Industrial Democracy was published by Longmans, Green in 1897, three years after The History of Trade Unionism, and it completed the Webbs’ grand project: where the earlier book traced how trade unions had developed, Industrial Democracy analyzed how they worked. The result was a work of institutional analysis that, for all its Victorian prolixity (nearly 900 pages in the original edition), established concepts and categories that remain in use in labour economics, industrial relations, and political science.
The book’s central contribution is its typology of trade union methods. The Webbs identified three distinct “methods” by which unions pursued their members’ interests: mutual insurance (providing benefits for unemployment, sickness, old age, and death), collective bargaining (negotiating wages, hours, and conditions directly with employers), and legal enactment (securing legislation to set minimum standards). They then analyzed the “regulations” that unions sought to impose — the standard rate, the normal day, sanitation and safety rules — and the economic effects of these regulations on wages, employment, and productivity.
The analytical framework was designed to answer a specific political question: were trade unions good for society, or merely good for their members at the expense of everyone else? The Webbs’ answer was carefully argued: unions that pursued the “method of the common rule” — establishing minimum standards that applied to all workers in a trade, not just union members — were economically beneficial because they prevented employers from competing on the basis of low wages and poor conditions. This “common rule” argument became the intellectual justification for minimum wage legislation, factory acts, and the entire apparatus of the welfare state.
The book was immensely influential, though its influence was often indirect — absorbed through the Fabian tracts, Labour Party programs, and academic textbooks that drew on the Webbs’ analysis without always citing them. In the United States, John R. Commons and his students at the University of Wisconsin built an entire school of institutional labor economics on foundations that the Webbs had laid. In Britain, the framework of collective bargaining that governed industrial relations from the 1906 Trade Disputes Act through the Donovan Commission of 1968 was essentially the system that the Webbs had described and advocated.
The book’s limitations are equally clear in retrospect. The Webbs assumed that trade unions would continue to grow in membership and influence, becoming increasingly responsible and moderate as they did so. They did not anticipate the conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s, the General Strike of 1926, or the eventual backlash against union power that produced Thatcherism. Their analysis was also narrowly British: they had little to say about the very different union traditions of continental Europe or the United States.
Collecting Industrial Democracy
First edition (Longmans, Green, London, 1897): Two volumes, green cloth.
Market values:
- First edition, two volumes, good: $100–$300
- Later single-volume editions: $20–$60
- 1920 revised edition: $30–$80
An important and undervalued book in the history of social science. First editions in good condition are scarce.