Manchester Trades Union Council

The Manchester Trades Union Council brings together trade union branches in Manchester in England.

In 1866 and 1867, a wave of strikes, some violent, took place in Manchester. Many trade unionists, while supportive of the aims of the strikes, abhorred violence, and two prominent individuals, William Henry Wood and Samuel Caldwell Nicholson, founded the Manchester Trades Council in August 1866 to assist unions in seeking peaceful solutions to trade disputes.[1] They proposed forming courts of arbitration, and in 1868 did set up a short-lived body, jointly with the Manchester Chamber of Commerce.[2] More significantly that year, the council called a conference of trade unionists from around the United Kingdom, which agreed to form the Trades Union Congress. This soon became the leading national association of trade unions.[3]

Despite its official name, the council always included trade unionists based in neighbouring Salford, and so was commonly known as the Manchester and Salford Trades Council.[4] George Davy Kelley became a delegate to the council in 1881, and he successfully proposed that it reconstitute itself officially under this name. He was elected as its secretary in 1883, and greatly increased affiliations to the body. Many of the new affiliated were general unions of unskilled workers, a development which Kelley opposed as he felt the organisations would not endure, but they soon came to dominate the council. Despite this, Kelley remained the council's most prominent figure, being elected to Manchester City Council in 1891 as a Liberal-Labour representative.[5]

In 1902, the council convened a meeting of local trade unionists and members of the Independent Labour Party and Social Democratic Federation, which renamed the council as the Manchester Trades and Labour Council, becoming the local affiliate of the Labour Representation Committee.[6] Two years later, Kelley broke his links with the Liberals, and in 1906 he was elected as a Labour Member of Parliament, standing down from his trades council posts.[5]

In the 1920s, the council affiliated to the Communist Party of Great Britain-led National Minority Movement.[7] Although the Labour Party set up its own Manchester Borough organisation, the council continued to campaign on a wide range of labour issues, remaining the leading labour movement organisation in the city into the 1930s, and attracted the support of John Maynard Keynes for its proposals on local industrial policy.[8]

Secretaries

1866: William Henry Wood
1879: Peter Shorrocks
1883: George Davy Kelley
1906: Tom Fox
1909: William R. Mellor
1929: A. A. Purcell
1936: W. J. Munro
1944: Horace Newbold
1969: Frances Dean
2000s: Geoff Brown
2010s: Alex Davidson

External links

References

  1. ↑ Alan J. Kidd, Manchester, pp.169-176
  2. ↑ Alan Clinton, The Trade Union Rank and File: Trades Councils in Britain, 1900-40, p.9
  3. ↑ G. D. H. Cole, A Short History of the British Working Class Movement: 1848-1900, pp.101-102
  4. ↑ International Workingmen's Association, The General Council of the First International: Minutes, p.355
  5. 1 2 Alan Haworth and Dianne Hayter, Men who made Labour, pp.122-123
  6. ↑ Declan McHugh, Labour in the City, p.53
  7. ↑ Alan Clinton, The Trade Union Rank and File: Trades Councils in Britain, 1900-40, p.148
  8. ↑ Alan Clinton, The Trade Union Rank and File: Trades Councils in Britain, 1900-40, pp.179-180
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