A Glorious History was co-written by former GPMU deputy general secretary and Unite assistant general secretary Tony Burke and Ann Field, a former national officer at the GPMU and Unite.
It charts the history of print and papermaking unions in the UK and Ireland and was launched last night (16 February) at the Marx Memorial Library in London. The library houses the Printworkers’ Collection which provided much of the source material for the duo, with a number of union historians and St Bride Library also providing valuable input.
“For the first time the story of print and paper worlers' struggle for workers rights and trade union freedoms is brought together in this brief volume,” the authors Field and Burke state in their introduciton.
The book’s timeline of trade union organisation begins in 1779 when journeymen bookbinders would meet regularly in a London pub as the ‘United Friends’. The first bookbinders’ union was subsequently formed in 1783.
The array of specialist functions – from vellum binding to compositors and ‘correctors of the press’ – each went on to form their own organisations.
“The more research Ann and I did, the more we realised that every trade in the printing industry and papermaking had their own union based on craft and skills,” Burke said.
“We traced more than 150 unions… and way back in 1868 the Manchester and Salford Trades Council was proposing a congress of trades councils.”
“All previous histories have been tribal, for example the NGA, SOGAT, GPMU, all from their own point-of-view,” Field explained.
“But surprise, surprise it’s a shared history. We’re the last generation with any concept of why things were the way they were, and we’ve got to get that across. There have been some very, very notable achievements by print workers.”
The book also details some of the brutal punishments handed out in the past to workers who dared to dissent.
In 1829 more than 40 men involved with the Wycombe ‘Swing’ Paper Riots were sentenced to death, transmuted to transportation to Australia on a prison ship, or 12-18 months’ hard labour.
It also throws up some surprises, such as the fact that more women than men were employed in print in the last quarter of the 19th Century, with women mainly working in bookbinding and finishing.
One of the notable photographs reproduced shows more than 50 women, all wearing hats, appealing for public sympathy in a 1907 dispute with Chorley & Pickersgill in Leeds over wage-cutting.
Printing industry workers also took action to reduce what had been punishing working hours. In 1959 there was a six-week general print dispute for a 40-hour week, involving ten unions and 100,000 workers.
“From 1785 to the early 1980s, it took 200 years to reduce working hours from 72 hours a week to 37-and-a-half,” Field noted.
“Throughout the histories of all the big developments in the trade union movement, printers were there at the beginning,” Burke said.
The modern-day union movement has been characterised by mergers and mega-mergers.
“One of the key chapters is about creating one union for the industry. We realised we had to have a national union because we had to be able to respond to companies getting bigger and bigger. The GPMU was formed in 1991 and it took all that time to get there,” Burke added.
He also highlighted the importance of linking up with other unions around the world.
“The lesson we’ve learned is, stand together and you can make a big difference.”
The GPMU union for print and paperworkers joined Amicus in 2004, with Amicus and the TGWU merging to form Unite in 2007.
Around 500 copies of A Glorious History have been printed via Unite print supplier Kopykat, and will be available to members, researchers, students, academics and journalists. The book will also be available online via the Marx Memorial Library website.
The A4 format book is 72pp plus covers, and perfect bound.
Unite’s GPM sector supported and funded the project.
