THIRTY YEARS’ GROWTH
[1890-1920]
In 1892, after more than two centuries of development, Trade Unionism
in the United Kingdom numbered, as we have seen, little more than
a million and a half of members, in a community approaching forty
millions; or about 4 per cent of the census population and including
possibly 20 per cent of the adult male manual-working wage-earners. At
the beginning of 1920, as we estimate, the number of Trade Unionists
is well over six millions, in a community that does not quite reach
forty-eight millions; being over 12 per cent of the census population
and including probably as many as 60 per cent[599] of all the adult
male manual-working wage-earners in the kingdom. With the exception of
slight pauses in 1893-95, 1902-4, and 1908-9, this remarkable growth in
aggregate membership has been continuous during the whole thirty years.
It is important to notice the continuous acceleration of this increase.
For a few years after the high tide of 1889-92 the aggregate membership
dropped slightly. When in 1897 it started to rise again it took a whole
decade to add half a million to the total of 1892-96. Three years more
brought a second half million: a total growth in the eighteen years
from 1892 to 1910 of about a million, or only about 66 per cent. It
then took only three or four years to add another million; whilst
during the last few years the increase has not fallen far short of half
a million a year, or of the order of 10 per cent per annum. Trade Union
membership has, in fact, doubled in the last eight years.[600]
No less significant is the fact that the increase has not been confined
to particular industries, particular localities, or a particular
sex, but has taken place, more or less, over the whole field. It is
common in varying degrees to the skilled, the semi-skilled, and the
unskilled workers. Even the women, still much less organised than the
men, have in 1920 five or six times as many Trade Unionists as they
had thirty years previously; and have trebled or quadrupled the then
proportion of Trade Union membership to the adult women manual-working
wage-earners. Financially, too, the Trade Unions have, on the whole,
greatly advanced; and their aggregate accumulated funds in 1920 (apart
from the assets of their Approved Society sections under the National
Insurance Act) exceed fifteen millions sterling; being about ten times
as much as in 1890, and constituting a “fighting fund” unimaginably
greater than ever entered the mind of Gast or Doherty, Martin Jude
or William Newton, or any other Trade Union leader of the preceding
century. It is the stages and incidents of this past thirty years’
growth that we have now to describe. We shall refer incidentally
to half-a-dozen of the more important strikes of the generation;
but nowadays it is not so much industrial disputes that constitute
landmarks of Trade Union history as the steps, often statutory or
political in character, by which the Movement advances in public
influence and in a recognised participation in the government of
industry. During the present century, at any rate, the action of Trade
Unionism on legislation, and of legislation on Trade Unionism, has been
incessant and reciprocal. The growing strength of the Movement has
been marked by a series of legislative changes which have ratified and
legalised the increasing influence of the wage-earners’ combinations
in the government both of industry and political relations. And every
one of these statutes--notably the Trade Disputes Act of 1906, the
Trade Boards Act of 1908, the Coal Mines Regulation (Eight Hours) Act
of 1908, the National Insurance Act of 1911, the Trade Union Act of
1913, the Corn Production Act of 1917, and the Trade Boards Extension
Act of 1918--have been marked by immediate extensions of Trade Union
membership and improvements in Trade Union organisation in the
industries concerned.
During the thirty years which have elapsed since 1890 the progress of
the Trade Union Movement, enormous as it has been, has been accompanied
by relatively little change in the internal structure of the several
Unions. What has occurred has been a marked change in the relative
position and influence of the different sections of the Trade Union
world, and even in its composition. Some sections have declined
relatively to others. Even more significant is the vastly greater
consolidation of the Trade Unionism of 1920 than that of 1890. Not only
have many more of the societies grown into organisations of numerical
and financial strength, but there has also been developed, especially
during recent years, an interesting network of federations among Unions
in the same industry, and often among cognate or associated industries,
some of which, undertaking negotiations on a national scale for a whole
industry, have become more influential and important than any but the
largest Unions.
THE COTTON OPERATIVES
The most notable of these changes is the decline in relative influence
of the cotton operatives. It is not that the Unions of Spinners,
Weavers and Card-room Operatives have decreased in membership or
in accumulated funds. On the contrary, they have in the aggregate
during the past thirty years more than doubled their membership;
and the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners, with
three-quarters of a million pounds belonging to its 25,000 members
(exclusive of 26,000 piecers), is, now as formerly, the wealthiest
Trade Union of any magnitude. Nor have these Unions in any sense lost
their hold on their own trade, at least in its central district of
Lancashire and Cheshire, though its outlying areas in Derbyshire,
Yorkshire, and Glasgow are still somewhat neglected. But the growth of
Trade Unionism in other industries has reduced the “Cotton Men” from
ten or twelve to four or five per cent of the Trades Union Congress;
and, owing partly to internal differences, their leading personalities
no longer dominate the counsels of the Movement. The excellent
organisation of the Cotton Trade Unions has been maintained; but it
has not been copied by other trades, and their internecine dissensions
have detracted from the influence of their various federations. There
has been, in fact, during the whole thirty years, only two or three
important incidents. A general strike of cotton-spinners took place in
1893, when all the mills were stopped for no less than twenty weeks.
