This
coercion could be applied, in general reforms, only by society,
by stress of public opinion. But in concrete cases, in their own
personal environment, the coercion had to be first applied by
themselves. They had learned the lesson of letting the world in
general go its way while they attended to their own business.
In the early fifties, then, a new species of union appears. It
discards lofty phraseology and the attempt at world-reform and it
becomes simply a trade union. It restricts its house-cleaning to
its own shop, limits its demands to its trade, asks for a minimum
wage and minimum hours, and lays out with considerable detail the
conditions under which its members will work. The weapons in its
arsenal are not new--the strike and the boycott. Now that he has
learned to distinguish essentials, the new trade unionist can
bargain with his employer, and as a result trade agreements
stipulating hours, wages, and conditions, take the place of the
desultory and ineffective settlements which had hitherto issued
from labor disputes. But it was not without foreboding that this
development was witnessed by the adherents of the status quo.
According to a magazine writer of 1853:
"After prescribing the rate of remuneration many of the Trades'
Unions go to enact laws for the government of the respective
departments, to all of which the employer must assent .... The
result even thus far is that there is found no limit to this
species of encroachment.
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