United We Stand: History Of Britains Trade Unions

by Alastair J. Reid

Previous histories of the British trade unions have tended to treat the working class as a single entity. This gave workers' identity a coherence and dignity, but it also made them separate from and excluded from the rest of British society. In this highly original and absorbing new book Alastair Reid discards this entire model, preferring to see working people' as integral to British society as a whole. Looking both at individual workers and their fates and at the often vast organisations that have represented them, Alastair Reid, in this fundamentally important book, shows how unions have throughout the modern era always been a crucial element in British life and that all governments have - whether they like it or not - had to develop policies to deal with them.

Genres: British Literature, Politics

330 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Jemma · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've recently reread this and it is a good account of the development of unions.

What doesn't quite work are the concepts of three categories of unions and fortunes linked closely to economic cycles. Both have some truth in them but this book overreaches when it claims this is deterministic.