The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (279 page)

Collective organizations of workers whose purpose is to substitute a collective bargain for separate individual bargaining and thereby maintain and improve the standard of living of their members. They act as defensive organizations set up to counteract the economic weakness of propertyless wage-earners as unorganized individuals.
There is little evidence to support the view that trade unions emerged out of medieval craft guilds. Although the first forms of permanent organization among wage-earners were the combinations of handicraftsmen established in the eighteenth century, modern trade unionism began with the spread of factory industry in the early nineteenth century. The development of unions in Britain, as the first industrial nation, is particularly instructive when assessing their political role. The repeal of the UK Combination Acts in 1824 enabled the secret local associations of craftsmen to surface and become centralized in national amalgamated unions—the first of which was the Amalgamated Society of Engineers formed in 1850. These ‘new model’ unions, whilst national in scope, remained conservative in outlook and represented only skilled craftsmen eager to retain their privileged position in the labour market. The Trade Union Act of 1871 declared unions legal organizations, and further legislation in the nineteenth century established the legality of collective bargaining. The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw the growth of new ‘general labour’ unions (Seamen's, Dockers, General and Municipal Unions), who appealed to the mass of low-paid, unskilled workers previously excluded from the ‘model’ unions. This wave of ‘New Unionism’ sought to replace the methods of the skilled workers—control over apprenticeship and joint negotiating boards—with the strike weapon and all embracing membership. Contemporary trade unionism in Britain is shaped by the often uneasy relationship which exists between the organizations of skilled and unskilled workers, a direct legacy of the nineteenth century.
The political role of trade unions can be analysed from three broad standpoints. Conservative pluralists (but also
Lenin
) maintain that unions are ‘economic’ organizations whose role is to follow a narrow agenda concerned with terms and conditions of employment. In this view although their agenda may legitimately encompass welfare and training issues, trade unions are denied an immediate political role in society. Writers in the social democratic Weberian tradition insist that the purpose of trade unionism is democratic participation in job regulation. The primary focus of union activity remains the workplace but as democratic, representative organizations it is argued that they should play a more active broader role in social reconstruction. This tradition has been highly influential in Britain, where in exceptional circumstances, the
Labour Party
developed out of the existing trade union movement. Marxist approaches to trade unionism are complex and centre on the extent to which unions both facilitate collective action and consciousness whilst simultaneously constraining and dividing the working class. Without unions, Marx argued, workers would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation; however, workers ought not to confine their efforts to ‘a fair day's wage for a fair day's work’, but inscribe on their banner the ‘revolutionary watchword—abolition of the wages system’ (
Wages, Price and Profit
).
European trade unionism has long been marked by national diversity in structure, ideology, and organizational form corresponding to differential historical development. Whilst in Germany industrial relations tends to be highly centralized, legalized, and co-operative, in Italy the impact of socialist and syndicalist politics has fashioned an assertive local workplace form of trade unionism. From the American business unions of the 1930s to the Japanese company unions and single union deals of the postwar period, trade unions have been obliged to confront a plethora of management strategies aimed at restructuring labour/capital relations. Nevertheless European unionism looks set to enter a new vigorous phase in the 1990s with a series of large-scale mergers and opportunities for international organization in the wake of the
Single European Act
.
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Tradition originally referred to a handing over or handing down of anything, but the word came primarily to refer to the oral handing down of lore and legend. ‘Oral tradition’ is thus a tautology. In what are now called Western countries there was, therefore, for many years a distinction and potential conflict between traditional beliefs and the ‘high’, written culture of the classics and established religion. In contemporary non-Western countries there is a similar relation between local values and systems of thought and those which are imported from the West as more advanced or modern.
Traditionalists in religion (specifically in mid-nineteenth-century Roman Catholicism) held that religious truth consisted of a single revelation, the life of Christ, developed by tradition. Secular traditionalists, defined broadly, are people whose thought gives a high value to tradition. In its widest sense, tradition includes anything which is typical of the past, customary, or part of a cultural identity. It can thus include such diverse items as religious beliefs, sporting customs, linguistic practices, or dietary habits. There is, however, a distinction between two senses of traditionalism. We might say of a northern Englishman who keeps whippets and pigeons, speaks in dialect, and lives on a diet of black pudding, potato pie, and mushy peas, that ‘He's a great traditionalist’. But this kind of traditionalism might be entirely apolitical; the same man may have a liberal theory of taste and seek neither to promulgate nor protect his own traditional tastes for other people. In so far as he just happens to like these things and does not value them because they are traditional, then perhaps we should not call him a traditionalist at all. Traditionalism in a stronger sense therefore suggests a propensity to revive or defend traditions against nontraditional beliefs and values.
The power of political traditionalism is not to be underestimated, but usually has been. Both Marxist socialism and liberal capitalism are essentially progressive and rationalist doctrines with a limited capacity for tolerating traditional ways, but little capacity for valuing or defending them. The failures of both doctrines on the spiritual or cultural level of giving meaning to people's lives, of allowing them to experience a sense of belonging or permanent achievement, have enhanced the appeal of custom and tradition. Nationalism everywhere and religious revivalism in the developing countries are powerful expressions of traditionalism. They are paralleled in the West by weaker and less political forms, ranging from the defence of ‘real’ beer to the revival of folk music, dancing, and holiday customs.
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See
economic man
.

 
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See
Rome, Treaty of
.

 
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