Chapter IX · (continued 2)

The “New Model” for Trade Union structure thus deliberately adopted merits attention. In contrast with what we have called the “New Model,” in 1851 of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, that of 1913 represents an attempt to include, in a single “amalgamated” Union, all the various “crafts” and grades of workers engaged in a single industry throughout the whole kingdom. The declared object of the National Union of Railwaymen is “to secure the complete organisation of all workers employed on or in connection with any railway in the United Kingdom.” It thus definitely negatives both “sectionalism” and “localism” in favour of “Industrial Unionism.” Indeed, it may be suggested that the new constitution passes, by definition, even beyond the “Industrial Unionism,” to which the most advanced section of Trade Unionists were aspiring, into what has been termed “Employmental Unionism,” in that it seeks to enrol in one Union, not merely all sections of railway workers, but actually all who are employed by any railway undertaking—thus including, not only the engineering and wood-working mechanics in the railway engineering workshops,[625] but also the cooks, waiters, and housemaids at the fifty-five railway hotels; the sailors and firemen on board the railway companies’ fleets of steamers, and (though no trouble has actually arisen about them) the compositors, lithographers, and bookbinders whom the railway printing works employ in the production of tickets, time-tables, office stationery, and advertisement posters; even the men whom one, at least, of the largest companies keeps in constant employment at the manufacture of crutches and wooden legs for the disabled members of its staff. This all-inclusiveness has, since 1913, brought the National Union of Railwaymen into conflict with many other Trade Unions; and the question of the proper lines of demarcation has so far remained unsettled. The principal new feature in constitutional structure was the establishment of a distinct legislature—the Annual General Meeting—consisting, in addition to the President and General Secretary, of sixty representatives elected by the membership in geographical constituencies of approximately equal size. Subordinate to the Annual General Meeting (which can be summoned specially when required) is the Executive Committee of the President, General Secretary, and twenty-four other members, the latter being severally elected by the device of the Single Transferable Vote by each of four prescribed departments of members in each of six gigantic geographical constituencies; one-third of such representatives retiring annually, and after each triennial term of service, becoming ineligible for three years, whilst the Branches to which they belong also become unable to nominate representatives for a like term. The Executive Committee, which, like the Annual General Meeting, consists of working railwaymen, paid only for their days of service, meets quarterly and appoints four sectional sub-committees, which must also meet at least quarterly. Noteworthy, too, is the District Council, which—constitutionally only a voluntary federation of geographically adjacent Branches for propagandist and purely consultative purposes—has, with an unofficial National Federation of District Councils, developed into an active “caucus” of the more energetic members for discussing and promoting “forward movements” in the Annual General Meeting, and “organising” the elections to the Executive Committee.

With such a constitution, and the administration of extensive friendly benefits in a society now approaching half a million members, it is inevitable that the Executive Committee should wield extensive powers. It initiates and conducts all trade movements, and can therefore call a national strike, even without a ballot vote; and whilst it may take a ballot vote at any time on any question, the rules expressly provide that it is not to be bound by the members’ decision. Originally the Executive Committee had power also “to settle” any dispute; but this was withdrawn by resolutions of the Annual General Meetings of 1915 and 1916, which required all settlements to be reported to itself for ratification. In practice very large powers, both of office management and of negotiation, are necessarily exercised by the six salaried officers, the President, the General Secretary, and the four Assistant Secretaries, each of whom is responsible for a separate branch of the Union’s work. They have, however, not been able to prevent a series of “unauthorised” strikes, local or sectional in character.

At the beginning of 1914 everything pointed to a further forward movement by the N.U.R. Its Annual General Meeting cordially accepted the Miners’ proposal to unite with them and the Transport Workers in the so-called Triple Alliance. Moreover, its desires now began to go beyond improvements in wages and hours. Its representatives had, for twenty years, sometimes moved and always supported the resolutions of the Trades Union Congress in favour of the Nationalisation of Railways. In 1913 the Railway Clerks’ Association had gone a step further, and had asked also for participation in control. In 1914 the resolution intended to be submitted on behalf of the N.U.R. declared that “no system of State Ownership of the railways will be acceptable to organised railwaymen which does not guarantee to them their full political and social rights, allow them a due measure of control and responsibility in the safe and efficient working of the railway system, and assure to them a fair and equitable participation in the increased benefits likely to accrue from a more economical and scientific administration.” Here we have the first expressions of the desire for participation in the management of the railways.[626] From that time forward the demand has become ever more explicit and determined. Meanwhile, however, the first step was plainly the drastic amendment of the scheme of Conciliation Boards; and proposals were under consideration when war broke out. In marked contrast with their previous action, the Railway Companies were actually meeting the Union representatives in a joint committee of seven a side. The growth in membership of the National Union of Railwaymen at that date to over 300,000, and its entry into the “Triple Alliance” of miners, railwaymen, and transport workers, had, in fact, at last compelled the Companies, in fact, to concede “recognition,” although they denied at the time that they were so doing. During the war the actual alteration of the scheme was to remain in abeyance, but the Executive Committee came in 1915 to a provisional agreement with the Companies as to certain amendments, which the Annual General Meeting of that year considered inadequate and refused to sanction. Meanwhile, in view of the rising cost of living, successive war bonuses, uniform throughout the Kingdom for all grades of the traffic staff, were obtained from the President of the Board of Trade—the cost, in effect, falling on the Government under its arrangement for guaranteeing to the shareholders the net revenue of 1913—amounting altogether to 33s. per week for men, 16s. 6d. per week for women and boys, and 8s. 3d. per week for girls, thus more than doubling the average pre-war wages. The Government, moreover, promised sympathetic consideration of the men’s demand for an Eight Hours’ Day immediately on the termination of the war.

When the Armistice in November 1918 brought hostilities to an end, negotiations were at once begun for a settlement of the outstanding questions. The National Union of Railwaymen, in more friendly conjunction with the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, whilst gaining advances fully equivalent to the increase in the cost of living, had secured in principle not only recognition, but also the valuable right of entering into negotiation with the united management of all the railways, instead of always being referred to the several companies; and even more important, it had obtained, in the uniform war bonuses, the basis of national rates of wages for the several grades, instead of rates and classes of workers varying from company to company. It was now to secure, without an effort, the Eight Hours’ Day, to come into operation on February 1, 1919, which the Government, not even consulting the Railway Companies, singly or collectively, in December 1918, conceded in principle without reduction of wages, whilst the necessary reclassification of workers and adjustment of times and wages on a national system became the subject of prolonged and difficult negotiations between the Railway Executive Committee and the two principal Unions.

The negotiations for “standardisation” which necessarily involved the amalgamation of the uniform war bonus with the varying basic rate, were dragged out by the Government from February to the end of August, to the growing irritation of the railwaymen. What occurred, as Ministers subsequently confessed, or rather boasted, was that, beginning actually in February, the Government made extensive secret preparations to break the strike which it was foreseen would occur when the Government’s decisions were made known. The railwaymen themselves confidently expected, seeing that the cost of living had not fallen, but was officially certified, in September 1919, at 115 per cent above that of July 1914, that their rates would be “standardised upwards,” so as both to adopt the scales of the best companies for all the staff, and to include the whole of the war bonus. But this automatic inclusion of the war bonus in the Standard Rate, which some trades had already secured, was exactly what the leading industrial employers were, for their own trades, anxious to prevent. They counted, indeed, on bringing about throughout British industry, during 1919 or 1920, irrespective of any change in the cost of living, a general reduction of the “swollen” wages of war-time; and there was a prevalent feeling among them, which is known to have been shared by some, at least, of the Ministers, and quite frankly expressed, that a big “fight with the Trade Unions” was inevitable, and that it would be “better to get it over” before industry had generally restarted under peace conditions. How far Sir Auckland Geddes, who as President of the Board of Trade was responsible for the negotiations, and his brother, Sir Eric Geddes, who as Minister of Transport took over the work, shared this view, and allowed it to inspire their official action, has not been revealed. The historian can only note that the Government proceedings appear consistent with this hypothesis. The Government deliberately separated from the mass of railwaymen the locomotive drivers and firemen, whose services were regarded as specially indispensable, and whose allegiance was divided between the two rival Unions. In August acceptable terms were proposed for these two classes, which conceded not only the absorption of the whole war bonus in the new scale of wages, but also certain further increases of pay, coming near to the Union’s full claims. Such a concession, it was subsequently noted, was admirably calculated, in the event of a strike, to detach the drivers and firemen from their fellow-members; to divide the two Unions, and to arouse expectations in the other grades which would make it practically certain that they would indignantly refuse the offer that was to be made in a few weeks. When the “definite” decision of the Government was sent to the Union, in a letter in which Sir Auckland Geddes with his own hand altered the word to “definitive,” as if in order to ensure an explosion, it was found that by the new scale, beginning on January 1, 1920, every grade was to suffer a reduction of existing earnings, varying from only a shilling or two per week in some cases up to as much as sixteen shillings per week—the new standard rate of the porter, for instance, being fixed at 40s., as compared with the 51s. or 53s. that he was actually receiving, or with the 60s. per week for which the Union had asked. No explanation was given by the brothers Geddes that what was intended was that there should be on January 1, 1920, no reduction whatever in the men’s earnings, and that the Government’s policy was (as subsequently stated by Mr. Lloyd George, but only on the very morning of the strike, which was the first revelation of it) that there should never be any reduction at all unless the cost of living fell for over three months below 110 per cent in excess of pre-war prices, and that (as was announced only in the Government advertisements on the eighth day of the strike) the future “sliding scale,” which had never been definitely formulated, would be allowed to work upwards as well as downwards. Unless the intention of the “definitive” offer was then and there to provoke an indignant strike, why was no hint of this “policy for 1920” included; why was it left to be only incidentally revealed, in such a way as not to be easily understood, in the final personal discussion with the Prime Minister; and, seeing that the Minister of Food himself had publicly announced that what was probable, from January 1920, was not a fall but a further rise in the cost of living, why was the alarming suggestion of a reduction to 40s. per week ever made at all? It is almost impossible to avoid the inference that the Government, which certainly decided the date and the issues, decided also the strike itself, with a view to “beating the Union,” in order to get a free hand for railway reorganisation without the necessity of consulting the operatives; in order, probably, to fit in with the general capitalist project of a scaling down of the “swollen” war-wages; and, as some say, in order to supply Mr. Lloyd George with a useful “election stunt,” with which, in the eyes of the middle class, irretrievably to damage the Labour Party.

