Noun
An organized combination among workmen for the purpose of maintaining their rights, privileges, and interests with respect to wages, hours of labor, customs, etc.
Source: Webster's dictionaryThe trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish. Samuel Gompers
The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class. Ernest Mandel
People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement. Michael Foot
By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights-the right to belong to a free trade union. Ronald Reagan
The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they're quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain. Arthur Scargill
You may see the emergence of a new political party from the body of the trade union movement which represents a very clear-cut socialist alternative policy and which gives expression to the views of the trade union movement in parliament. Arthur Scargill