ORGANIZED LABOUR

also called trade unionism, association and activities of workers in a trade or industry for the purpose of obtaining or assuring improvements in working conditions through their collective action. Additional reading Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism, rev. ed. (1920, reprinted 1975), is the pioneer work in British trade union history. This classic study has been revised and carried forward to the 1930s in a standard work, H.A. Clegg, Alan Fox, and A.F. Thompson, A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889, 2 vol. (19641985). A more popular, though also comprehensive, account is provided in Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism, 4th ed. (1987). For the earlier phases of union history, see John Rule (ed.), British Trade Unionism, 17501850: The Formative Years (1988); and E.H. Hunt, British Labour History, 18151914 (1981). There is a valuable discussion of the relationship between British trade unions and the law, including the compulsory arbitration issue, in Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain, 2nd ed. (1979).British and Australian union developments are compared in the valuable Henry Phelps Brown, The Origins of Trade Union Power (1983). Studies of the modern period of Australian union developments are offered in Ross M. Martin, Trade Unions in Australia: Who Runs Them, Who Belongs, Their Politics, Their Power, 2nd ed. (1980); and D.W. Rawson, Unions and Unionists in Australia, rev. ed. (1986). A detailed account of early Australian unions is J.T. Sutcliffe, A History of Trade Unionism in Australia (1921, reprinted 1967). Keith Sinclair, William Pember Reeves, New Zealand Fabian (1965), provides a biography of the architect of compulsory arbitration in New Zealand, and the same author's A History of New Zealand, rev. ed. (1980), is valuable in setting union development in a broad historical context. See also H. Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand Past and Present (1973). John Christopher Lovell United States and Canada The best historical survey of the American movement is Foster Rhea Dulles and Melvyn Dubofsky, Labor in America, 4th ed. (1984). The findings of much recent scholarship on the 19th century are presented in Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (1989). The 20th century is summarily covered in James R. Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth-Century America (1980); Robert H. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, 19201985 (1986); and David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (1980). Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, 2nd ed. (1988), is a standard work on the organization. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 18651925 (1987), is fundamental on the period it covers. On the role of American labour law, the leading modern interpretation is Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 18801960 (1985). Harold A. Logan, Trade Unions in Canada: Their Development and Functioning (1948), is a standard work; it can be supplemented for the modern period by Stuart Jamieson, Industrial Relations in Canada, 2nd ed. (1973); and Alton W.J. Craig, The System of Industrial Relations in Canada, 3rd ed. (1990). John Crispo, International Unionism: A Study in Canadian-American Relations (1967); and Gad Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics (1968, reprinted 1977), explore two of the main themes of Canadian labour history. Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.), Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century (1986), contains important comparative essays and also surveys later developments. David Brody Western Europe Walter Kendall, The Labour Movement in Europe (1975); and Hans Slomp, Labor Relations in Europe: A History of Issues and Developments (1990), are introductory surveys. Gary Marks, Unions in Politics: Britain, Germany, and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1989), explores the logic of political unionism. National differences in industrial work organization and their relations with unionism are discussed in Marc Maurice, Franois Sellier, and Jean-Jacques Silvestre, The Social Foundations of Industrial Power: A Comparison of France and Germany (1986; originally published in French, 1982). The emergence of the postwar settlement is analyzed in Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (1986). The events of 1968 are documented and placed in perspective in Colin Crouch and Alessandro Pizzorno (eds.), The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe Since 1968, 2 vol. (1978). Country studies of postwar unionism from the perspective of post-1968 developments are collected in Peter Gourevitch et al., Unions and Economic Crisis: Britain, West Germany, and Sweden (1984); and Peter Lange, George Ross, and Maurizio Vannicelli, Unions, Change, and Crisis: French and Italian Union Strategy and the Political Economy, 19451980 (1982). The two main works on neocorporatism are Gerhard Lehmbruch and Philippe C. Schmitter (eds.), Patterns of Corporatist Policy-Making (1982); and Philippe C. Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch (eds.), Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation (1979). John H. Goldthorpe (ed.), Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1984), analyzes the role of unions in the European political economies of the 1970s. For a comprehensive descriptive study of modern West European unions, see Jelle Visser, In Search of Inclusive Unionism (1990). Wolfgang Streeck Eastern Europe Jan F. Triska and Charles Gati (eds.), Blue-Collar Workers in Eastern Europe (1981), presents essayssome thematic, some by individual countryby leading experts on the topics of politics and economics of workers and unions in communist states. Union developments from the 1917 revolution to the post-1945 period are analyzed by an expert on Soviet political and economic affairs in Isaac Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labour Policy (1950, reprinted 1973). Victoria E. Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 19001914 (1983), places union development in a comparative European framework. Analysis of the role of unions in the later Soviet political structure is offered in Blair A. Ruble, Soviet Trade Unions: Their Development in the 1970s (1981). Feliks Gross, The Polish Worker: A Study of a Social Stratum (1945), is a sociological and historical study embracing the whole of the 19th century and the pre-World War II period of the 20th; Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity (1991), analyzes more recent developments. Diane P. Koenker Japan Taishiro Shirai (ed.), Contemporary Industrial Relations in Japan (1983), is a collection of authoritative analyses by leading Japanese scholars, including the editor's insightful study of enterprise unionism. Kazuo Koike, Understanding Industrial Relations in Modern Japan, trans. from Japanese (1988), portrays internal labour markets and their effect on unions and other labour institutions. Taishiro Shirai and Haruo Shimada, Japan, pp. 241322 in John T. Dunlop and Walter Galenson (eds.), Labor in the Twentieth Century (1978), offers a highly useful summary of historical and statistical materials up to the 1970s. Kazuo Okochi, Bernard Karsh, and Solomon B. Levine (eds.), Workers and Employers in Japan: The Japanese Employment Relations System (1973), covers all major aspects of the postwar system, including unions, prior to the 197374 oil crisis. Analysis of union, employer, and government relations in the decade following the oil crisis is found in Koji Taira and Solomon B. Levine, Japan's Industrial Relations: A Social Compact Emerges, pp. 247300 in Hervey Juris, Mark Thompson, and Wilbur Daniels (eds.), Industrial Relations in a Decade of Economic Change (1985). The English-language publications of the Japan Institute of Labour are an important source of information. Solomon B. Levine The developing world Rosalind E. Boyd, Robin Cohen, and Peter C.W. Gutkind (eds.), International Labour and the Third World: The Making of a New Working Class (1987), examines class formation and the labour movement in various areas. Robin Cohen, Peter C.W. Gutkind, and Phyllis Brazier (eds.), Peasants and Proletarians: The Struggles of Third World Workers (1979), focuses on forms of labour organization and strategies of working class action. World Labour Report (irregular), issued by the International Labour Office, provides systematic coverage of key issues of organized labour. Ronaldo Munck, The New International Labour Studies (1988), offers an overview of the field as applied to the Third World. Roger Southall (ed.), Trade Unions and the New Industrialization of the Third World (1988), examines the relationship between the new international division of labour and labour organization. Immanuel Wallerstein (ed.), Labor in the World Social Structure (1983), presents a collection of papers from a Soviet-American symposium, covering various aspects of labour's role in the Third World. Ronaldo Munck Eastern Europe Trade unionism in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe developed in close relationship with political parties, usually revolutionary parties. Because the autocratic Russian state prohibited public organization of any sort, especially trade unions, autonomous workers' movements often shared common interests with revolutionary parties and tended to cooperate with them. Moreover, revolutionary Marxist parties grew simultaneously with an industrialized, urban labour force, so that political ideasespecially revolution and Socialismhelped to give definition to workplace struggle. Russian and Polish labour movements will serve as examples here. Russia The earliest Russian labour organizations emerged among artisans in the form of legal guilds, which were not autonomous or spontaneous institutions but rather subject to close state supervision. Late in the 19th century, these were joined by mutual-aid societies, which spread among the more skilled and literate craftsmen in capital cities and among Jewish artisans in the western part of the empire. Particularly among the latter, such societies sometimes evolved into illegal organizations for struggle with employers, but by and large their function was to provide mutual support and cultural self-help. The earliest mutual-aid societies were begun by printers in Warsaw (1814), Riga (1816), and Odessa (1816), but their real expansion came in the late 1880s and the 1890s. Meanwhile, the population of factory workers grew outside of the artisanal tradition, finding recruits among peasants and children of hereditary factory workers in state-owned military enterprises. Traditions of solidarity among factory workers were based on ties with fellow countrymen and on informal collective living arrangements called artels. The growth of industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries gave rise to a factory proletariat and to labour unrest, but government repression prevented intermittent strikes from leading to permanent forms of organization. Agitators from Marxist Social-Democratic groups attempted to organize strikers, but they were hampered by frequent arrest and imprisonment and by the reluctance of workers to entrust their struggle to the hands of outside intellectuals. In 1901, however, the Russian government embarked on a unique experiment and organized its own police-supervised unions to channel worker protest and preserve loyalty to the tsarist regime. Led by the chief of security police in Moscow, Sergey