Definition
A combination of workmen is a concerted agreement or collective action among workers to advance their common interests in employment conditions — most commonly, to fix or increase wages, reduce hours, or resist unfavorable terms of employment. The term belongs primarily to nineteenth-century English and American labor law, where the legality of such combinations was deeply contested. At various points in legal history, combinations of workmen were treated as criminal conspiracies at common law; later statutory intervention in England progressively narrowed criminal liability, eventually recognizing workers' right to organize collectively without criminal penalty.
The term does not refer to a formal legal entity but to the act or fact of workers acting in concert. A single agreement among a handful of workers could constitute a combination, as could a large coordinated strike.
Common Confusion
COMBINATION OF WORKMEN vs. CONSPIRACY: Historically, the chief legal question surrounding combinations of workmen was whether they amounted to criminal conspiracy. Courts and commentators frequently treated the terms as overlapping — a combination became a conspiracy when its purpose or methods were deemed unlawful. Researchers should not assume that a source using "conspiracy" in the labor context is describing something categorically different from a "combination"; the distinction was often one of judicial characterization rather than factual difference.
COMBINATION OF WORKMEN vs. TRADE UNION: A combination was the earlier, less institutionalized concept — a concerted act or agreement, possibly ad hoc. A trade union implied a more permanent organizational structure. As English statutory law evolved through the nineteenth century, the term "combination" gradually gave way to "trade union" as the organizing concept in labor law. Sources predating the Trade Union Act 1871 are more likely to use "combination" as the operative term.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a marker of historical period. Encountering "combination of workmen" in a source almost always places that source in the pre-modern labor law era — roughly pre-1875 in England and pre-National Labor Relations Act (1935) in the United States. Researchers should approach it as a signal to locate the source within the specific statutory framework then in force.
English sources require particular attention to the sequence of combination acts. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made most combinations criminal. The Combination Laws Repeal Act 1824 (5 Geo. IV, c. 95) decriminalized combinations for wage-fixing purposes, but was almost immediately rolled back by the Combination of Workmen Act 1825 (6 Geo. IV, c. 129), which restored liability for certain coercive conduct while preserving a narrow space for peaceful collective wage negotiation. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry references the Statute 22 Vict. c. 34 (1859), which further clarified that peaceful dissuasion from work — without threat or intimidation — did not constitute the offence of molestation under the 1825 Act. Each of these statutes materially changes the legal significance of a "combination," so the date of any source is essential to interpreting what the term means in context.
American sources present a different problem: U.S. courts developed combination doctrine primarily through common law conspiracy cases rather than a parallel statutory ladder. Early American decisions drew heavily on English precedent but diverged over time. Researchers using American legal dictionaries from the same era may find entries that cite English authority without flagging that American courts had not uniformly adopted the same rules.
The term does not appear in modern labor law. Its functional successor concepts — collective bargaining, concerted activity, labor organization — are governed by statute (in the United States, primarily the NLRA) and carry their own specialized vocabulary. Do not import the legal standards attached to modern terms back into nineteenth-century materials that use "combination of workmen."
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is a narrow statutory gloss rather than a comprehensive definition. It zeroes in on the interpretive relationship between the 1825 Act (6 Geo. IV, c. 129) and the 1859 clarifying statute (22 Vict. c. 34), emphasizing what conduct does not constitute the criminal offence of molestation: combining to fix wages, or peaceably dissuading others from working, without threat or intimidation. This framing reflects the defensive posture of labor law writing in this period — defining the combination by the outer boundary of criminal liability rather than by its affirmative content.
What Rapalje & Lawrence does not supply: any treatment of the American law of combinations, the common law conspiracy backdrop against which these statutes operated, or the broader arc of English statutory reform leading from the 1799–1800 Combination Acts through the Trade Union Act 1871 and the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875. Researchers relying solely on this entry will have a partial and English-specific view of the term.
Jurisdictional Note
The term and its statutory framework are English in origin. American courts borrowed English combination doctrine but applied it unevenly through common law rather than equivalent statutes. By the twentieth century, the term had effectively disappeared from American legal usage, displaced by the statutory vocabulary of federal and state labor law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Military, Veterans & Admiralty Law Encyclopedia entry on VA Disability Compensation (military_18) is not a relevant match for this term. No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry closely corresponds to nineteenth-century labor combination doctrine.