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British
trade unionism has a long and continuous history.
Medieval guilds, which regulated craft production, clearly differed in function
from trade unions, in that guilds were combinations of both masters and workers
while modern unions emerged to serve workers' interests alone. However, aspects
of guild regulation--as in matters relating to apprenticeship--were incorporated
into the objectives of early unionism, so that some continuity may be discerned
between the decay of the one form of organization and the emergence of the
other. Examples of the trade-union form of organization are hard to trace before
the late 17th century; but during the following hundred years, combinations, as
they were known to contemporaries, became widespread, emerging among groups of
handicraft workers such as tailors, carpenters, and printers. Their emergence at
this period was a result of the development of manufacturing and commerce on a capitalist
basis. The number of handicraft workers within the economy was expanding, yet
for such workers the prospect of making the transition from journeyman
to master was diminishing. Both the rising demand
for their labour and their emerging status as
permanent employees were essential elements in this early development of labour
organization. An additional factor, related to the rise of capitalism, was the
progressive withdrawal of the state from wage regulation in particular and from
labour-market intervention more generally. This was confirmed by the repeal, in
1813 and 1814, of legislation that had provided for the fixing of wages by
justices and had stipulated apprenticeship requirements for entry into a trade.
The state's withdrawal from labour-market regulation raised with some urgency
the issue of the legality of trade unions. Under the Combination
Acts of 1799 and 1800, a general prohibition had been placed upon them,
in addition to the restraints imposed by the common law of conspiracy. Such a
general prohibition now appeared anomalous and unjust, and it was indeed removed
by legislation in 1824 and 1825. Common law impediments remained. (see also
craft guild, labour
law)
In the ensuing period, unions multiplied. As in the previous century, they
were typically local in scope and craft in composition. Even in the emerging
mechanized and factory-based sector, the relatively unsophisticated technology
and managerial organization required the employment of skilled tradesmen, and
these were assimilated into combinations based on the craft pattern of
organization; engineers, boilermakers, and cotton spinners are examples. Yet, at
this stage, the structure of unionism was still sufficiently fluid to permit
widespread experimentation. During the 1830s there developed a movement toward
" general unionism," directed both at establishing organization
nationally and at drawing the various organized trades into alliance with one
another. The pioneer in this movement was the cotton spinners' leader, John
Doherty, but much of its impetus derived from Robert Owen,
whose ideal of cooperative as against capitalist production found widespread
support. The most ambitious Owenite union project was the Grand
National Consolidated Trades Union of 1833-34, designed to embrace the
whole of labour though in practice focused on London tailors and shoemakers.
Inherently unstable, as were the other broad labour formations of the period,
this union did not expire without leaving an enduring legacy. Six Dorsetshire
agricultural labourers--the Tolpuddle Martyrs--were
convicted and sentenced to transportation to Australia for swearing a secret
oath in connection with the union. The union mounted a major campaign on their
behalf, and this episode is still cherished by the modern labour movement as
symbolic of its early struggle.
British settlers brought their customs with them to Australia
and New
Zealand, and, accordingly, early unions there corresponded closely to the
pattern of the home country. The penal character of the settlements established
in Australia from the late 18th century was hardly conducive to forming workers'
combinations, but the transition from convict to free settlement brought the
first signs of union activity. Local societies of craftsmen were operating in
the 1830s and '40s, ostensibly for the purpose of providing friendly benefits
for their members but in practice for trade purposes as well. Groups involved in
these societies included printers, tailors, building craftsmen, and engineers.
With the expansion of the economy from the 1850s, such groups formed the basis
for permanent trade unions. The emerging pattern was one of craft
unionism, in which Australian unions, like their counterparts in Britain,
sought to restrict entry into and regulate working conditions within their
respective trades. In Britain, during the middle decades of the century, a
number of such unions developed their organization on a national basis. The most
famous were the Amalgamated Society of Engineers
and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, constituted in 1851 and
1860, respectively. In Australia the main impetus to the national organization
of trades came later, with the federation of the separate colonies in 1901. (see
also convict labour)
In both countries, as unions consolidated their organization on independent
and sectional lines, collaboration became a means of securing common legislative
objectives rather than concerting industrial activity. This was classically the
case with the British Trades Union Congress (TUC),
an annual union assembly initiated in 1868 with a view to lobbying the
legislature through a standing Parliamentary Committee. The model was followed
in Australia, where, beginning in 1879, a number of Intercolonial Trade Union
Congresses were held, partly with a view to encouraging the formation of
parliamentary committees in each of the self-governing colonies. Such political
activity certainly achieved a further clarification of the unions' legal status.
Legislation removing various remaining impediments was passed in Britain in 1871
and 1875; similar measures followed in all the Australian colonies between 1876
and 1902 and in New Zealand in 1878. Though the three societies differed in many
respects, their broadly liberal character had, so far, proved accommodating to
trade unionism. In Britain especially, unions had themselves contributed to this
effect. As highly visible, stable, and professionally administered
organizations, the national craft unions of the mid-19th century contrasted with
the more secretive and volatile unions of the preceding era.
The late 19th century brought major labour upheavals that decisively
influenced the further development of unionism in all three countries. In
Britain, a tendency for unionism to expand beyond its narrow craft confines,
apparent in the early 1870s, was curtailed during the depression of the
mid-1880s. In the business upswing of 1888-92, the formation of new unions of
less skilled workers was resumed, this time with the aid of socialist activists.
The movement received an enormous stimulus through the victory of London dockers
in their great strike of 1889, secured in the last resort by Australian
financial support--a gesture from the New World to the Old. However, in 1890
employers in the maritime sector counterattacked against new unions of seamen
and dockers, and the new union established in the gas industry also suffered
major setbacks. Even certain craft unions experienced stronger resistance from
employers, who were alarmed by the injection of a greater militancy into union
behaviour at a time when they faced increased foreign competition in their
established markets. Following a national lockout in 1897-98, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers
was obliged to accept the introduction of new machinery and payment systems on
employers' terms. In both the maritime and engineering industries, employers had
asserted their power by combining in national federations. Perhaps most serious
of all for the unions, employer reaction spilled over into the courts, where a
series of judicial rulings, culminating in the Taff Vale judgment of 1901,
undermined the legislation of the 1870s. (see also Taff
Vale case)
A crisis in labour
relations was also reached in Australia and New Zealand in 1890. From
1870, the craft character of unionism in those countries had also been modified
by the emergence of national industrially based unions in the mining, shipping,
and pastoral industries. The most notable examples in Australia were the Miners'
Association and the Shearers' Union; these extended their organization to New
Zealand, where union development closely paralleled that in Australia. Greater
scale and militancy in labour organization, clearly apparent by the late 1880s,
drew forth a corresponding response from employers, leading to major
confrontations in the early 1890s. The first was the great maritime strike of
1890, involving seamen and wharf labourers in both Australia and New Zealand and
also extending to shearers and coal miners. These new unions, however, had
embarked on a trial of strength with associated employers at a time when the
economy had turned against them, boom turning into prolonged depression. In
conditions of heavy unemployment, the maritime strike was broken, and there
followed further defeats for the shearers in 1891 and 1894 and for the miners in
1892. (see also industrialization)
Industrial defeats led unions to turn to politics with greater urgency than
before. In New Zealand they gave their support to the Liberal Party,
which won a historic victory in December 1890. The Liberals' social and economic
reforms that followed attracted attention throughout the developed world, but
they also may have delayed the emergence of labour as an independent political
force, since the modern Labour Party emerged as late as 1916 and did not form a
government for the first time until 1935. In Britain also the break with
Liberalism came slowly, but interest in direct labour representation quickened
in the 1890s, leading at the turn of the century to a political alliance between
unions and moderate socialist groups. The Labour Party
so created remained in the shadow of the Liberals until after World War I, but
thereafter it developed rapidly to assume office for the first time in 1924. The
link between the industrial defeats of the 1890s and direct union involvement in
politics was most clearly manifest in Australia. By 1900, Labour parties had
emerged in four of the colonies, consisting of affiliated trade unions and
electorate branches. The federation of the colonies in the following year led to
the formation of a national parliamentary party, and by the end of 1915 Labour
governments were in office at the federal level and in five of the six states.
Despite differences in timing, the experience of all three countries was
remarkably similar, with enhanced union interest in politics from the 1890s
leading to the formation of Labour parties and, ultimately, Labour governments.
However, the outcomes of such political involvement, in regard to the unions'
situation within the wider society, diverged widely between New Zealand and
Australia on the one hand and Britain on the other. (see also New
Zealand Labour Party, Australian Labor Party)
To remedy their industrial weakness, unions in Australasia turned to the
state and the law for support, through the installation of systems of compulsory
arbitration that would oblige employers to deal with them. It was the Liberal
government in New Zealand that enacted the first effective measure. The Industrial Conciliation
and Arbitration Act of 1894 was drafted by that government's most
radical member, William Pember Reeves, a socialist
among liberals. Addressing the problem of employers' noncompliance with
arbitration decisions, Reeves devised a system in which participation was
voluntary for unions but compulsory for employers. A union that chose to
register under the act could bring any employer before the Arbitration Court,
whose awards had legal force.
Following the New Zealand legislation, compulsory arbitration was introduced
in Australia at both the state and federal level. The major landmarks were the
Acts of 1900 and 1901 in Western Australia and New South Wales, respectively,
and the federal statute of 1904. The new system was not installed without a
struggle; employer opposition was strong, and it was overborne only by a
combination of political forces that included Liberals and the new Labour
parties. The New Zealand experiment also attracted attention in Britain. Within
the TUC, support came from weaker, newer unions that had not yet achieved
employer recognition and saw compulsory arbitration as a means of enforcing it.
The temporary operation of such a system in World War I did indeed have this
effect, but at the turn of the century most unions were skeptical. Legally
enforced collective agreements would entail closer involvement with the
judiciary, and British judges were regarded as incapable of delivering impartial
rulings on labour issues. Following the 1901 Taff Vale judgment, union support
for the Labour Party developed rapidly, with a view to securing maximum freedom
from judicial interference. In the 1906 Trade
Disputes Act, British unions secured the legal immunities they desired,
and the principle of legal abstention remained fundamental to the conduct of
British labour relations to the 1970s.
In a different social setting, Australasian unions believed that compulsory
arbitration would work to their advantage, and so it proved. In 1890 there was
little to suggest that the propensity to unionize was exceptionally high in
these countries, but 20 years later Australia was the most highly unionized
country in the world, and union coverage had been greatly extended in New
Zealand as well. Apart from a slight drop in the early 1920s, growth in union
membership in Australia was virtually unchecked until 1927, the proportion of
the work force organized rising from 9 to 47 percent. Compulsory arbitration
explicitly recognized and protected unions, and under it even the weakest unions
could force employers to have the pay and working conditions of their employees
fixed by an arbitration court. This capacity drew in recruits, and in both
countries growth was further encouraged by the practice of handing down
arbitration awards that conferred preference in employment on union members. In
the case of New Zealand, a 1936 amendment to the legislation of 1894 provided
for compulsory union membership--a change that led to a dramatic increase in
union coverage. In Australia a further crucial development came in 1907, with
the Arbitration Court's judgment in the Harvester case. This ruling held that a
living wage was a first charge upon industry, and it set a basic wage for
unskilled labour at a level substantially higher than existing rates--an
approach to wage determination that unions could certainly live with. Within
both countries, however, the degree of dependence of unions upon legal support
varied. Unions with a small or scattered membership (and there were many such)
were almost wholly dependent; but for larger and more concentrated
organizations, a real alternative existed in the shape of direct bargaining and strike
action.
In the years immediately before and after World War I, that alternative found
increasing support in unions of miners, railway men, and wharf workers, where,
as in Britain, the syndicalist
ideology of direct action had acquired some influence. Syndicalist rejection of
parliamentary politics, and hostility to the state in all its forms, was given
particular edge in the context of compulsory arbitration. In New Zealand a
militant Federation of Labour developed in opposition to the arbitration system,
and in 1912-13 a violent confrontation occurred in ports and mining towns, but
the strikes were broken by employers (now mobilized in defense of arbitration),
farmers, and the government. It was significant that the majority of unions
valued their registration under the Arbitration Act too highly to affiliate with
the Federation of Labour. In Australia, compulsory arbitration also survived an
increased advocacy and practice of strike action. During and after the war the
idea of the "One Big Union," which would unify existing organizations
and maximize striking power, gained a certain currency. It seems to have delayed
the emergence of an Australian counterpart to the TUC, toward which the
intercolonial congresses of the previous century had been moving. Eventually
hopes of realizing the grander plan faded, and the Australian
Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) was formed in 1927. Though some of the
impetus behind the ACTU's emergence came from those who saw it as an instrument
for the coordination of strike activity, in practice its survival owed much to
the function it performed within the federal arbitration system in representing
unions in basic wage and other national test cases.
In Britain the broadening of unionism's membership base was underpinned by
the spread of employer recognition and voluntary collective bargaining
procedures, and it was the union leaders' faith in this process that encouraged
them to believe that they could dispense with political and legal support. The
engineers' defeat in 1898 did not lead to a withdrawal of employer recognition,
and by this stage collective bargaining had spread beyond the crafts into coal
mining and cotton manufacturing. However, unlike the craft, coal, and cotton
unions, those of more recent origin still faced an uphill struggle. In the
maritime, railway, and gas industries recognition was commonly denied, but the
willingness of the new unions to recruit across occupational boundaries
contributed to their survival. During the years after 1910 it was the unions
constituted on a general or multioccupational basis that grew most rapidly. Of
the three largest unions of the second half of the 20th century, two--the Transport
and General Workers Union and the General and
Municipal Workers Union--were direct descendants of new unions of 1889.
