No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Legal Boundaries, Organizational Fields, and Trade Union Politics: The Development of Railway Unions in the US and the UK
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2024
Abstract
Throughout the nineteenth century, powerful railway unions in the USA and the UK cultivated an expansive system of voluntary sickness, death, unemployment, and superannuation benefits. By the early twentieth century, the movements had diverged: while the British Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants relinquished its commitment to voluntarism in favor of state healthcare and pensions, the American Railway Brotherhoods persisted along voluntarist lines, resisting social insurance in favor of exclusive schemes for their white male membership. What accounts for these diverging orientations? I highlight the importance of organizational forms as a lens for understanding comparative trade union strategy, emphasizing the role of law in designating legitimate forms of working-class association. I demonstrate that governing elites in both countries promoted voluntarism as a benign form of working-class organization throughout much of the nineteenth century. Consequently, I argue, early American and British trade unions adopted benefits in part because they enabled them to mimic the far more respected and legitimate friendly and fraternal mutual benefit societies. Toward the end of the century, the context had changed: while alternative organizational avenues were opened for trade unions in the UK, benefits presented an ongoing organizational lifeline for American unions. In defining and redefining the boundaries of legitimate forms of workers’ associations, legal decisions in both countries shaped not only trade union organizing strategies in the short run but also their positioning in broader social struggles.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Social Science History Association
References
Adams, W. G. S. (1902) “The incorporation of trade unions: The position in England.” Journal of Political Economy 11 (1): 89–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) (c. 1851–1920) Monthly Reports. MSS.259. Coventry: Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.Google Scholar
Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) (c. 1876–1913) Annual Reports and Proceedings. MSS.127. Coventry: Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.Google Scholar
Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) (c. 1880–1915) Railway Review. MSS.127. Coventry: Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.Google Scholar
American Federation of Labor (c. 1905) “Report of the proceedings of the…annual convention of the American Federation of Labor.” HathiTrust, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101065131037 (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
Archer, Robin (2008) Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Bacon, Frederick Hampden (c. 1917) A Treatise on the Law of Life and Accident Insurance: Including Benefit Societies, and Voluntary Associations. Vol. 1. St. Louis: F.H. Thomas Law Book Company.Google Scholar
Beito, David T. (1997) “The ‘lodge practice evil’ reconsidered: Medical care through fraternal societies, 1900–1930.” Journal of Urban History 23 (5): 569–600.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beito, David T. (2000) From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890–1967. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Bernard Gibaud, Jan Lucassen, van der Lindon, Marcel, and Dreyfus, Michel (2003) British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Bloch, Ruth H., and Lamoreaux, Naomi R. (2015) “Voluntary associations, corporate rights, and the state: Legal constraints on the development of American civil society, 1750–1900.” Working Paper Series 21153. National Bureau of Economic Research, doi: 10.3386/w21153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boxall, Peter (2008) “Trade union strategy,” in Blyton, Paul, Heery, Edmund, Bacon, Nicolas, and Fiorito, Jack (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Industrial Relations. London: SAGE Publications Ltd: 209–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bridges, Amy (1986) “Becoming American: The working class in the US before the Civil War,” in Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R. (eds.) Working Class Formation: Patterns in Nineteenth Century United States and Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press: 157–96.Google Scholar
Brodie, Marc (2014) “‘You could not get any person to be trusted except the state’: Poorer workers’ loss of faith in voluntarism in late 19th century Britain.” Journal of Social History 47 (4): 1071–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen (BLF) (c. 1873–1915) “Locomotive firemen’s magazine.” HathiTrust. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000675974 (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen (BLF) (1874–1915) “Proceedings.” HathiTrust, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010007101?type%5B%5D=all&lookfor%5B%5D=brotherhood%20of%20locomotive%20firemen%20proceedings&ft= (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
