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Members of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union demanding improved benefits during a strike in March 2023 in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

Mlungisi Louw/Volksblad—Gallo Images/Getty Images

Unionism in the developing regions, or Third World, has been largely shaped by the structure of their economies. From the turn of the 20th century, there was a gradual decline in the proportion of Third World workers engaged in agriculture, but even so, until World War II fully three-quarters of the active population was engaged in farming. The numbers engaged in manufacturing increased from 26 million to 46 million between 1900 and 1960, but as a proportion of the labour force they represented a mere 8 percent. During the same period, the number of workers engaged in extractive industries increased threefold, reflecting the importance of these activities during the colonial period, but as a proportion of the working population they represented a mere 1 percent. Service-sector employment also increased threefold between 1900 and 1960, but in this case it embraced a considerable 18 percent of the work force and a massive absolute number of 92 million workers. Across these sectors of employment, trade unionism developed unevenly, and in various phases of history one or the other was dominant. In all cases the objective economic determinants of trade unionism—i.e., whether prevailing conditions were favourable or not to its development—would prove crucial, and they set the context in which labour organized.

The first stable trade unions in many Third World countries were located within the export sector. By the beginning of the 20th century, railroad workers, dockers, and miners had formed strong labour organizations. These workers, who were integrated into the outward-oriented economies typical of the colonial division of labour, held considerable bargaining power through their ability to disrupt a major economic activity. For example, when in 1885 Hong Kong workers refused to unload a French warship, their action spread to coolies, boatmen, and rickshaw pullers. The strong group consciousness of dockworkers in African countries made them among the first to take collective class action. Railway workers, too, were as important in Ghana as they were in Argentina in organizing the early labour movement. And miners, for example in Chile and South Africa, have retained a considerable political influence through their strong and stable union organization in spite of their reduced numbers in relative terms. Once industrialization spread beyond these “enclaves” of the export sector, wider layers of workers, such as those engaged in textiles, began to organize.

A new international division of labour that emerged after World War II led to the consolidation of a significant manufacturing sector in a number of Third World countries. From the textile industry to automobile manufacturing and electronics, large factories and a transformed labour process created the conditions for a new wave of union organization. In Brazil during the 1970s, for example, organization within the workplace led to a powerful labour movement spearheaded by the metalworkers’ union. In South Africa, likewise, the rise of new black trade unions in the 1970s was reflected in an increased level of organization at factory level. Similar processes could be discerned in South Korea and the Philippines. As opposed to the early government-controlled trade unions, this “new wave” of unionism had much deeper roots in the workplace. Nevertheless, the role of trade unions in the Third World has remained predominantly defensive, organizing work forces that have been created by the international division of labour and seeking through collective effort to defend living standards and improve working conditions. Their success in so doing is sporadic and very uneven across countries.

The public sector is relatively well organized in many Third World countries, either in spite of or because of government attitudes. Freedom of association for agricultural workers has also been achieved in most countries, although this is more readily achieved in big plantations with a stable labour force than in the traditional subsistence-farming sector. In the newly industrializing countries of East Asia, there are growing numbers of organizable workers owing to the economic modernization that has taken place there, although in general (with the exception of South Korea) labour organization has stagnated. In Africa, some countries such as Tanzania have promoted rural trade unions in particular, but in general the potentially organizable labour force in large enterprises is but a small minority of the working classes. In the huge “informal” sector, which is so prevalent in the Third World, unionization is even more difficult. In some countries, such as India, there have been some moves by industrial workers to extend their organization to cover unregistered casual and rural workers. The sheer size of this sector and its role in the economy mean that it has genuine bargaining power and can indeed force the pace for trade unions, which tend to neglect the smaller industrial units and the nonpermanent work force.

There is a close link between the level of socioeconomic development and the degree of labour organization in the Third World. Thus, Argentina has a degree of unionization approaching 40 percent, whereas the Dominican Republic has less than 10 percent trade-union membership. Likewise, Singapore has a far greater proportion of trade-union members than Papua New Guinea. Overall, there emerges a picture of incomplete unionization in the Third World, with only a handful approaching 40 percent, and most countries falling below 20 percent. Such quantitative analysis has its limits, however. It is equally important to assess the level of control that each trade-union movement has over the labour market. In addition, it is the distribution of the labour force across different occupational categories that sets the framework in which a trade-union movement develops. Exactly how it operates within these constraints depends on a range of political factors not considered here.

Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism, rev. ed. (1920, reprinted 1975), is the pioneer work in British trade union history. This classic study has been revised and carried forward to the 1930s in a standard work, H.A. Clegg, Alan Fox, and A.F. Thompson, A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889, 2 vol. (1964–1985). A more popular, though also comprehensive, account is provided in Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism, 4th ed. (1987). For the earlier phases of union history, see John Rule (ed.), British Trade Unionism, 1750–1850: The Formative Years (1988); and E.H. Hunt, British Labour History, 1815–1914 (1981). There is a valuable discussion of the relationship between British trade unions and the law, including the compulsory arbitration issue, in Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain, 2nd ed. (1979).

British and Australian union developments are compared in the valuable Henry Phelps Brown, The Origins of Trade Union Power (1983). Studies of the modern period of Australian union developments are offered in Ross M. Martin, Trade Unions in Australia: Who Runs Them, Who Belongs, Their Politics, Their Power, 2nd ed. (1980); and D.W. Rawson, Unions and Unionists in Australia, rev. ed. (1986). A detailed account of early Australian unions is J.T. Sutcliffe, A History of Trade Unionism in Australia (1921, reprinted 1967). Keith Sinclair, William Pember Reeves, New Zealand Fabian (1965), provides a biography of the architect of compulsory arbitration in New Zealand, and the same author’s A History of New Zealand, rev. ed. (1980), is valuable in setting union development in a broad historical context. See also H. Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand Past and Present (1973).