Though union membership growth was a marked feature of the early 20th century
in Britain, as in Australasia, its upward course was less steady and more
vulnerable to shifts in the economic cycle. In the full-employment years of
1910-20 it was explosive, accompanied by an escalation of industrial militancy
in mining, railways, docks, and elsewhere. As in the former colonies, such
militancy was tinged with syndicalism. But growth was halted abruptly in 1920,
with membership at 45 percent of the work force, and in conditions of heavy
unemployment there followed a long decline into the early 1930s. Though
unemployment checked growth in the other countries as well, the contraction in
British union coverage, to 22.6 percent, was particularly severe. Despite the
shrinking membership, industrial conflict took time to abate, as employers'
efforts to force down wages were met with determined resistance. In 1921, with
the creation of a General Council, the TUC had equipped itself to coordinate
industrial action, and this power was put to the test in 1926 when a general strike
was called in support of the Miners Federation. Conflict on this scale
inevitably pitted unions against state, and it was this wider aspect of the
dispute that in the end caused the TUC, committed as it was to constitutional
modes of action, to call the strike off. Government, for its part, having
established what it regarded as the boundaries of legitimate action and having
confirmed them in legislation in 1927, was not inclined to intervene further to
restrict union activity. Nor did employers move to de-recognize unions.
In conditions of full employment and inflation following World War II, the
respective industrial relations systems of both Britain and Australasia came
under strain. In the case of compulsory arbitration, unions that had once clung
to the system when they were weak now chafed at its restrictions when their
strength was recovered. At an early stage there were confrontations involving
traditionally militant mining and wharf unions. With the Cold War then at its
height, Communist
influence within such unions called forth drastic countermeasures by
governments, and the 1949 coal strike and 1951 wharf strike, in Australia and
New Zealand, respectively, were decisively defeated. As in the past, however,
the majority of unions were not drawn into open opposition to arbitration.
Nonetheless, though the "adventurist" phase of Communist-inspired
militancy was over, more general tendencies toward direct bargaining and strike
activity persisted in both countries. Established as an alternative to
industrial conflict, compulsory arbitration always faced in practice the problem
of how to deal with strikes. A crisis was reached in Australia in the 1960s,
when unions were fined for strikes with increasing frequency. The imprisonment
of a union official in 1969, in an attempt to recover payment, led to a wave of
protest and to the tacit abandonment of penal sanctions. The episode was
revealing. It was the system's flexibility, its capacity to adapt to variations
in the balance of industrial power over time and between different industries,
that had contained the unions within it. Indeed, flexibility (and complexity)
became such marked characteristics of the system that doubt grew as to its
continued usefulness. In the 1980s the Australian government commissioned a
complete review, yet the Hancock Report that emerged recommended no fundamental
modification. Compulsory arbitration had been woven deeply into the fabric of
national life in both countries, and in the process unions had been integrated
more completely than in other democracies.
In postwar Britain, enhanced union power was widely blamed for inflation and
for overmanning and disruption in industry. Between 1945 and 1951, when the
Labour Party was in government and the wartime ban on strikes continued,
integration between state and unions was unusually close. Government acted to
break a series of dock strikes, without general union opposition, in a situation
that closely paralleled that in Australasia. Through the 1950s and '60s,
however, unions and government drifted into opposition. The wartime experiment
in compulsory arbitration had struck no deep roots and was abandoned, while the
return to purely voluntary bargaining was increasingly perceived as damaging in
its economic consequences. Under full employment, shop
steward organization spread rapidly through industry and was associated
with a growing tendency toward unofficial, or "wildcat," strike
activity. The voluntary institutions of British industrial relations appeared to
be breaking down, and they were subjected to searching review by a Royal
Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations appointed in 1965. The
largely voluntary remedies proposed by the commission did not satisfy
governments, which were intent on urgent action. In 1969 a Labour government
proposed legal restraints on unofficial strikers, enforceable by fines--a
development even less welcome to British unions than to those in Australia. The
proposals were withdrawn, but the successor Conservative government introduced a
new legal code in the Industrial Relations Act
of 1971, which included laws on unfair industrial practices and on legally
binding agreements. These and various other provisions were to be enforced by a
special Industrial Relations Court--in effect reversing the entire British
tradition of legal abstention. Even then, unions refused to be contained within
the tight legal framework that had been created, and this government was
besieged by a renewed industrial militancy that not only rendered its
legislation inoperable but also brought it to electoral defeat on the issue of
the enforcement of statutory controls on wage bargaining.
In all three countries, profound shifts in the structure of the employed
population during the later 20th century eroded the traditional membership base
of unions. In following these shifts toward white-collar,
female, and service-sector employment, unions endeavoured to match strides with
the rapidly changing composition of the work force--just as, earlier in the
century, they had broken through the divide separating skilled from unskilled
manual labour. However, though their composition was modified profoundly, with
greatly increased representation of white-collar and female employees, they
could not keep pace. Union coverage of the work force in Britain recovered to
its 1920 level in 1948, then surged forward in the 1970s to pass 50 percent for
the first time. From a peak in 1979, however, it fell away. Closer integration
with the state may have afforded Australasian unions better protection against
the adverse consequences of structural change, but this is uncertain. Australian
union coverage peaked at 60 percent in 1954; subsequent decline was checked in
the early 1970s, but by the late 1980s coverage may have been as low as 42
percent. Higher levels of unemployment from the 1970s reinforced the trend,
associated as they were with a rapid contraction of employment in union
strongholds in manufacturing, mining, and the docks. In Britain this contraction
was accelerated by a series of union defeats, the most drastic of which was
inflicted upon the National Union of Mineworkers in the great strike of 1984-85.
Legal restrictions on British unions, attempted in the 1970s, were reintroduced
in the following decade. But if the political and industrial climate had turned
more sharply against British than Australasian unions, the problem of adaptation
to change remained a common one. (J.C.Lo.) (see
also women,
service industry)
Trade unionism in North America had its beginnings in a transition during the
late 18th century from a mutualist/dependent to a free wage-labour system. As journeymen
artisans moved out of what has been called "economic clientage" to master
craftsmen, they found their interests in conflict with those of their
employers. Only through collective effort could workers enforce the list of
"prices" they established for their work and defend their trades
against cheap and diluted labour. The first identifiable labour strike dates
from 1768, when journeymen tailors in New York City stopped work to resist a pay
cut. Sustained labour organization began with the Federal Society of Journeymen
Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia in 1794.
The first sign of a labour movement--that is, organizational activity exceeding
the narrow sectional interests of particular crafts--appeared in Philadelphia,
where the various craft bodies joined in 1827 to form the Mechanics' Union of
Trade Societies. In Canada, these developments were
slower to emerge: the first craft locals appeared in Montreal in 1827 and in
Toronto in 1832, and the earliest city central came only in 1871, with the
formation of the Toronto Trades Assembly. The first national union of locals in
a single trade to survive, the National Typographical Union, was formed in 1852
in the United States. Like other national unions that followed, it chartered
locals in Canada as well; this led to its renaming in 1869 as the International
Typographical Union--a designation that became common in North American
unionism.
Rooted as it was in the preindustrial trades, this early trade unionism did
not lose its essential craft character with the onset of industrialization.
Mule spinners, molders, machinists, and iron puddlers and rollers were employing
new skills, and they functioned in a factory context, but they had much the same
collective concerns as did traditional craftsmen and fitted readily into the
emergent trade-union structure. On the railroads, too, the key jobs were defined
as operating "crafts." Even with the quickening pace of industrialism,
then, North American trade unionism in the 19th century was overwhelmingly a
movement of skilled workers.
But job consciousness, powerful though it was, by no means constituted the
sole, or even predominant, inspiration for collective activity. Historical
research on working-class life has demonstrated that labour consciousness was a
complex phenomenon, rooted in distinctive structures of culture, community, and
ideology as well as in craft identity. American workers of the Jacksonian era
adhered to a conception of artisan
republicanism, which celebrated producerist values and the republican ideals of
the American Revolution. Counter to this vision ran the corrosive impact of
emergent industrial capitalism, which, in the view
of the Philadelphia Workingmen's Party, created "invidious distinctions
[and] unjust and unnatural inequalities" by dividing Americans into
"two distinct classes, the rich and the poor." Beginning with
workingmen's parties in the 1830s, a series of labour- reform
movements fought a running battle for "equal rights." In the
1860s, this was the task of the National Labor Union
and, after its decline, of the Knights of Labor.
On their face, these reform movements seemed to cut athwart trade unionism,
insofar as they aspired to the cooperative commonwealth rather than simply to a
higher wage, appealed broadly to all "producers" rather than strictly
to wage workers, and thought of themselves as broadly inclusive political and
educational movements. But contemporaries saw no contradiction here: trade
unions tended to workers' day-to-day needs, labour reform to their higher hopes.
While the two were accepted as strands of a single labour movement, however, it
was well understood that they were strands that had to be kept operationally
apart.
During the 1880s, that functional separation began to break down. The
international craft
unions, having by now emerged as the dominant element in the trade-union
structure, became less tolerant of challenges to their jurisdictions and
internal lines of authority. For its part, despite a robust labour-reform
rhetoric, the Knights of Labor began to act increasingly like a rival
trade-union movement, carrying on strikes and organizing workers along
industrial rather than craft lines. When the Knights rejected a proposal
reaffirming the historic separation of trade-union and labour-reform functions,
the alarmed internationals joined in December 1886 and formed the American
Federation of Labor (AFL). The immediate aim was to drive the Knights
from the industrial field, and, thanks largely to the Knights' own confusion and
to employers' counterattacks, this was speedily accomplished. But more important
in the long run was the permanent stamp that the AFL made on the American labour
movement. This was partly institutional: the AFL legitimized the emergent
trade-union structure that gave preeminence to the rule of the internationals.
But equally significant was the enunciation of a guiding labour
philosophy--" pure and simple" unionism--under
the aegis of Samuel Gompers and his circle of
Marxist trade unionists. Labour reform was thenceforth denied any further role
in the struggle of American workers. The weapons in that struggle were to be
defined as economic and not political; the participants would be strictly wage
workers organized along occupational lines; and the objective of trade unionism
became exclusively the incremental achievement of higher wages and better
working conditions.
In Canada these American events had very considerable consequences. Given the
sparse settlement and small industrial base, Canadian unions found it difficult
to build a national structure of their own. An attempt initiated by the Toronto
Trades Assembly in 1873 soon failed. It was also natural, given the colonial
(after 1867, dominion) ties to Britain, for Canadian workers to look to English
unions, and at least two groups--the carpenters and engineers--in fact built up
sizable Canadian memberships after 1850. But the much more compelling links were
to the United States, partly because labour markets in many skilled trades
ignored the national boundaries and partly because the American unions were the
readiest source of institutional assistance. By the end of the 1880s, as many as
half the organized workers in Canada were in locals affiliated to internationals
with headquarters in the United States. And it was this segment of Canadian
labour that was mainly responsible for forming, parallel to the AFL, the Trades
and Labor Congress (TLC) in 1886.
For some years, the TLC followed its own bent. The Knights of Labor had been
highly successful in Canada, notably in Quebec.
After virtually disappearing from the United States in the early 1890s, the
Knights remained a considerable force in Canada, and, although strictly excluded
from the AFL, were made welcome in the TLC. As late as 1901, moreover, its
president was proposing that the Canadian branches break their links with the
internationals, form their own national unions, and turn the TLC into a wholly
Canadian movement. But in 1902 just the opposite transpired. The TLC expelled
the Knights and adopted the AFL principle of opposition to dual unionism, which
meant that the Canadian branches of the internationals gained a virtual monopoly
on trade-union representation in the TLC. It became, in effect, the Canadian
wing of the American movement. Responding to Canadian political conditions, the
TLC was somewhat more flexible than the AFL on issues of independent labour
politics and state intervention, but, on the whole, American pure-and-simple
unionism exerted the commanding influence on Canadian unionism in these years.
Only in Quebec did a very different tradition assert itself. Here, following
a lockout of boot and shoe workers in 1900, the Roman Catholic church
stepped in and, in accordance with the papal encyclical Rerum
Novarum (1891), encouraged the unionization of Quebec workers. The
result was a vigorous French Catholic movement, the Confédération
des Travailleurs Catholiques du Canada, which stands as a unique instance of
confessional unionism in North America. Only after World War II did Quebec
unionism shed its links to the church and evolve into a secular movement.
In the American West, pure-and-simple unionism was challenged in 1905 by the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW had two sources. One was the socialist
left wing, which had concluded that the AFL could not be captured and made over
into the necessary trade-union base for socialist electoral politics. The second
was a western brand of working-class radicalism forged by a decade of industrial
war in the western mining states. The two groups proved incompatible, and the
IWW, dominated by radicals from the Western Federation of Miners, drove out the
socialists and committed itself to a syndicalist
version of class war, in which political action was excluded. Struggle would
centre on direct industrial action and ultimately on the revolutionary general
strike, and out of that would emerge a workers' society organized on the basis
of industrial unions. The IWW led a number of important strikes in the east
between 1907 and 1913, but its main theatre of operations was among western
workers, including Canadians, in metal mining, lumber, transportation, and
agriculture. During World War I, however, the IWW was violently suppressed, and
it never regained the organizational momentum of its peak years between 1914 and
1917.