Vasilyevich Zubatov, such unions quickly emerged primarily among skilled factory workers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, Vilnius, and Minsk. While the experiment soon lost favour with the government, it gave workers new experience with collective bargaining and grievance procedures, and it led to their demands for the right to choose shop-floor representatives and to strike. The unrest that led to the Russian Revolution of 1905 grew out of this movement among factory workers, and in October of that year the tsar conceded to workers the right to organize trade unions. From their foundations in mutual-aid societies, police unions, and the independent strike councils (soviets) that had emerged during the revolution, new trade unions multiplied in October and November of 1905. In St. Petersburg, 30,000 workers joined 41 unions in just six weeks. In Moscow, 56 unions were created in this period, embracing about 25,000 workers. In both cities, tradesmen employed by small shops were the first to organize; metalworkers and textile workers, employed primarily in large plants, were slower to join unions, in part because their individual factories were big enough to offer by themselves the advantages of organization and solidarity. The wave of union organizing continued into 1906 and 1907 with the publication of the Temporary Laws of March 4, 1906, legalizing the formation of public organizations. Union activists attempted to organize nationally, but before an all-Russia trade-union congress could take place, the union movement succumbed to a wave of reaction set off by the dissolution of the second state Duma (parliament) in June 1907. Police found unions in violation of some regulation or another (organizing strikes remained illegal, for example) and ordered them closed. The resulting precarious legal status of unions frightened prospective members, and union fortunes waned. Between 1907 and 1909, police closed 350 unions and arrested many of the most important labour leaders. By 1910, union membership had fallen to 60,000, compared to 250,000 members in January 1907. Beyond these legal members, there remained, in the underground or in exile, dedicated cadres of Social-Democratic activists who would become important leaders when unions' fortunes revived. Economic recession and political repression combined to depress trade-union activity until 1912. Those unions that remained legal could offer little to their members besides cultural activities and fellowship; collective bargaining, strikes, political activity, and intercity contact were all forbidden. During this period, differences between the approaches of Menshevism and Bolshevism, the two wings of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party, became more pronounced. Mensheviks believed in service to the working class and focused on consumer cooperatives, schools, libraries, and clubs. Bolsheviks tended to engage in political and strike activity, trying to force a revolutionary situation. When union activism revived in 1912, unionists agitated for legal shop-floor representatives and collective labour contracts. Strikes increased in the period 191214 but remained outside the union sphere. Modest gains in labour legislation gave encouragement to a reformist wing of the union movement, but continued government harassment forced many activists to adopt a more revolutionary ideology. World War I propelled hundreds of thousands of new workerswomen, youths, and peasantsinto Russian factories, diluting the old skilled cadres and creating new pressures on work culture. As a result, when the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought an immediate freedom to organize, trade unions had to compete as centres of organization with less cumbersome factory committees and urban soviets of workers' deputies. The main concerns of factory committees were local grievances, representing their factory to larger bodies, and adjudicating disputes among workers themselves, but, as trade unions failed to organize quickly enough to deal with problems of wages, hours, control, and regulation, factory committees began to join in citywide conferences to deal with many of these problems. Simultaneously, unions formed administrative structures, recruited members, and began to coordinate economic bargaining with employers. By the end of 1917, more than 2,000 unions had formed in Russia, with a reported membership of 2.7 million workers. When the Bolsheviks came to power in November 1917 (October 1917, Old Style), much of Russian industry was at a standstill. Workers in many idle factories assumed the responsibility of restarting the plants, usually through their factory committees, but gradually, between 1918 and 1920, central and local government agencies took over. Most trade-union leaders agreed that, under Socialism, the primary task of unions was to facilitate production and that workers' interests were now identical to state employers' interests. Trade unions assumed more state functions, serving as military recruiting offices, centres of supply, providers of social services, and judicial organs. A minority of independent union leaders argued that the interests of workers and managers would always conflict, even under socialized industry, and that the task of unions was to defend workers first. A syndicalist minority within the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were renamed in 1918) believed that independent trade unions should manage the state economy. By 1921 a compromise was reached, pressured by widespread factory discontent: trade unions were thenceforth to have a dual function of helping to raise productivity while guaranteeing workers' legitimate rights against overbearing managers. As a transmission belt between the Party and the working rank