The best historical survey of the American movement is Foster Rhea Dulles and Melvyn Dubofsky, Labor in America, 4th ed. (1984). The findings of much recent scholarship on the 19th century are presented in Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (1989). The 20th century is summarily covered in James R. Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth-Century America (1980); Robert H. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, 1920–1985 (1986); and David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (1980). Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, 2nd ed. (1988), is a standard work on the organization. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (1987), is fundamental on the period it covers. On the role of American labour law, the leading modern interpretation is Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (1985). Harold A. Logan, Trade Unions in Canada: Their Development and Functioning (1948), is a standard work; it can be supplemented for the modern period by Stuart Jamieson, Industrial Relations in Canada, 2nd ed. (1973); and Alton W.J. Craig, The System of Industrial Relations in Canada, 3rd ed. (1990). John Crispo, International Unionism: A Study in Canadian-American Relations (1967); and Gad Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics (1968, reprinted 1977), explore two of the main themes of Canadian labour history. Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.), Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century (1986), contains important comparative essays and also surveys later developments.

Walter Kendall, The Labour Movement in Europe (1975); and Hans Slomp, Labor Relations in Europe: A History of Issues and Developments (1990), are introductory surveys. Gary Marks, Unions in Politics: Britain, Germany, and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1989), explores the logic of political unionism. National differences in industrial work organization and their relations with unionism are discussed in Marc Maurice, François Sellier, and Jean-Jacques Silvestre, The Social Foundations of Industrial Power: A Comparison of France and Germany (1986; originally published in French, 1982). The emergence of the “postwar settlement” is analyzed in Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (1986). The events of 1968 are documented and placed in perspective in Colin Crouch and Alessandro Pizzorno (eds.), The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe Since 1968, 2 vol. (1978). Country studies of postwar unionism from the perspective of post-1968 developments are collected in Peter Gourevitch et al., Unions and Economic Crisis: Britain, West Germany, and Sweden (1984); and Peter Lange, George Ross, and Maurizio Vannicelli, Unions, Change, and Crisis: French and Italian Union Strategy and the Political Economy, 1945–1980 (1982). The two main works on neocorporatism are Gerhard Lehmbruch and Philippe C. Schmitter (eds.), Patterns of Corporatist Policy-Making (1982); and Philippe C. Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch (eds.), Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation (1979). John H. Goldthorpe (ed.), Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1984), analyzes the role of unions in the European political economies of the 1970s. For a comprehensive descriptive study of modern West European unions, see Jelle Visser, In Search of Inclusive Unionism (1990).

Jan F. Triska and Charles Gati (eds.), Blue-Collar Workers in Eastern Europe (1981), presents essays—some thematic, some by individual country—by leading experts on the topics of politics and economics of workers and unions in communist states. Union developments from the 1917 revolution to the post-1945 period are analyzed by an expert on Soviet political and economic affairs in Isaac Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labour Policy (1950, reprinted 1973). Victoria E. Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 (1983), places union development in a comparative European framework. Analysis of the role of unions in the later Soviet political structure is offered in Blair A. Ruble, Soviet Trade Unions: Their Development in the 1970s (1981). Feliks Gross, The Polish Worker: A Study of a Social Stratum (1945), is a sociological and historical study embracing the whole of the 19th century and the pre-World War II period of the 20th; Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity (1991), analyzes more recent developments.

Taishiro Shirai (ed.), Contemporary Industrial Relations in Japan (1983), is a collection of authoritative analyses by leading Japanese scholars, including the editor’s insightful study of enterprise unionism. Kazuo Koike, Understanding Industrial Relations in Modern Japan, trans. from Japanese (1988), portrays internal labour markets and their effect on unions and other labour institutions. Taishiro Shirai and Haruo Shimada, “Japan,” pp. 241–322 in John T. Dunlop and Walter Galenson (eds.), Labor in the Twentieth Century (1978), offers a highly useful summary of historical and statistical materials up to the 1970s. Kazuo Okochi, Bernard Karsh, and Solomon B. Levine (eds.), Workers and Employers in Japan: The Japanese Employment Relations System (1973), covers all major aspects of the postwar system, including unions, prior to the 1973–74 oil crisis. Analysis of union, employer, and government relations in the decade following the oil crisis is found in Koji Taira and Solomon B. Levine, “Japan’s Industrial Relations: A Social Compact Emerges,” pp. 247–300 in Hervey Juris, Mark Thompson, and Wilbur Daniels (eds.), Industrial Relations in a Decade of Economic Change (1985). The English-language publications of the Japan Institute of Labour are an important source of information.

Rosalind E. Boyd, Robin Cohen, and Peter C.W. Gutkind (eds.), International Labour and the Third World: The Making of a New Working Class (1987), examines class formation and the labour movement in various areas. Robin Cohen, Peter C.W. Gutkind, and Phyllis Brazier (eds.), Peasants and Proletarians: The Struggles of Third World Workers (1979), focuses on forms of labour organization and strategies of working class action. World Labour Report (irregular), issued by the International Labour Office, provides systematic coverage of key issues of organized labour. Ronaldo Munck, The New International Labour Studies (1988), offers an overview of the field as applied to the Third World. Roger Southall (ed.), Trade Unions and the New Industrialization of the Third World (1988), examines the relationship between the “new international division of labour” and labour organization. Immanuel Wallerstein (ed.), Labor in the World Social Structure (1983), presents a collection of papers from a Soviet-American symposium, covering various aspects of labour’s role in the Third World.