Welsh Journals

LABOUR ORGANIZATION AMONG AGRICULTURAL WORKERS IN WALES, 1872-1921 The one satisfactory revolution wrought by the War has been the emancipation of the agricultural labourer. (Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald, 10 June 1921) A STUDY of farm workers' trade unions and organization over the course of the period 1872-1921 enables us to see two things: first, the sheer disinclination on the part of Welsh farm workers to organize in the years down to 1914 and, second, how that earlier indifference was to a significant degree replaced, from the autumn of 1917, by a mood of militancy and a will to organize. Of particular significance in the 'awakening' process was the encouragement given to farm labourers on the part of outside trade unions, and trades and labour councils like the National Union of Railwaymen, to form trade unions and, also, the growing influence of the newly-emerging Labour Party over rural workers. Perhaps this latter tendency was inevitable, for it could not be said of the old dominant Liberal cause that it had really been concerned with the welfare of the Welsh farm labourer. Rather, it was the class of tenant farmers and their supposedly disadvantaged condition imposed by an alien 'landlordism' which engaged its attention and for whom it campaigned. Farm labourers' combinations in the years from the 1870s to 1914 to increase their earnings and generally to improve their working and living conditions were few indeed. Not that their condition did not merit such action, for earnings of outdoor married labourers in the purely agricultural areas of the principality were inadequate for a decent subsistence. Indeed, outdoor married labourers and their families right down to 1918 in Cardiganshire, Carmarthenshire and Anglesey, and doubtless in other counties too, were able to survive only by dint of their unmarried children, working away from home as farm servants, sending a part of their cash wages back home to support their families.1 Again, despite improvements that came from the 1870s, the long working day was to remain a grievance among all categories of Welsh farm labourers down to the close of the first world war. D. A. Pretty rightly emphasizes that 'the grievance of long hours was 1 P.P., IX (1919), Wages and Conditions of Employment in Agriculture in Wales, 31, 51, 63.