PUGH, Arthur

Trade Unionist

Pugh was a trades unionist who played an important role in the formation of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation. He served as president of the Trades Union Congress in 1926. 

Pugh was born on 19 January 1870 at Ross-on-Wye, the son of a civil engineer. Both his parents died young, and at thirteen Pugh was apprenticed to a local butcher. In 1894 he moved to Wales, where he took a job in the steel industry. He married Elizabeth Morris of Port Talbot in 1891. Pugh and his wife then moved to Lincolnshire, where he became increasingly involved with the trades union movement. In 1906 he became an assistant secretary to the executive of the British Steel Smelters’ Association. 

Pugh’s responsibility was for the union’s finances. He did a remarkable job, given his lack of experience and formal education, and turned the Steel Smelters into one of the most efficient and best-run unions in the country. He fully agreed with the union’s policy of conciliation and working with employers to set fair wages. In 1916 he became the effective chief executive of the union and in 1917 led the it into the newly formed Iron and Steel Trades Confederation. He joined the council of the Trades Union Congress in 1920, serving as its president in 1926, the year of the General Strike. 

Despite leading the unions during the strike, Pugh was always more of a conciliator. He played little part in organising the strike, but he did become closely involved in the talks to bring it to an end. He served on several parliamentary commissions investigating labour unrest, but he seems to have had no desire to enter politics himself. He retired from the post of secretary of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation in 1935, the same year that he was knighted KB, and thereafter lived quietly, writing a history of the steel unions which was published in 1951. He died in Bedford on 2 August 1955. 

Pugh’s Rowntree paper of 1923 was one a pair looking at the relationship between waste and industrial unrest – the companion lecture by T.D. Buttercase looked at the role played by employers – as part of a larger theme of waste in industry to which the spring conference was devoted. Pugh begins by pointing out that strikes and lock-outs, what most people think of when they consider the problem of industrial unrest, are in fact just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem extends much deeper. He also points out that responsibility for industrial unrest cannot be laid solely on the shoulders of labour. Managers and the owners of capital have a responsibility too. 

The problem, as Pugh sees it, is a fundamental lack of understanding of the real role of labour. Capitalists, as the owners of resources, and managers, responsible for controlling and coordinating those resources, have some sort of stake in the firm. Workers, on the other hand, are simply a source of labour bought in the market, and therefore ‘labour’s place in industry was to carry out orders without asking too many questions, if it questioned at all.’ 

This division naturally produces a situation where, in order to assert their rights, workers are thrown into conflict with capital and management. To overcome this, Pugh calls on his audience to recognise that ‘industrial unrest has more and more become an effort on the part of the workers to articulate the demand for a higher standard of human dignity, and a more definite status in all that concerns the life of the nation.’ Like many other Rowntree lecturers, he makes the point that the division between capital and labour is artificial and false. We are all in this together. Management needs to stop fighting trades unions and engage with them, recognising that they can be a powerful force for good. Fairness needs to be observed in all negotiations, especially over pay.  

But, of course, organised labour has a similar responsibility to be fair and to recognise that it too is part of a partnership. Pugh goes on to lay out a number of practical proposals before finally, rather oddly, calling on his audience to remember the spirit of the First World War when all segments of society pulled together in a common cause. He seems to have conveniently forgotten the numerous instances of wartime labour unrest. 

Major works 

Men of Steel, By One of Them: A Chronicle of Eighty-Eight Years of Trade Unionism in the British Iron and Steel Industry, 1951. 

Obituary notice, The Times, 3 August 1955.
Philips, G.A., ‘Pugh, Sir Arthur’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

“PUGH, Arthur,” The Rowntree Business Lectures and the Interwar British Management Movement, accessed April 25, 2024, https://rowntree.exeter.ac.uk/items/show/194.