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trade is one of the great rhetorical expressions of the labour movement. The rights of trade unions are what are denied today in countless national situations, and in an international trading context, which contrives to pit workers against one another in the proverbial race to the bottom. In these situations, free trade unionism is a hurrah term: we in the labour movement are all free trade unionists now. However, it is worth recalling that until just over a decade ago use of the word in this context was highly controversial in some labour circles. It was regarded as a tendentious word, a loaded adjective that cold warriors in western capitalist society had appropriated for propaganda purposes. “Free” trade unions were what communist organisations of the same name were not. That battle between the proponents of and critics of free trade unionism is now over. It was comprehensively won by the former, although occasional faint echoes of the old conflict can be heard in quarters where the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and its adherents have always been seen as an inferior form of trade unionism. Some retain a vague nostalgia for the more full-blooded trade unionism that the ICFTU's rival, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) is supposed to have stood for. For those who have come of age since this cold-war battle was in progress, or who vaguely feel that a more vigorous form of trade unionism lost out with the collapse of communism, it is worth reviewing the notion of freed trade unionism in various historical contexts.[1] The focus of this conference is on issues that were important to the labour movement at the start of the last century as well as the present one. I suggest that the essentials of free trade unionism were of importance in both of these periods: indeed that they are timeless. When the founders of the ICFTU discussed the definition of free trade unionism in 1949, they were not inventing something new so much as distilling the essential of trade unionism as practised in most developed western countries for at least half a century and, in some cases, for a great deal longer. They not only focused on the problem of government or employer control of the labour movement but all attempts by outside agencies to direct it. Some of the discussants viewed trade union - socialist party links as problematic. And indeed this view did reflect a tension that had been present at the beginning of the 20 th century.
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