Year: 1992
Type: article
Abstract: Divisions of LabourMovements of workers (labour) necessarily involve large groups of people.The mobilisation of large groups in mass movements is, for the activists, the perennial problem.To an activist, the powerful forces making for division and apathy, as against solidarity and animation, operate as a dead weight, conserving the past and frustrating the future.The aim set for the 8th British-Dutch conference, based on Manchester from 17-20 September 1992, is to examine, historically, the social and political bases of divisions of labour.Contributors to the conference are invited to address themselves to the theme at two levels.First, in terms of division at the level of the social base: those ethnic, gender, occupational, and cultural factors which have tended to divide or to unite workers in their social and work activity without necessarily having any obvious effects upon political and economic organizations.Second, however, contributors might address themselves to division at the level of the movement: the way in which factors dividing or uniting at the social level impinge upon and join other considerations -economic, political, and so on -creating sectionalism or solidarity among trade unions, and factionalism or cohesion among political parties.The most useful papers are likely to be those which attempt to combine factors operating at both levels, social base and movement, in order to address major historical issues.But potential contributors should not be inhibited from offering papers which are more narrowly conceived: their new research may throw useful light on particularities which can be woven, through conference discussion, into a more general argument.The conference theme goes to the heart of a key difference between British and Dutch society: that of the absence in British society of "confessional" or religiously affiliated labour organizations and political parties, in contrast to Dutch "pillarisation" -the division of all forms of social organization on such lines.Yet the contrast may be greater than it seems, for within the "broad church" of the British labour movement factions and sections have expressed differences internally which may be expressed externally in Holland.A conference of British and Dutch labour historians should be well placed to gauge the real comparative divisions of labour within apparently unique social forms.The conference theme also provides an opportunity to contribute to a variety of smouldering or active historical debates.Our conference title reminds us of the volume edited by Royden Harrison and Jonathan Zeitlin, Divisions of Labour: Skilled Workers and Technological Change in Nineteenth Century England (1985) and invites us to explore the extent to which craft or skilled workers and their particular historical experiences constituted a distinct social formation, or shaped the labour movements of Britain and Holland.Papers mining this vein may well be regarded as a contribution to debate around the attempt to explain the changed character of the later nineteenth century British labour movement in terms of
Language: English
Topic: Labor Movements and Unions
Subfield: Public Administration
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4252269043