The Canadian version of western syndicalism sprang into life in 1919, just as
the IWW was expiring. This was the One Big Union (OBU), which had its roots in a
postwar labour disaffection from conventional trade unionism that was especially
pronounced in western Canada. Structured more along geographic than along the
industrial-union lines of the IWW, the OBU had its moment of glory in the Winnipeg
General Strike of 1919, and for a few years thereafter it virtually
displaced the TLC as the dominant movement in the four western provinces. The
OBU, despite its swift collapse, left behind a significant regional legacy:
thereafter, the western provinces would persistently be the site of a more
progressive, politically active brand of Canadian trade unionism.
The syndicalist challenge stemmed, to some degree, from the failing fortunes
of pure-and-simple unionism in the early decades of the 20th century. The
essence of that formulation had been to locate labour's struggle firmly in the
industrial arena. But the struggle for collective bargaining proved to be much
harder than Gompers and other trade unionists had anticipated. Where competitive
pressures were severe enough, as in bituminous coal mining, not even the most
innovative and determined of union efforts at market control proved
sufficient--hence the collapse of the United
Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in the 1920s. Elsewhere, as in the
metal-fabricating industries, the problem was the speed of technological
innovation and, in particular, the perfection of mass-production
methods, which undercut the role of craft workers. Scientific management,
moreover, demanded strict supervisory control over the workplace and hence posed
a profound threat to customary patterns of workers' autonomy in the labour
process. When an effort to find common ground in the Murray Hill agreement
(1900) between the International Association of Machinists and the National
Metal Trades Association failed within a year, the die was cast: a
quarter-century of bitter industrial warfare ensued. Labour's fortunes varied at
different times and places, but the end result was unquestionably an arrested
labour movement, with union penetration settling at roughly 10 percent of the
nonagricultural labour force. As welfare capitalism took hold in the New Era of
the 1920s, the more advanced sectors of the industrial economy seemed quite
beyond the reach of the AFL. (see also industrial
engineering)
With the onset of the Great
Depression in 1929, the balance of forces in the United States shifted
dramatically. To begin with, national politics became more favourable to
organized labour. Partly for ideological reasons, partly because of labour's
increasing influence on the Democratic Party, Franklin Roosevelt's New
Deal proved much more responsive to trade-union demands than had the
Republican administrations of the post-World War I era. By now, moreover, key
union leaders--most important, John L. Lewis of
the UMWA and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America--had
defined what the labour movement most required from the state: protection of the
rights of workers to organize and engage in collective bargaining. These rights
were asserted in principle under Section 7(a) of the National
Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 and then made thoroughly
effective by passage of the National Labor Relations Act
in 1935. More commonly known as the Wagner Act, the latter legislation
prohibited employers from interfering with the right of workers to organize and
from dominating the organizations they established. It also defined the
procedures by which, through majority rule, workers selected their bargaining
agents; required employers to bargain with such agents to the end of reaching
contractual agreements; and set up, through the National
Labor Relations Board, quasi-judicial mechanisms for enforcement of the
law. American employers lost the enormous power advantages they had enjoyed in
the struggle over collective bargaining, but in exchange the labour movement
conceded the highly prized independence from the state that was a core element
of pure-and-simple unionism. Under the Wagner Act, collective bargaining
remained "free"--that is, the terms of agreements were not to be
mandated by the state--but the framework itself came securely under the aegis of
state regulation. (see also labour law)
At the same time, the New Deal moved to mitigate the market pressures that
had driven the antiunionism
of American employers. The NIRA legislation, through codes of fair competition,
was designed to enable industries to cartelize their depression-ridden markets.
The exchange was entirely deliberate--granting representational rights to
workers as a price for granting market controls to industry. As the basis of New
Deal economic policy, this attempt at industrial stabilization lasted only two
years, but the underlying linkage of labour rights and market benefits survived
invalidation of the NIRA by the Supreme Court in 1935.
The Wagner Act contained an explicit economic rationale: collective
bargaining would generate the mass purchasing
power essential for sustained economic growth. This, in turn, prefigured
the Keynesian economic policy that, by managing demand, became the government's
way of underwriting the New Deal's collective bargaining system after World War
II. With federal macroeconomic policy (as specified by the Employment
Act of 1946) responsible for maintaining long-term demand, and price
competition firmly controlled by the restored oligopolistic structures of the
major industries (or, as in the transportation and communications sectors, by
direct state regulation), the market-driven basis for American antiunionism
seemed to have run its course in the postwar era. (see also supply
and demand)
Much the same could be said for the labour-process basis for antiunionism in
the key mass-production sectors. By the 1930s, the Taylorist crisis over job
control had passed; what remained at issue was no longer whether managers had
the authority to control the labour process but only how they would exercise it.
There were compelling reasons, almost systemic in nature, for the formalization
of labour-relations
policies. For example, where tasks were subdivided and precisely defined, job
classification necessarily followed, and from that in turn came the principle of
pay equity. Time-and-motion study--another pillar
of Taylorist management--meant objective, testable standards for setting the
pace of work. Corporate commitment to this formalized system was imperfect,
however, and broke down disastrously in the early years of the Great Depression.
Rank-and-file fury over job insecurity and intolerable speedups, plus pressure
from New Deal agencies and the labour movement, forced management's hand.
Consequently, between 1933 and 1936--before collective bargaining actually
began--all the key elements of the modern workplace regime fell more or less
into place: specified, uniform rights for workers (beginning with seniority and
pay equity); a formal procedure to adjudicate grievances arising from those
rights; and a structure of shop-floor representation to implement the grievance
procedure. Corporate employers would have much preferred to keep this regime
under nonunion conditions. Indeed, it had taken shape in the course of their
efforts to implant so-called employee representation plans (i.e.,
company unions) that they had hoped would satisfy the requirements of New Deal
labour policy. But when that strategy failed, managers were prepared to have
their workplace regimes incorporated into contractual
relationships with independent unions within the terms of the Wagner Act. (see
also labour, division of, seniority system, grievance
procedure)
To fulfill its part in this process, the labour movement had first of all to
adopt an industrial-union (i.e.,
plantwide) structure appropriate to mass-production industry. The problem was
that the AFL was committed to a craft structure and, under its constitutional
rules, lacked the means to compel member unions to cede jurisdictions they held
over craft workers in the mass-production sector to the emerging industrial
unions. This impasse was broken only by a split within the AFL in 1935, leading
to the formation of the rival Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO) under the leadership of John
L. Lewis. Even then, once the CIO unions scored their dramatic unionizing
victories in rubber, auto, and steel of 1936 and 1937, a second condition had to
be met: the CIO unions had to demonstrate their capacity to enforce the
contractual provisions of workplace due process and discipline a turbulent rank
and file. World War II brought this second phase
to completion. Under close wartime regulation, institutional relations between
the CIO and corporate industry were solidified, and, after a strike wave tested
the parameters of this relationship in the immediate postwar period, there
ensued a system of industrywide collective bargaining that endured for the next
40 years.
The industrial-union struggle spilled over from the United States into
Canada. At the insistence of the AFL, the TLC expelled the Canadian branches of
the CIO internationals in 1939. The next year these CIO unions joined the
remnants of the All-Canadian
Congress of Labour, which had formed in 1927 on the dual principles of
industrial unionism and Canadian nationalism, to create the Canadian
Congress of Labour (CCL) in affiliation with the American CIO. Only
during World War II, however, did organizational realities begin to catch up
with these superstructural developments. Although stirred by events south of the
border, the Canadian movement did not experience a comparable surge of
organization during the Great Depression. Only in February 1944 did the wartime
administration of W.L. Mackenzie King issue Order
in Council P.C. 1003, granting to Canadian workers collective-bargaining rights
that American workers already enjoyed under the Wagner Act. The Canadian
version, however, allowed for a greater degree of public intervention in the
bargaining process. Investigative and cooling-off provisions in labour disputes
were already a cornerstone of Canadian policy (going back to Mackenzie King's
Industrial Disputes Investigative Act of 1907), and wartime conditions demanded
a no-strike provision (linked to the mandatory inclusion of binding arbitration
of grievances in union contracts), which likewise became a permanent feature of
Canadian labour-relations law. During the war decade, the Canadian
mass-production sector was rapidly organized by CIO unions. (see also labour
law)
By the early 1950s the organizational situation was similar on both sides of
the border. In both countries, one-third of the nonagricultural labour force was
unionized. In both countries, the industrial-union federations peaked at roughly
two-thirds the size of their longer established craft rivals. At the onset of
the Cold War, an internal crisis over Communist
participation gripped the labour movements of both countries. Although somewhat
different in its details, the outcome was identical on both sides of the
border--the expulsion of Communist-dominated unions in 1949 and 1950. And when
the American unions settled their differences and merged into the AFL-CIO
in 1955, the Canadian federations followed suit the next year by uniting in the Canadian
Labour Congress (CLC). At that point, 70 percent of all Canadian
unionists belonged to international unions with headquarters in the United
States. The 1950s can be said to mark the apex of this historical tendency
toward an integrated Canadian-American movement.
Beginning in the 1960s, the fortunes of the two movements diverged. In the
United States, market pressures steadily eroded the postwar
collective-bargaining system. In auto, steel, and clothing, the problem was
intensifying foreign competition; in communications, trucking, railroads, and
airlines, it was federal deregulation in the 1970s; and elsewhere, as in mining,
retailing, and meat processing, a host of nonunionized domestic competitors
entered the field. Meanwhile, a structural shift occurred toward a service
economy, narrowing the established union base in the goods-producing sectors:
production workers made up 30 percent of the nonagricultural U.S. labour force
in 1950 but only 22 percent in 1976. The economic troubles that then set
in--declining productivity and a slowing growth rate, inflation, the harsh
recession of 1982--had a devastating impact on the American movement. Between
1975 and 1984, four million members were lost, and the unionized share of the
labour force shrank from 28.9 percent to below 20 percent. If not for
public-employee unions, which added two million members between 1956 and 1976,
the U.S. labour movement would have found itself in an even more parlous state,
as unionization in the private sector slipped to close to pre-New Deal levels.
(see also service industry)
Canada's economy was comparably hard hit in these years, yet unions north of
the border fared far better. Indeed, they grew steadily after the mid-1960s,
and, with 3.5 million members by the early 1980s, claimed over 40 percent of the
Canadian labour force--more than twice the union density in the United States.
How is this remarkable divergence to be explained?
The decline of the American movement occurred within an increasingly hostile
political environment. In Canada, on the other hand, a changing party system
enhanced labour's place in Canadian public life. In 1961, with the backing of
Canadian labour, the New
Democratic Party (NDP) was formed as a social-democratic rival to the
Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties. As it made headway, the NDP
changed the landscape of Canadian politics. For its part, Canadian organized
labour, by abandoning the nonpartisanship espoused by the AFL-CIO, not only
gained political muscle but also became a progressive force in the nation's
public life. It assumed the mantle of what has been called "social
unionism"--in stark contrast to the political marginalization of the
AFL-CIO that followed the collapse of the Democratic New Deal coalition in the
late 1960s.
Beginning with passage of the Taft-Hartley
Act of 1947, which applied unfair-labour-practice provisions to unions
and in a variety of ways weakened their economic and organizational power,
labour law in the United States became steadily more burdensome to the labour
movement. By contrast, Canadian federal and provincial law retained, and even
deepened, its pro-union bias. Nor was there any Canadian counterpart to U.S.
President Ronald Reagan's decision in 1981 to
break a strike by federal air-traffic controllers--an act of enormous symbolic
importance that legitimized the resurgence of antiunionism
in corporate America. Antiunionism gained no such public legitimacy in Canada.
Underlying this was a factor emphasized by the sociologist Seymour Martin
Lipset: that collectivist values inhering in Canadian political culture granted
the labour movement a legitimacy it never quite achieved in the more
entrepreneurial nation south of the border.
As these divergences became more marked, the "international"
character of the North American movement began to wane. Public-employee
unionism--even more prominent a recent development in Canada than in the United
States--would have sufficed in itself to push the Canadian movement in an
independent direction, but Canadian branches in the private sector as well began
to break loose, some by seeking greater autonomy within their international
unions, but others--including those of communications workers, paper workers,
woodworkers, and auto workers--by splitting off and becoming independent. A
dwindling share of the Canadian movement--less than 35 percent by 1990--retained
ties to the AFL-CIO. Two developments offered some prospect for reviving the
integrationist bent of the North American movement: first, the creation of a
common U.S.-Canadian economic market and, second, the deepening crisis in Canada
over an independent Quebec. But, in the main, events of the 1970s and '80s
merely underscored the very different dynamics that were driving the Canadian
and American trade-union movements and that seemed to be carrying them farther
apart along separate paths of national development.
(Da.B.)
The history of unionism on the European
continent differs significantly in several respects from that in Britain and
the United States. First, industrial development came later and proceeded faster
than in Britain, with plants and enterprises starting on a large scale and often
using the most advanced technology. This disconnected European unions from
medieval craft traditions and prevented the establishment of a system of craft
unions representing only workers with a specific skill. Early attempts
at craft unionism were soon absorbed into broad and encompassing industrial
unions, which organized all workers in an industry or country regardless of
skill and employment status. These unions represented primarily the interests of
workers in large establishments who had no particular skills to defend and whose
employers exercized firm control over the organization of work, or they
represented workers in industries such as railways, mining, and electricity
supply, in which labour relations were a matter of
public interest and concern. Not being able to monopolize an indispensable skill
and thereby realize their interests at the workplace and through the market
alone, workers in such industries needed unions capable of mobilizing mass
solidarity across occupational boundaries. As a consequence, western European
union movements have usually formed strong national confederations capable of
representing their affiliates in political bargaining with the government;
maintained weak or nonexistent division between skilled and unskilled, and often
between blue-collar and white-collar, members or affiliates; contained a small
number of large, instead of a large number of small, individual unions;
conducted comprehensive industrywide collective bargaining with a tendency to
reduce or eliminate wage differentials by sector, employer, skill, or
occupation; and pursued a universalistic social policy--on such issues as social
insurance, health care, and occupational safety--that takes the place of
enterprise- or group-specific "voluntary" regulations
characteristically negotiated by more narrowly defined, sectional unions.
