Trades Union Congress

Trades Union Congress (TUC), national organization of British trade unions. Although it is the sole national trade union, three other related bodies also exist: the Scottish Trades Union Congress, the Wales Trade Union Council, and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (including the Northern Ireland Committee).

Founded in 1868, the TUC held annual conferences of independent unions to promote trade union principles. From 1871 it had a permanent standing committee, the Parliamentary Committee, whose principal function was to lobby Parliament for legislation favourable to unions. The TUC comprised almost exclusively unions of skilled workers until 1889, when it began to accept the first affiliations of “new” or unskilled general unions. But the TUC’s organization remained extremely rudimentary, and rather than enlarge its own role, it helped to establish two new separate bodies: the General Federation of Trade Unions, founded in 1899 as an insurance fund for strikes, and the Labour Representation Committee, founded in 1900 and in 1906 renamed the Labour Party. The latter sponsored candidates for Parliament until after 1918, when it became a national political party.

The TUC assumed its modern form after World War I, when it replaced the Parliamentary Committee with a General Council that could better represent the diverse industrial unions of the British labour movement. The council acquired powers to deal with interunion conflicts and to intervene in disputes with employers, and it helped mobilize unions during the nationwide General Strike of 1926. Under leaders such as Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine in the 1930s and ’40s, the TUC became the unchallenged representative of industrial labour in dealings with the government, and it participated closely in the management of British industries during World War II.

In the decades following World War II, the TUC helped shape economic policy in cooperation with government and business. Its status was secure until 1979, when the Conservative Party came to power under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Excluded from government policy making, the TUC was unable to rally its members against the Thatcher government’s legal restrictions on trade unions. These and other factors caused the TUC’s membership to decline from about 12 million in 1979 to about 6.6 million at the end of the 20th century.

Unions affiliated with the TUC act autonomously, conducting negotiations independently of the national union. While the TUC is not itself affiliated with any political party, many of its affiliate unions support the Labour Party. Outside Great Britain, the TUC is affiliated with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), which it helped to found in 1949.