Note 645 — Chapter IX · (continued 2)

In view of the failure of the Trades Union Congress to equip its Parliamentary Committee with any staff that would enable it to deal with these problems, the Fabian Society started in 1912 the Fabian Research Department, to investigate and supply information upon these and other questions. This organisation has now become the Labour Research Department, an independent federal combination of Trade Unions, Co-operative and Socialist societies, and other Labour bodies (including the Labour Party, the English, Scottish, and Irish Trades Union Congresses, the Co-operative Union, the Daily Herald, most of the big Trade Unions, and some hundreds of Trade Councils, Local Labour Parties, etc.), with individual students and investigators. It has its offices at 34 Eccleston Square, London, S.W.1, next door to those of the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party; issues to its members a monthly bulletin of information, and has published many useful books, pamphlets, and monographs. It answers a stream of questions from Trade Unions all over the country on every conceivable point of theory or practice; it supplies particulars of rates of pay, hours of labour, and conditions of employment in other trades; and it is frequently employed in helping to prepare cases for submission to Joint Boards or Arbitration Tribunals. Its influential conduct of the “publicity” of the National Union of Railwaymen in the 1919 strike has already been described.