Masters, Unions and Men

Masters, Unions and Men

Author: Richard Price

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1980-06-26

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9780521228824

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The incidence of industrial conflict and the nature of workplace industrial relations have occupied a central place in public and academic commentary on British society. Debate about the role of the trade unions in the state, the degree of authority that the unions can and should exercise over their members, the desirability of a legal framework for collective agreements, the nature of rank and file militancy and the means and techniques of re-establishing employers' authority over the work in the face of an expanded workers' frontier of control all lie at the heart of the social crisis that marked British society from the end of the 1960s.


Trade Unions and Society

Trade Unions and Society

Author: Hamish Fraser

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-02-14

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1000554015

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First published in 1974, Trade Unions and Society examines the process by which trade unions sought and achieved recognition in the three decades after 1850. It shows a parallel process: on the one hand, trade unionists struggling to attain the indispensable Victorian virtue, ‘respectability’, without sacrificing their essentially protective functions; on the other hand, employers recognizing the value of an ordered system of industrial relation in which trade unions could exert discipline and control over their workers. While this was going on, middle-class radicals (often themselves employers) continued their attack on aristocratic domination of political institutions and looked to a ‘labour aristocracy’ as allies. The book shows the manner in which, thanks to their own efforts and those of their indefatigable publicists, unionists became identified with the respectable elite of the working class. It deals with a crucial period in the trade union development but looks at it not merely from the point of view of the unions, but also that of the employers, politicians, the press, intellectuals, political economists, giving for the first time a rounded picture of trade unionism and industrial relations in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. This book will be of interest to students of economics and history.