Chapter IX · (continued 3)
Reading edition
During the past quarter of a century these Unions of Labourers, which are now better styled Unions of General Workers, have changed in character, and are now often huge national organisations of financial stability, administered by men as competent as any in the Trade Union world. Their officers, who have greatly increased in number, have elaborated a technique of their own, combining an efficiency in recruiting with an effective representation of their members’ case in negotiations with the employers, and before arbitration tribunals, which, particularly in such influential bodies as the National Union of General Workers, the Dock, Wharf and Riverside Labourers’ Union, the Workers’ Union and the National Federation of Women Workers, brings them much nearer what we have described as the Trade Official than the typical labourers’ organiser of 1889. The exclusively women’s Unions, among which the National Federation of Women Workers is the only one of magnitude, have been exceptionally fortunate in attracting and retaining women of outstanding capacity—good organisers and skilled negotiators—who have not only obtained for their members a remarkable improvement in the conditions of employment, but have, by their statesmanship, won a position of outstanding influence in the Trade Union Movement. It is, indeed, important to note that the accomplished officials of the larger Unions of General Workers, and not those of women only, have become aware of a diversity of view between the skilled craftsman with a “vested interest” in his trade, and the unskilled or, as they prefer to call them, the semi-skilled or general workers, bent on being considered qualified for any work which the employer has to give. Hence these officials sometimes take a larger view of Labour questions than the trade officials of the skilled crafts. They tend to be in favour of the amalgamation of separate societies into “One Big Union”; of much more equality of remuneration among all manual workers; of the “open door” to capacity; of equal rates for men and women on the same job; and of a levelling up of the Standard of Life of the lowest section of the workers. This leads them instinctively to a co-ordinated use of the industrial and the political weapons.
Some of these officials, however, are paid in a manner which may exercise an adverse influence on their activity. A new method of remuneration of the officers of a Trade Union has been devised. In one case the very able General Secretary of a Union of skilled craftsmen, whose services have been in the past most valuable to the trade, is reputed to be paid so much per member per annum, and with the great increase in membership to be making an income four times as large as the salaries of the General Secretaries of great Trade Unions. In another very extensive Union of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, practically the whole staff is paid “by results,” the Branch Secretaries, for instance, by rule retaining for themselves “six per cent on the contributions, levies and fines received from the members of the Branch on behalf of, and remitted to, the Chief Office”; and being paid also “a procuration fee of 1s.” for “introducing new members” into the Approved Society; and for the extra work involved in disputes, a further “6d. when under 25 members are affected, and 1s. for the first 25 or over; 2s. for the first 50; 6d. per 50 or part thereof afterwards.” This method of remunerating Trade Union officials—analogous to that successfully employed by the Industrial Insurance Companies for their agents—has certain attractions. A fairly adequate remuneration for the position and work can thus be allotted to the officer, without its amount being specifically voted by the members or appearing in the accounts in such a way as to offend the rank and file by a contrast between their weekly wage for manual labour and the Standard Rate of what is essentially a different occupation. It is, however, rightly regarded as a pernicious system. The practice of “paying by results” is alleged to lead sometimes to reckless recruiting, to “in and out” Trade Unionism, and even to wholesale poaching among the membership of other Unions; and it produces in the Trade Union world a type of “business man” more concerned for numbers than for raising the Standard of Life of the members he has enrolled, or for co-operation with other Trade Unions for their common ends.
Quite another type, of more recent introduction, is the Political Officer of the Trade Union world. He may be merely the Registration Officer or Election Agent serving the local Labour Party and the Labour Candidate in a particular constituency; he may be simply a Labour M.P.; he may be the secretary or staff officer of a great Trade Union or powerful federation, or, indeed, of the Labour Party itself, devoting himself to political functions; he may combine with one or other of these posts, or some other Trade Union office, that of a Member of Parliament; but he is distinguished from the typical General Secretary, Trade Official or Labour Organiser—from one or other of which he has usually developed—by his absorption in the political work of the Movement, either inside the House of Commons or outside it, within one constituency or in a wider field. He may not always hold a political office. A marked feature of the past decade has been the frequency and the amount of the calls upon the time of the Trade Union leaders who are not in Parliament, for public service in which their own Unions have no special concern. The Trade Union official has to serve on innumerable public bodies, nearly always without pay of any kind, from local Pension or Food or Profiteering Act Committees, or the magisterial bench, up to National Arbitration Tribunals, official Committees of Enquiry or Royal Commissions. Such a man is perpetually devoting hours every day to the consideration and discussion, and sometimes to the joint decision, of issues of public character, in which it is his special function to represent, not the opinions and interests of the particular Trade Unionists by whom he is paid, but the opinions and interests of the whole wage-earning class. All this important work, a twentieth century addition to the functions of the Trade Union staff, and not alone the increasing calls of Parliament, is tending more and more to the development of what we have called the Political Officer of the movement.