A second distinction of trade unionism in western Europe emerged in the area
of managerial prerogative. Since many continental industries started at new
sites and on a large scale, they were less burdened with a legacy of local management
and craft autonomy than were British enterprises. Because of the more unitary
and centralized organization of European firms, a distinction between management
and labour and the right of management to manage were from the beginning more
securely established, and shop-floor contestation between management and labour
over the organization of the labour process became much less central to European
than to British and American industrial relations. Representing both unskilled
and skilled workers in large establishments, western European industrial unions
were never committed to defending job demarcations among skilled and between
skilled and unskilled workers. This enabled especially the more politically
powerful union movements to accept managerial prerogative and high flexibility
in internal labour markets. In fact, their lack of commitment to any specific division
of labour on the shop floor later enabled European unions to support and
promote comprehensive public and private labour-market policies of general
upgrading of skills and jobs. And while effective centralized control over the
shop floor was ceded to management from the beginning, that control was later
available to share with politically powerful unions if and when these were
willing to seek legislation on "industrial democracy."
"Cooperative" union participation in management then became possible,
because industrial unions had no history of resisting large-scale organization
as such, were not beholden to any particular group of workers, and had no
principal interest in curtailing firms' internal flexibility.
A third defining characteristic of trade-union history in western Europe is
in the area of political power. Unable to afford the laissez-faire liberalism of
Victorian Britain, European states early on took an active role in the
regulation of labour markets, often siding with capital in support of rapid
accumulation. At a time when the doctrines of voluntarism and state abstention
became established in British industrial relations, unions were regarded by
European ruling elites as a threat to both national unity and economic progress.
In these circumstances, " pure-and-simple"
unionism was impossible. European unions had little choice but to define
themselves as political movements--at least until conditions for independent,
economic unionism had been created--and in fact they typically started out as
industrial arms of political parties, usually socialist or Roman Catholic. Where
political unionism was of the Roman Catholic
kind, it aimed at establishing an autonomous space for cooperative industrial
self-governance of workers and employers, free from interference by the modern
nation-state. Where the guiding political doctrine was Socialist
or, after 1917, Communist, the objective was to
gain control over the state in order to use its growing interventionist
capacities for fundamental social transformation in the interest of workers.
Finally, where political unionism was syndicalist or anarchist, its ultimate
goal was to replace the state with a political organization based on the
workplace and on relations between associated producers.
Just as craft unionism gives rise to fragmentation by occupation, so
political unionism may breed fragmentation along party lines, and by the end of
the 19th century almost all continental European union movements outside
Scandinavia were ideologically divided. In order to overcome these divisions,
unions had to extricate themselves from the control of allied political parties,
and European industrial-political unionism became most powerful where unions
managed to escape political division, overcome it to form unified organizations,
or coordinate their policies. Where organizational unity was accomplished, it
enabled political unionism to become an independent economic and political
force, continuing universalist traditions of comprehensive social reform without
being subservient to any particular party or government strategy. Especially in
northern and northwestern Europe, unions became established participants in
national politics, functioning in a wide variety of policy areas as recognized
quasi-public or para-governmental intermediary institutions.
By the early 20th century western European unions were making slow but steady
progress toward expanding their membership, extending the range of collective
bargaining, consolidating their organizations, and winning legal and political
recognition. The breakthrough, however, came with World War I.
Wartime mobilization brought tight labour markets, rapid expansion of mass
production, long working days, hazardous working conditions in arms and
ammunition factories, and soaring profits for employers. It also ushered in
state intervention and economic planning on an unprecedented scale. As the war
dragged on, national elites found themselves compelled to include labour leaders
in the governance of the war economy as managers of rising shop-floor
discontent. Typically, union cooperation was gained in exchange for promises of
democratization, union recognition, and redress of social inequities after the
war.
Ironically, the position of moderate union leaders in national war coalitions
was strengthened by objection among workers to the war and to the sacrifices
demanded of them. All over Europe, autonomous movements of shop-floor workers'
councils emerged, continuing labour's prewar tradition of pacifism and
internationalism. Workers' councils not only opposed the governments that
organized the war and the employers that profited from it but they also rejected
the leadership of collaborationist unions and social-democratic political
parties. Rather than parliamentary social democracy, their objective was a syndicalist
political order founded on and controlled by councils of industrial workers.
Especially toward the end of the war, council movements succeeded in organizing
major strikes in a number of countries, and in Russia the Bolsheviks overthrew
the tsar with a program of soviet (that is, "council") democracy (see
below Eastern Europe). All of this enabled moderate union leaders to
extract more promises and commitments from governments, military leaders, and
employers for the time after the war.
Faced with overexpanded economies, huge national debts, a radicalized and
assertive working class, and the threat of revolutionary internationalism
inspired and supported by the Soviet Union, employers and political elites after
1918 were eager to close ranks with the moderate labour leaders who had assumed
quasi-governmental responsibility during the war. In country after country,
unions obtained major concessions, such as universal suffrage and parliamentary
democracy, the right to strike, legal support of union organization and
industrywide collective bargaining, the extension of industrial agreements to
nonunionized firms and sectors, the eight-hour working day, a wide range of
social benefits, joint councils of unions and employers to oversee key
industries, and works councils to represent workers at the workplace. Often
these were conceded as elements of comprehensive social pacts--like the
Stinnes-Legien Agreement in Germany--that were
negotiated between national organizations of capital and labour and underwritten
by the government, apparently foreshadowing a continuing role of unions in the
governance of national economies.
In most European countries, the bulk of the concessions made in the immediate
aftermath of the war were withdrawn in subsequent years. Increasingly, the
stabilization of western Europe's war-torn economies came to be perceived as
possible only at the expense of workers and unions, with the fight against
inflation seeming to require wage cuts, longer hours, curtailment of union
rights, sharp reductions in public spending, and the resulting high
unemployment. As domestic conflicts intensified, the political right found
confirmed its old doubts about the compatibility of social order and national
unity with democracy and free trade unions, and even the moderate left came
again to question the compatibility of democracy and full employment with
capitalism. The Great Depression of the early
1930s, in particular, brought large-scale unemployment and made deep inroads in
the organizational strength and political influence of unions, in many countries
abolishing the fragile postwar gains in the institutionalization of union rights
and collective bargaining.
By the end of the 1920s at the latest, national political systems in Europe
began to drift sharply apart. First in Italy
and most dramatically in Germany, Fascist or conservative-authoritarian regimes
either outlawed unions altogether--often driving their leaders from their
countries, incarcerating them, or assassinating them--or turned them into
appendages of an ever-more powerful state apparatus. Authoritarian responses to
class conflict and economic crisis were encouraged by an international
environment that seemed to offer little opportunity for shared economic growth
and few if any alternatives to nationalist protection and preparation for
renewed military hostilities.
In Sweden, on the other hand, the electoral
victory of the Social
Democrats in 1932 paved the way for the first successful attempt to
achieve full employment by Keynesian means under political democracy and free
collective bargaining within a capitalist economy. After intense industrial and
social conflict in the 1920s, the Social Democrats were able to unite their
country behind a platform of state-led expansion, an extensive social-welfare
policy, social equality, and institutionalized autonomy for responsible,
centralized, and comprehensive collective bargaining. In 1938, the peak
associations of business and labour concluded the Saltsjöbaden Agreement,
in which, while affirming the rights of unions to strike and of employers to
lock out in retaliation, they pledged to use these measures only as a last
resort and in consideration of their effect on third parties. Swedish unions,
having moved into a secure position of industrial strength in which their
actions inevitably affected the performance of the national economy, accepted
responsibility for economic growth and monetary stability in exchange for a
number of concessions: a complementary social and labour-market policy; the
cooperation of employers in a reduction of pay differentials; progressive
taxation; expansion of employment in the public sector; and equal participation
of women in the work force. Given such economic and political strength, Swedish
unions were prepared to accept employers' claims to an almost unlimited right to
manage. As World War II drew closer, therefore, Germany and Sweden represented
opposite ends of a wide spectrum of western European politics and industrial
relations.
It was only after 1945, under the leadership of the two victorious
democracies, the United States and Britain, that unions and collective
bargaining became firmly established throughout western Europe. In some
countries, business and traditional elites were discredited by their
collaboration with Fascist regimes or the German occupation. In others, joint
resistance during the war had laid the ground for close postwar cooperation.
Everywhere, the presence of Soviet Communism as an apparent alternative to
capitalism seemed to make it imperative to include moderate labour movements in
the reconstruction. And not least, the United
States, as the architect of a system of free trade intended to be immune
against the nationalism of the interwar years, needed to ensure that competing
economies were saddled with the same social costs that it had incurred under the
New Deal.
Modern western Europe thus came to be built on a "historical
compromise" between capital and labour. Among the concessions gained by the
latter were a firm commitment to parliamentary democracy; a welfare state
establishing a basic floor of income and services for all citizens; a commitment
of governments, of whatever political complexion, to an active full-employment
policy; and the right of unions to free collective bargaining. In return,
moderate labour movements pledged to pursue political
reform only by constitutional means, renouncing in particular the use of
the strike for political purposes; tolerated private property in the means of
production; accepted a free-market economy with little or no public intervention
in price formation; and agreed in principle to observe the right of management
to manage. By the end of the 1950s at the latest, most European unions had,
explicitly or implicitly, come to accept the terms of this bargain.
This second postwar settlement marked the beginning of the longest
uninterrupted period of peace and prosperity in European history. Embedded in an
international free-trade regime guaranteed and dominated by the United States,
it helped accelerate the spread from America to Europe of "Fordist"
modes of production and accumulation: the mass manufacture of standardized
consumer durables in factories that used Taylorist methods of work organization
and were operated by large, vertically integrated, and increasingly
multinational corporations. By helping to expand and maintain the purchasing
power of mass consumers, European unions also played an important part in the
stabilization of economic growth. Moreover, by concentrating their activities on
macroeconomic wage bargaining and redistributive social policies at the national
level, political-industrial unions left managers the freedom to introduce new
technologies and to rationalize the labour process in pursuit of higher
productivity and profitability.
An inherent problem of the post-World War II settlement was that, with
governments guaranteeing full employment and free collective bargaining,
inflation could be contained only if unions resisted using their artificially
increased bargaining power to win wage gains in excess of productivity
increases. This required, at the minimum, effective control of national unions
over the shop floor. While European industrial unions were much more successful
in this than their British counterparts, by the end of the 1960s even their hold
on their members began to slip. In part this was caused by a general rise in
inflation imported from the United States. When unions continued to exercise
wage restraint in increasingly overheated national economies, a new generation
of workers that had not lived through the Great Depression and had never
experienced unemployment turned against their leaders. All over Europe, massive
waves of unofficial strikes occurred in 1968 and 1969, organized from the shop
floor in defiance of national union policy and throwing moderate "income
policies" into disarray. More subtle factors also contributed to this
outbreak. By concentrating on macroeconomic matters during a period of
aggressive rationalization and fast productivity growth, industrial unions had
left workers with little protection at the workplace. Growing discontent with an
ever more perfect Taylorist organization of work, workers found no official
representation in an industrial-relations system that had accepted managerial
prerogative in the workplace in exchange for the recognition and political
status of unions, full employment, growing wages, and a comprehensive welfare
state. Remarkably, such discontent emerged strongly even in countries, such as
Italy and France, where unions were weak and the
shop floor was ruled by employer paternalism, and Germany and Sweden, where
union distance from the "qualitative" issues of the workplace was part
of a general union strategy of economywide solidarity and egalitarianism.
During the 1960s it had come to be widely believed in Europe that worker
militancy was a matter of the past and that strikes in particular were withering
away. This made the shock of 1968 and '69 all the more profound, and in the
immediate aftermath employers and national governments accepted high wage
increases and inflation rates in order to avoid further confrontations with
workers. This lasted well into 1973 and 1974, the years of the first oil crisis,
when governments continued to assign high priority to full employment without
touching unions' right to free collective bargaining. Instead, economic
stabilization was sought by bringing unions still further into the centre of
policy making, increasing rather than curtailing their power and responsibility
and helping them strengthen their organizations so that national union leaders
could manage shop-floor discontent more effectively. This brought about a new
political configuration that came to be known as " neocorporatism."
Essentially a tripartite social contract involving government, business, and
labour, neocorporatism sought to restore full employment through moderate wage
demands (often entailing losses in real wages and distributive position), in
return for which unions were granted influence over policies relating to
subjects such as unemployment insurance, employment protection, early
retirement, working hours, old-age pensions, health insurance, housing,
taxation, public-sector employment, vocational training, regional aid, and
subsidies to declining industries. In addition, governments and employers agreed
to a variety of means to help industrial unions strengthen their workplace
organizations so they could better absorb worker discontent. One important means
was legislation on industrial democracy. " Codetermination,"
as it was called in Germany and Sweden, provided workers with
quasi-constitutionalized shop-floor representation on nonwage matters, such as
work organization, that industrial unions had been unable or unwilling to
address before 1968. Thus, in order to prevent a return of the representation
gap of the 1960s and channel the energies of workplace unionists into
economically innocuous activities, governments in a number of countries allowed
industrial democracy to make significant inroads into managerial discretion. For
this and other reasons, neocorporatism increasingly alienated European
employers, but unions, backed by and working through the new or expanded
institutions of industrial democracy, often succeeded in increasing their
membership density during the 1970s.