Whether intentionally on the part of the Ministers, or by reason of an amazing maladroitness in their negotiations, what had been foreseen and expected by the Government, and for six months secretly prepared for, actually came to pass. On Wednesday, September 24, the Executive Council of the National Union of Railwaymen issued orders for a national strike to begin at midnight on Friday, September 26, unless countermanded by telegraph. So little had the Union intended or contemplated such action that absolutely no notice of the crisis had been given to the Miners’ Federation or the Transport Workers’ Federation, who were the railwaymen’s colleagues in the Triple Alliance; and the Union had only some £3000 available in cash. Efforts were made by the men to avert the stoppage, which it was recognised would be a national calamity. The Executive Council sought and obtained long interviews with the Prime Minister himself on Thursday, and even on the Friday morning; and the verbatim reports of these discussions reveal (a) that the Government showed no inclination to meet the men’s case—Sir Eric Geddes peremptorily intervening at one point even to prevent a criticism of the “definitive” new scale being adduced; (b) that the Government did not even then set forth what subsequently turned out to have been the proposal that the Ministry of Transport had really intended to make (unless, indeed, we are to assume that the “definitive” offer was silently changed in the course of the strike). Again, it can only be inferred that Mr. Lloyd George either did not wish to prevent the strike or else was quite exceptionally below his usual level of lucidity in explanation of any scheme that he wished to have accepted. What the Prime Minister did was immediately to denounce to the public the National Union of Railwaymen as engaged in an anarchist conspiracy!

The nine days’ stoppage that ensued was, in many respects, the most remarkable industrial conflict that we have yet seen. Half a million railwaymen left their work at midnight on the 26th of September, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen at once joining loyally with the N.U.R., and very nearly every member of either Union coming out. The men on the Irish railways were directed to remain at work. Never before had there been so nearly a complete stoppage of the railway service from one end of Great Britain to the other. It is to be noted that the third Union, the Railway Clerks’ Association (which had come to include the Clerical, Administrative, and Supervisory Staffs), directed its members to remain absolutely neutral, and not to do any of the strikers’ work. The various Unions of Post Office employees sought and obtained an official decision that they were not to be called upon to do any service hitherto done by men on strike. The Government, which sent soldiers to guard some of the railway stations,[627] hastened to announce publicly—in significant contrast with its decision of 1912—that in no case would the troops be employed to run trains. For the first time the Government found itself liable to pay unemployment benefit to all other workers who were stopped as a result of the strike; and for the enormous extension of the State Unemployment Benefit that was expected to be required, arrangements were promulgated under which the Benefit would be issued by each employer to his own wage-earners, when these were thrown idle by the strike; and that whilst such persons might be called upon to take temporary employment in handling food supplies, they would not be required to accept service on the railways themselves.

There was, in spite of wild newspaper exaggerations, practically no disorder and no attempt to injure property. Except in a very few cases, in which local mishandling of the situation by the authorities led to resentment and misunderstanding, the Executive Council’s order that the horses were not to be allowed to suffer was cordially acted on by the men. The Government was allowed, without attempt at obstruction, to bring at once into operation the elaborate arrangements it had long been preparing, for ensuring the regular supply of London and other large towns with milk and other foodstuffs by means of an extensive motor-lorry service. Volunteers for railway work were called for, and with the aid of the small remnant of non-unionists a tiny trickle of trains was set going, which provided for the local passenger service in London and some other cities; and gradually accomplished one or two long-distance trains per day, which carried the mails and were crowded with venturous passengers. What stopped almost completely was the mineral and heavy goods traffic, and by the end of the week so many industries had come to the end of their fuel, and so many coalpits were short of waggons and of room at the pithead, that, whilst nearly 400,000 workmen in collieries and factories were already idle, the next week would have seen literally millions unemployed. Meanwhile, in spite of press reports to the contrary, the Union Executives knew that, whilst a few men returned to work, each day more joined the strikers, so that there were actually a greater number signing the book at the end than at the beginning of the struggle. But the National Union of Railwaymen found considerable difficulty in realising from its investments, and in making locally available at a couple of thousand centres, sufficient cash to pay immediately the half a million pounds of strike pay that was required; and only the prompt and cordial assistance of the Co-operative Wholesale Society’s printing department, which got out the necessary supply of cheques in marvellously quick time, and of the Co-operative Wholesale Society’s Bank, which made the N.U.R. cheques payable at the several Co-operative Societies themselves, averted a breakdown. Food was in some cases refused to the strikers by shopkeepers; and it may be that it was only the prompt assistance of the Co-operative Societies, which agreed to honour vouchers issued by the local strike committees, that prevented the Government from putting in operation a project of starving out the railwaymen’s families by withdrawing their ration cards or withholding the food supplies under Government control. One blow below the belt the Government did strike in arbitrarily commanding the withholding from the strikers of a whole week’s pay which they had earned by their service prior to the stoppage, and which it was the custom of the companies always to keep in hand for a week by way of security against theft or embezzlement. This had never been done in any previous railway strike. Whether or not the railwaymen had broken any legal contract of service by giving only three days’ notice of their strike, is not clear—the point appears never to have been raised or decided,—but in any case the companies had only a right to sue each man for any damages that might be shown to be caused by such a breach of contract; and the Government had plainly no legal warrant for becoming the judge in its own cause, and itself arbitrarily assessing the damages due from each man at precisely one week’s earnings. This action, coupled with the evasive and ever-changing terms of the Government’s wage proposals, and the campaign of abuse that the Government organised throughout the press—personally directed by Sir William Sutherland, one of the Prime Minister’s secretaries—had a great influence in rallying the Trade Union world in support of the railwaymen.

