From 1911-14 were the Trade Unions a threat to British society?
From 1911-14 were the Trade Unions a threat to British society?
The five years or so before the First World War showed a dramatic upsurge in the amount of strike action taking place and historians such as Halevy, Cole and Postgate have argued that this was brought about by a desire from the workers to follow the principles of syndicalism. In other words, they wished to take 'direct action' instead of following the constitutional system of politics, in order that they may first take control of the country's industry and then total control of the whole country. The historians who advocate this theory list various reasons for their belief. To begin with, they point to the fact that the railwaymen, transport workers and miners had amalgamated into the Triple Alliance, which could mark the start of a union for the whole of industry and henceforth increasing the chances of a general strike. A general strike would have been necessary for the workers to take control of industry- the first objective of a syndicalist. A further reason which historians use to demonstrate the influences of syndicalism, is the sheer scale and seriousness of strikes taking place and certainly there was a noticeable increase in the number of working days lost and the number of strikes after 1910. In 1912, forty-one million working days were lost, when in the preceding five years the average had been just seven million. The maximum number of actual strikes was in 1913, when 1,459 took place, compared to an average of 600 in the preceding six years. The most serious strike in terms of men laid off took place in 1912, when two million men lost their jobs in a coal strike. Finally, historians argue that it was the spread of syndicalist ideas from France and U.S.A. that caused workers to re-evaluate their positions in society and increase their militancy in their quest for a revolution.
