Great Britain 1868

Synopsis

What remains the largest campaigning pressure group on behalf of workers' conditions, pay, and rights in the United Kingdom, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), was founded in Manchester in 1868. A voluntary association of unions, it gave a formal, national voice to previously disparate regional and sectional trade unions. Besides defending the precarious legal status of the unions in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and pressuring the government to adopt legislation favorable to the TUC's interests and to those of its members, the TUC also had a political function. Early leading figures like Henry Broadhurst were Liberals, but the TUC also played a decisive role in the founding (and funding) of the Labour Party in 1900. The TUC reached its peak in the late 1970s with more than 12 million affiliated trade union members, but it has remained at the helm of the British trade union movement...