The “publicity campaign,” by which, for the first time in an industrial struggle, a persistent organised appeal was made by both sides to public opinion, was, indeed, the most remarkable feature of the struggle. At the outset the Government, in spite of the outspoken advocacy of the Daily Herald, had it all its own way. The public, seriously inconvenienced by the stoppage, was told by nearly every newspaper in the Kingdom—daily supplied by a Government office with a lengthy bulletin of “Strike News”—that the strike was the result of an “anarchist” conspiracy among the railwaymen; that the Union had wantonly broken off negotiations without cause because it positively wished to “hold up” the whole community; that the Government had not really intended any reduction of wages at all, and that the figure of 40s. had reference only to the contingency of the cost of living reverting to what it was before the war; that, in fact, the Government were positively doubling the railwaymen’s wages, and that the men, realising this, and discovering how they had been deceived by their Executive Council, were resuming their duties at all points. To counteract this Government propaganda, the Daily Herald made the most enterprising arrangements for getting its issue distributed all over England, and more than doubled its circulation, whilst the National Union of Railwaymen employed its own Publicity Department, utilising for this purpose the Labour Research Department.[628] A number of competent writers, cartoonists, and statisticians belonging to the Labour Party placed their services in this way at the Research Department’s disposal, so that the Executive Council was able, within a couple of days, to pour forth a stream of articles, letters, speeches, and cartoons, for which the newspapers generally accorded space.[629] Every move of the Government, and every statement that it issued, was immediately countered by an appropriate answer. When Mr. Lloyd George supplied a message denouncing the strikers which appeared on the film in every cinema, Mr. J. H. Thomas was himself filmed in the act of delivering a cogent reply. But the Union’s Publicity Department found the space given by the newspapers inadequate, and started placing full-page advertisements in the Times and other newspapers, in which the Government’s equivocations and evasions as to the wages offered were effectively exposed. The Government followed suit, and presently the two advertisements appeared on successive pages, with the unforeseen result that the Government’s statement of its proposals to the men was detected in changing from day to day as the strike continued, growing progressively more favourable to the men, but professing still to be the “definitive” decision of Sir Auckland Geddes which had provoked the strike. The outcome of a week’s skilfully organised “publicity” was a steady shifting of public opinion, and even a distinct change in the newspaper editorials. By the end of the week the men’s case was winning.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the principal Trade Unions indirectly affected by the railway stoppage, notably the various sections of Transport Workers, together with officials or representatives of the Miners, the Parliamentary Committee, and the Labour Party, had been meeting in anxious conclave—summoned, it should be stated, by the Executive of the National Transport Workers’ Federation—with a view to restraining their own members from impetuous action in support of the railwaymen, and to bringing pressure to bear on both parties to secure a settlement. At first the prospect seemed hopeless. The Government took up an attitude of defiance. Mr. Lloyd George declared that he would not enter into any negotiations with the railwaymen’s Unions until the men had unconditionally returned to their duty. A national appeal was made to all the Local Authorities—not to strengthen the police force by special constables, as is the constitutional procedure, but to institute a “Citizen Guard,” in order to repel the forces of disorder; a wild use of a term of bad omen, which was calculated, if not intended, to bring the “class war” into the streets. It was known that measures of arbitrary confiscation of the Union funds were seriously under consideration, together with discriminatory issues of food supplies. On the other side, the feeling of the Trade Unionists was rising to anger. The position could not well have been more serious. But the “eleven”—afterwards the “fourteen”—Trade Union mediators were patient and persistent. They had long interviews with the railwaymen’s Executive. They had long discussions with the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Minister of Transport. They cleared up misunderstandings. They eliminated provocative expressions. They brought the Government to admit that there was no present chance of reducing wages. They got the railwaymen to see that merely to postpone the issue was to strengthen their grip upon what they were actually receiving. Notwithstanding the Government’s defiant words, the Trade Union mediators got the railwaymen’s Executive Council into prolonged and repeated discussions at 10 Downing Street with the Prime Minister and his colleagues.[630] At last, on Sunday morning, October 3, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Thomas were closeted together for the final stage; the news was immediately flashed all over the kingdom that the strike was settled, and in the evening Mr. Thomas announced to a mass meeting of railwaymen in the Albert Hall the terms of settlement. These included an immediate resumption of work without victimisation or recrimination; payment of the impounded arrears of wages; “stabilisation” of existing earnings of all rates (except where improved) until September 30, 1920; negotiations as to “standardisation” and settlement of wage scales to be begun again, and a settlement to be come to before December 31, 1919; and the lowest adult railwayman to be raised forthwith to 51s. per week as a minimum. Before the end of 1919 it was announced that the Government had agreed to concede, for the future, that all questions relating to the conditions of service should be dealt with, not by the railway companies but by a Central Board of ten members (with power to increase by a further one on each side), five nominees of the National Union of Railwaymen and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, and five representatives of the railway management. In case of disagreement, reference will be made to an Appeal Board of twelve members, four nominated by these Trade Unions, four representing the management, and four the general public, with a chairman nominated by the Government. What is specially significant is that it is recognised that “the public” does not consist merely of the upper and middle, or of the capitalist and professional classes. Of the four representatives of the public, two are to be nominated, respectively, by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and the Federation of British Industries, and two, respectively, by the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress and the Co-operative Union, who are thus taken to represent the four-fifths of the population (and therefore of the railway users) who are manual working wage-earners. At the same time it was conceded that the Advisory Committee for Railway Management, which replaces under the Minister of Transport the Railway Executive Committee, is to include, from the start, three representatives of the railwaymen’s Unions, all the members having equal and identical functions and rights.

We do not yet know what agreement will be reached about “standardisation” or the future scale of wages, but the Ministry of Transport is not likely to try another fall with the railwaymen’s Trade Unions. The strike has had, indeed, results of the first importance. The Government has learnt that Trade Unionism is not easily beaten, even when all the resources of the State are put forth against it, and when public opinion is incensed. The great capitalist organisations have seen the warning against their projects of a general reduction of wages; and this is postponed, at least, for a year. On the other hand, the railwaymen’s Unions have realised the magnitude of the struggle into which they so precipitately entered, or into which they were so artfully inveigled. The need for, and the potency of, skilled publicity work, and the possibilities of a highly organised and adequately supported Labour Research Department, are commonly recognised. Finally, it is seen that national industrial conflicts of such a magnitude are matters of wider concern to the Trade Union world than any one Union can appreciate; and an attempt was made, to be subsequently described, if not to continue in existence the group of “Fourteen Mediators,” at least to get established some authoritative standing Council, by which the approach of an impending industrial crisis of national scope could be closely watched, so that all the necessary steps may be taken in time to deal with the situation in the best possible way. The Trade Union world realised its need for what was called a General Staff.

Amalgamations and Federations

Whilst the numerical strength and industrial and political influence of the several Trade Unions have thus steadily increased during the past thirty years, it is less easy to characterise the changes in the relations of Trade Unions with each other.

The multiplicity of separate organisations in which the six or seven million Trade Unionists are grouped, and the complication and diversity of the relations among the various societies, continue to-day, as they did thirty years ago, to baffle classification, and almost to defy analysis. It remains as impossible as it was in 1890 to state precisely how many distinct Trade Unions are in existence, because the endless variety of their federal organisations makes it uncertain which of the local or sectional Unions are to be counted as independent societies. We estimate, however, that upon any computation the number of financially distinct organisations, which we may put at about 1100, remains approximately what it was thirty years ago. The tendency to amalgamation, that is to say, has just about kept pace, arithmetically, with the starting of new organisations, whilst the average membership of each unit has more than quadrupled.

Such a statement fails, however, to do justice to the change that has come over the Trade Union world. Thirty years ago it was, on the whole, a congeries of numerically small units, only two or three of which counted as many as 50,000 members. To-day there are nearly a dozen which severally manage memberships of a quarter of a million, and probably fifty which deal with more than 50,000 each. A few other national societies of smaller membership are of some importance. Scattered up and down the United Kingdom a thousand other local or sectional societies exist, with memberships from a few dozen to a few thousand, but these play no part and exercise no influence in the movement as a whole. Probably five-sixths of all the Trade Union membership, and practically all its effective force, are to be found among the hundred principal societies to which the Ministry of Labour has long confined its detailed statistics. [631]

The movement for the amalgamation of competing societies has, during the past decade, been specially energetic and persistent. This has arisen, partly spontaneously, from the obvious disadvantages attendant both on rivalry between Trade Unions seeking to enrol the same classes of members throughout the kingdom—such as that between the various societies of railway employees—and on the division of workmen of the same craft among a number of independent local societies, such as the Coopers, the Chippers and Drillers, and the Painters and other branches of the Building Trades. But during the past decade the movement has been reinforced by the desire for an organisation based on the whole of an industry, such as engineering, housebuilding, mining, or the railway service, in which all the co-operating crafts and grades of workers would be associated in a single Industrial Union; in contrast with the earlier conception of the separate organisation of each craft throughout the whole kingdom; such as that of the carpenters, the enginemen, the engineering mechanics, the clerks, and by analogy the general labourers, in whatsoever industry they may be working. The case for the Industrial Union in such an industry as mining, for example, merely from the standpoint of Collective Bargaining, and for the sake of getting effective Common Rules, has always been a strong one; but the movement for the substitution of “Industrial” for “Craft” Unionism has been strengthened since about 1911 by the aspirations of those who saw in Trade Unionism something more than an organisation for raising wages and shortening the working day. If the wage-earners were ever to obtain, through their own voluntary associations, the control of their own working lives, and to obtain a steadily increasing participation in the direction of industry; if a Vocational Democracy were to be superimposed on a Democracy based on geographical constituencies; it seemed as if this could be done only by Trade Unions co-extensive with each separate industry. The influence of the movement known as “Guild Socialism” has accordingly been exercised, on the whole, in favour of Industrial Unionism, not so much for the sake of its immediate advantages in improving the conditions of the wage-contract, as because it was only in this form that Trade Unionism could become the vehicle of aspirations to the control of each industry by the whole mass of the workers employed therein.

Except in the way of industrial federations, to be hereafter referred to, it is only in mining and the railway service that any great progress has been made in this direction. The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, established, as we have seen, only in 1888, with no more than 36,000 members, has attracted to itself, year by year, an almost continuous stream of local or sectional organisations among the 1,200,000 workers in and about the coal and iron-stone mines; successively absorbing into one or other of its local units or affiliating directly to itself, not only all the district associations, old or new, of coal-hewers and other underground workers, but also some of the separate organisations of enginemen and firemen, mine mechanics, deputies and overmen, colliery clerks, cokemen, and others employed in or about the mines, until its aggregate membership in 1920 is somewhere about 900,000. And though the Miners’ Federation is still only a Federation of fully autonomous district associations—some of these, too, being themselves federations of the organisations of lesser localities; and although it still depends for its funds almost entirely upon specific levies upon its constituents, it has found means, by its frequently meeting delegate conferences, controlling the strong Executive Committee which they elect, to centralise very effectively the general policy of the whole mining industry, notably with regard to the hours of labour, the conditions of safety, the percentage of general advances of wages and the amount of the national war bonuses, and last, though not least, on the burning issue of nationalisation of the mines and the participation of the miners in their administration. But although the Miners’ Federation embodies in its constitution the principles of federalism and an extreme local autonomy, it takes no account of sectional differences, and makes no provision for the representation at its delegate conferences, or upon its Executive Committee, of any distinct grades or sections. Perhaps, for this reason, the Federation does not yet speak directly for all the organised manual working wage-earners in the industry. There are at least forty separate Trade Unions of enginemen, boilermen and firemen, colliery mechanics, cokemen, under-managers, deputies, overmen and other officials, colliery clerks, and surface-workers of various kinds, not yet affiliated to the Miners’ Federation, either locally or nationally; these have formed National Federations, parallel with the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, of enginemen, deputies, colliery mechanics and under-managers respectively; and in February 1917 seventeen of the societies drew together to form the National Council of Colliery Workers other than Miners, for the purpose of maintaining their separate influence.