The second oil shock in 1979 heralded fundamental changes in European
economic policy and industrial relations. Faced with persistently high
unemployment, an increasingly integrated world capital market and a rapid loss
of competitive position to Japan, European governments gradually abandoned their
attempts at bargained national accommodation with organized labour and gave
preference to supply-side policies of competitive restructuring. An important
factor in this restructuring was the advance of microelectronic technology.
Unlike the dedicated technology of the Fordist period, microelectronics
allowed for a variety of alternative, "flexible" ways of organizing
production in response to different product strategies, local organizational
structures and cultures, and available work skills. For unions to play a role in
the reorganization of productive relations that was made possible (and
necessary) by the new technologies, they had to decentralize their
organizational and political capacities and create a strong union presence in
the workplace.
Other factors also militated toward the decentralization of unions and
industrial relations. As the work force became increasingly heterogenous, its
interests were less easily subsumed under the blue-collar egalitarianism that
had dominated union policies since the interwar and immediate postwar years. In
particular, during the 1960s and '70s pay differentials had been reduced to the
point where many skilled and white-collar workers were no longer willing to be
represented by comprehensive, "solidaristic" collective bargaining.
Class-based solidarity was further attenuated by growing employment in the
public sector--often under privileged conditions that in the leaner 1980s were
perceived by private-sector workers as coming at their expense. As a result,
national unions found it more difficult to unite their members behind common
demands. Where centralized wage bargaining did not actually break up--as it did
in Sweden--union leaders came under pressure to give groups inside their
organizations greater freedom to express and pursue their special interests.
During the 1980s most western European unions came to realize that the
survival of the high-wage and high-welfare economies that they had been so
instrumental in creating depended less on political bargains with the government
and national employers' associations than on participating in this restructuring
toward a flexible, highly skilled, innovative economy capable of producing
customized and quality-competitive goods and services. This seemed to require
cooperative workplace relations, flexible internal labour markets, extensive
training and retraining of workers, and a fundamental reorganization of work.
This last involved a blurring of the distinction between conception and
execution or between indirect and direct, nonmanual and manual, and managerial
and nonmanagerial work; decentralization of decision making; flatter
hierarchies; and broader and overlapping job descriptions and skill profiles.
Never having depended for their strength on job control, European unions
found it easier to adapt to the "post-Fordist" forms of industrial
organization than did their British or American counterparts. Still, adaptation
required that unions decentralize their organizations and insert themselves into
the workplace in a way that jeopardized neither productive cooperation nor their
own independence. For this,
industrial unions that could avail themselves of
established systems of industrial democracy and codetermination seem to have
been particularly well placed. Indeed, German and Scandinavian
unions in particular may actually have contributed to the quality-competitive
restructuring of their economies by, on the one hand, foreclosing employers'
options of hiring low-wage and low-skill labour and, on the other hand, exerting
pressures and creating opportunities at the workplace for the de-Taylorization
of work organization and the general upgrading of production. Especially
important in this context were the unions' roles in labour-market policy and
vocational training.
By adjusting to the requirements of productive flexibility at the workplace,
then, most Scandinavian unions increased their membership density, while
Belgian, German, and in part Italian unions maintained their strength. In
France, Spain, and to an extent The Netherlands and Austria, on the other hand,
unions were left behind by rapid industrial modernization and went into
precipitous decline. (W.St.)
Trade unionism in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe developed in close
relationship with political parties, usually revolutionary parties. Because the
autocratic Russian state prohibited public organization of any sort, especially
trade unions, autonomous workers' movements often shared common interests with
revolutionary parties and tended to cooperate with them. Moreover, revolutionary
Marxist parties grew simultaneously with an industrialized, urban labour force,
so that political ideas--especially revolution and Socialism--helped to give
definition to workplace struggle. Russian and Polish labour movements will serve
as examples here.
The earliest Russian labour organizations emerged among artisans in the form
of legal guilds, which were not autonomous or spontaneous institutions but
rather subject to close state supervision. Late in the 19th century, these were
joined by mutual-aid societies, which spread among the more skilled and literate craftsmen
in capital cities and among Jewish artisans in the western part of the empire.
Particularly among the latter, such societies sometimes evolved into illegal
organizations for struggle with employers, but by and large their function was
to provide mutual support and cultural self-help. The earliest mutual-aid
societies were begun by printers in Warsaw (1814), Riga (1816), and Odessa
(1816), but their real expansion came in the late 1880s and the 1890s.
Meanwhile, the population of factory workers grew outside of the artisanal
tradition, finding recruits among peasants and children of hereditary factory
workers in state-owned military enterprises. Traditions of solidarity among
factory workers were based on ties with fellow countrymen and on informal
collective living arrangements called artels. (see also friendly
society)
The growth of industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries gave rise to
a factory proletariat and to labour unrest, but government repression prevented
intermittent strikes from leading to permanent forms of organization. Agitators
from Marxist Social-Democratic groups attempted to organize strikers, but they
were hampered by frequent arrest and imprisonment and by the reluctance of
workers to entrust their struggle to the hands of outside intellectuals. In
1901, however, the Russian government embarked on a unique experiment and
organized its own police-supervised unions to channel worker protest and
preserve loyalty to the tsarist regime. Led by the chief of security police in
Moscow, Sergey Vasilyevich
Zubatov, such unions quickly emerged primarily among skilled factory
workers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, Vilnius, and Minsk. While the
experiment soon lost favour with the government, it gave workers new experience
with collective bargaining and grievance
procedures, and it led to their demands for the right to choose shop-floor
representatives and to strike.
The unrest that led to the Russian
Revolution of 1905 grew out of this movement among factory workers, and
in October of that year the tsar conceded to workers the right to organize trade
unions. From their foundations in mutual-aid societies, police unions, and the
independent strike councils (soviets) that had emerged during the revolution,
new trade unions multiplied in October and November of 1905. In St. Petersburg,
30,000 workers joined 41 unions in just six weeks. In Moscow, 56 unions were
created in this period, embracing about 25,000 workers. In both cities,
tradesmen employed by small shops were the first to organize; metalworkers and
textile workers, employed primarily in large plants, were slower to join unions,
in part because their individual factories were big enough to offer by
themselves the advantages of organization and solidarity.
The wave of union organizing continued into 1906 and 1907 with the
publication of the Temporary Laws of March 4, 1906, legalizing the formation of
public organizations. Union activists attempted to organize nationally, but
before an all-Russia trade-union congress could take place, the union movement
succumbed to a wave of reaction set off by the dissolution of the second state
Duma (parliament) in June 1907. Police found unions in violation of some
regulation or another (organizing strikes remained illegal, for example) and
ordered them closed. The resulting precarious legal status of unions frightened
prospective members, and union fortunes waned. Between 1907 and 1909, police
closed 350 unions and arrested many of the most important labour leaders. By
1910, union membership had fallen to 60,000, compared to 250,000 members in
January 1907. Beyond these legal members, there remained, in the underground or
in exile, dedicated cadres of Social-Democratic activists who would become
important leaders when unions' fortunes revived.
Economic recession and political repression combined to depress trade-union
activity until 1912. Those unions that remained legal could offer little to
their members besides cultural activities and fellowship; collective bargaining,
strikes, political activity, and intercity contact were all forbidden. During
this period, differences between the approaches of Menshevism and Bolshevism,
the two wings of the Russian
Social-Democratic Workers' Party, became more pronounced. Mensheviks
believed in service to the working class and focused on consumer cooperatives,
schools, libraries, and clubs. Bolsheviks tended
to engage in political and strike activity, trying to force a revolutionary
situation. When union activism revived in 1912, unionists agitated for legal
shop-floor representatives and collective labour contracts. Strikes increased in
the period 1912-14 but remained outside the union sphere. Modest gains in labour
legislation gave encouragement to a reformist wing of the union movement, but
continued government harassment forced many activists to adopt a more
revolutionary ideology. World War I propelled
hundreds of thousands of new workers--women, youths, and peasants--into Russian
factories, diluting the old skilled cadres and creating new pressures on work
culture. As a result, when the Russian Revolution of
1917 brought an immediate freedom to organize, trade unions had to
compete as centres of organization with less cumbersome factory committees and
urban soviets of workers' deputies. The main concerns of factory committees were
local grievances, representing their factory to larger bodies, and adjudicating
disputes among workers themselves, but, as trade unions failed to organize
quickly enough to deal with problems of wages, hours, control, and regulation,
factory committees began to join in citywide conferences to deal with many of
these problems. Simultaneously, unions formed administrative structures,
recruited members, and began to coordinate economic bargaining with employers.
By the end of 1917, more than 2,000 unions had formed in Russia, with a reported
membership of 2.7 million workers. (see also communism)
When the Bolsheviks came to power in November 1917 (October 1917, Old Style),
much of Russian industry was at a standstill. Workers in many idle factories
assumed the responsibility of restarting the plants, usually through their
factory committees, but gradually, between 1918 and 1920, central and local
government agencies took over. Most trade-union leaders agreed that, under
Socialism, the primary task of unions was to facilitate production and that
workers' interests were now identical to state employers' interests. Trade
unions assumed more state functions, serving as military recruiting offices,
centres of supply, providers of social services, and judicial organs. A minority
of independent union leaders argued that the interests of workers and managers
would always conflict, even under socialized industry, and that the task of
unions was to defend workers first. A syndicalist minority within the Communist Party
(as the Bolsheviks were renamed in 1918) believed that independent trade unions
should manage the state economy. By 1921 a compromise was reached, pressured by
widespread factory discontent: trade unions were thenceforth to have a
"dual function" of helping to raise productivity while guaranteeing
workers' legitimate rights against overbearing managers. As a "transmission
belt" between the Party and the working rank and file, they would serve as
a "school for Communism" and teach workers that their interests were
identical with those of the state.
During the 1920s trade unions worked closely with state agencies in setting
wages, providing unemployment relief and social services, and raising
productivity. With the rapid industrialization drive of 1928-32, they became
little more than administrative cogs of decreasing relevance to the interests of
workers on the factory floor.
Poland regained statehood in 1918, and a divided trade-union movement united.
Trade unions had first developed in Galicia, in Austrian Poland, in the 1870s,
where unions were legal. German trade unions had organized Silesian workers in
the western part of German Poland, and in Russian Poland, as in Russia, unions
were illegal. With independence, local unions combined into a powerful movement
under the general influence of the moderate Polish Socialist Party,
although the union movement maintained an official policy of party neutrality.
Another group of Christian trade unions organized separately.
Poland in the early 20th century was still an agrarian country, with 61
percent of the population engaged in agriculture in 1931. Moreover, under a
severe economic crisis after 1918, the labour force was very fluid, with workers
moving in and out of industry. Union structure was based not on skill but on
industry, and even unemployed workers were incorporated. The biggest unions,
like the railway workers' union, supported extensive cultural activities,
including clubs, libraries, and a secondary boarding school. Union membership in
the 1930s fluctuated between 900,000 and 950,000 in spite of efforts by the
government under Józef Pilsudski to split and weaken union
solidarity. This figure represented about 18 percent of the working class of
five million, including agricultural labourers and domestic servants.
Under the Communist government of Poland, the working class grew rapidly
between 1947 and 1958. At the same time, trade unions became interlocked with
management and government organs, losing their independent function. Wages were
set centrally, and unions were relegated to administering social-welfare
activities within the workplace. Even here, as the Polish economy began to
decline in the late 1970s, unions faced challenges when they were unable to
deliver these services, such as housing and holidays. At the same time, a shift
in the social composition of the Polish working class created a less docile
union membership. By 1972, only one-third of economically active Poles worked in
agriculture; new recruits to industry came predominantly from proletarian
backgrounds, and these were relatively young. The rapid mobility from
blue-collar to white-collar jobs characteristic of Poland's earlier Communist
years had now slowed. These structural characteristics, combined with economic
stagnation and the inability of trade unions to respond, produced a wave of strikes
in 1980 and the rise of new trade unions to challenge the old. To settle the
strikes, the Polish government in August 1980 agreed to recognize new,
self-governing trade unions, authentic representatives of the working class
whose task would be to defend the social and material interests of workers.
Within weeks, new independent locals had federated into a national independent
union, named Solidarity. Old trade unions were
simultaneously reconstructed to become more independent from the state, but
their membership plummeted from 12 million to 4 million by the end of 1980.
Solidarity was declared illegal in December 1981, so that trade unions continued
to be more fragmented than before 1980, but this pluralistic trend contributed
to the revival of Solidarity and the defeat of the Polish Communist Party in
elections in the summer of 1989. (D.P.K.)