and file, they would serve as a school for Communism and teach workers that their interests were identical with those of the state. During the 1920s trade unions worked closely with state agencies in setting wages, providing unemployment relief and social services, and raising productivity. With the rapid industrialization drive of 192832, they became little more than administrative cogs of decreasing relevance to the interests of workers on the factory floor. Japan After Japan's surrender in 1945, Allied occupation reforms spurred a spectacular spread of independent trade unions, which had been eliminated during wartime. Until it was halted in 194950 by sharp deflation, revision of labour laws, and a purge of leftists, unionism enlisted 6 million membersalmost half of all workers. Unions resumed steady growth after 1955 as industrial employment leaped upward with Japan's economic miracle. Organized labour peaked in 1975 at 12.6 million members, one-third of all eligible workers, becoming the third largest movement among the industrialized democracies. As economic expansion slowed following the 197374 oil crisis and subsequent industrial restructuring toward hard-to-unionize services, union membership leveled off to one of every four workers. Backed by new constitutional rights to organize, bargain, and strike, in sharp contrast to prewar years, Japanese unions made notable achievements as they increasingly emphasized industrial activity. Genuine union-management negotiations and wide-ranging joint consultation at enterprise, industrial, and national levels became well institutionalized. Also established was comprehensive legislation for labour standards and social security. Unions provided the principal support for such progressive political parties as the Socialists, Democratic Socialists, and Communists, in opposition to the conservative Liberal-Democrats, who reigned continuously after 1948. However, unions were faulted for severe ideological disunity, undue employer influence, and a narrow focus on their members' interests to the neglect of unorganized workers and the wider society. A chief feature of Japanese unionism is its decentralized enterprise-level structure. Numbering more than 70,000, most basic union organizations form inside, not across, large-scale private enterprises and government agencies. Democratically run, well-financed, and self-staffed, the typical enterprise union actively represents only workers permanently employed in the firmblue- and white-collar together and also foremen. This rank-and-file choice reflects the influence of fundamental economic, technological, and sociopolitical forces in Japanese society. Some theories explain it as the legacy of Japanese feudalism or as part of a system of employer paternalism, but most important has been what can be called a labour-market dualism. This evolved as Japan rapidly industrialized with sharply separated work forces for the relatively few large-scale, technologically advanced oligopolies on the one hand and for the millions of less secure small- and medium-size firms on the other hand. Considerable differentials in wages, benefits, working conditions, and employment security have long favoured the larger firms, so that a major reason to unionize within such enterprises lies in shared motivations among permanent workers to protect their advantages while simultaneously avoiding harm to their company's competitive strength. In order to obtain and preserve gains and to avoid divisions, most unions seek coordination and guidance through industrywide federations and national centres. Upper-level organizations, although less well-financed, gradually have gained influence over enterprise unions despite decades of severe ideological rivalry, which began in the 1920s and revived with Japan's defeat in World War II. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Sohyo, the Socialists' backbone, and Domei, the Democratic Socialist mainstay, fiercely competed, but, along with two lesser centres, they finally achieved unity in 1989 with the founding of Rengo (Japanese Trade Union Confederation), embracing almost eight million members. Rengo potentially offers a broadened role for organized labour. It aims to shift union power from the enterprise to upper levels by merging the numerous industrial federations, embracing millions of unaffiliated union members, and organizing the unorganized in cross-enterprise union structures. In 1955 Sohyo successfully coordinated union demands by launching the first shunto (spring offensive); this has since been continued annually for the bargaining of general wage and benefit increases in April, when Japan's fiscal year begins. Shunto counters the tendency toward disparate settlements at the enterprise level, where unionmanagement negotiations formally occur, and also spills over into nonunion sectors, thus resembling an incomes policy mechanism. Shunto subject matter has gradually broadened to include issues such as work hours, pensions, and housing, as well as large wage bonuses paid once or more each year. Solomon B. Levine The developing world Unionism in the developing regions, or Third World, has been largely shaped by the structure of their economies. From the turn of the 20th century, there was a gradual decline in the proportion of Third World workers engaged in agriculture, but even so, until World War II fully three-quarters of the active population was engaged in farming. The numbers engaged in manufacturing increased from 26 million to 46 million between 1900 and 1960, but as a proportion of the labour force they represented a mere 8 percent. During the same period, the number of workers engaged in extractive industries increased threefold, reflecting the importance of these activities during the colonial