STAGE 1902: SIDNEY
& BREATICE WEBB– TRADE UNION
In historical, Sidney
Webb and Beatrice Potter, married in 1892, were one of the most productive and
influential husband-wife research teams in the history of the social sciences.
Beatrice Potter was born in 1858 as the ninth daughter of a well-to-do,
liberally minded businessman. In the 1880s, she started on her own to study
economics and sociology, a brand-new field of study, at the same time as her charity
work in the slum districts of London’s East End developed into a form of
sociological field work. Among other things, her work resulted in a book about
the British co-operative movement. It is the first one of its kind and a major
study of the history of British the trade-union movement. Coming from plain
conditions, Sidney Webb (1859-1947) worked his way up to the rank of a civil
servant at the Ministry of Colonial Affairs by way of private studies and
degrees in social science and law at the University of London. In their
contributions, Webb published articles on economic theory in Quarterly Journal
of Economics, Economic Journal, and Journal of Political Economy.
The 1880s in Great
Britain was a period of economic depression and political unrest. In spite of
mass unemployment, the labour market was disturbed by big strikes, which were
protests against poverty, low wages, and miserable working conditions. In
connection with a couple of spectacular and successful strikes in London in
1889, newly created, large unions for unskilled workers challenged the old
trade-union movement, which ever since the beginning of the industrial
revolution in the eighteenth-century had been based exclusively on the
principle of craft unionism with some connection with the guild system.
Socialist and anarchist groups provided more or less utopian solutions to the
problems in society, at the same time as the introduction of equal voting
rights for men in 1885 made a democratic and reformist strategy for the growing
working class movement possible.
Sidney Webb resigned from
this position so as to devote himself full time to research, political reform
work at the municipal level, and socialist agitation. Even though the
partnership of Sidney and Beatrice Webb lasted for half a century, it was only
in the 1890s that it directly concerned industrial relations. The result was
two major pieces of pioneering work which are The History of Trade Unionism
(1894) and Industrial Democracy (1897). It is especially the latter book that is
the basis for Sidney and Beatrice Webbs reputation as “the father and mother of
Industrial Relations”. The book on the history of the British trade-union
movement is based on enormously extensive research of primary source materials,
collected mainly from the unions in the bigger industrial cities. It is not
only a question of written sources, but also information obtained by means of
such modern methods as participatory observations of union meetings at various
levels and interviews with representatives of unions as well as employers.
Questions of methodology are discussed in detail in the preface to Industrial
Democracy. With her experience of sociological field work, Beatrice appears to
have been the one chiefly responsible for collecting the source materials,
while Sidney usually did the writing.
In The History of Trade
Unionism, the development of the trade-union movement is described, in a
well-balanced way, as resulting from the interaction of economic forces,
political and judicial decisions and changing union strategies. Meanwhile, from
the period of its establishment and the subsequent period of proclamation of
its illegality, the political repression of 1799-1825, up to the full emergence
of “the new trade unionism” around 1890. Having provided this descriptive
account of the “natural history” of the British unions, Sidney and Beatrice
Webb took on the task of systematically and theoretically analysing that same
material, resulting in a book truly deserving the label of a classic which is
Industrial Democracy. It is both a
document of that time and in its central parts a surprisingly modern text of
contemporary relevance.
In Industrial Democracy,
Sidney and Beatrice Webb repudiated the predominant economic doctrine’s
abstract and deductive theorizing and, instead, advocated a historical approach
to the study of actually existing institutions, an approach which they called
“sociology”. In the preface to Industrial Democracy, a manifesto was put
forward that is “Sociology, like all other sciences, can advance only upon the
basis of a precise observation of actual facts.” A realistic theory of trade
unions’ effect on the production and distribution of wealth had to be based on
empirical studies of the historical development of the trade-union movement as
well as its current structure and functions. In accordance with this
institutionally-oriented approach which is inspired by, inter alia, French and
British positivist philosophy and the German historical school’s criticism of
the theory of classical economics. The Webb’s divided their book into three
parts which are “Trade Union Structure” (problems of organization), “Trade
Union Function” (forms of activities) and “Trade Union Theory”.
The first part starts off
with a description and analysis of the constitutional development of British
unions. There was an ingenuous kind of direct democracy in the early unions,
only working at the local level: every issue was settled at meetings of the
entire membership and members took turns presiding over these meetings. As a
consequence of local associations amalgamating into unions, change became
necessary, though a total abandonment of direct democracy was late in coming.
In the beginning, the election of officials was decided by equal voting,
executive boards often changed between the different sections, and referenda
dominated as the procedure of decision making. It was not until the end of the
nineteenth-century that primitive democracy began to be replaced by
representative institutions. There is the board and officials in the leading
unions were elected at regularly recurring congresses, which also supervised
the activities of the former union leadership.
The third part of
Industrial Democracy, “Trade Union Theory”, starts off with a critical study of
the view of wage formation and unions in classical economic theory which is
ever since Ricardo and J. S. Mill to their followers of the late
nineteenth-century. The polemic in “The Verdict of the Economists” gives the
impression of beating a dead horse. As noted by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
themselves, contemporary economists had ever since the late 1870s demolished
the old theories of wage funds, the iron law of wages and the detrimental
influence of unions. Alfred Marshall, whose Principles of Economics (1890) is
often referred to with very deep respect in long foot-notes, had thus claimed
that wage increases, just as a lowering of interest rates, results in increases
in production and capital growth which is particularly with regard to human
capital and that unions can be of great value to the economic system.
As, however, the Webb’s
move on to a presentation of their own version of economic theory, based on
observations of reality, the survey at once becomes more productive. In the
chapter “The Higgling of the Market” which is an expression taken from Adam
Smith, a realistic description of the commercial life’s many and long links of
transactions is presented from the transactions in production between, inter
alia, labour and management, via wholesale trade and retail trade, to the
consumers that is in which the power game oscillates between unfettered
competition and monopolistic limits on competition. Unions are conceived as
protecting the workers against both these extremes. The lack of empirical research
on the mechanisms of transactions in the market is commented on. In this
respect, Sidney and Beatrice Webb did pioneering work, anticipating much of the
research in business economics of the last decades.
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