After Japan's surrender in 1945, Allied occupation reforms spurred a
spectacular spread of independent trade unions, which had been eliminated during
wartime. Until it was halted in 1949-50 by sharp deflation, revision of labour
laws, and a purge of leftists, unionism enlisted 6 million members--almost half
of all workers. Unions resumed steady growth after 1955 as industrial employment
leaped upward with Japan's economic "miracle." Organized labour peaked
in 1975 at 12.6 million members, one-third of all eligible workers, becoming the
third largest movement among the industrialized democracies. As economic
expansion slowed following the 1973-74 oil crisis and subsequent industrial
restructuring toward hard-to-unionize services, union membership leveled off to
one of every four workers. (see also Allied Powers)
Backed by new constitutional rights to organize, bargain, and strike, in
sharp contrast to prewar years, Japanese unions made notable achievements as
they increasingly emphasized industrial activity. Genuine union-management
negotiations and wide-ranging joint consultation at enterprise,
industrial, and national levels became well institutionalized. Also established
was comprehensive legislation for labour standards and social security. Unions
provided the principal support for such "progressive" political
parties as the Socialists, Democratic Socialists, and Communists, in opposition
to the conservative Liberal-Democrats, who reigned
continuously after 1948. However, unions were faulted for severe ideological
disunity, undue employer influence, and a narrow focus on their members'
interests to the neglect of unorganized workers and the wider society.
A chief feature of Japanese unionism is its decentralized "
enterprise-level" structure. Numbering more than 70,000, most basic union
organizations form inside, not across, large-scale private enterprises and
government agencies. Democratically run, well-financed, and self-staffed, the
typical enterprise union
actively represents only workers "permanently" employed in the
firm--blue- and white-collar together and also foremen. This rank-and-file
choice reflects the influence of fundamental economic, technological, and
sociopolitical forces in Japanese society. Some theories explain it as the
legacy of Japanese feudalism or as part of a system of employer
"paternalism", but most important has been what can be called a
labour-market "dualism." This evolved as Japan rapidly industrialized
with sharply separated work forces for the relatively few large-scale,
technologically advanced oligopolies on the one hand and for the millions of
less secure small- and medium-size firms on the other hand. Considerable
differentials in wages, benefits, working conditions, and employment security
have long favoured the larger firms, so that a major reason to unionize within
such enterprises lies in shared motivations among permanent workers to protect
their advantages while simultaneously avoiding harm to their company's
competitive strength.
In order to obtain and preserve gains and to avoid divisions, most unions
seek coordination and guidance through industrywide federations and national
centres. Upper-level organizations, although less well-financed, gradually have
gained influence over enterprise unions despite decades of severe ideological
rivalry, which began in the 1920s and revived with Japan's defeat in World War
II. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Sohyo, the
Socialists' backbone, and Domei, the Democratic
Socialist mainstay, fiercely competed, but, along with two lesser centres, they
finally achieved unity in 1989 with the founding of Rengo
(Japanese Trade Union Confederation), embracing almost eight million members.
Rengo potentially offers a broadened role for organized labour. It aims
to shift union power from the enterprise to upper levels by merging the numerous
industrial federations, embracing millions of unaffiliated union members, and
organizing the unorganized in cross-enterprise union structures.
In 1955 Sohyo successfully coordinated union demands by
launching the first shunto ("spring
offensive"); this has since been continued annually for the bargaining of
general wage and benefit increases in April, when Japan's fiscal year begins. Shunto
counters the tendency toward disparate settlements at the enterprise level,
where union-management negotiations formally occur, and also spills over into
nonunion sectors, thus resembling an " incomes
policy" mechanism. Shunto
subject matter has gradually broadened to include issues such as work hours,
pensions, and housing, as well as large wage bonuses paid once or more each
year. (S.B.L.)
Unionism in the developing regions, or Third
World, has been largely shaped by the structure of their economies. From
the turn of the 20th century, there was a gradual decline in the proportion of
Third World workers engaged in agriculture, but even so, until World War II
fully three-quarters of the active population was engaged in farming. The
numbers engaged in manufacturing increased from 26 million to 46 million between
1900 and 1960, but as a proportion of the labour force they represented a mere 8
percent. During the same period, the number of workers engaged in extractive
industries increased threefold, reflecting the importance of these activities
during the colonial period, but as a proportion of the working population they
represented a mere 1 percent. Service-sector employment also increased threefold
between 1900 and 1960, but in this case it embraced a considerable 18 percent of
the work force and a massive absolute number of 92 million workers. Across these
sectors of employment, trade unionism developed unevenly, and in various phases
of history one or the other was dominant. In all cases the objective economic
determinants of trade unionism--i.e.,
whether prevailing conditions were favourable or not to its development--would
prove crucial, and they set the context in which labour organized.
The first stable trade unions in many Third World countries were located
within the export sector. By the beginning of the 20th century, railroad
workers, dockers, and miners had formed strong labour organizations. These
workers, who were integrated into the outward-oriented economies typical of the
colonial division of labour, held considerable bargaining power through their
ability to disrupt a major economic activity. For example, when in 1885 Hong
Kong workers refused to unload a French warship, their action spread to coolies,
boatmen, and rickshaw pullers. The strong group consciousness of dockworkers in
African countries made them among the first to take collective class action.
Railway workers, too, were as important in Ghana as they were in Argentina in
organizing the early labour movement. And miners, for example in Chile and South
Africa, have retained a considerable political influence through their strong
and stable union organization in spite of their reduced numbers in relative
terms. Once industrialization spread beyond these "enclaves" of the
export sector, wider layers of workers, such as those engaged in textiles, began
to organize.
A new international division of labour that emerged after World War II led to
the consolidation of a significant manufacturing sector in a number of Third
World countries. From the textile industry to automobile manufacturing and
electronics, large factories and a transformed labour process created the
conditions for a new wave of union organization. In Brazil
during the 1970s, for example, organization within the workplace led to a
powerful labour movement spearheaded by the metalworkers' union. In South Africa,
likewise, the rise of new black trade unions in the 1970s was reflected in an
increased level of organization at factory level. Similar processes could be
discerned in South Korea and the Philippines. As opposed to the early
government-controlled trade unions, this "new wave" of unionism had
much deeper roots in the workplace. Nevertheless, the role of trade unions in
the Third World has remained predominantly defensive, organizing work forces
that have been created by the international division of labour and seeking
through collective effort to defend living standards and improve working
conditions. Their success in so doing is sporadic and very uneven across
countries.
The public sector is relatively well organized in many Third World countries,
either in spite of or because of government attitudes. Freedom of association
for agricultural workers has also been achieved in most countries, although this
is more readily achieved in big plantations with a stable labour force than in
the traditional subsistence-farming sector. In the newly industrializing
countries of East
Asia, there are growing numbers of organizable workers owing to the
economic modernization that has taken place there, although in general (with the
exception of South Korea) labour organization has stagnated. In Africa,
some countries such as Tanzania have promoted rural trade unions in particular,
but in general the potentially organizable labour force in large enterprises is
but a small minority of the working classes. In the huge "informal"
sector, which is so prevalent in the Third World, unionization is even more
difficult. In some countries, such as India, there
have been some moves by industrial workers to extend their organization to cover
unregistered casual and rural workers. The sheer size of this sector and its
role in the economy mean that it has genuine bargaining power and can indeed
force the pace for trade unions, which tend to neglect the smaller industrial
units and the nonpermanent work force.
There is a close link between the level of socioeconomic development and the
degree of labour organization in the Third World. Thus, Argentina has a degree
of unionization approaching 40 percent, whereas the Dominican Republic has less
than 10 percent trade-union membership. Likewise, Singapore has a far greater
proportion of trade-union members than Papua New Guinea. Overall, there emerges
a picture of incomplete unionization in the Third World, with only a handful
approaching 40 percent, and most countries falling below 20 percent. Such
quantitative analysis has its limits, however. It is equally important to assess
the level of control that each trade-union movement has over the labour market.
In addition, it is the distribution of the labour force across different
occupational categories that sets the framework in which a trade-union movement
develops. Exactly how it operates within these constraints depends on a range of
political factors not considered here. (R.Mu.)
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노동조합 (勞動組合, trade union)
노동자의 권리와 이익을 지키기 위한 노동자의 자주적
조직.
현대의 노동조합은 근대 자본주의 경제의 발전을
배경으로 생성·발달되어왔다. 따라서 노동조합이 최초로
역사의 무대에 등장한 곳은 역시 가장 먼저 고전적
자본주의가 무르익은 영국이었다. 그러나 영국에서도
노동조합의 자유로운 활동이 공인받기 시작한 것은 겨우 1824년
무렵부터였다. 따라서 가장 오래된 노동조합일지라도 그
역사는 150년 안팎이라하겠다.
노동조합이 등장하기 이전에도, 새로운 기계·설비의
도입에 대해 강력히 반대하면서 일어났던 '러다이트 운동'처럼
파괴적이거나 정치혁명적 색채가 짙은 노동운동은
존재했었다. 그러나 노동조건의 유지·개선을 목적으로 하는
자주적 노동자집단이 발달할 수 있는 여건은 형성되지 못한
상태였다. 시간이 흐름에 따라 노동자계급은 정치적
혁명운동이나 기계에 대한 폭력적 파괴활동만으로는
자신들의 생활을 개선할 수 없다는 것을 깨닫게 되었다. 또
사용자측은 노동조합 활동을 무조건 억압하기보다 이를
용인하고 고용조건 교섭에 관한 규정을 만드는 편이 보다
합리적이고 유리하다는 것을 인식하게 되었다. 이처럼
여건이 변화하는 흐름 속에서 비로소 노동조합은
대중조직으로 자리잡기 시작했다.
본질
먼저 노동조합의 본질은 무엇이며, 또 그 목적은 과연
무엇인가를 명확히 이해할 필요가 있다. 굳이 시드니 웨브의
고전적 정의를 인용하지 않더라도, 노동조합은 '고용조건의
유지·개선을 목적으로 하는 노동자의 자주적·항구적 단체'라고
정의내릴 수 있다. 웨브는 이후에 '고용조건'이라는 용어
대신 '노동자생활'이라는 표현을 사용함으로써 조합의
목적을 정치적·문화적인 것에까지 확대하기도 했다. 그러나
역시 가장 기본적인 쟁점은 고용조건과 노동조건의 유지 및
개선이라 할 수 있다. 결국 노동조합은 어디까지나
노동자들의 고용조건이나 지위를 향상시키기 위해 활동하는
단체이지, 결코 사회주의 이념을 우선으로 하는 단체나
혁명집단은 아니라고 규정할 수 있다.
그러므로 자본을 소유한 자본가와 맨주먹의 노동자가
양대계급으로 분열된 채 서로의 경제적 이해관계를 놓고
대립하는 자본주의 사회에서는 노동조합이 필연적으로
등장한다고 볼 수 있다. 이처럼 자본주의 사회제도를
부정하지 않으면서 노동자 생활개선을 추구하는
노동조합운동은 ' 노동조합주의'(trade
unionism)에 이념적 토대를 둔 것이라 할 수 있다.
노동조합주의는 원래 영국에서 태동된 것으로서 직업별
조합이 산업별조합으로 이행하는 가운데 노동조합운동의 한
부분을 차지했다. 개량주의의 입장인 노동조합주의는
정치활동을 부정하며 노동자 생활조건의 점진적 개선만을
목표로 삼는다. 따라서 노동자 이외에는 어느 누구에게도
노조참가를 허용하지 않으며, 만약 정치활동이
행해지더라도 그것은 경제활동의 연장으로서 생활조건
향상과 관련한 입법활동에만 국한되어 이루어진다. 한국의
노동조합법 역시 노동주합주의에 기반을 두고 있다 (→ 노동조합
및 노동관계조정법).
한편 이와 같은 정의에 따른다면 산업혁명 이전의 사회
또는 공산주의 체제로 이행중인 사회에서는 엄격히 말해
단체교섭권 또는 쟁의권을 갖는 조합이 존재할 수 없다고
보아야 한다. 그리고 만약 노동조합이라는 명칭을 적용한
예가 있을지라도 그것은 자본주의 사회의 조합과는 성격이
전혀 다른 것으로 이해해야 한다.
노조의 본질이라 할 수 있는 또 하나의 조건은 노동자
자신의 '자주적 단체'이어야 한다는 점이다. 사용주나
정부의 원조·지배·개입 등으로 조직된 경우나, 특정정당의
일방적 원조 혹은 지시에 의해 조직된 경우는 진정한
의미에서 노조라고 할 수 없다. 조합은 노동자 자신들을
위한 조직으로서, 반드시 노동자들의 자주적 의사에 의해
결성되고 운영되는 대중단체이어야 한다. 또한 노동조합은
특정목적을 추구하기 위한 단체가 아니다. 특정목적을 위한
집단은 그 목적이 달성될 때 자연히 해체된다. 그러나
노동조합이 목표로 삼는 고용조건의 유지와 개선은 어떤
시점에서 중단되는 문제가 아닐 뿐 아니라, 자본주의 사회가
존속하는 한 조합의 목적이 궁극적으로 달성되는 상황은
도래하지 않을 것이다. 웨브가 조합의 본질로서 '항상적'(恒常的)
단체의 조건을 제시한 것은 바로 이와 같은 이유에 기인한다.
기능
노동조합은 어느 시대, 어느 나라에서나 일반적으로 크게
3가지 기능을 한다. 물론 그 기능들은 모두 앞서 말한
노동조합의 본질에 대응되는 것으로서 경제적 기능, 공제 및
복리증진 기능, 정치적 기능으로 요약할 수 있다. 이 3가지
기능 가운데 조합이 요구받는 본연의 임무를 고려한다면
가장 중요한 것은 역시 경제적 기능이다.
노조의 경제적 기능에는 여러 가지가 있는데 특히
단체교섭과 쟁의행위가 가장 핵심을 이룬다. 고용조건의
개선은 고용주의 일방적 시혜나 호황 또는 노동력 부족 등의
결과로 이루어질 수 있다. 그러나 역시 그 대부분은 조합의
존재 혹은 적극적 활동에 의해 실현된다.
