of the service sector which tends to be less unionized, more women entering the workforce – women tend to be less unionized, a more flexible labour market with more part-time jobs and therefore fewer unionized workers, a loosening of trade union links with the Labour Party. Today however around 25 % of the total workforce is unionized which is still an impressive proportion.
