Ross Murdoch Martin

Background

Ross Martin was born in 1929, in Australia.

Career

Ross Martin has taught at La Trobe University, Melbourne for forty years and is an Emeritus Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University.

After publishing Trade Unions in Australia, Martin undertook a comprehensive study of the Trades Union Congress's influence in TUC: The Growth of a Pressure Group, 1868-1976. The bulk of the book takes the TUC from its early powerlessness to 1940, when the wartime British government, worried about possible industrial disruptions, made the TUC a full-fledged member of the highest governing councils, it ends in 1976 when the TUC was able to deliver unions on a matter of great delicacy, wage controls.

As that indicates, history was not Martin's only purpose in this book. In addition to tracing the rise of this vital organization from despised suitor for government favors to the recognized voice of industrial labor, Martin's book is a sophisticated study of the very nature of the TUC as a political pressure group and the ways that have shaped the history of labor politics in Britain.

Martin turned next to the very nature of unions in Trade Unionism: Purposes and Forms. This is actually two books in one, the first part a study of the ways in which social theorists have looked at unions, and the second a comparison of union-government relations across borders and cultures. The two sections even have separate bibliographies. In the first part. Martin describes the differences among Pluralists, who lake unions on their own terms as concerned with wages and working conditions; Syndicalists, who focus on the revolutionary anti-capitalist potential of unions; Authoritarians, who see unions as instruments of slate power; and other influential theorists. The second part looks at the practice of union politics in diverse nations. such as the United States, France, and India, analyzing the differences between private, autonomous unions and those that are cither dominant players or subordinate instruments in various governments.

Turning from the general to the particular, Martin followed up with a biography of an early labor leader whose own career illustrates the differences between the accommodationist tendency and the more radical tendencies in the labor movement. The Lancashire Giant: David Shackleton, Labour Leader, and Civil Servant tells the story of a union leader who became one of the first Labour Party members of parliament and the first workingman to become a permanent secretary in the British cabinet. While specifically renouncing socialism as a personal philosophy, Shackleton was one of the first to recognize that a viable Labour Party had to include socialists if it was to have any credibility with the workers. It was a fateful decision for both the Labour Party and the labor movement.

Achievements

• Ross Murdoch Martin is an outstanding educator and prolific author. He has long been an expert on the history and impact of labor unions and on the Labour Party in England. Martin's broad survey of labor movements in global terms provides a useful system for understanding them. His works were highly praised by critics.

Works

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  • The Lancashire Giant: David Shackleton, Labour Leader and Civil Servant

    (The Lancashire Giant tells the story of a nine-year-old c...)

    2000
  • Tuc, the Growth of a Pressure Group, 1868-1976 1980