The employers had demanded a reduction of 10 per cent, whilst the
Trade Union urged that the depression should be met by placing all the
mills on short time. This stoppage was at last brought to an end by
agreement between the employers and the Trade Union, arrived at without
external intervention in a fourteen hours continuous session, which
made the reduction in rates only 7d. in the £ (2.916 instead of 10
per cent), and included elaborate arrangements for future adjustment
of wages and other differences by mutual discussion without cessation
of work.[601] This “Brooklands Agreement,” which we described in our
_Industrial Democracy_, governed the spinning trade from 1893 to 1905,
but was in the latter year formally terminated by the Unions concerned,
on the ground that the machinery worked both slowly and in such a way
as to hamper the operatives in obtaining the advantage of good times.
Provisional arrangements were made, but these did not prevent a strike
of seven weeks in 1908, which ended in a compromise advantageous to the
operatives. Apart from minor and local disputes, frequently about bad
material or refusal to work with a non-Unionist, there was, however, no
forward movement, notably with regard to the hours of labour. In 1902
a slight amendment of the Factory Act was secured by agreement with
the employers, by which the factory week was reduced from 56½ to
55½ hours; and with this the trade remained contented. Right down
to 1919 there was no important trade movement, but in February of that
year all sections of the cotton operatives claimed their share in the
general reduction of hours that was proceeding; and, after prolonged
negotiations, 300,000 operatives struck in June. When it was seen that
the stoppage of the mills had become general, the employers gave way
and conceded a Forty-eight Hours week, which has not yet been embodied
in law, accompanied by a 30 per cent advance in piece rates so as to
involve no reduction of earnings.
The organisation of the cotton operatives, whilst remaining
essentially as described in our _Industrial Democracy_, has gone
on increasing in federal complexity. The various sections--notably
spinners with their attendant piecers; weavers, including winders,
and in some towns also warpers, beamers, and reelers; card, blowing
and ring-room operatives; warp-dressers and warpers; tape-sizers;
beamers, twisters and drawers; and overlookers--continue to be
organised in very autonomous local bodies, which are styled sometimes
societies or associations, and sometimes merely branches, and which
vary in number in the different sections from half-a-dozen to ten
times as many. But these are nearly all doubly united, first in a
federal body for the whole of each section (which may be styled an
amalgamation, a federation, an association, or a General Union of
the section), and also in a local “Cotton Trades Federation” or
“Textile Trades Federation,” which combines the local organisations
of the weavers and sometimes other sections in each of a couple of
dozen geographical districts in Lancashire and Cheshire. The weavers’
“amalgamation,” and other sections of the “manufacturing” trade, are
further united in the Northern Counties Amalgamated Association, with
175,000 members. Finally, all the federal organisations of the several
sections are brought together in the United Textile Factory Workers’
Association, which focuses the opinion of all the cotton operatives,
including the Amalgamated Association of Bleachers and Dyers, on those
fundamental issues on which they are conscious of a common and an equal
interest.[602]
The officials of the Cotton Trade Unions--herein differing from those
of the greatly developed General Union of Textile Workers, which has
organised the (principally women) woollen weavers--have remained
predominantly technicians, devoting themselves almost entirely to the
protection of their members’ trade interests, without taking much part
in the wider interests now largely influencing the Trade Union world,
and showing little sympathy either in larger federations or in the new
spirit. They have been slow to take an active part in the political
development of the Trade Union world, which has manifested itself, as
we shall describe in a subsequent chapter, in the organisation of the
Labour Party. This backwardness may be ascribed, in some degree, to the
political history of Lancashire, where an ancestral Conservatism still
lingers, and where it was possible, even in the twentieth century, for
so prominent a Trade Union official as the late James Mawdsley, the
able leader of the cotton-spinners, to stand for Parliament in 1906 as
a member of the Conservative Party. The influence of an exceptionally
large proportion of Roman Catholics among the cotton operatives must
also be noted. It is a unique feature of the technical officials of
the Cotton Unions that they have frequently been willing to serve
the industry as the paid officials of the Employers’ Associations
when they have been offered higher salaries. Their main duty, whether
acting for the employers or the workmen, is to secure uniformity in
the application of the Collective Agreements as between mill and mill;
and such a duty, it is argued, like that of the valuer or accountant,
is independent of personal opinion or bias, and can be rendered with
equal fidelity to either client. This was not at first resented by the