period, but as a proportion of the working population they represented a mere 1 percent. Service-sector employment also increased threefold between 1900 and 1960, but in this case it embraced a considerable 18 percent of the work force and a massive absolute number of 92 million workers. Across these sectors of employment, trade unionism developed unevenly, and in various phases of history one or the other was dominant. In all cases the objective economic determinants of trade unionism i.e., whether prevailing conditions were favourable or not to its developmentwould prove crucial, and they set the context in which labour organized. The first stable trade unions in many Third World countries were located within the export sector. By the beginning of the 20th century, railroad workers, dockers, and miners had formed strong labour organizations. These workers, who were integrated into the outward-oriented economies typical of the colonial division of labour, held considerable bargaining power through their ability to disrupt a major economic activity. For example, when in 1885 Hong Kong workers refused to unload a French warship, their action spread to coolies, boatmen, and rickshaw pullers. The strong group consciousness of dockworkers in African countries made them among the first to take collective class action. Railway workers, too, were as important in Ghana as they were in Argentina in organizing the early labour movement. And miners, for example in Chile and South Africa, have retained a considerable political influence through their strong and stable union organization in spite of their reduced numbers in relative terms. Once industrialization spread beyond these enclaves of the export sector, wider layers of workers, such as those engaged in textiles, began to organize. A new international division of labour that emerged after World War II led to the consolidation of a significant manufacturing sector in a number of Third World countries. From the textile industry to automobile manufacturing and electronics, large factories and a transformed labour process created the conditions for a new wave of union organization. In Brazil during the 1970s, for example, organization within the workplace led to a powerful labour movement spearheaded by the metalworkers' union. In South Africa, likewise, the rise of new black trade unions in the 1970s was reflected in an increased level of organization at factory level. Similar processes could be discerned in South Korea and the Philippines. As opposed to the early government-controlled trade unions, this new wave of unionism had much deeper roots in the workplace. Nevertheless, the role of trade unions in the Third World has remained predominantly defensive, organizing work forces that have been created by the international division of labour and seeking through collective effort to defend living standards and improve working conditions. Their success in so doing is sporadic and very uneven across countries. The public sector is relatively well organized in many Third World countries, either in spite of or because of government attitudes. Freedom of association for agricultural workers has also been achieved in most countries, although this is more readily achieved in big plantations with a stable labour force than in the traditional subsistence-farming sector. In the newly industrializing countries of East Asia, there are growing numbers of organizable workers owing to the economic modernization that has taken place there, although in general (with the exception of South Korea) labour organization has stagnated. In Africa, some countries such as Tanzania have promoted rural trade unions in particular, but in general the potentially organizable labour force in large enterprises is but a small minority of the working classes. In the huge informal sector, which is so prevalent in the Third World, unionization is even more difficult. In some countries, such as India, there have been some moves by industrial workers to extend their organization to cover unregistered casual and rural workers. The sheer size of this sector and its role in the economy mean that it has genuine bargaining power and can indeed force the pace for trade unions, which tend to neglect the smaller industrial units and the nonpermanent work force. There is a close link between the level of socioeconomic development and the degree of labour organization in the Third World. Thus, Argentina has a degree of unionization approaching 40 percent, whereas the Dominican Republic has less than 10 percent trade-union membership. Likewise, Singapore has a far greater proportion of trade-union members than Papua New Guinea. Overall, there emerges a picture of incomplete unionization in the Third World, with only a handful approaching 40 percent, and most countries falling below 20 percent. Such quantitative analysis has its limits, however. It is equally important to assess the level of control that each trade-union movement has over the labour market. In addition, it is the distribution of the labour force across different occupational categories that sets the framework in which a trade-union movement develops. Exactly how it operates within these constraints depends on a range of political factors not considered here. Ronaldo Munck The United States and Canada Origins of craft unionism Trade unionism in North America had its beginnings in a transition during the late 18th century from a mutualist/dependent to a free wage-labour system. As journeymen artisans moved out of what has been called economic clientage to master craftsmen, they found their interests in conflict with those of their employers. Only through collective effort could workers enforce the list of prices they established for their work and defend their trades against