In the railway service, as we have already described, the merging in the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, first of the Scottish Society in 1892, and then of the General Railway Workers’ Union, and the United Signalmen and Pointsmen’s Society in 1913, made possible the establishment of the National Union of Railwaymen on the basis of an organisation co-extensive with the industry, with the embodiment in the constitution of sectional representation. The four “departments” into which the members are divided vote separately in the elections. Under these provisions the National Union of Railwaymen, though hampered by the continuance of the separate Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, has been able to make effective not only its claims for higher remuneration, but also its demands for a normal Eight Hours Day, a national system of classification, and national wage scales for the several grades; though still not its aspirations (expressed since 1914) to participation in management, or those (expressed for over a decade) to the elimination from industry of the capitalist profitmaker by the scheme of Railway Nationalisation.

In other industries, too, the concentration of Trade Union forces during the past decade has increasingly taken the form of an amalgamation of rival sectional organisations, sometimes in response to a demand from the rank and file. Thus the Ship Constructors’ and Shipwrights’ Association, established in 1888, has successfully absorbed not only the very old Shipwrights’ Provident Union of London, but also all the remaining local Trade Unions of shipwrights that long lingered in Liverpool, Dublin, etc. The National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association has taken over a number of small societies of French polishers, gilders, and upholsterers. The United Garment Workers’ Trade Union was formed in 1915 by the amalgamation of a number of societies in the various sections of the tailoring trade; and in 1919 it was agreed that this, together with the Scottish Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, should be merged in the old Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, which would then include practically all the organised workers in the making of men’s and women’s clothing in Great Britain. Many small Unions of machine workers, minor craftsmen, and general labourers have been absorbed in one or other of the half-a-dozen large Labour Unions. The Amalgamated Card and Blowing-Room Operatives have taken over various small sectional societies in the Cotton trade. In Sheffield thirteen small Unions, catering for different sections of the gold and silver workers, joined together in 1910 in the Gold, Silver, and Kindred Trades Society, which in 1913 absorbed several more societies in this industry. In the autumn of 1919, as we have already mentioned, six of the sectional societies in the engineering industry decided to merge themselves, with the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, in a new and more gigantic amalgamation with 400,000 members; the United Pattern Makers’ Society, the Electrical Trades Union, and many small and specialised societies of mechanics in iron still standing aloof. In the same month three of the principal Unions of postal and telegraph employees united in a single Union of Post Office Workers, with 90,000 members. Other amalgamations among small or local societies took place among the Basketmakers, the Block Printers, the Leather-workers, the Dyers, the various sections in the Pottery Trade, etc.

Such amalgamation is greatly obstructed by legal requirements. Down to 1917 the law demanded that each society desiring to unite should ratify the decision by a two-thirds majority not merely of those voting, but of the entire membership. Such a poll is almost impossible of attainment by Trade Unions, whose members cannot usually be individually communicated with, owing not only to their frequent changes of residence and the absence of many of them abroad, but also to the lack, in most cases, of any complete register of addresses. In 1917 the Government at last permitted the passage of an Amending Act for which Trade Unionists had often pressed; but even then insisted on any amalgamation being carried, at a 50 per cent poll of the whole membership, by at least 20 per cent majority, conditions which make amalgamation everywhere difficult, and in some Unions (such as those of seamen) quite impossible. In several cases Unions in which the general opinion has been in favour of amalgamation have failed to get the necessary vote. We have already described the ingenious device by which the British Steel Smelters’ Society and the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation surmounted this difficulty.

Meanwhile, of federations as distinct from amalgamations the Trade Union world has a variety more bewildering than ever, some of which have already been referred to. We have to note that the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades Federation, the establishment of which in 1889 we described in Industrial Democracy, has continued in existence, doing useful work from time to time in connection with demarcation disputes and other subjects of inter-union controversy, especially on the North-East Coast, notably contributing also in 1905 to the successful claim of the Clyde trades to weekly instead of fortnightly pays, which the employers had stubbornly resisted for a whole decade, but continuing to be weakened by the abstention, except for a few years, of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, which, however, now frequently consents to act in conjunction with it in general trade questions.

What is significant is the change in type and purpose of these multifarious industrial federations, which have now come to form an important element in the Trade Union world.[632] Federation, in fact, has undergone a subtle change of character. Instead of loose alliances for mutual support in disputes, or for the adjustment of mutual differences as to “demarcation” and transfer of members, the federations of all the craft or sectional Unions engaged in particular industries—notably those of the Building Trades, the Transport Workers, and, though not yet to the same extent, the Printing Trades and the Woollen Workers, like the older organisation of the Cotton Operatives—have become increasingly, themselves negotiating bodies, recognised by the equally organised employers, and concerting with these what are, in effect, national regulations governing their industries throughout the whole kingdom. The later development of the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades Federation has been in the same direction. In the case of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain the development has gone still further; and this great organisation, whilst retaining the federal form, and, even now, not completely admitted to “recognition” by the Mining Association of Great Britain, unquestioningly acts for the whole industry in national issues, as if it were an “amalgamated” Union. Whether or not we are to see all the rival and sectional Unions in each industry amalgamating into a single “Industrial Union,” as many Trade Unionists desire, it must be recognised that the development, during the past decade, of active negotiating federations for the several industries goes far to supply the most urgent need. In short, although financially distinct Trade Unions remain, on the whole, as numerous as ever, the number of separate negotiating bodies, so far as concerns matters relating to an industry as a whole, becomes steadily smaller.

We pass now to federal bodies of a different character.

The General Federation of Trade Unions

In 1899, arising out of the losses caused by the costly engineering dispute of 1897-98, the Trades Union Congress established a General Federation of Trade Unions, largely at the instance of Robert Knight, the able secretary of the Boilermakers, designed exclusively as a mutual reinsurance agency against the heavy financial burden to which, in the form of Strike Pay, or Dispute or Contingent Benefit, labour disputes subject every active trade society.[633] By means of a small contribution from a large aggregate membership (1s. or 2s. per year per member), the General Federation is able to recoup to its constituent societies 2s. 6d. or 5s. per week per member affected towards their several expenditures upon disputes. Beginning with 44 societies, having a total membership of 343,000, it steadily increased the number of its adherents until, in 1913, it had affiliated as many as 150 societies, having at that date 884,291 members. Since that time the number of societies has dropped to 141 in 1919; but their increase in membership had raised the aggregate affiliation to 1,215,107, the largest ever recorded. The General Federation, whilst suffering for the past seven years from an arrest of growth, has to its credit twenty years’ success in surmounting the difficulties which have destroyed every previous attempt of the kind, and its prudent management is shown by the fact that it was able, from its normal revenue, to discharge all its obligations down to 1905, and to accumulate a reserve of £119,656. In that year the members rashly insisted on a reduction of the contribution by one-third, not foreseeing the outburst of disputes in 1908-9, which caused the Federation to pay out for 638 disputes no less than £122,778, and necessitated in 1913 the doubling of the contribution. Since that date, in spite of payments to societies averaging £1500 every week of the year, the Federation has not only met its engagements, but also built up a reserve exceeding a quarter of a million sterling. In 1911 it formed an Approved Society under the National Insurance Act, with the object of relieving the separate Trade Unions, and notably the thousand small ones, from the onerous task of separately administering the Act, and to ensure that their members did not go off to the Industrial Insurance Companies, an effort which has failed to attract more than a few thousand members. An extension of the effort to the provision of death benefits, by the formation of a Friendly Society section in 1913, has proved scarcely more successful.

It must be recognised that during the past six or seven years the Federation has lost favour with important sections of the Trade Union world. It was probably inevitable that its inclusion of small sectional societies should eventually bring it into conflict with the larger Unions by whom such societies are often regarded as illegitimate competitors. Grounds of this kind may be assigned for the secession of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the Amalgamated Society of Tailors in 1915; and for the powerful hostility shown since 1913 by the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. But this feeling has been accentuated by a growing resentment of the part played by the General Federation—not unconnected with the forceful personality of the General Secretary—first in international relations, and secondly in the representation of Trade Union opinion to the Government and to the public.

The General Federation, from its very establishment, affiliated itself to the International Trade Union Federation, which aimed at the collection and publication of statistics of Trade Unionism all over the world by an International Trade Union Secretariat, and at the mutual interchange of Trade Union information. For the first fifteen years of its existence this action of the General Federation was not objected to, although the fact that it represented only 25 to 30 per cent of British Trade Unionism impaired the value of its statistical contributions. The Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, which might well have undertaken the task, long ignored its international interests; but during the Great War increasingly resented the appearance of the General Federation as the representative of British Trade Unionism, and especially the almost continuous negotiations between its secretary, Mr. Appleton, and Mr. Gompers, the Secretary of the American Federation of Labor, and with M. Jouhaux, the Secretary of the Confédération Générale du Travail of France, along lines not consistent with those of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress. When, in 1918, attempts were made to reconstitute the International Federation of Trade Unions, the Parliamentary Committee claimed at first to be itself the representative of Great Britain; but presently compromised on a joint and equal representation by the two bodies.

