TRADES’ UNIONS AND FACTORY LEGISLATION.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1285, 2 May 1878, Page 3

TRADES’ UNIONS AND FACTORY LEGISLATION.

(“London Times.”) It is a remarkable fact that Trades’ Unions have done so little to promote the objects sought after in legislation like the Factories and Workshops Bills. For good or evil the power of Trades’ Unions to influence the relations between employers and employed is great and cannot be denied; and yet it would seem that workmen themselves have cared little for objects in which all workmen are naturally interested. That workshops should fulfil the conditions of sanitary science so as to be reasonably healthful, and that dangerous machinery should be fenced, are almost common-places, but workmen trust to the law to secure their realisation. This anomaly is probably to bo explained in some measure by the circumstances that agitation to obtain these safeguards from accident and disease began at a time when Trades’ Unions were most restricted in their freedom of action, if they were not absolutely unlawful combinations, and when workmen were driven to obtain their ends by indireet means and by mediation. It can scarcely bo questioned that Fielden and Oastler were stimulated by workmen in the labors they undertook, and they must have relied upon operatives for the facts, if not for the arguments, on which they based their agitations. Factory legislation thus had its beginning before trades’ unionism was developed, and the force of newer agencies has never been required to sustain it. At the same time, the history of the Factory Acts is a striking illustration of the ease with which large classes of men may be led to trust to others to bring about what they could themselves secure. The operatives of the manufacturing districts might have taken out of the hands of Parliament the superintendence of their labour, if they had cared to effect the transfer. The fact that they have not done so may show that Parliament has not, on the whole, fallen far short of their wishes ; but it shows, also, how easily men are content to bo governed when the intentions of the government appear to be beneficent.