Clawson, Mary Ann (1985) “Fraternal orders and class formation in the nineteenth-century United States.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 27 (4): 672–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clemens, Elisabeth S. (2020) Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Commons, John Rogers, and Sumner, Helen L., eds. (1910) A Documentary History of American Industrial Society. Vol. 4. Cleveland: A. H. Clarke Co.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cordery, Simon (1995) “Friendly societies and the discourse of respectability in Britain, 1825–1875.” Journal of British Studies 34 (1): 35–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cordery, Simon (1996) “Fraternal orders in the United States: A quest for protection and identity,” in Gibaud, Bernard, Lucassen, Jan, van der Lindon, Marcel, and Dreyfus, Michel (eds.) Social Security Mutualism: The Comparative History of Mutual Benefit Societies. Lausanne: Peter Lang: 83–109.Google Scholar
Crompton, Gerald (2009) “Lines of division: Railway unions and labour, 1900−39,” in Worley, Mattew (ed.) The Foundations of the British Labour Party. London: Routledge: 37–57.Google Scholar
Davies, Stephen (1997) “Two conceptions of welfare: Voluntarism and incorporationism.” Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (2): 39–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Henry Frederick Alexander (c. 1876) The Law and Practice of Friendly Societies and Trade Unions: Under the Friendly Societies Act, 1875, the Trade Unions Act, 1871, and the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act, 1875; with Official Regulations and Rules and Forms. London: H. Sweet.Google Scholar
Davis, Mike (1980) “Why the US working class is different.” New Left Review 1 (123): 3–44.Google Scholar
DiMaggio, Paul J., and Powell, Walter W. (1983) “The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields.” American Sociological Review 48 (2): 147–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobbin, Frank (1995) “The origins of economic laws: Railway entrepreneurs and public policy in nineteenth-century America,” in Scott, Richard and Moller Christensen, Soren (eds.) The Institutional Construction of Organization: International and Longitudinal Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.: 277–301.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (2022 [1906]) L’ouvrier negre en amérique [The negro worker in America], Revue Économique Internationale. Critical Sociology 3: 298–348, https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205221138011.Google Scholar
Dubofsky, Melvyn, and Dulles, Foster Rhea (2010) Labor in America: A History. 8th edition. Wheeling: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Eden, Frederick Morton (2011 [1797]) The State of the Poor: Or, an History of the Labouring Classes in England, from the Conquest to the Present Period. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ernst, Daniel R (1992) “Free labor, the consumer interest, and the law of industrial disputes, 1885–1900.” American Journal of Legal History 36 (1): 19–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ernst, Daniel R. (1995) Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Fisher, Clyde Olin (c. 1922) Use of Federal Power in Settlement of Railway Labor Disputes. Washington: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Forbath, William E (1991) “Courts, constitutions, and labor politics in England and America: A study of the constitutive power of law.” Law & Social Inquiry 16 (1): 1–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, Gerald (1988) “The state and the making of the working class: France and the United States, 1880–1914.” Theory and Society 17 (3): 403–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilbert, Bentley (1965) “The decay of nineteenth-century provident institutions and the coming of old age pensions in Great Britain.” Economic History Review 17 (3): 551–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glenn, Brian J. (2001) “Understanding mutual benefit societies, 1860–1960.” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26 (3): 638–51.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gompers, Samuel (c. 1916) “Labor vs. its barnacles.” The American Federationist 23 (4): 268–74.Google Scholar
Gosden, P. H. J. H. (1961) The Friendly Societies in England, 1815–1875. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Brian (1985) Worker and Community: Response to Industrialization in a Nineteenth Century American City, Albany New York 1850–1884. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Greene, Julie (2006) Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gupta, P. S. (1960) “The history of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, 1871–1913.” PhD diss., Oxford University, https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1ec7b57a-7997-4705-b563-c5a06851d108.Google Scholar
Hacker, Jacob S. (1998) “The historical logic of national health insurance: Structure and sequence in the development of British, Canadian, and U.S. medical policy.” Studies in American Political Development 12 (1): 57–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, Carlos S. (c. 1908) Fraternal Society Law Embracing the Statute Law and a Digest of the Decisions of the Court of Last Resort of the Several States Concerning Fraternal Beneficiary Societies. Los Angeles: Chicago Star Bindery.Google Scholar
Hattam, Victoria (1993) Labor Visions and State Power. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haveman, Heather A. (1992) “Between a rock and a hard place: Organizational change and performance under conditions of fundamental environmental transformation.” Administrative Science Quarterly 37 (1): 48–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haydu, Jeffrey (1991) Between Craft and Class: Skilled Workers and Factory Politics in the United States and Britain, 1890–1922. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hostler, Stanley (1955) “The Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen: Benevolent Era, 1873–1887.” PhD diss., The Pennsylvania State University.Google Scholar