But more serious than the question of international representation was the resentment at the ever-widening range of subjects at home on which Mr. Appleton, the Management Committee, and the Conferences of the General Federation claimed to voice the feelings of Organised Labour. It was urged that the Federation was formed exclusively for the purpose of mutually reinsuring Strike Benefit, and that it had accordingly no mandate, and did nothing but weaken the Trade Union forces, both in the narrow field of the conditions of the wage contract, and on the broader issues of Labour’s political aspirations, whenever it entered into rivalry with the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress on the one hand, or with the Labour Party on the other. It looks as if the General Federation must in future either restrict itself to the limited range of its original purpose, or else run the risk of being financially weakened by the secession of influential Trade Unions, which will not permanently remain affiliated to all three national bodies, when finding these speaking on the same subjects with different voices.

Trades Councils

Of another form of loose federation of the branches of all the Trade Unions within a given area we have already described the origin and the development in the local Trades Councils. These have gone on increasing in number, much more than in strength, until in 1920 we estimate that more than 500 are in existence, with an aggregate affiliated membership running into several millions of Trade Unionists. The character of their active membership, their functions, and their proceedings have remained much as we described them thirty years ago; but they have, on the whole, increased in strength and local influence, as well as in numbers and membership. They were, as we shall presently mention, somewhat arbitrarily excluded in 1895 from the Trades Union Congress, of which they were actually the originators; and although they have since joined in various provincial federations of Trades Councils,[634] these have never acquired any great strength, and do little more than arrange for co-operation in local demonstrations. An attempt to form a National Federation of Trades Councils did not succeed. On the other hand, as we shall describe in Chapter XI., the Trades Councils were, from its establishment in 1900, admitted, equally with Trade Unions, as constituents of the Labour Representation Committee (now the Labour Party), and whether as Trades Councils, or (notably with the smaller ones) in their new form of “Trades Councils and Local Labour Parties,” they are coming slowly to form its geographical basis. It is more and more on the political side that they are in some degree succeeding in uniting the energies of the Trade Unions of a particular town. This is especially the case so far as municipal politics are concerned. They have, for instance, been the main force in securing the general adoption of the Fair Wages Clause, and in furthering the election of Labour Candidates to local governing bodies. But they are rigidly excluded from all participation in the government or trade policy of the Unions; and, so far as Trade Unionism itself is concerned, their direct influence on questions of national scope is not great. Consisting, as in the main they do, of the delegates elected by branches of national societies, they are hampered by the narrow limits of the branch autonomy. For in trade matters the branch can bring to the Council no power which it does not itself possess, whilst towards any action involving expense by the Council it can, in many Unions, contribute only the voluntary extra-subscriptions of its members. During the present century, however, many Unions have started paying from central funds the affiliation fees of their branches to Trades Councils. Down to the end of the Nineteenth Century, however, the resources of the Councils accordingly seldom sufficed for more than the hire of a room to meet in,[635] the necessary postage and stationery, and the payment of a few pounds a year for the “loss of time” of their principal officers. In no case except London does a Trades Council as such, even in 1920, pay a “full-time” salary, so as to command the whole time of a single salaried official, though the Trades Councils of cities like Glasgow, Manchester, and Bradford have salaried secretaries who have other duties; and where the Trades Council is combined with the Local Labour Party it is more and more coming to have the services of a Registration Officer or Election Agent, whose salary is usually provided as part of the election expenses of the Labour candidate.

For a long time it could hardly be said that the Trades Councils enjoyed even the moral support of the great Unions. The central executives of the national societies were apt to view with suspicion and jealousy the existence of governing bodies in which they were not directly represented. The local branches, if not actually forbidden, were not encouraged to adhere to what might conceivably become a rival authority. The strong county Unions frequently stood aloof unless they were allowed an overwhelming representation. One of the notable changes of the present century has been the diminution of this jealousy of the Trades Councils. We know of no case in which branches are now forbidden to join a Trades Council. In most cases, although permission may have to be obtained from the Executive Council or Committee, it is nowadays readily granted, and with the recognition of the need for political action, between 1901 and 1913, came positive encouragement to the branches to affiliate to the Trades Councils of their localities. [636]

It remains, however, true in 1920 as in 1890 that the Trades Councils do not include the national leaders of the Trade Union world. The salaried officials of the old-established societies seldom take part in their proceedings. The London Trades Council, for instance, the classic meeting-place of the Junta, has long since ceased to be able to count among its delegates the General Secretaries of the Engineers, Bricklayers, Railwaymen, Steel-smelters, or of any other of the great Societies having their head offices in London. The powerful coterie of cotton officials forms no part of the Manchester Trades Council. Of the boilermakers, neither the General Secretary nor any one of the nine District Delegates is usually to be found on a Trades Council. The Miners’ Agents are notorious for abstention from the Councils in their localities. This, however, is due nowadays, whatever may once have been the reason, principally to the enormous additions to the work of all the salaried officials of the Trade Union world, which make it impossible for the majority of them to attend Trades Council meetings. The Trades Councils now serve as a useful training-ground, wider than that of the Trade Union Branch, for those whom we have elsewhere described as the non-commissioned officers of the Movement, from whose ranks nearly all the Trade Union leaders emerge.

Apart from their constant activity in municipal politics, and their energetic support of the Labour Party in all elections, the Trades Councils have, in the present century, considerably increased in usefulness. They have given valuable assistance in Trade Union propaganda, alike within their own districts and in the adjacent rural districts. No small part of the increase in Trade Union membership, notably among nondescript workers in the towns, and the agricultural labourers in the country, is to be ascribed to the constant work and support of some of the more active among them. They have done much to appease quarrels among the local branches of different Unions, and they are occasionally able to intervene successfully as arbitrators.[637] Even without formal arbitration they bring warring parties together. They nominate working-class representatives to many local committees and conferences, and serve, in this way, as useful links with public administration. Some of them have, of recent years, done a great deal to promote the better education of the artisan class. They affiliate to the Workers’ Educational Association or the Labour College, and support its classes; they arrange public meetings and obtain outside speakers; they affiliate to the Labour Research Department, which has a special “Trades Councils and Local Labour Parties Section”; they subscribe to the travelling library of book-boxes maintained by the Fabian Society; they frequently issue their own monthly bulletin of Trade Union and Labour news, or journal of local government information, or at least their annual Year-Book; and they act as distributing centres for the nationally published pamphlets and leaflets—sometimes even for the more popular books on Labour questions.[638] They have come, in several centres, to form, by Joint Councils, an indispensable connecting link between the Trade Union and Co-operative Movements, and they serve, more than any other agency, as the cement between the local branches of these two movements and the Labour Party itself. To what extent they are destined, in their character of constituent members of the Labour Party, sometimes actually combined with Local Labour Parties (in the latter cases with the inclusion, since 1918, of a section of individual members, Trade Unionists or others, “workers by hand or by brain”), to develop an effective political organisation, drawing together the whole of the supporters of the Labour Party in each Parliamentary constituency, remains yet to be demonstrated.

The Trades Union Congress

But the most extensive federation of the Trade Union world is to-day, as it has always been, the Trades Union Congress, which could count in September 1919 an affiliated membership of more than five and a quarter millions, a number never paralleled in this or any other country. We have described in previous chapters the origin and development of this federal body, its uses in drawing together the scattered Trade Union forces, and its failure either to help in the solution of the problems of industrial organisation or to give an intellectual lead to the rank and file. [639]

We drew attention in the first edition of this book in 1894 to the weakness of the organisation of this imposing annual Congress; and, from 1895 onward, certain changes have been successively made in its constitution and procedure, not always, as we think, for the better. At the Norwich Congress in 1894 the Parliamentary Committee, which the Congress annually elects as its executive, was charged by a resolution proposed by W. J. Davis to consider the amendment of the Standing Orders, and to make the amended orders applicable to the next Congress. On the authority of this ambiguous resolution, which seems to have had in view only the establishment of Grand Committees to deal with the multiplicity of resolutions on the annual agenda, the Parliamentary Committee, of which the Chairman was then John Burns, M.P., decided forthwith to expel all the Trades Councils from the Congress, to make obligatory the “vote by card” according, not to the number of delegates, but to the aggregate membership of each Union, and to confine the delegates rigidly to the contemporary salaried officers and the members of Trade Unions actually working at their crafts—thereby excluding not only the veteran Henry Broadhurst, M.P., with John Burns himself, but also Keir Hardie, Tom Mann, and other leaders of the new movement that was seeking to make Trade Unionism a political force. Who, exactly, was responsible for this coup d’état was not officially revealed. It was said, with some authority, that James Mawdsley, the rough and forceful secretary of the Cotton-spinners, was at the bottom of the move, and that he made use of the personal rivalry between Henry Broadhurst and John Burns to get them both, and also the rebellious element from the Trades Councils, which all three disliked, excluded from future Congresses.[640] The Congress at Cardiff in 1895 was very angry, and, in effect, rebuked the Parliamentary Committee, but allowed the new Standing Orders to be confirmed on the newly adopted “card vote.” In so far as the intention was to keep the new ideas out of Congress, the result was plainly a failure, as within four years (to be described in Chapter XI.) there was a majority in Congress for the creation of the independent organisation entitled the Labour Representation Committee, which became in due course the present Labour Party. The effect was merely to weaken the intellectual influence on the Trade Union world of the Congress and its Parliamentary Committee.