These three or four thousand salaried officials of the Trade Union world, whatever their several types, and whatever the duties to which they are assigned, are, with insignificant exceptions, all selected in one way, namely by popular election by the whole body of members, either of their respective Unions, or of particular districts of those Unions. They are, in the skilled trades, required to be members of the Union making the appointment; and in order to gain the suffrages of their fellow-members they must necessarily have made themselves known to them in some way. They are, accordingly, selected almost invariably from among what we have described as the non-commissioned officers of the Movement, those who are serving or who have served as Branch Secretaries, or other local officers. They have thus all essentially the same training—a training which has no more reference to the work of an administrator of Friendly Benefits than to that of a Political Officer. What happens is that the popular workman is, by the votes of his fellow-workers, taken suddenly from the bench, the forge or the mine, at any age from 30 to 50, with no larger experience than that of a Branch Official, and put to do the highly specialised work of one or other of the types that we have described.[648] It is a further difficulty that such training and experience that an individual Trade Unionist may have had, and such capacity as he may have shown, whilst they may secure his election to a salaried office, or his promotion from one such office to another, will be held to have no bearing on the question of which office he will be chosen to fill. The popular Branch Secretary, who has led a successful strike, may be elected as General Secretary in a head office where his work will be mainly that of the manager of an insurance company. The successful Trade Official, expert at negotiating complicated changes in piecework lists, may find himself elected as the Union’s candidate for Parliament; and will, in due course, be sent to the House of Commons to deal on behalf of the whole wage-earning class, with political issues to which he has never given so much as a thought. The Trade Union secretary, whose daily work has trained him to the meticulous supervision of the friendly benefits, may find himself perpetually called away from his office to represent the interests of Labour as a member of Royal Commissions and Committees of Enquiry on every imaginable subject.
With such imperfect methods of selection for office, and with so complete a lack of systematic training for their onerous and important functions, it is, we think, a matter for surprise that Trade Union officials should have won a well-deserved reputation for knowledge and skill in negotiations with employers. But their haphazard selection and inadequate training are not the only difficulties that they have to overcome. Trade Union officials are nearly always overworked and expected to become specialist experts in half-a-dozen techniques; they are exposed to harassing and demoralising conditions of life, and they are habitually underpaid. The conditions of employment and the terms of service which the Trade Unions, out of ignorance, impose on those who serve them, far from being conducive to efficient administration and wise leadership, are often disgracefully poor. In November 1919 the National Union of Railwaymen set a notable example in raising the salaries of their two principal officers to £1000 a year each. But this is wholly exceptional. Even now, after the great rise in the cost of living, the salary of the staff officer of an important and wealthy Trade Union rarely exceeds £400 or £500 a year, without any provision for any other retiring allowance than the Union’s own Superannuation Benefit of ten or twelve shillings per week, if such a benefit exists at all. The average member forgets that what he has to compare the Secretary’s salary with is not the weekly wage of the manual working members of the Union, but—on the very doctrine of the Standard Rate in which they all believe—the remuneration given by “good employers” for the kind of work that the Secretary has to perform. When we remember that the modern Trade Union official has to be constantly travelling and consorting with employers and officials of much higher standards of expenditure than his own, and when we realise the magnitude and financial importance of the work that he performs, the smallness of the salary and the lack of courtesy and amenity accorded to the office is almost ludicrous. The result is that the able and ambitious young workman in a skilled trade is not much tempted by the career, even if he regards it as one of Trade Union leadership, unless he is (as so many are) an altruistic enthusiast; or unless his ambitions are ultimately political in character. The able young workman will both rise more rapidly and enjoy a pleasanter life by eschewing any ostensible service of his fellow-workmen, and taking advantage of the eagerness of intelligent employers to discover competent foremen and managers, nowadays not altogether uninfluenced by the sub-conscious desire to divert from Trade Unionism to Capitalism the most active-minded of the proletariat. Nor does the danger to the Trade Union world end with the refusal of some of its ablest young members to become Trade Union officials. The inferiority of position, alike in salary, in dignity and in amenity, to which a Trade Union condemns its officers, compared with that enjoyed by men of corresponding ability and function in other spheres, puts a perpetual strain on the loyalty of Trade Union officials. They are constantly being tempted away from the service of their fellows by offers of appointments in the business world, or by Employers’ Associations, or in Government Departments. And there are other evils of underpayment. A Trade Union official whose income is insufficient for his daily needs is tempted to make unduly liberal charges for his travelling expenses, and may well find it more remunerative to be perpetually multiplying deputations and committee meetings away from home than to be attending to his duties at the office. He may be driven to duplicate functions and posts in order to make a living wage. The darkest side of such a picture, the temptation to accept from employers or from the Government those hidden bribes that are decorously veiled as allowances for expenses or temporary salaries for special posts, is happily one which Trade Union loyalty and a sturdy sense of working-class honour have hitherto made it seldom necessary to explore. But such things have not been unknown; and their underlying cause—the unwise and mean underpayment of Trade Union officials—deserves the attention of the Trade Union world.
