ABSTRACT
Combinations of employed persons to determine conditions of work and dispense benefits among members have a fairly long history, dating back to the journeymen clubs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the first really significant development of trade unions of a modern type came with the rather exclusive craft unions and unions of skilled operatives of the mid-Victorian period. The incidence of trade union development was very uneven. Strike activity became the dominant form of collective action by labour from the early 1870s. Strike activity was highly concentrated among a small number of trades. Berg lists a whole range of activities where the introduction of mechanisation and technical change gave rise to worker resistance, including the cutlery trades, file making, glassmaking, silk throwing, hosiery, shoemaking, brick making, shipbuilding, engineering, coalmining, and textiles and typesetting. The gradual integration of trade unionism into the social and legal fabric, facilitated by employer and government recognition, left the union movement without a cause.