With this exception of the exclusion of the Trades Councils, and of the outstanding personalities whom they occasionally sent as delegates, the visitor to the Trades Union Congress in 1919 would have found very little difference between it and the Congresses of thirty years before, except for an increase in the size of the gathering and in the number of members represented; and, as must be added, an all-round improvement in the education and manners, especially of the younger delegates. As an institution it can hardly be said to have shown, between 1890 and 1917 at least, any development at all.

It must be admitted that, with all its shortcomings, the Congress, which has now for over fifty years continued to meet annually in some industrial centre, serves many useful purposes. It is, to begin with, an outward and visible sign of that persistent sentiment of solidarity which has throughout the whole of the past century distinguished the working class. Composed of delegates from all the great national and county Unions and an increasing number of local societies, and largely attended by the salaried officials, the Congress, unlike the Trades Councils, is really representative (except for the absence of most of the political side of its organisation) of all the elements of the Trade Union world. Hence its discussions reveal, both to the Trade Union Civil Service and to party politicians, the movement of opinion among all sections of Trade Unionists, and, through them, of the great body of the wage-earners. Moreover, the week’s meeting gives a unique opportunity for friendly intercourse between the representatives of the different trades, and thus leads frequently to joint action or wider federations. Nevertheless the Congress remains, as we have described it in its early years, rather a parade of the Trade Union forces than a genuine Parliament of Labour. [641]

All the incidental circumstances tend to accentuate the parade features of Congress at the expense of its legislative capacity. The Mayor and Corporation of the city in which it is held are frequently permitted to give a public welcome to the delegates, and to hold a sumptuous reception in their honour. The Strangers’ Gallery is full of interested observers, Distinguished foreigners, representatives of Government departments, “fraternal delegates” from America and the Continent, and from the Co-operative Union and the National Union of Teachers, inquisitive politicians, and popularity-hunting ministers sit through every day’s proceedings. The press-table is crowded with reporters from all the principal newspapers of the kingdom, whilst the local organs vie with each other in bringing out special editions containing verbatim reports of each day’s discussions. But what more than anything else makes the Congress a holiday demonstration instead of a responsible deliberative assembly is its total lack of legislative power. The delegates are well aware that Congress resolutions on “subjects” have no binding effect on their constituents, and therefore do not take the trouble to put them in practicable form, or even to make them consistent one with another. From the outset the proceedings are unbusiness-like. Much of the first day is consumed in pure routine and a lengthy inaugural address from the President, who has been since 1900 always the Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee of the preceding year. The rest of the agenda consists of resolutions sent in by the various Unions and brought higgledy-piggledy before the Congress in an order determined by the chances of the ballot. These resolutions are subjected to no selection or revision beyond an attempt by subcommittees to merge in one the several proposals on each subject. The delegates have at their disposal about twenty-five hours to discuss every imaginable subject, ranging from the nationalisation of the means of production down to the prohibition of one carter driving two vehicles at a time. To enable even a minority of those present to speak for or against the proposals, each speaker is limited to five, or perhaps to three minutes, a rule which is more or less rigidly enforced. But, in spite of this vigorous application of the closure, the President is seldom able to get the business through, and has frequently as much as he can do to maintain order. The Standing Orders Committee is entirely taken up with its mechanical business, and is not authorised, any more than is the Parliamentary Committee itself, to formulate a programme for the consideration of the delegates. Nor does the Congress receive much guidance from experienced officials of the old-established Unions. Whether from a good-natured desire to let the private members have their turn at figuring in the newspapers, or from a somewhat cynical appreciation of the fruitlessness of Congress discussions, many of them habitually lie low, and seldom speak except to defend themselves against attacks. Moreover, they are busily engaged, both in and out of Congress hours, in arranging for the election of themselves or their friends on the Parliamentary Committee, which has hitherto always been governed by mutual “bargaining” for votes.[642] When the four days’ talk draws near to an end, many of the resolutions on the agenda are still undisposed of. On the Saturday morning, when most of the delegates have started for home, a thin meeting hurries rapidly through the remainder of the proposals, speeches are reduced to sixty seconds each, and the Congress adopts a score of important resolutions in a couple of hours. From first to last there is no sign of a “Front Bench” of responsible leaders. As a business meeting the whole function of the Congress is discharged in the election of the Parliamentary Committee, to which the representation of the Trade Union world for the ensuing year is entrusted.

In the first edition of this book, in 1894, we gave a description of the work of the Parliamentary Committee which it is interesting to recall:

The duties of the Parliamentary Committee have never been expressly defined by Congress, and it will easily be understood that resolutions of the kind we have described afford but little guidance for practical work. But there is a general understanding that the Committee is to watch over the political interests of its constituents, in much the same way as the Parliamentary Committee of a town council or a railway company. It is obvious that, in the case of the Trade Union world, such a mandate covers a wide field. The right of Free Association, won by Allan, Applegarth, Odger, and their allies, is now a past issue, but the Trade Union interest in legislation has, with the advance of Democracy, extended to larger and more complicated problems. The complete democratisation of the political machinery, the duty of the Government to be a model employer, the further regulation of private enterprise through perfected factory legislation, the public administration of monopolies, are all questions in which the Trade Union world of to-day considers itself keenly interested. To these distinctly labour issues must be added such interests of the non-propertied class as the incidence of taxation, the public provision for education and recreation, and the maintenance of the sick and the aged. We have here an amount of Parliamentary business far in excess of that falling upon the Parliamentary Committee of any ordinary town council or railway company. To examine all bills, public or private, introduced into Parliament that may possibly affect any of the foregoing Trade Union interests; to keep a constant watch on the administration of the public departments; to scrutinise the Budget, the Education Code, and the Orders of the Local Government Board; to bring pressure to bear on the Ministry of the day, so as to mould the Queen’s Speech into a Labour Programme; to promote independent Bills on all the subjects upon which the Government refuses to legislate; and, lastly, to organise that persistent “lobbying” of Ministers and private members which finally clinches a popular demand—all this constitutes a task which would tax the energies of half a dozen highly trained Parliamentary agents devoting their whole time to their clients. This is the work which the Trade Union Congress delegates to a committee of busy officials, all absorbed in the multifarious details of their own societies, and served only by a Secretary who is paid for a small part of his time, and who accordingly combines the office with other duties. [643]

The whole organisation is so absurdly inadequate to the task, that the Committee can hardly be blamed for giving up any attempt to keep pace with the work. The members leave their provincial headquarters fifteen or twenty times a year to spend a few hours in the little offices at 19 Buckingham Street, Strand, in deliberating upon such business as their Secretary brings before them. Preoccupied with the affairs of their societies, and unversed in general politics, they either confine their attention to the interests of their own trades, or look upon the fortnightly trip to London as a pleasant recreation from hard official duties. In the intervals between the meetings the Secretary struggles with the business as best he can, with such clerical help as he can afford to pay for out of his meagre allowance. Absorbed in his own Parliamentary duties, for the performance of which his constituents pay him a salary, he can devote to the general interests of the Trade Union world only the leavings of his time and attention. It is therefore not surprising to learn that the agenda laid before the Parliamentary Committee, instead of covering the extensive field indicated by the resolutions of the Congress, is habitually reduced to the barest minimum. The work annually accomplished by the Committee during the last few years has, in fact, been limited to a few deputations to the Government, two or three circulars to the Unions, a little consultation with friendly politicians, and the drafting of an elaborate report to Congress, describing, not their doings, but the legislation and other Parliamentary proceedings of the session. The result is that the executive committee of the United Textile Factory Workers’ Association and the Miners’ Federation exercised a far more potent influence in the lobby than the Committee representing the whole Trade Union world; whilst such expert manipulators as Mr. John Burns, Mr. Havelock Wilson, or Mr. George Howell, can point to more reforms effected in a single session than the Parliamentary Committee has lately accomplished during a whole Parliament.

It is therefore not surprising that there exists in the Trade Union world a growing feeling of irritation against the Parliamentary Committee. In each successive Congress the Committee, instead of taking the lead, finds itself placed on its defence. But it is obvious that Congress itself is to blame. The members of the Committee, including the Secretary, are men of quite as sterling character and capacity as a board of railway directors or a committee of town councillors. But whereas a railway company or a town council places at the disposal of its Parliamentary Committee the whole energies of a specially trained town clerk or solicitor, and allows him, moreover, to call to his aid as many expert advisers as he thinks fit, the Trades Union Congress expects the Parliamentary affairs of a million and a half members to be transacted by a staff inferior to that of a third-rate Trade Union. At one period, it is true, the leaders of the Trade Union world as a whole successfully conducted a long and arduous Parliamentary campaign. We have described in a previous chapter the momentous legislative revolution in the status of Trade Unionism which was effected between 1867 and 1875. But the Conference of Amalgamated Trades, and its successors the Parliamentary Committee, had in these years at their command the freely given services of such a galaxy of legal and Parliamentary talent as Mr. Frederic Harrison, Professor E. S. Beesly, Mr. Henry Crompton, Mr. Thomas (now Judge) Hughes, Messrs. Godfrey and Vernon Lushington, and Mr. (now Justice) R. S. Wright. The objection felt by the present generation of Trade Unionists to be beholden to middle-class friends is not without a certain validity. But if the Trade Union Congress wants its Parliamentary business done it must, at any rate, provide such a salary as will secure the full services of the ablest man in the movement, equip his office with an adequate number of clerks, and authorise the Parliamentary Committee to retain such expert professional assistance as may from time to time be required.

