JNF-The-Working-Class-Struggle-of-Half-a-Century

Trade Unionism
The early trade unionists in England had their share of trouble. In the
eighteenth century, the workers formed combinations or trade clubs.
Sometimes the members met to enjoy a social evening, to make payments
into a sickness or burial fund, to seek to keep up and improve the
level of their wages and to enforce existing trade customs. However the
authorities and the employers regarded these clubs as dangerous. A
publication of the British Central Office of Information said, The reaction
of authority was to turn the law against these infant bodies. By
1800 nearly forty separate measures prohibited individual combinations,
and in that year, through a Combination Act, the ban became
general. The aim of this Act was to ensure the freedom of employers to
regulate wages and working conditions without and reference to their
employees. Workpeople who joined combinations could be prosecuted
and savagely punished as many were.
Other set-backs cropped up. Robert Owen made a scheme to
organize a large national union, but the plan failed because of lack of
experience. Within a year Owen’s union had crashed in ruins and the
authorities, still bitterly hostile to the idea of trade unionism, stepped in
to try to wipe out the remnants of the combination. In this drive their
most famous victims were the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six farm labourers
from the West Country of Dorset, who were transported to Australia as
a punishment for taking an oath on joining a trade union.
However a ray of light broke through after a dark period. For
more than a decade after 1834, trade unions went into decline though a
few combinations kept going and with the development of better communications
by rail and road, they began to link together to concentrate
their bargaining strength.
Co-operatives
The history of the Co-operative Movement in Britain also showed how
the ordinary people got together to work out their economic salvation.
Over a century ago, 28 Englishmen, chiefly cotton weavers by trade
started without any money to establish a co-operative shop. Edward
Topham and J.A. Hough co-authors of the book The Cooperative
Movement in Britain, stated that they Collected a few pence weekly until
18