ABSTRACT
In the middle of 1910 a new influence burst upon British labour. Tom Mann returned from Australia. Mann had become prominent as a labour leader during the great London dock strike in 1889. In Britain a native tradition of syndicalist thought and an industrial milieu very different from that of France or the Usa provided the origins for the prolonged period of ‘labour unrest’, and Mann’s leadership was the catalyst. Mann saw that ‘dual unionism’, the policy of recruiting workers into new trade unions with explicitly revolutionary objectives, was not appropriate in Britain where so many more workers than in France and the Usa were already organised, including many unskilled. The Gftu’s most successful work in the years immediately before the First World War was in health and unemployment insurance. Part II of the National Insurance Act set up machinery for compulsory unemployment insurance in certain industries and provided for voluntary insurance for some other workers who wished to participate.