Such was the position as we saw it in 1894. The Trades Union Congress did not in any important respect improve its organisation, nor equip its Parliamentary Committee with any adequate staff. Its failure to cope with the Parliamentary business in which the Trade Union world was interested became more and more manifest; and the discontent was increased by the disinclination felt by many of the leading members of the Committee for the larger aspirations and more independent attitude in politics that marked the active spirits of the rank and file of Trade Union membership. All this co-operated to produce the vote of the 1899 Congress in favour of some definite step to increase the number of Labour Members in the House of Commons, out of which sprang the independent organisation subsequently known as the Labour Party, which we shall describe in Chapter XI. But although the Trades Union Congress thus created, at the very end of the nineteenth century, a separate political organisation for the Trade Union world, into which the steadily increasing political activity of the Trade Unions has since flowed, the Congress and its Parliamentary Committee made no change in their own work. There has accordingly continued to be the same stream, year after year, of miscellaneous resolutions before Congress, 99 per cent of them dealing with political issues, involving either legislation or a change of Government policy, resolutions which have continued to be presented and discussed without any regard to their place in any consistent programme for the Trade Union world as a whole. The Parliamentary Committee has continued to regard itself almost entirely as a Parliamentary Committee, just as if the Trade Unions had not united in a distinct political organisation and had not created their own Parliamentary Labour Party. The futile annual deputations to Ministers have continued to present to them the crude resolutions of the Trades Union Congress, without regard to the contemporary situation in the House of Commons, or the action taken by the Parliamentary Labour Party, and without taking into account in what relation they stand to the political programme of the Trade Union world as formulated, year by year, in the Conferences of the Labour Party. Meanwhile the essentially industrial work of the national organisation of Trade Unions has continued to be neglected. Both the Trades Union Congress and the Parliamentary Committee have shown the greatest disinclination to tackle such essentially Trade Union problems as those presented by the existence in the same trade of competing Trade Unions;[644] by the formation of separate Unions on overlapping and mutually inconsistent bases; by the growing rivalry between the warring conceptions of organisation by craft and organisation by industry; by the increasing failure of the membership of each branch to correspond with the staffs of the separate gigantic establishments characteristic of the present day; by the “rank and file movement,” demanding a greater direct control of workshop conditions than can easily be made compatible with the centralisation of policy in the national executives; by the development of the “Shop Stewards’” organisation; by the spread in different industries of systems of “payment by results,” unsafeguarded by the necessary adaptations of the Standard Rate and Collective Bargaining; by the tendency of the employers to make deductions from the Standard Rate when it suits them to take on individuals or new classes of workers whom they declare to be inferior, whether women or boys, old men or partially incapacitated workers of any sort; and by the introduction of “Scientific Management.” [645]

During the whole of this century, in fact, the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, and the Congress itself, have failed to grapple with the work that calls out to be done by some national organisation of the Trade Union world. After allowing to be created, on the one hand, the General Federation of Trade Unions, abandoning to it the whole function of insurance, together with the representation of British Trade Unionism in the International Federation of Trade Unions, and, on the other, the Labour Party, with its inevitable absorption of the political activity of the Trade Union world, the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress has failed to recognise, and to concentrate upon, the sphere that it had left to itself, namely, to become the national organ for the improvement and development of British Trade Unionism in its industrial aspect. Whilst the Trades Union Congress has continued anxiously and nervously to abstain from any attempt to demarcate the spheres of rival Unions or to improve their mutual relations, action which would have brought the Parliamentary Committee dangerously into conflict with one or other of its constituents, and has confined its attention as much as ever to the statutory and governmental reforms which its various sections desired, it has been progressively overshadowed, on the political side, by the rise of the Labour Party, to be described in a subsequent chapter.

Towards the end of 1919 the discontent of the Trade Union world with the position and attitude of the Parliamentary Committee came to a head. The sudden railway strike, described in this chapter, revealed the lack of any organ of co-ordination in industrial movements which inevitably affected the whole Trade Union Movement. The Parliamentary Committee itself laid before a special Trades Union Congress in December 1919 a report declaring that “the need has long been recognised for the development of more adequate machinery for the co-ordination of Labour activities, both for the movement as a whole, and especially for its industrial side. Again and again the lack of co-ordination has resulted, not only in the overlapping of administrative work, but also in unnecessary internal and other disputes, involving vast financial and moral damage to the whole Labour Movement. To do away with some of this overlapping and to provide means of co-ordinating the work of certain sections was the object with which the Triple Industrial Alliance was founded by the Miners, Railwaymen, and Transport Workers, and the same object is behind the numerous steps towards closer unity which have been taken in various industries and groups. The Negotiating Committee, hastily improvised to deal with the situation created by the railway strike this autumn, was generally felt to have fulfilled, however imperfectly, a vital need of Labour; but it is clear that it ought not to have been necessary to create a new and temporary body to do this work; the necessary machinery should have been already in existence in the form of a really effective central co-ordinating body for the movement as a whole.

“It appears to us that the body which is required should and must be developed out of the existing organisation of the Trades Union Congress and out of its closer co-operation with other sections of the working-class movement. At present, the Standing Orders do not permit the Parliamentary Committee to undertake the work which is required. Indeed, its functions, as they are now defined, are in great measure a survival from a previous period, when the chief duties of the Congress were political, and there existed no separate political organisation to express the policy and objects of Labour. We accordingly suggest that the whole functions and organisation of the Parliamentary Committee demand revision, with a view to developing out of it a real co-ordinating body for the industrial side of the whole Trade Union Movement. It is also necessary to take into account the relation of the reorganised Central Industrial Committee to the other sections of the movement, and especially to the Labour Party and to the Co-operative Movement.

“If a better central organisation could be developed both on the industrial side and by the closer joint working with the other wings of the working-class movement, a vast development of the very necessary work of publicity, information, and research would at once become possible. The research, publicity, and legal departments now working for the movement require co-ordination and extension equally with its industrial and political organisation. The research, publicity, and legal work now done by the Trades Union Congress, the Labour Party, and the Labour Research Department must be co-ordinated and greatly enlarged in close connection with the development of the executive machinery of the movement.”

The proposal did not secure the approval of the Miners’ Federation, but the special Congress, by a very large majority, passed the following resolution:

“That in view of the imperative need and demand for a central co-ordinating body representative of the whole Trade Union Movement and capable of efficiently dealing with industrial questions of national importance, the Parliamentary Committee be instructed to revise the Standing Orders of Congress in such manner as is necessary to secure the following changes in the functions and duties of the Executive body elected by Congress:

“(1) To substitute for the Parliamentary Committee a Trades Union Congress General Council, to be elected annually by Congress.

“(2) To prepare a scheme determining the composition and methods of election of the General Council.

“(3) To make arrangements for the development of administrative departments in the offices of the General Council, in the direction of securing the necessary officials, staff, and equipment to secure an efficient Trade Union centre.

“Further, in order to avoid overlapping in the activity of working-class organisations, the Parliamentary Committee be instructed to consult with the Labour Party and the Co-operative Movement, with a view to devising a scheme for the setting up of departments under joint control, responsible for effective national and international service in the following and any other necessary directions:

“(a) Research: To secure general and statistical information on all questions affecting the worker as producer and consumer by the co-ordination and development of existing agencies.

“(b) Legal advice on all questions affecting the collective welfare of the members of working-class organisations.

“(c) Publicity, including preparation of suitable literature dealing with questions affecting the economic, social, and political welfare of the people; with machinery for inaugurating special publicity campaigns to meet emergencies of an industrial or political character.”

The Officers of the Trade Union Movement

If we survey the growth of the British Trade Union Movement during the past thirty years, what is conspicuous is that, whilst the Movement has marvellously increased in mass and momentum, it has been marked on the whole by inadequacy of leadership alike within each Union and in the Movement itself, and by a lack of that unity and persistency of purpose which wise leadership alone can give. Hence, in our opinion, the organised workers, whilst steadily advancing, have not secured anything like the results, either in the industrial or in the political field, that the individual sacrifices and efforts in their cause might have brought about. This deficiency in the brain-work of successful organisation is very marked in the various sections of the building trades, with their chaos of separate societies, and in the engineering industry, with its persistence of competing Unions formed on inconsistent bases, its lack of uniformity in Standard Rates, and its failure to devise any plan of safeguarding Collective Bargaining in the various systems of “Payment by Results.” But it has been equally apparent in the incapacity of the Trade Union Movement as a whole to establish any central authority to prevent overlapping organisations and demarcation disputes, and to co-ordinate the efforts of the various sections of workers towards a higher standard of life and greater control over the conditions of their working lives. The British workmen, it must be said, have not become aware of the absolute need for what we may call Labour Statesmanship. They have not yet learnt how, either in their separate Trade Unions or in the Labour Movement as a whole, to attract and train, to select and retain in office, to accord freedom of initiative to and yet to control, a sufficient staff of qualified officials capable not merely of individual leadership, but also of well devised “team play” in the long-drawn-out struggle of the wage-earning class for its “place in the sun.” To this constant falling short of the reasonably expected achievements is, we think, due the perpetual see-saw in Trade Union policy: the Trade Unionists of one decade relying principally on political action, to the neglect of the industrial weapon, whilst those of a succeeding decade, temporarily disillusioned with political action, rush wildly into strikes and neglect the ballot-box. This change of feeling is due each time to the failure of the results to come up to expectation. We shall understand some of the reasons for this shortcoming if we examine how the Trade Union Movement is, in fact, officered.

