In Search of the Golden Rivet: Review Article

Royden Harrison

Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1992, vol. 16, issue 4, 491-500

Abstract: This is a critical discussion of the first volume of K. Coates and T. Topham: The making of the Transport and General Workers' Union. This title is revealing. The authors are trying to break out of the constraints of recognized types of trade union hist ory in favor of a successor to E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class. The dangers of such an enterprise are identified, but it is allowed that many of them have been avoided. Thus, the authors do ask what the "New Unions were" and why they survived in the late 1880s but not the early 1870s. However their answers are defective in so far as they neglect the immense importance of refrigeration and of the criminal law amendment Act of 1871. The boo k ends with a valuable discussion of why some workers did, and other workers did not, favor One Big Union. Copyright 1992 by Oxford University Press.

Date: 1992
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