To date, the study of labour in Ireland begins with the medieval guilds. As urban-based organisations, they arrived with the Anglo- Norman invasion in the twelfth century and the establishment of towns and cities. Guilds (sometimes spelt gilds) were comprised of master craftsmen, journeymen, and apprentices, who were brought together for mutual benefit.

The Guilds had very little in common with modern-day trade unionism. "The concept of a separate organization of employed workers, to determine wages and conditions by negotiation with their employers" wrote Henry Pelling in his History of British Trade Unionism , " had no place in the medieval system of industry. The recognised crafts were catered for by the gilds, which were combinations of both masters and journeymen. The journeymen were skilled workers who had served an apprenticeship to their trade. The gilds had the responsibility of protecting the standards of their respective crafts by defining the terms of service for apprentices, which usually ran for seven years. Furthermore they could also fix the prices for the manufactured product and determine the piece-rate to be paid to the journeyman."

In his book, A Labour History of Waterford, Emmet O'Connor wrote that "The gilds formed part of a system of social, economic, and legal relations, designed chiefly to control labour and protect the local economy. They could regulate working practices and apprenticeships. Through the [city and town] Corporation and the assizes, they could set wages and prices. Gilds also had a benefit function, and from their sundry incomes could assist needy brethren in times of distress. In theory, the arrangement offered a mutual accommodation to masters and men, while subordinating both to the common good; the gild protected the employment and wage levels of journeymen by restricting apprenticeships and fixing prices, and by maintaining standards of workmanship, it protected the consumer. The gild's close relation to the Corporation and the courts ensured that administration and justice served the best interests of trade... In practice, however, the accommodation depended on a careful management of the labour supply to restrain either masters or men, on the journeymen's prospects of becoming masters, on the admittance of journeymen to the gild, and on medieval social values."

The rise of manufactures in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century saw the decline of Guild influence on wages and work conditions. As Pelling puts it in his History of British Trade Unionism,

"the gild system worked reasonably satisfactorily while master and journeyman worked side by side, and while the journeyman could provide his own tools and raw material. But in the eighteenth century the rapid growth of commerce, the improvement of communication, the development of specialization, and in some industries, the introduction of machinery, led in many cases to an increasing separation of the interests of master and man. The journeyman might now need a good deal of capital to rise into the ranks of the masters; but, on the other hand, he had less chance of saving a portion of his income if, as sometime happened, his status as a craftsman was undermined by the new methods of working. In any case,change was so rapid that the formal system of regulation [of wages under the gild system] became simply an embarrassment to the masters. So far as they could, they neglected it; and this attitude was reflected in the attitude both of the magistracy and of parliament itself."

"The journeymen, for their part, deprived of the protection to which they had been accustomed, began to combine separately from their employers, often with the overt and presumably legal object of petitioning parliament for the redress of their grievances, but not infrequently also with the purpose of enforcing wage demands against their employers by the direct sanction of bad work, 'go-slows', or 'turn-outs' (later known as strikes). Naturally, if Parliament failed to respond to the petitions the direct sanction became the only practicable one"

"It will be seen that these combinations of workmen did not grow out of the gilds; but as the gilds declined, so the need for combination grew, in order to enable the workers to maintain rights and privileges formerly guaranteed to them either by the gilds or directly by Act of Parliament"

It is with these, sometimes legal, sometimes illegal, combinations of skilled journeymen in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that we find first glimpses of a recognisable trade unionism.


COMBINATIONS

in Dublin, the earliest combinations so far discovered date from around 1670, while in the provinces they start to emerge around the early 1700s. Generally, according to O'Connor, combinations were formed to defend "wages, hours, and conditions, the regulation of apprentices, or the exclusion of 'colts' - men who had not served a proper apprenticeship - or strangers, and disbanded if the demands were met, though in Dublin, Belfast and Cork some combinations evolved into societies." By the 1780s, combinations had become a constant fixture of Dublin life, with memberships drawn from the city's artisans. By this time, combinations were illegal, and most met under the guise of mortality or friendly societies. In Belfast, combination was most developed among the cotton weavers, while in Waterford it was the city's coopers.

Outside the cities, combinations were more underground, analogous to the agrarian secret societies such as the Defenders and the Whiteboys. As with the secret societies, combinations - both urban and rural - were not above violence and intimidation to secure their objectives. Emmet O'Connor writes that "records of strikes, or 'turn-outs', appear with increasing frequency from the second half of the eighteenth century, and there were general turn outs in the early 1800s when wartime inflation spurred unskilled operatives to become more prominent in combination. Unable to enforce a scarity of labour by regulating apprenticeships, these men processed their wage claims through anonymous, threatening letters .. Violence to property, and sometimes to masters or scabs, made turn-outs notorious up to the 1840s."

The detoriorating political and economic situation saw the British government pass the Combination Laws of 1799/1800 . These ruled that any workman "who shall enter into any combination to obtain an advance of wages, or to lessen or alter the hours or duration of the time of working, or to decrease the quantity of work, or for any other purpose contrary to this Act" was liable to three months imprisonment. The Acts forced the labour movement further underground. The laws were finally repealed in 1824, following a report by the select committee of the House of Commons, thus bringing labour combinations/trade unions out into the open.

Further reading:

J.J. Webb, The Guilds of Dublin (Dublin,1929)

Mary A. Bunning, Medieval Trade Guilds (Dublin: Catholic Truth society, 1930)

Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Middlesex: Penguin books, 2nd edition, 1971)

John W. Boyle, The Irish Labor Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1988)

Emmet O'Connor, A Labour History of Waterford (Waterford: Waterford Trades Council, 1989)

Emmet O'Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, 1824-1960 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1992)

Mary Clark & Raymond Refaussé (Eds), Directory of Historic Dublin Guilds (Dublin: Dublin Public Library, 1993)

Philomena Connolly & Geoffrey Martin (Eds), The Dublin Guild Merchant Roll c.1190-1295 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999)