ABSTRACT
The difficulties of establishing the attitudes of the heterogeneous working class by other means are obvious. Members were urged to oppose pensions and other state welfare measures and instead to support trade unions in the struggle for higher wages. Working-class dislike of state welfare, he suggested partly from suspicion of the state as a complex of institutions run by or on behalf of the rich and partly from experience of state social intervention which was seen rather rarely to have brought unmixed benefit to workers. The largest exclusively working-class organizations of the period were the friendly societies, which had about 5.6 million members in Great Britain in 1900, when trade unions totalled about 1.2 million. Trade union attitudes, predictably, varied: over time, partly in accordance with their level of strength; among different occupational groups; and between leaders and rank and file.
