TRADES UNION CONGRESS

(>TUC) national organization of British trade unions. Although it is the sole national trade union centre, three other related bodies also exist: the Scottish Trades Union Congress, the Wales Trade Union Council, and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Northern Ireland Committee). Founded in 1868, the TUC held annual conferences of independent unions for the exposition of trade union principles. From 1871 it had a permanent standing committee, the Parliamentary Committee, whose principal function was to lobby Parliament for legislation favourable to unions. The TUC was composed almost exclusively of unions of skilled workers until 1889, when it began to accept the first affiliations of new or unskilled general unions. But the TUC's organization remained extremely rudimentary, and rather than enlarge its own role, it helped to establish two new, separate bodies: the General Federation of Trade Unions, founded in 1899 as an insurance fund for strikes, and the Labour Representation Committee, founded in 1900 and in 1906 renamed the Labour Party. The latter first acted as a body for sponsoring candidates for Parliament until after 1918, when it became a national political party. The TUC began to assume its modern form after World War I, when it replaced the Parliamentary Committee with a General Council that could better represent the diverse industrial unions of the British labour movement. The council acquired powers to deal with interunion conflicts and to intervene in disputes with employers, and it helped mobilize unions during the nationwide General Strike of 1926. Under such leaders as Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine, the TUC in the 1930s and '40s became the unchallenged spokesman for industrial labour in dealings with the government, and it participated closely in the management of Britain's industries during World War II. The TUC retained its status in the postwar decades, and TUC members cooperated with government and business in formulating economic policy until 1979, when a Conservative government came to power under Margaret Thatcher. Excluded from government policy making thereafter, the TUC was unable to rally its members against the Thatcher government's legal restrictions on trade unions. As a result of these and other factors, the TUC's membership declined from about 12,000,000 in 1979 to about 8,000,000 in 1989. The TUC's union affiliates are autonomous and act independently in the conduct of their relations with business. The TUC is not itself affiliated with any political party, but many of its affiliate unions support the Labour Party. The TUC is affiliated with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), which it helped to found in 1949.