단체교섭이란
임금인상·시간단축·해고반대 등 다수 조합원의 고용조건
개선요구를 조합임원이 일괄 대표해서 사용자 또는 단체와
교섭하는 것을 말한다. 조합은 다양한 구성원들로 구성되기
때문에 성별·연령별, 또는 숙련도에 따라 각각 차이를
보이며 또한 블루칼라와 화이트칼라의 차별도 존재한다.
따라서 조합의 임원은 우선 조합원들에게 최소한
동일노동에 대한 동일임금과 동일대우의 형평을 보장해
주면서, 더 나아가 각 조합원의 직무별·작업별·기능별
대우의 격차를 올바르게 자리잡고, 그 안에서 전체 조합원의
고용조건 개선을 위해 노력해야 한다. 법률상 사용자는
특별한 이유없이 단체교섭을 거부할 수 없다. 또한
단체교섭이 합의에 이르지 못하고 결렬되면 노사 어느
쪽이나 쟁의행위에 돌입할 수 있다. 즉 이때부터 노동자들의
파업이나 사보타주 또는 사용자에 의한 직장폐쇄 등의
실력행사가 이루어지게 되는 것이다.
단체교섭은 노조측에 주어진 노동기본권의 하나일 뿐만
아니라, 사용자에게도 노사관계 안정을 위해 오히려 유리한
수단이 될 수 있다. 그러나 쟁의행위는
노사 어느 쪽에게나 큰 손실을 의미한다. 조합측이 시도하는
쟁의행위에는 여러 가지가 있는데 중심적인 것은 파업이다.
파업의 형태는 다양하지만 그 공통된 목적은 생산활동을
저지해서 사용자측에 타격을 주는 데 있다. 또한 파업은 그
행위 자체에 의미를 두는 것이 아니라 이후의 단체교섭에
초점을 둔 행위이다. 물론 파업으로 야기되는 노사 쌍방의
피해 규모, 세론의 동향, 조합지도자의 판단이나 식견 등
여러 가지 요인들이 결과적으로 큰 영향을 미친다. 그러나
어떤 경우에라도 파업은 그 자체가 목적이 아니라, 이후의
단체교섭을 유리한 상황에서 진행시키기 위한 노조측의
비상수단이다. 파업 외에도 노조가 취할 수 있는
쟁의행위에는 사보타주나 보이콧 등이 있지만 이들 행위는
파업에 비해 부차적인 수단이다.
단체교섭과 쟁의행위로 대표되는 경제적 기능과 더불어
노동조합의 2번째 기능으로 고려해야 하는 것이 공제 또는
복리적 기능이다. 노동조합운동 초기, 즉 자유로운
노조활동이 공적으로는 거의 인정받지 못했던 시대에는
노동자들이 공제호조(共濟互助) 단체를 구성하고 그 조직을
통해 사실상의 조합활동을 시도했다. 영국의 '우애조합'(friendly
society)이 그 대표적인 실례이다.
노동조합은 오랫동안 공제호조활동이라는 그늘에 숨어
은밀하게 조직의 뿌리를 내리고 활동했다. 그러나 시간이
흐름에 따라 마침내 조합운동의 '자유'를 획득했고 그에
따라 노조의 주된 임무는 공제활동에서 점차 경제적
기능으로 바뀌었다. 19세기말에 이르자 마침내 조합의
공제기능은 거의 소멸되고 의료보험이나 실업보험 등의
사회보험제도가 그 기능을 대신하게 되었다. 그러나 제2차
세계대전 후에는 상황이 다시 바뀌어 조합의 복지적 기능도
단지 부수적 역할이 아니라 기본적인 중요성을 갖는 것으로
재평가되기 시작했다. 대부분 회사측 또는 사용자측이
종업원을 위해 실시하는 각종 사내 복지시설 운영은 사실상 산업별
노동조합의 말단 활동으로서 대부분 하부조합(local union)의
책임이 되고 있다.
산업별 노동조합이란 철강·섬유·화학·전기·철도·석탄
등 산업의 근대적 구분을 중심으로, 개별 기업의 틀을 넘어
구성되는 횡단조직이다. 서양사회의 산업별조합은 규모가
커짐에 따라 말단조직의 일상적 요구를 만족시킬 수 없게
되었다. 또한 조합으로서의 활동이 완만해지고 고립되면서
노화현상이 나타남에 따라 조합 내 하부조직의 중요성이
점차 커졌다. 결국 하부조합들도 단지 전국 횡단조합의
말단기구로만 존재하는 것이 아니라 그 자체가 독립된
자주적 조합으로 활동할 수 있는 실체를 갖추게 되었다.
이에 따라 조합이 장악하는 각 기업의 복지공제시설들이
차츰 더 중요한 비중을 차지하게 되었으며 각종 부가급부(fringe
benefit)나 유럽의 임금 드리프트(drift) 등이 하부조합에서
노사간의 주요의제가 되었다. 이렇게 하여 조합의 복지·공제
기능의 의의가 새롭게 재평가되기 시작한 것이다.
3번째로는 노조의 정치적 기능이 문제가 되는데 이
경우에도 역시 조합의 산업적 또는 경제적 기능을 무시한 채
정치적 기능만을 중시해서는 안된다. 노조의 본래 기능은
조합원의 고용조건 개선을 목적으로 하는 단체활동이다.
하지만 그 목적을 달성하기 위해서는 법률의 개정이나 제정,
정부에 대한 요구, 노동자 정당과의 연계 등이 불가피한
경우가 있다. 더 나아가 때로는 노조활동 자체가 정치적
색채를 띨 수도 있다. 그러나 그 모든 정치적 행위는
어디까지나 조합의 산업경제적 기능을 보다 쉽고 폭넓게
달성하기 위한 수단일 뿐, 앞서 말한 대로 조합이 정치활동
자체를 목적으로 삼는 단체는 아닌 것이다.
발달사
조합이 각각의 기능을 달성하기 위해 취하는 조직의
형태에는 통일된 원칙이 있는 것이 안라 나라마다 다르고
시대에 따라서도 변화해왔다. 그러나 변화의 큰 흐름에 따라
구분한다면 직종 또는 직업별 노동조합과 산업별
노동조합의 2가지로 나눌 수 있다. 노조활동이 시작된
초기에는 직종별 조합이 중심을 이루다가 점차 몇몇
관련직종이 연결된 직업별 조합 또는 복합직종별 조합이
활약하게 되었다. 오늘날에도 영국의 '합동기계공조합'이나
미국의 '배관공조합' 등은 직업별 조합의 형태로서 막강한
통제력을 행사한다.
그러나 근대산업기술이 발전됨에 따라 조합의 기반이었던
직종 가운데 어떤 것은 소멸하고 또 어떤 것은 새로운
직종으로 등장하는 변화가 잇달아 발생했다. 뿐만 아니라
직종간의 경계가 변동·교차하게 되고 조합간의 분쟁도
끊임없이 발생한다. 게다가 직종별·직업별 조합은 대부분
숙련기능자를 중심으로 구성되었기 때문에 급속한 산업기술
발달에 따라 대량으로 등장한 반숙련자나 미숙련자는 결국
소외당하게 되었다. 조합원들 가운데 숙련기능자들의
특권적 지위를 옹호하는 데에만 급급했던 조합은 스스로
배타적·보수적 성격을 띠어 시야가 좁아지게 되었다. 한편
이러한 조합의 구성원들이 갖는 특정 직업의 숙련기능은 각
사업장이나 기업의 생산활동에 불가결한 요소였다. 따라서
각 직장별 조합원수에 상관없이 사용자는 직종별·직업별
조합과 교섭하면서 조합의 요구사항을 어느 정도 수용할
수밖에 없었다.
그러나 생산기술이 더욱 발전함에 따라 점차
반숙련노동자들도 새로운 생산설비의 종사자로 일하게
되었으며, 이에 따라 사용자는 고임금의 직종별·직업별
조합에 의존하지 않고 대신 조합의 아웃사이더나
비조합원을 쉽게 고용할 수 있게 되었다. 이러한 방법으로
사용자가 소기의 생산목적을 달성할 수 있게 되자 기존의
직종별·직업별 조합들은 강력한 교섭력을 잃게 되었다.
이같은 변화의 결과 영국에서는 대략 1880∼90년대를 경계로
해서 근대적 산업기술의 등장에 따라 변화된 산업구분에
기초를 둔 노동조합의 새로운 형태, 즉 '산업별 노동조합'(industrial
union)이 등장했다.
이 새로운 조합형태는 원칙적으로 숙련도나 직종에
상관없이 동종사업장 또는 동종기업의 모든 노동자들
가운데 가능한 한 많은 수를 하나의 단위로 조직하는
방식이었다. 이들 단위조직을 철강·화학·섬유·철도 등
산업별로 구분하고 개별기업의 틀을 넘어 횡단적인
조직으로 구성함으로써 산업별 조합이 탄생했다. 산업별
조합은 제1차 세계대전을 거치면서 더욱 발전했고 그 이후로
오늘날까지 70∼80년 동안 각국 노동조합 조직에 가장
표준적인 형태로 지위를 구축해왔다.
이처럼 근대 기술의 발달에 따라 노동조합의 형태도
직종별·직업별 조합에서 산업별 조합으로 발전했다. 오늘날
구미에서는 산업별조합이 전조합의 대부분을 차지하며
직업별 조합은 특수 숙련기능자를 중심으로 구성되어
산업별 조합에 비하면 아주 미약한 세력을 지닐 뿐이다.
조합의 조직방식에는 이들 외에도 다양한 형태가 존재하며,
간혹 지역별로 구성된 횡단적 조합형태가 발견되기도 한다.
또한 제2차 세계대전을 전후해 영국과
미국에서 거대한 규모의 '일반조합'(general union)이 발전했던
사실을 간과해서는 안된다. 영국의 ' 운수
일반노동조합'(Transport and General Workers' Union)은 자동차
운전사를 비롯한 옥외노동자 중심으로 조직되었는데 1개
조합이 10만원의 조합원으로 구성된 영국 최대의
노동조합이다. 흔히 '지나치게 거대하다'는 비판을 받고
있는 이 조합에 다른 2개의 거대한 일반조합을 합하면 영국
전체 조합원의 1/4을 넘는 규모에 달한다.
임금 등의 고용조건이 안정된 산업의 노동자 및
숙련기능자들은 조합을 통해 그들의 권리와 요구를
주장하는 동시에 조직을 발전시켰다. 그러나 그처럼 발전된
조합의 조직권 밖에는 또다른 다수의 노동자들이 더욱
불리한 여건을 극복하지 못한 채 남아 있었다. 그들은
옥외노동자나 상품배달노동자, 그동안 어떤 산업별조합에도
들지 않았던 노동자, 또는 조합이 존재할지라도 소외되었던
완전미숙련자나 보조노동자, 잡역노동자 등으로 다양하다.
조합과의 관계에서 언제나 음지의 존재였던 이들을 위해
직종은 물론 산업구분까지 무시하고 아무런 차별 없이
광범위한 조직을 만들고자 시도한 것이 '일반조합'이며 미국
최대 규모인 '트럭 운전사조합'(Teamsters' Union)이 그 좋은
예이다. 일반적으로 전통적 조합은 시간이 흐름에 따라
조직의 폐쇄적 성격을 드러내기도 하고 내부 운영체계가
관료화되기도 한다. 따라서 비교적 고용조건이 열악하고
불안정한 하층 미숙련자나 옥외 잡역노동자들은 자연히
조합의 조직권 밖으로 제외되기 쉽다. 이 점에 착안해서
조직된 형태가 일반조합이다. 일반조합은 거대조합으로의
팽창속도가 너무 거세어 기존의 산업별 조합과 세력권
다툼을 일으키는 경우가 많다.
상급조직과 국제적 조직
조직의 성격을 지니는 노동조합에는 상부조직으로
연합체나 국제기구 등이 존재한다. 예를 들면 '미국노동총연맹산업별노동조합회의'(American
Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations/AFL-CIO), '영국
노동조합회의'(Trades Union Congress/TUC), '프랑스 노동총동맹'(Confédération
Générale du Travail/CGT), 독일 노동조합연맹'(Deutscher
Gewerkschaftsbund/DGB), 일본의 '총평'(일본노동조합총평의회)과 '동맹'(전일본노동총동맹),
한국의 '노총'(한국노동조합총연맹) 등이 있다.
또한 각종 국제조직들도 중요한 역할을 담당한다.
대표적인 국제기구로는 '세계노동조합연맹'(World Federation of Trade
Unions/WFTU)·'국제자유노동조합연맹'(International Confederation
of Free Trade Unions/ICFTU) 등이 있다. 그러나 이들 기구는
상부조직인 만큼 조합이 이데올로기, 사상, 정치적 입장
면에서 여러 가지 색채를 띠게 함으로써 오히려 조합의
단결이나 통일을 저해할 수도 있다. 그와 같은 결과는
조합의 견실한 발전에 결코 긍정적인 요소로 기여할 수 없다.
