BRITAIN TRADE UNION

Importance of Trade Union Representation in United Kingdom



Importance of Trade Union Representation in United Kingdom

Introduction

Researchers agree that the economic circumstances are responsible for the formation of the first union were nature such that a large majority of workers chose to cease to be independent producers (i.e. they controlled their own production processes and were the owners of outcomes of their efforts) and become employees. Even before the start of the Industrial Revolution this scenario was not conclusively verified and historians have traced the history of unions in the complicated modern guild system to resemble the typical unions of the industrial England and the rest of Europe. In the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, production hands of small craftsmen were employed by several people who are travelers and who are new apprentices. A complex regulatory system was established so that fairly strict learning and performance of the various professions could be carried out. The system was meat to impose severe restrictions on worker mobility. Given the characteristics of this system, it was hoped that the officers were setting up their own in a few years.

In the case of England may be said that the unions emerged as official associations in certain industries in the early XVIII. Some of these skilled workers could not be established on behalf of their own professions with the passage of time (as expected) and these were associated towards the request of increase in union assembly salaries.

Discussion

With the introduction of new machines, the use of new sources energy and the generalization of the factory system brought about by the Revolution Industrial profoundly altered the structure of labor demand. (Dickson, 1988, Pg # 506-520) It became less demanding for skilled workers and it was increasingly necessary to have an abundant low-skilled workforce but with large production capacity. In the last decades of the eighteenth century learning system based guilds gradually began to lose importance. Skilled workers (officers and teachers) of the same profession who lost their jobs in industries began to associate for the defense their interests. Initially, these associations became more confident in government action-in-legal mechanisms in their acting as a group.

In the last years of the eighteenth century in England a strong depression economic and a great wave of demands by growing number largest workers' associations of all types of trades. The whole process led to the parliamentary approval of the Law on Associations Workers (Combination Act) in 1799. This law and another of 1800, which amended the first part, prohibit any kind of coalition of workers who had intended to raise wages or improve working conditions.

Current Economic Theory of Trade Unions

The perspective of current economic theory the role of trade unions can be analyzed under two different approaches. Both approaches consider the union as an operator with a defined behavior: it implies that the union tries to maximize a utility function that is generally dependent on wage and employment ...