cheap and diluted labour. The first identifiable labour strike dates from 1768, when journeymen tailors in New York City stopped work to resist a pay cut. Sustained labour organization began with the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia in 1794. The first sign of a labour movementthat is, organizational activity exceeding the narrow sectional interests of particular craftsappeared in Philadelphia, where the various craft bodies joined in 1827 to form the Mechanics' Union of Trade Societies. In Canada, these developments were slower to emerge: the first craft locals appeared in Montreal in 1827 and in Toronto in 1832, and the earliest city central came only in 1871, with the formation of the Toronto Trades Assembly. The first national union of locals in a single trade to survive, the National Typographical Union, was formed in 1852 in the United States. Like other national unions that followed, it chartered locals in Canada as well; this led to its renaming in 1869 as the International Typographical Uniona designation that became common in North American unionism. Rooted as it was in the preindustrial trades, this early trade unionism did not lose its essential craft character with the onset of industrialization. Mule spinners, molders, machinists, and iron puddlers and rollers were employing new skills, and they functioned in a factory context, but they had much the same collective concerns as did traditional craftsmen and fitted readily into the emergent trade-union structure. On the railroads, too, the key jobs were defined as operating crafts. Even with the quickening pace of industrialism, then, North American trade unionism in the 19th century was overwhelmingly a movement of skilled workers. But job consciousness, powerful though it was, by no means constituted the sole, or even predominant, inspiration for collective activity. Historical research on working-class life has demonstrated that labour consciousness was a complex phenomenon, rooted in distinctive structures of culture, community, and ideology as well as in craft identity. American workers of the Jacksonian era adhered to a conception of artisan republicanism, which celebrated producerist values and the republican ideals of the American Revolution. Counter to this vision ran the corrosive impact of emergent industrial capitalism, which, in the view of the Philadelphia Workingmen's Party, created invidious distinctions unjust and unnatural inequalities by dividing Americans into two distinct classes, the rich and the poor. Beginning with workingmen's parties in the 1830s, a series of labour-reform movements fought a running battle for equal rights. In the 1860s, this was the task of the National Labor Union and, after its decline, of the Knights of Labor. On their face, these reform movements seemed to cut athwart trade unionism, insofar as they aspired to the cooperative commonwealth rather than simply to a higher wage, appealed broadly to all producers rather than strictly to wage workers, and thought of themselves as broadly inclusive political and educational movements. But contemporaries saw no contradiction here: trade unions tended to workers' day-to-day needs, labour reform to their higher hopes. While the two were accepted as strands of a single labour movement, however, it was well understood that they were strands that had to be kept operationally apart. During the 1880s, that functional separation began to break down. The international craft unions, having by now emerged as the dominant element in the trade-union structure, became less tolerant of challenges to their jurisdictions and internal lines of authority. For its part, despite a robust labour-reform rhetoric, the Knights of Labor began to act increasingly like a rival trade-union movement, carrying on strikes and organizing workers along industrial rather than craft lines. When the Knights rejected a proposal reaffirming the historic separation of trade-union and labour-reform functions, the alarmed internationals joined in December 1886 and formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The immediate aim was to drive the Knights from the industrial field, and, thanks largely to the Knights' own confusion and to employers' counterattacks, this was speedily accomplished. But more important in the long run was the permanent stamp that the AFL made on the American labour movement. This was partly institutional: the AFL legitimized the emergent trade-union structure that gave preeminence to the rule of the internationals. But equally significant was the enunciation of a guiding labour philosophy pure and simple unionismunder the aegis of Samuel Gompers and his circle of Marxist trade unionists. Labour reform was thenceforth denied any further role in the struggle of American workers. The weapons in that struggle were to be defined as economic and not political; the participants would be strictly wage workers organized along occupational lines; and the objective of trade unionism became exclusively the incremental achievement of higher wages and better working conditions. In Canada these American events had very considerable consequences. Given the sparse settlement and small industrial base, Canadian unions found it difficult to build a national structure of their own. An attempt initiated by the Toronto Trades Assembly in 1873 soon failed. It was also natural, given the colonial (after 1867, dominion) ties to Britain, for Canadian workers to look to English unions, and at least two groupsthe carpenters and engineersin fact built up sizable Canadian memberships after 1850. But the much more compelling links were to the United States, partly because labour markets in many skilled trades ignored the national boundaries and partly because the American unions were the readiest