We have so far considered the officials of the Trade Union world merely as individual administrators. This, indeed, is almost the only way in which their work is regarded by their members. It is remarkable how slow the Trade Union world is to recognise the importance, to administrative or political efficiency, of the constitution of a hierarchy, a group or a team. Where a great society has a salaried staff of half-a-dozen to a score of officials—under such designations as General Secretary, Assistant Secretaries, President, Members of Executive Council or District Delegates, Organisers or Investigators—it is almost invariable to find them all separately elected by the whole body of members, or what is even more destructive of unity, by different district memberships. We only know of one example in the Trade Union world—that of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation—in which the responsible Executive Committee itself appoints the official staff upon which the performance of the work depends. All the salaried officers of a Trade Union, whatever their designations or functions, can usually claim to have the same, and therefore equal authority, namely, their direct election by the members. This results in the lack of any organic relation not only between the Executive Committee and the District Officers who ought to be its local agents, but even between the Executive Committee and the General Secretary and Assistant Secretaries. The Executive Committee can shunt to purely routine work a General Secretary whom it dislikes, and an unfriendly General Secretary can practically destroy the authority of the Executive Committee. In some cases the work of the office is in practice divided up amongst all the salaried staff, Executive Councillors, General Secretary, and Assistant Secretaries indiscriminately, each man doing his own job in the way he thinks best, and any consultation or corporate decision being reduced to a minimum. There is, in fact, no guarantee that there will be any unity of policy within an Executive Committee elected by a dozen different districts, or between an Executive Committee and its leading officials, who are elected at different times for different reasons. The members may choose a majority of reactionary Executive Councillors and simultaneously a revolutionary General Secretary. In nearly all Unions any suggestion as to the desirability of adopting the middle-class device of entrusting a responsible Executive Committee with the power of choosing its own officers has been resented as undemocratic.[649] In some Unions the indispensable amount of unity is secured, not without internal friction, by the presence of some dominant personality, who may be a secretary or president, or merely a member of the Executive Committee. The same drawback is seen in the constitutions of such wider federations as the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party. The result is that the Trade Union Movement has not yet evolved anything in the nature of Cabinet Government, based on unity of policy among the chief administrators, nor do we see any approach to the Party System, which in our national politics alone makes Cabinet Government possible. It looks as if any Democracy on a vocational basis must inevitably be dominated by a diversity of sectional interests which does not coincide with any cleavage in intellectual opinions. From the standpoint of corporate efficiency the drawback is that the sectional divergencies are always interfering with the formulation and unhesitating execution of decisions on wider issues, on which it would be advantageous for the Movement as a whole, in the interests of all, to have an effective general will, even if it be only that of a numerical majority.
Finally, it is a great drawback to the Trade Union world that it possesses no capital city and no central headquarters even in London. Its salaried officials, on whom it depends for leadership and policy, are scattered all over the country. The General Secretaries of the great Trade Friendly Societies and of the Unions of General Workers are dispersed between London, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Liverpool, and Leicester. The officials of the Cotton Operatives are quartered in a dozen Lancashire towns, and those of the Miners in every coalfield. The District Delegates of the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades and the organisers of the Dockers and the Seamen are stationed in all the principal ports. We have seen how little the Trades Union Congress, meeting once a year for less than a week, supplies any central organ of consultation or direction. The meeting in London, every few weeks, of the two or three dozen members of the Parliamentary Committee and the Executive Committee of the Labour Party is wholly inadequate for the constant consultation upon policy, the mutual communication of each other’s immediate projects, and the taking of decisions of common interest that the present stage of the Trade Union Movement requires. Probably no single thing would do so much to increase the efficiency of the Trade Union world as a whole as the provision of an adequate Central Institute and general office building in Westminster, at which could be concentrated all the meetings of national organisations, federations and committees; and which would make at any rate possible the constant personal communication of all the different headquarters. [650]