House of Commons (c. 1793) “A bill for the encouragement and relief of friendly societies.” House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century (1715–1800), House of Commons Papers. Parliamentary Archives Online, https://archives.parliament.uk/collections/getrecord/GB61_HL_PO_PU_1_1793_33G3n282 (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
House of Commons (c. 1824) “Select committee on state of law in United Kingdom respecting artisans leaving kingdom, and exportation of tools and machinery, and combination of workmen to raise wages: Report, minutes of evidence.” Nineteenth Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, House of Commons Papers. UK Parliamentary Archives, https://parlipapers-proquest-com.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/parlipapers/docview/t70.d75.1824-008876?accountid=9630 (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
House of Commons (c. 1868) “Royal commission to inquire into organization and rules of trades unions and other associations eleventh and final report.” Command Papers, Nineteenth Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, House of Commons Papers. UK Parliamentary Archives, https://parlipapers-proquest-com.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/parlipapers/docview/t70.d75.1867-044275?accountid=9630 (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
House of Commons (c. 1886) “Select committee on national provident insurance report, proceedings, minutes of evidence, appendix, index.” Nineteenth Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, House of Commons Papers. UK Parliamentary Archives, https://parlipapers-proquest-com.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/parlipapers/docview/t70.d75.1886-062334?accountid=9630 (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
House of Commons (c. 1909) “Royal commission on the poor laws and relief of distress.” Command Papers, Twentieth Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, House of Commons Papers. UK Parliamentary Archives, https://parlipapers-proquest-com.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/parlipapers/docview/t70.d75.1909-011072?accountid=9630 (Accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
Hyman, Richard (2001) Understanding European Trade Unionism: Between Market, Class and Society. London: SAGE Publications.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenks, Leland H. (1944) “Railroads as an economic force in American development.” Journal of Economic History 4 (1): 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joseph, Antoine (2000) Skilled Workers’ Solidarity: The American Experience in Comparative Perspective. New York: Garland Publishing.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira, and Zolberg, Aristide R., eds. (1986) Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kirk, Neville (1994) Labour and Society in Britain and the USA: Challenge and Accommodation, 1850–1939. Aldershot: Scolar Press.Google Scholar
Landis, Abb (c. 1900) Friendly Societies and Fraternal Orders: A History of the Legislation, Supervision, Mortality Experience, Management, Reforms, Rates of Assessment and Present and Past Financial Condition of the English Friendly Societies. Winchester, Tennessee: Self Published.Google Scholar
Lloyd, Thomas (c. 1806) The Trial of the Boot & Shoemakers of Philadelphia, on an Indictment for a Combination and Conspiracy to Raise Their Wages. Philadelphia: B. Graves.Google Scholar
MacDonald, James Ramsay (1903) The Law and Trade Union Funds. A Plea for Ante-Taff Vale. London: Independent Labour Party.Google Scholar
March, James G., and Olsen, Johan P. (1989) Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Marks, Gary Wolfe (2014) Unions in Politics: Britain, Germany, and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (1866) Report of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Vol. 3. Boston: Little Brown and Company.Google Scholar
McCartin, Joseph A. (2023) “The Railway Labor Act: Exhibit A in our outmoded system of labor law.” New Labor Forum 32 (3): 34–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Melling, Joseph Leslie (1980) “British employers and the development of industrial welfare, c. 1880-1920: An industrial and regional comparison.” PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.Google Scholar
Meyer, B. H. (c. 1901) “Fraternal beneficiary societies in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 6 (5): 646–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meyer, John W., and Rowan, Brian (1977) “Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony.” American Journal of Sociology 83 (2): 340–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, B. R. (1964) “The coming of the railway and United Kingdom economic growth.” The Journal of Economic History 24 (3): 315–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montgomery, David (2014) “Labor in the industrial era,” in Morris, Richard B. (ed.) A History of the American Worker. Princeton: Princeton University Press: 79–114.Google Scholar
National Fraternal Congress (NFC) (c. 1886–96) “Proceedings of the annual meeting of the National Fraternal Congress.” HathiTrust, National Fraternal Congress. Online, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009997328 (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
