38
(c) Workpeople's Organisations.
The structure of the British Trade Union movement to-day in Great Britain is the result of development extending over upwards of a century of the association of workpeople for the protection of their interests and for the development of collective bargaining. The development has on the whole not followed a pre-conceived plan and in the rosult, the individual trade unions, as they exist to-day, exhibit a wide variety of internal structure and of external relationships with the rest of the movement.
The unions range from small purely local unions, composed of members of a single craft with little or no external relationships with the main body of unions, to national amalgamations or federations covering a whole industry and to national unions membership of which is open to many grades of workers in a large variety of industries.
An idea of the growth of the movement will be gathered from the following Table showing the total number of unions known to have been in existence in Great Britain and Northern Ireland at the end of certain selected years, and their aggregate membership to the nearest thousand:
Number of Trade Unions
Year
at end of
year.
Membership at end of Year
Males
Females
Total
Thousands
Thousands
Thousands
1896
1,358
1,466
142
1,608
1906
1,282
1,999
211
2,210
1914
1,260
3,708
437
4,145
1919
1,360
6,600
1,326
7,926
1926
1,164
4,407
812
5,219
1936
1,035
4,495
800
5,295
1937
1,030
4,948
895
5,843
1938
1,021
5,128
926
6,054
A reduction in the number of trade unions from a maximum of 1,384 reached at the end of 1920, to 1,021 at the end of 1938 was largely due to amalgama- tions, and to the absorption of some of the smaller unions by larger unions. At the end of 1938 there were 24 unions, each with a membership of 50,000 or over, accounting for a total membership of 3,844,000 or over 63 per cent. of the aggregate membership of all unions.
The yearly increases in the aggregate membership of unions since the end of 1933 have more than balanced declines which occurred in the years 1931-3; and by the end of 1938 the aggregate membership had reached a figure in excess of that for any year since 1922.
Owing largely to the complexity of their organisation, no statistics are available to show, other than on very broad industrial groupings, the representa- tive power of trade unions in the various industries. Many unions are represented in more than one industry, while the members of two important unions (the Transport and General Workers' Union and the National Union of General and Municipal Workers) catering largely for unskilled workers permeate, to a greater or lesser extent, practically every industry in the country.
-
It may be noted however that trade union membership in the coal mining group, and in the metal, engineering and shipbuilding group at the end of 1938, totalled over 700,000 and 850,000 respectively, while the national and local government group accounted for about 620,000, and the textile and railway groups had about 420,000 and 480,000 members respectively.
In these circumstances while it is, in general, true that the activities of every trade union are directed to promoting the interests of their members and to improving their economic and social conditions, the methods and effectiveness of the individual unions vary so widely that it is impossible to select any one union as being typical of the movement or to illustrate the normal activities of a trade union in Great Britain by reference to any standard.
5.