source of institutional assistance. By the end of the 1880s, as many as half the organized workers in Canada were in locals affiliated to internationals with headquarters in the United States. And it was this segment of Canadian labour that was mainly responsible for forming, parallel to the AFL, the Trades and Labor Congress (TLC) in 1886. For some years, the TLC followed its own bent. The Knights of Labor had been highly successful in Canada, notably in Quebec. After virtually disappearing from the United States in the early 1890s, the Knights remained a considerable force in Canada, and, although strictly excluded from the AFL, were made welcome in the TLC. As late as 1901, moreover, its president was proposing that the Canadian branches break their links with the internationals, form their own national unions, and turn the TLC into a wholly Canadian movement. But in 1902 just the opposite transpired. The TLC expelled the Knights and adopted the AFL principle of opposition to dual unionism, which meant that the Canadian branches of the internationals gained a virtual monopoly on trade-union representation in the TLC. It became, in effect, the Canadian wing of the American movement. Responding to Canadian political conditions, the TLC was somewhat more flexible than the AFL on issues of independent labour politics and state intervention, but, on the whole, American pure-and-simple unionism exerted the commanding influence on Canadian unionism in these years. Only in Quebec did a very different tradition assert itself. Here, following a lockout of boot and shoe workers in 1900, the Roman Catholic church stepped in and, in accordance with the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), encouraged the unionization of Quebec workers. The result was a vigorous French Catholic movement, the Confdration des Travailleurs Catholiques du Canada, which stands as a unique instance of confessional unionism in North America. Only after World War II did Quebec unionism shed its links to the church and evolve into a secular movement. Challenges to pure-and-simple unionism In the American West, pure-and-simple unionism was challenged in 1905 by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW had two sources. One was the socialist left wing, which had concluded that the AFL could not be captured and made over into the necessary trade-union base for socialist electoral politics. The second was a western brand of working-class radicalism forged by a decade of industrial war in the western mining states. The two groups proved incompatible, and the IWW, dominated by radicals from the Western Federation of Miners, drove out the socialists and committed itself to a syndicalist version of class war, in which political action was excluded. Struggle would centre on direct industrial action and ultimately on the revolutionary general strike, and out of that would emerge a workers' society organized on the basis of industrial unions. The IWW led a number of important strikes in the east between 1907 and 1913, but its main theatre of operations was among western workers, including Canadians, in metal mining, lumber, transportation, and agriculture. During World War I, however, the IWW was violently suppressed, and it never regained the organizational momentum of its peak years between 1914 and 1917. The Canadian version of western syndicalism sprang into life in 1919, just as the IWW was expiring. This was the One Big Union (OBU), which had its roots in a postwar labour disaffection from conventional trade unionism that was especially pronounced in western Canada. Structured more along geographic than along the industrial-union lines of the IWW, the OBU had its moment of glory in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, and for a few years thereafter it virtually displaced the TLC as the dominant movement in the four western provinces. The OBU, despite its swift collapse, left behind a significant regional legacy: thereafter, the western provinces would persistently be the site of a more progressive, politically active brand of Canadian trade unionism. The syndicalist challenge stemmed, to some degree, from the failing fortunes of pure-and-simple unionism in the early decades of the 20th century. The essence of that formulation had been to locate labour's struggle firmly in the industrial arena. But the struggle for collective bargaining proved to be much harder than Gompers and other trade unionists had anticipated. Where competitive pressures were severe enough, as in bituminous coal mining, not even the most innovative and determined of union efforts at market control proved sufficienthence the collapse of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in the 1920s. Elsewhere, as in the metal-fabricating industries, the problem was the speed of technological innovation and, in particular, the perfection of mass-production methods, which undercut the role of craft workers. Scientific management, moreover, demanded strict supervisory control over the workplace and hence posed a profound threat to customary patterns of workers' autonomy in the labour process. When an effort to find common ground in the Murray Hill agreement (1900) between the International Association of Machinists and the National Metal Trades Association failed within a year, the die was cast: a quarter-century of bitter industrial warfare ensued. Labour's fortunes varied at different times and places, but the end result was unquestionably an arrested labour movement, with union penetration settling at roughly 10 percent of the nonagricultural labour force. As welfare capitalism took hold in the New Era of the 1920s, the more advanced sectors of the industrial economy seemed quite beyond the reach of the AFL. Western Europe Characteristics of the co