New Unionism in the 1880s
On Saturday 18 February, Workers’ Liberty will host “New Unionism: how workers can fight back”, a dayschool to discuss militant, class-struggle trade unionism, past and present, with a particular focus on the struggles that reshaped the British labour movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Cathy Nugent outlines some of the important features of historical “New Unionism”. Beginning in the late 1880s, a great unionising drive among unskilled and semi-skilled workers began. This period of “new unionism” lasted — with setbacks and shifts in character along the way — right up to the...