The affairs, industrial and political, of the six million Trade Unionists, enrolled in possibly as many as fifty thousand local branches or lodges (including a thousand independent small local societies), are administered by perhaps 100,000 annually elected branch officials and shop stewards. These may be regarded as the non-commissioned officers of the Movement; and it is fundamentally on their sobriety and personal integrity, combined with an intimate knowledge of their several crafts and a steadiness of judgement, that the successful conduct of the branch business depends. They continue to work at their trades, and receive only a few pounds a year for all their onerous and sometimes dangerous work. It is these non-commissioned officers of the Trade Union army who keep the Trade Union organisation alive. But they have neither the training, nor the leisure, nor even the opportunity, so long as they remain non-commissioned officers, working at their trades, to formulate a detailed policy, or to supply the day-by-day executive leadership to the particular Trade Union, or to the Trade Union Movement. For the work of translating into action, industrial or political, the desires or convictions of the whole body of the members, the Trade Union world necessarily depends, in the main, on its salaried officers, who devote the whole of their time to the service of the Movement, in one or other capacity. Such a whole-time salaried staff was slow to be formed. In 1850 it did not exist at all. It probably did not in 1860 number as many as a hundred throughout the whole kingdom. In 1892, in the first edition of this book, we put it approximately at 600. In 1920, with a fourfold growth in membership, and (under the National Insurance Act) a vast increase in the office and financial business of the Trade Unions, we estimate the total number of the salaried officers of all the Trade Unions and their federations (not including mere shorthand typists and office-boys) at three or four thousand, of whom perhaps one-tenth, in or out of Parliament, are engaged exclusively on election and other political work. But even on the industrial side, Trade Union officials differ considerably in the work they have to do, and the differences in function result in marked varieties of type.

We have first the salaried officials of the skilled trades. They are broadly distinguished from the officers of the Labourers’ Unions by the fact that they are invariably men who have worked at the crafts they represent, and who have usually served their society as branch secretaries. We may distinguish among them two leading types, the Administrator of Friendly Benefits, and the Trade Official.

To the type of Administrator of Friendly Benefits, the school of William Allan, belong most of the General and Assistant Secretaries at the head offices of the great Trade Friendly Societies organisations in which the mass of routine, financial, and other office business has become so great that only the ablest men succeed in rising above it. Owing to the continued increase in membership of the principal Unions, to their tendency to amalgamate into larger and larger aggregations, to the constant extension of friendly benefits, and since 1911 to the enormous addition to the work made by the National Insurance Act, the administrative staffs of the Unions have had to be doubled and quadrupled. But the Trade Union official of this type, however great may be his nominal position, has, during the past thirty years, come to exercise less and less influence on the Trade Union world. Rigidly confined to his office, he becomes in most cases a painstaking clerk, and rises at the best to the level of the shrewd manager of an insurance company. He passes his life in investigating the claims of his members to the various benefits, and in upholding, at all hazard of unpopularity, a sound financial system of adequate contributions and moderate benefits. Questions of trade policy interest him principally so far as they tend to swell or diminish the number of his members in receipt of “Out of Work Pay.” He is therefore apt to be more intent on getting unemployed members off the books than on raising the Standard Rate of wages or decreasing the length of the Normal Day. For the same reason he proves a tenacious champion of his members’ rights in all quarrels about overlap and demarcation of work; and it may happen that he finds himself more often engaged in disputes with rival Unions than with employers. He represents the most conservative element in Trade Union life. On all occasions he sits tight, and votes solid for what he conceives to be the official or moderate party.

More influential in Trade Union politics is the salaried officer of the other type. The Trade Official, as we have called him, is largely the result of the prevalence, in certain industries, of a complicated system of “Payment by Results.” We have already described how the cotton lists on the one hand and the checkweigher clause on the other called into existence a specially trained class, which has since been augmented by the adoption of piecework lists in boot and shoemaking and other industries. The officers of this type are professionals in the art of Collective Bargaining. They spend their lives in intricate calculations on technical details, and in conducting delicate negotiations with the employers or their professional agents. It matters little whether they are the general secretaries of essentially trade societies, such as the federal Unions of Cotton-spinners and Cotton-weavers, or the exclusively trade delegates of societies with friendly benefits, such as the Steel-smelters, the Boilermakers, and the Boot and Shoe Operatives. In either case their attention is almost entirely devoted to the earnings of their members. Alert and open-minded, they are keen observers of market prices, employers’ profits, the course of international trade, and everything which may affect the gross product of their industry. They are more acutely conscious of incompetency, whether in employer or employed, than they can always express. Supporters of improved processes, new machinery, and “speeding up,” they would rather see an antiquated mill closed or an incompetent member discharged than reduce the Standard Rate. Nor do they confine themselves exclusively to the money wages of their clients. Among them are to be found the best advocates of legislative regulation of the conditions of employment, and whilst they have during the present century fallen somewhat into the background when wider political issues have come to the fore, the elaboration of the Labour Code during the past fifty years has been due, in the main, to their detailed knowledge and untiring pertinacity.

The Trade Official, however, has the defects of his qualities. The energetic workman, who at about thirty years of age leaves the factory, the forge, or the mine, to spend his days pitting his brains against those of shrewd employers and sharp-witted solicitors, has necessarily to concentrate all his energies upon the limited range of his new work. As a Branch Secretary, he may have taken a keen interest in the grievances and demands of other trades besides his own. Soon he finds his duties incompatible with any such wide outlook. The feeling of class solidarity, so vivid in the manual working wage-earner, tends gradually to be replaced by a narrow trade interest. The District Delegate of the Boilermakers finds it as much as he can do to master the innumerable and constantly changing details of every variety of iron-ship, boiler, and bridge building in every port, and even at every yard. The Investigator of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives is often hard put to it to estimate accurately the labour in each of the thousand changing styles of boots, whilst at the same time keeping pace with ever-increasing complexity both of machinery and division of labour. The Cotton Official, with his bewildering lists, throws his whole mind into coping with the infinite variety of calculations involved in new patterns, increased speed, and every alteration of count and draw and warp and weft. The Miners’ Agents can seldom travel beyond the analogous problems of their own industry. Such a Trade Official, if he has any leisure and energy left at the end of his exhausting day’s work, broods over larger problems, still special to his own industry. The Secretary of a Cotton Union finds it necessary to puzzle his head over the employers’ contention that Bimetallism, or a new Indian Factory Act, deserves the operatives’ support; or to think out some way of defeating the evasions of the law against over-steaming or of the “particulars clause.” The whole staff of the Boilermakers will be absorbed in considering the effect of the different systems of apprenticeship in the shipyards, or the proper method of meeting the ruinously violent fluctuations in shipbuilding. The Miners will be thinking only of the technical improvement of the conditions of safety of the mine, or of the way to protect the interests of the hewer in an “abnormal place.” And the modern Knight of St. Crispin racks his brains about none of these things, but is wholly concerned with the evil of home work, and whether the inspection of small workshops would be more rigidly carried out under the Home Office or under the Town Council. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Trade Officials are characterised by an intense and somewhat narrow sectionalism. The very knowledge of, and absorption in, the technical details of one particular trade, which makes them such expert specialists, prevents them developing the higher qualities necessary for the political leadership of the Trade Union world.

In another class stand the organisers and secretaries of what used to be called the Labourers’ Unions, and are now styled Unions of General Workers—a less stable class, numbering in 1892 about two hundred, and in 1920 possibly ten times as many. In contrast with the practice of the old-established societies these officers have at no time been always selected from the ranks of the workers whose affairs they administer.[646] In “revivalist” times the cause of the unskilled workers attracts, from the ranks of the non-commissioned officers of other industries, men of striking capacity and missionary fervour, such as John Burns and Tom Mann, who organised and led the dock labourers to victory in 1889. But these men regarded themselves and were regarded more as apostles to the unconverted than as salaried officers, and they ceded their posts as soon as competent successors among their constituents could be found. In the main the unskilled workmen have had to rely for officers on men drawn from their own ranks. In not a few cases a sturdy general labourer has proved himself a first-rate administrator of a great national Union. But it was a special drawback to these Unions in the early days of their development that the “failures,” who drift from other occupations into the ranks of general labour, frequently got elected, on account of their superior education, to posts in which personal self-control and persistent industry are all-important. Nor were the duties of an organiser of unskilled labourers in old days such as developed either regular habits or business capacity. The absence of any extensive system of friendly benefits reduced to a minimum the administrative functions and clerical labour of the head office. The members, for the most part engaged simply in general labour, and paid by the day or hour, had no occasion for elaborate piecework lists, even supposing that their Unions had won that full recognition by the employers which such arrangements imply. On the other hand, the branches of a Labourers’ Union in those days were, for one reason or another, always crumbling away; and the total membership was only maintained by perpetually breaking fresh ground. Hence the greater part of the organiser’s time was taken up in maintaining the enthusiasm of his members, and in sweeping in new converts. This involved constant travelling, and the whirl of excitement implied in an everlasting round of missions in non-Union districts. The typical organiser of a Labourers’ Union in 1889-94 approximated, therefore, more closely than any other figure in the Trade Union world, to the middle-class conception of a Trade Union official. He was, in fact, a professional agitator. He might be a saint or he might be an adventurer; but he was seldom a man of affairs. [647]