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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Chris Wrigley, British Trade Unions since 1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002)

THIS BOOK is part of the "New Studies in Economic and Social History" series, sponsored by the Economic History Society, and now published through Cambridge University Press. As such, it has a fairly clear brief: to provide a short and digestible overview of its subject, primarily for the student market. What do its readers need to know about the history of British trade unionism in the 20th century and the debates surrounding it?

Chris Wrigley's credentials as a guide can scarcely be doubted; he has published very extensively on the subject of industrial relations. For this book, he divides his topic into four main themes: the structure and organization of trade unions, strikes, incomes policy, and trade union legislation. Each of these four chapters sets out to cover the period from 1945 to 2000, while the first part of the book's chronological reach is, oddly, hived off to a separate chapter of its own.

This highlights one of the peculiar aspects of the project. Why "since 1933?" There is no justification given for the chosen period, and it doesn't even seem to follow from anything so contingent as there being a previous volume in the series with 1933 as an arbitrary cut-off date. One of the positive features of writing across the common historical caesura of World War II might be to examine continuities and inheritances across the period, but this is never really attempted. The separation of the 1930s and the war years from the thematic chapters which follow only serves to marginalize them within the study. There is a photograph of the 1986 Jarrow marchers on the front cover; in the text there is no reference either to them or to the Jarrow Crusade of 1936.

The book is really concerned with the period after 1945. Wrigley presents useful material on trade union membership and density during the second half of the 20th century, and discusses the ways in which the face of trade unionism has altered, as a reflection of changes in the workplace. By the end of the century, he notes, the most likely person to be a trade unionist was "a female black in paid employment." (31)

Wrigley sets the history of trade unions firmly in the context of the history of employment and a general survey of economic policy. This is difficult to avoid, but does present a challenge within the parameters of a short book which is also trying to engage with the detail of some specific debates about the study of trade unionism, for example about the use of available statistics and the applicability of models of union activity in explaining varying propensities to strike. There are a few notable casualties in the struggle for space in the text. There is little on the TUC as a political player, and scarcely anything on the trade unions' party political affiliations, influence, and ambitions. Here the effects of European directives and employment standards might have been given more prominence than they are at the end of the book, as trade unions began to direct their lobbying efforts away from Westminster. On the other hand, there is welcome attention given to comparative material in discussing what might or might not be significant about the place of trade unionism in British life, with tables to compare different countries' experiences.

Perhaps textbooks should diverge from our expectations. There are certainly some interesting details brought to prominence in this account: the cultural experiment of Centre 42 in the 1960s dominates the introductory chapter (taking up two of the five and a half pages of text). But I was struck by what was missing. There is no "beer and sandwiches at Number 10," surprisingly little on the "Winter of Discontent," or on the practical impact of major disputes in public utilities and in schools in the 1970s and 1980s, and the effects of this on public perceptions of trade unions. The visceral struggle of the 1984 miners' strike merits only a short paragraph, devoted to the issue of how injunctions operated against secondary picketing (but never mentioning the "flying picket" phenomenon). By any measure, the miners' strike was surely the major episode in British post-war trade union history, and it hardly seems to aid understanding to discuss the Conservative government's approach to labour relations in the 1980s without reference to it. Instead, we are told that trade union legislation under Thatcher was influenced by the ideas of Hayek — though the book does not enlighten students about what those ideas were.

The problems of omissions and the treatment of subjects by allusion rather than detailed explanation are in part a feature of the kind of book this is. The series in which it appears is intended to "survey the current state of scholarship." It aims to introduce students to "the significant debates," though the references to, and isolated quotations from the secondary literature sometimes serve to distract the reader from grasping the main lines of interpretation within a chapter. In fact, there is no concerted attempt to provide a straightforward overview of the historiography in the area, though the final chapter does present some critics' verdicts on the overall impact of trade unionism.

This approach in a textbook risks achieving neither one thing nor the other: it disdains a chronologically-organized account (which, for example, could introduce students to the Donovan report and In place of strife as points of interest in their own right), but does not fully commit itself to offering a synthesis of the secondary literature and a commentary on writing about the subject. The result is disappointing, and a bit half-hearted. In the accumulation of information about trade union membership, trade union law, employment patterns, economic trends, and economic policy, it is often difficult to discern a clear line of argument, or a definite sense of what the book is setting out to achieve. The division into sections adds to this impression.

To take the chapter on incomes policy as one example: while this offers a valid topic in its own right, its interest within a study of trade unionism should have more to do with how unions had to respond to those policies and the degrees of influence which they might have in that context. The volume runs to only 86 pages of text, including tables, which does not offer much scope to stray beyond a defined brief. British Trade Unions since 1933 might have been more useful for its target market if it had been content to focus its discussion on what its title describes. In fact, Wrigley's main interest here is in the frameworks within which trade unionism developed, and this, rather than the history of the trade unions themselves, becomes the main theme of the book.


Clare Griffiths University of Sheffield

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