Scottish trade unionism’s foundation stone is a Glasgow grave: the Calton weavers, shot down by the military during the great strike of 1787 as the Cotton pages tell, lie under a memorial that calls them what the movement has always called them — the first martyrs. From their generation forward, the west of Scotland’s dense concentrations of weavers, spinners, colliers and, later, engineers made Glasgow the natural capital of Scottish labour organisation, legal or not: unions were criminal combinations until 1824, which changed their paperwork more than their existence.
The state’s fear of organised workers peaked in 1820, in the strange episode called the Radical War. Amid post-war slump and franchise agitation, a proclamation calling for a rising and a general strike appeared on Glasgow’s walls; sixty thousand stopped work, small bands marched — one to defeat by hussars at Bonnymuir — and the response was exemplary terror: the leaders Andrew Hardie and John Baird were hanged and beheaded at Stirling, and the elderly weaver James Wilson suffered the same fate before a horrified crowd of twenty thousand on Glasgow Green. The 1820 martyrs joined 1787’s in the movement’s calendar, monuments marking them across the region.
Victorian Glasgow supplied the movement’s next great trial. In 1837 the leaders of the powerful Glasgow cotton spinners’ union were arrested during a bitter strike and tried for a catalogue crowned by conspiracy to murder; convicted on the lesser charges in 1838, five were sentenced to seven years’ transportation. The case became a British sensation — parliamentary inquiries, national defence campaigns — and the men were pardoned within a few years, but the union was broken: a lesson in legal warfare the movement never forgot. Out of such battles the craft unions built their Victorian fortresses — engineers, boilermakers, printers — strongest of all on the Clyde.
Glasgow then institutionalised the movement it had bled for: the Scottish Trades Union Congress was founded in the city in 1897, and Glasgow has remained its headquarters and heartland — the co-ordinating brain through the twentieth century’s epics that fill this section’s other pages: the Singer strike of 1911, Red Clydeside, 1926, and on to the UCS work-in of 1971, where Jimmy Reid’s discipline — ‘no hooliganism, no vandalism and no bevvying’ — won the country and saved the yards.
Deindustrialisation thinned the battalions but not the tradition: Glasgow’s modern union strength sits in hospitals, schools, transport and councils — carers and cleaners where riveters were — and recent years’ equal-pay victories for the city’s women workers were won by exactly the fusion of workplace and community that Mary Barbour would recognise. Two hundred and forty years from Calton, the thread has never broken.