내부조직
조합의 목적은 앞서 말한 바와 같이 고용조건을 유지·개선하는
데 있다. 이 목적을 실현하기 위해서는 질서있는 조직을
갖추어야 하며, 조합의 의사결정기구와 더불어 그 결정된
의사를 실현하는 집행기구가 필요하다. 노동조합이
노동자들의 자주적 대중단체인 한, 그 의사결정은
민주적으로 이루어져야 한다. 일반적으로 조합의 민주적
의사결정은 조합원대회에서 실현된다. 조합의 규모가 작을
때에는 조합원대회에 노조원 전원이 출석하여 토의와
투표로 의사결정과정이 진행된다. 그러나 조합의 규모가
커져 총인원이 몇 만에서 몇 십만에 이를 경우 전원이
정해진 시기에 한 장소로 집합하는 것은 사실상 불가능할
것이다. 또 산업의 특성에 따른 어려움도 있다. 예를 들면
공공산업 또는 연속조업을 필요로 하는 산업인 경우 조합원
전원이 동시에 직장을 떠나 조합대회에 참가할 수는 없는
것이다. 이러한 이유들 때문에 오늘날 대부분의 조합은
직장마다 또는 하부조직마다 조합원의 의사를 대표할
대의원을 선정해 그들로 구성되는 대의원대회를
의사결정기구로 삼는다.
조합원대회 또는 대의원대회가 조합의 의사결정기구라고
한다면 조합의 집행기구는 그 조합원대회에서 선출된
임원들로 구성된다. 임원단은 위원장, 즉 조합장과 부위원장,
사무장 등 이른바 조합3역(組合三役)을 중심으로 이루어진다.
먼저 위원장은 정해진 임기내에 조합의 대외적 업무를
총괄적으로 책임지고 부위원장은 위원장을 보좌하며 필요할
때에는 위원장 업무를 대행한다. 사무장은 조합의
내부통일과 조합 업무수행을 맡는다.
노동조합은 다수의 조합원들로 조직을 구성해야 하며 또
그들을 교육시키지 않으면 안된다. 따라서 각 조합마다
조직담당부서 및 교육선전부서를 설치해야 하며 또 조합비
징수와 각종 비용지불, 현금출납, 조합재산 보관 등의
업무를 담당할 총무부서를 두어야 한다. 그밖에도 조합의
여러 가지 일상업무를 수행하기 위해서는 조합원 이외에
다수의 사무원을 고용해 사무국을 구성하고 그들을
효율적으로 지휘·감독해야 한다. 또한 조합의 상근임원이나
사무국 직원에게 급여를 지급한다. 한편 이와 같은 조합 내
제반업무의 처리와 운영은 모두 사무장의 책임하에
이루어진다. 각부서별로는 조직부장·총무부장·교육선전부장이
있고 따라서는 조사부장이나 청년부장·여성부장 등을
임명하기도 하는데 이들은 모두 사무장 아래 소속되며 간부
조합원 중에서 선출된다.
노동조합의 경영참가
노조의 활동범위는 당연히 시대에 따라 변천해왔다. 앞서
웨브의 정의에서도 살펴본 바와 같이 노조의 임무는 조합원
스스로 고용조건이나 고용상 지위개선을 위해 행하는
자주적 단체활동이다.
경영자가 어떤 경영방침과 생산계획을 갖고 있고, 어떤
기술 어떤 판매방식을 채용하는가의 문제는 원래
노조로서는 관심 밖의 일이었다. 조합의 입장에서는 보다
나은 고용조건을 요구하는 것이 주안점이고, 만약 그것이
충족되지 않으면 조합원이 그 직장을 떠나든가 또는 조합의
이름으로 파업에 들어가면 그 뿐이었다. 경영은 경영자의
책임이고 그 성패여부는 조합원이 알 바가 아니었다. 그것이
오래 전부터 노동조합이 경영에 대해 취해온 기본적
태도였다. 즉 조합은 경영 '외부'에 존재했던 것이다.
그렇지만 시간이 경과함에 따라 경영방침이 고용조건에
직접 영향을 미친다는 것이 명백한 사실로 인식되었다. 뿐만
아니라 회사가 어떤 기계나 생산기술을 도입하는 것은
그대로 실업이나 일시해고 또는 휴직에 연결되며 만약
그렇지 않은 경우일지라도 노동강도에 커다란 영향을
미치는 것은 분명한 사실이다. 이와 더불어 제1차 세계대전
후 영국이나 독일에서는 노동자정당이 정권을 잡았으며
노조의 유력자가 관료직에 앉거나 국회의원이 되기도 하여
각종 정부위원으로서 입법·행정에 중요한 영향력을
행사하게 되었다. 이렇게 하여 조합은 이전처럼 경영 밖의
조직으로서 단지 경영에 대립하는 투쟁체(鬪爭體)로만
머무를 수는 없게 되었다. 정치·행정·산업에로의 조합의 '참가'와
더불어 이에 대한 조합의 사회적 책임이 생겨나게 된 것이다.
'유럽 노동운동의 비극'도 이와 같은 상황에서 비롯된
것이라 할 수 있다.
오늘날 노조의 경영참가는 시대적 표어로 부상하고 있다.
어떤 의미에서는 노조가 경영에 협력하여 그에 대한 책임을
공유하고, 사회에 대해서도 경영자와 함께 책임을 다하며,
경영 내부에 뛰어들어 경영 성과의 배분과정에서도 균등한
혜택을 받아야 한다는 주장까지 대두하고 있다. 이것은
노조측의 분명한 방향 전환이라 할 수 있다. 즉 경영의 외적
존재에서 내적 존재로의 전환이므로 노조차원에서는 실로
질적 변화를 이룬 것이라 할 수 있다. 그러나 이것이 기존
노조에 과연 긍정적 요인으로 작용할 것인가에 대한 평가는
아직 합의된 결론을 얻지 못하고 있다 (→ 경영참여제도).
BIE| 大河內一男·隅谷三喜男 글 | 朴英淑 참조집필
한국의 노동조합
한국의 노동운동은 임금노동자가 형성된 개항기부터
싹트기 시작했다. 1870년대 이후 주로 광산과 부두
노동자들은 이미 자연발생적이고 산발적인 집단행동이나
폭동을 일으키고 있었으며, 1900년대에 들어서 조합 또는
노동조합이라는 명칭의 노동단체들이 등장하기에 이르렀다.
그러나 대부분 친목단체의 성격을 띠고 출발한 이들 조직이
언제나 노동자들의 편에만 섰던 것은 아니며, 오히려 그들
자신이 노동자를 수탈·단속하는 경우도 있었다. 그후
노동야학·노동회 등의 계몽·취업알선 단체들이 결성되면서
노동자들의 의식이 강화되고 노동쟁의도 빈번해졌으나,
근대적 노동조합운동의 형태로 보기는 어렵다.
본격적인 노동조합운동은 3·1운동 이후에 시작되었다.
이때부터 개항 이후로 축적된 노동자들의 의식이
민족의식과 결합되었으며, 당시 점차 확산되고 있던
사회주의 운동과도 연계되었다. 그결과 중앙에서는 전국적
노동자조직 결성을 위해 일관된 노력이 전개되었다. 1920년
최초로 '조선노동공제회'가 결성된 뒤, 1922년 '조선노동연맹회'를
거쳐 1924년 노동자·농민의 통합단체인 '조선노농총동맹'이
그 뒤를 이었고, 이는 다시 1928년 '조선노동총연맹'과 '조선농민총연맹'으로
분리되었다. 이러한 중앙의 움직임과 달리, 지방에서는
직종별·직업별 노동조합이 산업별노조로 개편되면서,
지역연합체를 중심으로 일본인 사용자의 수탈에 저항하기
시작했다. 대표적인 예로 1929년 원산총파업이 발생했는데,
이 사건 이후 일제의 탄압이 더욱 가혹해짐에 따라 지방
노동조합운동은 비합법화·좌경화·폭력화되었고 마침내 1937년
중일전쟁을 계기로 민족독립운동과 사회주의운동에
흡수되었다.
1920년대 조선노농총동맹과 1930년대 적색노조로 이어진
노동운동은 해방 이후 좌익의 조선노동조합전국평의회(
전평) 결성과 더불어
본격적으로 활성화되었다. 전평은 1945년 11월 전국 1,194개
조합, 55만 3,408명 조합원으로 조직된 뒤 해방정국에서
노동자들의 요구를 하나로 결집해 활동을 전개했다. 한편
이에 대한 대응으로 우익은 1946년 대한독립촉성노동총연맹(대한노총)을
결성했고, 마침내 전평은 미군정과 우익진영의 탄압으로 1947년
활동이 불법화되면서 유명무실한 세력으로 남았다. 이후
대한노총이 유일한 전국조직으로 1950년대를 주도했으나,
이들은 자유당 정권에 의해 어용단체로 자리잡고 노동조합
본연의 임무보다는 집권세력의 정치기반 역할을 했다. 1953년
노동관계법 제정으로 노동조합운동은 법적 지위를
부여받았으나, 발전 가능성은 여전히 제한적이었다.
이후 1960년대에 들어서 노동조합운동은 4·19혁명으로
자주화·민주화로 나아가는 전기를 마련하기도 했으나, 5·16군사정변으로
또다시 단절을 겪어야 했다. 한편 기존의 대한노총과 새로
등장한 전국노동조합협의회가 함께 결성했던 한국노동조합총연맹(한국노련)은
5·16군사정변으로 해산되었으나 같은해 8월 한국노동조합총연맹(
한국노총)으로
재건되었다. 군사권력의 하향적 방식으로 단기간에 세워진
한국노총은 이전의 한국노련과 달리 12개의 산별노조체제로
조직되었으나, 역시 노동자들의 권익보다는 정권과 자본의
이해를 대변하는 데 급급했다. 그럼에도 불구하고
한국노총은 제3공화국과 제5공화국에 의해 유일한
전국조직으로 유지되어오다가 1987년에야 경쟁체제로
전환되었다. 1960년대초부터 경제개발계획과 더불어
공업화가 진전됨에 따라 노동조합운동은 점차 활기를
띠었고 쟁의 발생 건수도 많아졌다. 이에 대응해 정부는 1971년
10월유신을 단행하고 국가보위에 관한 특별조치법으로
노동자의 단체교섭권 및 단체행동권을 유보시켜, 마침내
우리나라 노동운동은 암흑기를 맞았다. 결과적으로 정규적
노조활동은 위축되고 대신 그리스도교계에서 주도한
도시산업선교활동이 확산되었으며, 노동쟁의의 형태는 'YH사건'
등에서와 같이 과격성을 나타내기 시작했다.
1970년대말에는 10·26사태 직후 노동자들의 불만이
한꺼번에 분출하면서 대규모 노동쟁의가 발생했다. 뒤이은
제5공화국 출범과 함께 1980년에 노동관계법이 대폭
개정되었고, 그결과 노동조합운동이 기업별 체제하에서
계속 정부의 규제를 받게 됨에 따라 소득 불평등에 대한
노동자들의 불만은 점점 심화되었다. 이처럼 응축된 불만은
1987년 6·29선언을 계기로 폭발되어 대규모 파업이 잇달아
발생했고, 그뒤 2년여의 기간에 걸쳐 대등한 노사관계
확립을 위한 노동조합운동이 활발히 전개되었다. 또한 '경제적
조합주의'를 견지하는 한국노총이 체질개선을 추구하는
가운데 '정치적 조합주의'를 표방한 재야노동 세력이 전국노동조합협의회(전노협)를
조직함으로써 노동조합운동은 이원화되었으나, 신규노조 및
조합원수는 급증했다.
한국 노동조합의 조직현황은 다음과 같다. 1963년 한국노총
산하의 16개 산업별노조와 1,820개 단위노조(분회)에서 1986년
16개 산업별연맹 및 2,658개 단위노조로 확대되었다. 그러나
이 수치는 1987년에 고양된 노동운동의 여파로 1989년 다시 21개
산별연맹과 7,883개 단위노조로 크게 증가했다. 이 기간에
늘어난 조합수는 1986년 이전 수준과 비교할 때 거의 2배에
달하며, 21개 산별연맹에는 철도·섬유·광산·전력·외기·통신·항운·선원·금융·담배인삼·화학·금속·연합·출판·자동차·관광·체신·보험·택시·고무·사무금융
노련이 포함된다. 이 가운데 최대조직은 금속노련으로서 그
단위조합은 1,609개, 조합원은 44만 8,538명에 달한다. 이처럼
조직이 확대된 것 이외에 총조합원수는 1963년과 1986년 각각
22만 4,000명과 103만 6,000명이었던 것이 1989년에는 193만 2,000명으로
늘었으며, 조직률도 1986년 15.5%에서 1987년 23.45%로 크게
신장되었다.
한국의 노동조합은 서구의 산업별 또는 직능별 조합과
달리 '기업별 노동조합'의 형태로 조직되어 있다. 1960∼70년대에는
산업별노조의 형태를 취했으나 실제로 상급노조의 대부분은
산업별 교섭의 강제력도 갖추지 못한 기업별 조직에
불과했으며, 이것마저도 1980년 노동법 개정으로 폐기되어
완전한 기업별 노조체제가 정립되었다. 이 체제는
노동자들의 단결 범위가 매우 제한적이고 그들의 의식 또한
계급지향적이기보다는 협소한 기업별 의식으로 한정되어
있어, 종업원과 조합원의 구별이 쉽지 않다. 따라서
사용자가 노조활동에 개입할 수 있는 여지가 많아져
자주성을 침해받기 쉽다. 최근 '무노동무임금'이나
해고자의 조합원자격 인정 등의 문제가 주요한 쟁점으로
부각되는 것도 바로 이와 같은 조합의 조직형태와 밀접한
관련을 갖는다. → 노동운동,
노동조합법
李尙圭 글
|
田莊兵衛,
우철민 역, 동녘, 1985
