A short history of labor unions

Unions have a surprisingly short history having really only been around for less than two hundred years. A big part of the reason for that is that before the industrial revolution very few people actually worked for somebody else, most were self employed. As the way that people worked changed the power transferred to the employer and the workers needed unions for protection.

There is some debate about just how unions got their start; some believe that the firsts unions were to old guilds of Europe while others will argue that these really weren't unions. The guild system goes back to medieval times when skilled tradesmen were very protective of their craft. In order to learn it you had to serve an apprenticeship and then become a member of the guild. This severely restricted the number of people who knew the trade making the members pretty much irreplaceable. This gave the members of the guild a very strong negotiating position.

The reason that there is some dispute about whether the guilds were the first trade unions is that the members rarely worked for somebody else. Following an apprenticeship it was normal to work as a journeyman in a shop for a few years while you saved up some money and then open your own shop. Therefore the guild really wasn't about protecting employees as much as it was about reducing the competition for the members who owned their own shop.

The real start of the unions came with the decline of the guild system during the industrial revolution. The modern machinery that was used greatly reduced the need for the skilled tradesmen as unskilled workers could now do the same job at a much faster rate. Since there were few if any skills necessary to do these jobs the employees had no real negotiating power and would just have to accept whatever wages and working conditions they were offered. The result was that wages declined dramatically and the working day got much longer, not to mention a lot more dangerous.

In order to counter the deterioration in wages and working conditions that then existed employees started to join together in the early part of the nineteenth century to form unions. In most cases it was illegal to form a union which made doing this dangerous. Because unions had no legal standing there was often violence as the union tried to form or to take action against an employer. Over time however attitudes towards unions slowly changed and the laws would follow them. Now it is generally legal to join a union and the union normally has the right to take job action. Of course many of the things that the early unions fought for are now protected by law like limits on the number of hours worked and a minimum wage. Nevertheless unions still have an important role to play.