Historical reasons for the formation of combinations of workers, legal impediments

Think of the dabbawalas, or the mill workers of Girangaon whose chawls still stand in central Mumbai. One worker asking a factory owner for a raise can be replaced by the next man at the gate. Five thousand workers asking together cannot. That arithmetic is the whole reason workers ever formed combinations. The harder question, and the one this topic answers, is why the law spent so long treating that arithmetic as a crime.

In two minutes

Workers combine because a single worker bargains from weakness; for a long time the law answered that combination with criminal conspiracy and restraint-of-trade doctrines, and only gradually, in England and then in India, did it move from punishing unions to recognising and protecting them.

The rest of this chapter

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