Rigby v Connol

[...]

The present Plaintiff certainly does not state in his statement of claim that there is any property at all here, and I think that that is a fatal objection to the statement of claim altogether, and I might, if I thought fit, dismiss the action simply on that ground. He states nothing but that there is an association which he calls a “Trades Union,”—the “Journeymen Hatters' Fair Trade Union”—as governed by rules. He says that he has been a member, and that he has been unfairly and improperly expelled, but he does not allege that there is any property of any kind or description belonging to the union, or that he is entitled to any share of it. That is, however, a very technical ground, and I intend to base my judgment also on the larger ground that if he had stated fully the position and rules of this trades' union to which he belonged, the result would have been the same, for the reasons I am about to state.

If he had stated the rules this would have been discovered from them, that the members pay subscriptions and are liable also to the payment of certain fines, and that the moneys subscribed in that way are applicable to various purposes, which may be divided into two, those which I will call benefit purposes, and those which I will call trade purposes. The benefit purposes are the usual provisions of benefit societies amongst workmen,—provisions for sickness, for want of employment, for the deaths of the members and of their families, for providing funerals, for making provision for their widows and children, and so forth. Those are personal benefits to the members of the societies, and, no doubt, the law of benefit societies confers on the members of the benefit society, in consideration of their having paid their subscriptions, rights of property, that is, the right to participate in the benefits according to the rules of the society.

The other purposes, which I will call trade purposes, are of a totally different character. Their object is to regulate the carrying on of the trade of journeymen hatters, to provide in substance that the number of apprentices to the trade shall be limited, that the number of persons employed shall be limited, that they shall only work in shops in which no other persons work than persons who are recognised by the “ Journeymen Hatters' Fair Trade Union ,” and generally to control the affairs of the trade. There are some other special and peculiar provisions and privileges as well, which it is very difficult to put under the trade rules, but they really are portions of the trade rules, and all regulate the trade and the conduct of the people in the trade. Those are the trade purposes. As regards them there is no actual property at all; the members raise money, but it is to be applied for the one purpose of regulating the trade.

[...] The only question remaining, therefore, is whether the negative words in this Act, “nothing in this Act shall enable,” really prevent me giving him any relief whatever, because those words do not say that the Court may not otherwise enforce; all the section says is, “Nothing in this Act shall enable.”

The question, therefore, which I have to consider is, what would have happened without the Act? And it appears to me that without the Act it is clearly an unlawful association; it is an association by which men are not only restrained in trade, but they are bound to do certain acts under a penalty. Take the very act for which this man was expelled. He was expelled because he bound his son apprentice in a shop where the workmen did not belong to this union but to another union. That is the allegation. And the rule is that any man binding his son in a “foul shop,” which, as it has been explained to me, includes a shop of this description, where the members employed belong to another union and not to this union, shall be fined £5, and so on according to the rules. I see a great number of other stipulations of a character which are not only a restraint in trade, but so much in restraint of trade, limiting the subject of it, that I have no doubt that before this Act was passed these rules would have been altogether illegal; and if nothing in the Act, therefore, will assist the Plaintiff, he must still be in the position of a member of an illegal association coming to a Court of Justice to assist him to enforce his rights under that illegal association.

If that is so, it is impossible for me, and I do not think it ever was intended by the Legislature, looking to the terms of the Act of Parliament, to enable the Courts to interfere on behalf of the members of these societies for the purpose of getting relief inter se with respect to rights and liabilities contrary to the Act; and in construing the Act as I do, I believe I am not only fairly construing it, as is my habit, according to the literal meaning itself, but according to the manifest intention of the Legislature.