ABSTRACT
By the middle of 1833, Robert Owen had become established as the recognised leader of the Trade Union movement. At Charlotte Street, in July, 1833, the Labour Exchange passed under new management. It was taken over from Owen by the United Trades Association, a federation of a considerable number of Trade Unions in London. Owen’s plan for a “Grand National Guild of Builders” had been previously circulated to the lodges, printed in full in the Pioneer, and expounded by Owen at a number of meetings. The Builders’ Parliament, under Owen’s guidance, spent a week in reorganising the Union on lines of “universal government,” by which the various crafts were bound more firmly together into a single united body. For Owen and his friends, the whole affair of the Builders’ Union was only a side-show, or at any rate only a small part of a wider movement of general regeneration.