Niblack, William Caldwell (c. 1894) The Law of Voluntary Societies, Mutual Benefit Insurance and Accident Insurance. Chicago: Callaghan & Co.Google Scholar
Novak, William J. (2001) “The American law of association: The legal-political construction of civil society.” Studies in American Political Development 15: 163–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Brien, Ruth (1998) Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of New Deal Labor Policy, 1886–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Orren, Karen (1991) Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pelling, Henry (1992) A History of British Trade Unionism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pennsylvania General Assembly (1869) “An act to authorize mechanics, journeymen, tradesmen and laborers to form societies and associations for their mutual aid, benefit and protection.” P. L. 1260, No. 1242.Google Scholar
Revill, George (1999) “Liberalism and paternalism: Politics and corporate culture in ‘Railway Derby,’ 1865–75.” Social History 24 (2): 196–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, M. Fothergill (c. 1913) The Spirit of Association, Being Some Account of the Gilds, Friendly Societies, Co-Operative Movement, and Trade Unions of Great Britain. London: Legare Street Press.Google Scholar
Roediger, David R. (1999) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso Books.Google Scholar
Rosenweig, Roy (1977) “Boston masons, 1900–1935: The lower middle class in a divided society.” Journal of Voluntary Action Research 6 (304): 119–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schloesser, Henry Herman, and Clark, William Smith (c. 1912) The Legal Position of Trade Unions. London: P. S. King & son.Google Scholar
Shefter, Martin (1994) Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda, and Amenta, Edwin (1986) “States and social policies.” Annual Review of Sociology 12 (1): 131–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen (1982) Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smiles, Samuel (c. 1862) Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverance. London: A. L. Burt.Google Scholar
Stevens, Albert Clark (c. 1907) The Cyclopædia of Fraternities. New York: E.B. Treat and Company.Google Scholar
Stryker, Robin (2000) “Legitimacy processes as institutional politics: implications for theory and research in the sociology of organizations,” in Lounsbury, Michael (ed.) Research in the Sociology of Organizations. Vol. 17. Leeds: Emerald Group Publishing Limited: 179–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taft, Philip (1963) “On the origins of business unionism.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 17 (1): 20–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taillon, Paul Michel (1997) Culture, Politics, and the Making of the Railroad Brotherhoods, 1863–1916. Madison: University of Wisconsin.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher L. (1985) The State and the Unions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Trades Union Congress (c. 1899) Parliamentary Committee Reports. HD 6661, Special Collections TUC Publications. London: London Metropolitan University.Google Scholar
Treble, James H. (1970) “The attitudes of friendly societies towards the movement in Great Britain for state pensions, 1878–1908.” International Review of Social History 15 (2): 266–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
UK Parliament (c. 1828) “Bill to consolidate and amend law relating to friendly and other societies.” Bills and Acts, Nineteenth Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, UK Parliamentary Archives Online, https://parlipapers-proquest-com.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/parlipapers/docview/t70.d75.1828-010791?accountid=9630 (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
UK Parliament (c. 1874) “Bill to consolidate and amend law relating to friendly and other societies: (As Amended in Committee).” Bills and Acts, Nineteenth Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, UK Parliamentary Archives Online, https://parlipapers-proquest-com.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/parlipapers/docview/t70.d75.1874-049878?accountid=9630 (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
UK Parliament (c. 1902) “Trade disputes—legal position of trade unions.” Hansard Online. UK Parliamentary Archives, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1902-05-14/debates/9b599b9f-3470-4420-8d7f-fbccf9bf4069/TradeDisputes%E2%80%94LegalPositionOfTradeUnions (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
UK Parliament (c. 1906) “Trade dispute bill, second reading.” Hansard Online. UK Parliamentary Archives, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1906-12-17/debates/3ced4a9e-75a8-46aa-a2b6-217e4c921ac7/TradeDisputesBill (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
Upchurch, John Jorden (c. 1887) The Life, Labors and Travels of Father J. J. Upchurch: Founder of the Ancient Order of United Workmen. San Francisco: A. T. Dewey.Google Scholar
US Congress (c. 1897) “Congressional record February 26, Vol. 29 part 3 (bound edition).” Congressional Record, https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1897/02/26/house-section (accessed May 30, 2024).Google Scholar
Vondracek, Felix John (1972) “The rise of fraternal organizations in the United States, 1868–1900.” Social Science 47 (1): 26–33.Google Scholar
Voss, Kim (1993) The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Weir, Robert E. (1952) Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Witt, John Fabian (2009) The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar