Trade Unions and Free Labour: The Background to The Taff Vale Decision

It is a commonplace that public sympathy for the cause of the strikers was an important factor in the dockers’ victory in the late summer of 1889.I What is not so well appreciated is that this sympathy was already beginning to waste away during the last weeks of the strike2 and public opinion in general very quickly turned to outright opposition in the months that followed. Through all the decade of the nineties and well into the new century, a hostility developed towards trade unionism in general and new unionism in particular that bordered at times on the hysterical. It finds various expressions in the contemporary press, in the employment of large police and military forces during trade disputes, and in increasingly adverse judgments against the unions in the Courts. This whole period after 1889 is one of a developing counter-attack by the propertied classes against the industrial organisations of the working people. The final break-through is reached in 1901 when, as the result of the Taff Vale case and the decision in Quinn v. Leathem, the trade unions found themselves stripped