workmen, who even saw some advantage in the Employers’ Association
being served by officers thoroughly acquainted with the complicated
technicalities as the operatives saw them. There has, however, latterly
been a change of feeling; and though such transfers of services cannot
be prevented (the Employers’ Associations constantly finding the Trade
Union official the best man available), they are now resented.[603]
It is felt in some quarters that many of the “cotton men” have fallen
out of harmony with the newer currents of thought in the Trade Union
world. It is alleged that they accept too implicitly the employers’
assumptions, and do not sympathise with aspirations of more fundamental
change than a variation of wages or hours. But the influence of the
“cotton men” is, in the Trade Union world, still important for their
specific contribution, to Trade Union theory and practice, of equal
piecework rates for both sexes; of a rigid refusal to allow an employer
to make the inferiority either of any workers or of any machines that
he chooses to employ an excuse for deductions from the Standard Rate,
and of the utmost possible improvement of machinery so long as the
piecework rates are strictly controlled by Collective Bargaining and
firmly embodied in rigidly enforced lists--points on which many Trade
Unionists who would deem themselves “advanced” have not yet attained
the same level.[604]
THE BUILDING TRADES
The Building Trades have lost their relative position in the Trade
Union world to nearly as great an extent as the cotton operatives.
Thirty years ago their representatives stood for 10 per cent of the
Trades Union Congress, whereas to-day they probably do not represent 3
per cent of its membership. They have, for a whole generation, supplied
no influential leader. The only large society in this section, the
Amalgamated Society of Carpenters, Cabinetmakers, and Joiners (133,000
members), has more than doubled its membership since 1890, drawing
in various small societies of cabinetmakers, and carpenters, but not
yet the older General Union of Carpenters and Joiners, which counts
15,000 members; and so, too, has the small but solid United Operative
Plumbers’ Society, with 14,000 members--neither of them, however,
commanding the allegiance of anything like the whole of its craft. The
numerous small societies of painters have, for the most part, drawn
themselves together in the National Amalgamated Society of Operative
House and Ship Painters and Decorators (30,000 members); whilst the
National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association (12,500 members)
represents a union of many small societies. Altogether the Trade Unions
in the building trades, including all the little local societies, have
probably done no more than double their membership of 1892, and the
increase has been relatively least in the most skilled grades. This
is due, in part, to an actual decline in the trade, the total numbers
enumerated in the 1911 census being actually less than in that of 1901,
the fall being even greater down to 1919, when it was estimated that
only seven-twelfths as many men were at work at building as in 1901.
The story of the Building Trade Unions during the thirty years is
one of innumerable small sectional and local disputes with their
employers--taking the form, during 1913, of repeated sudden strikes in
the London area against non-Unionists, forced on by the “hot-heads”
and discountenanced by the Executive Committees, and leading, in 1914,
to a general lock-out by the London Master Builders’ Association. The
employers demanded that the Trade Unions should penalise members who
struck without authority, and that the Unions should put up a pecuniary
deposit which might be forfeited when a strike occurred in violation
of the Working Rules. They also insisted on each workman signing a
personal agreement to work quietly with non-Unionists, under penalty of
a fine of 20s. In the lock-out that ensued the whole building trade of
the Metropolis was stopped for over six months. Efforts at a settlement
in June were rejected on ballot of the operatives; and whilst signs
of weakening occurred among the operatives the National Federation of
Building Trade Employers had decided on a national lock-out throughout
the kingdom in order to secure the employers’ terms, when the outbreak
of war brought the struggle to an end, and work was resumed practically
on the old conditions.
During the war, when the bulk of the operatives were enrolled in the
army, and building was restricted to the most urgently needed works,
disputes remained in abeyance. At the beginning of 1918 a new start
was made in the organisation of the industry by the establishment
of a National Federation of Building Trade Operatives, itself a
development from a previous National Building Trades Council, in
which all the national Trade Unions, 13 in number, for the first
time joined together. Notwithstanding great differences in numerical
strength, the Unions agreed to constitute the Federation Executive of
two representatives from each national union. The Federation is formed
of local branches, each of which is composed of the branches in the
locality of the nationally affiliated Unions, governed by the aggregate
of the “Trades Management Committee” of such branches, acting under
the direction and control of the Federation Executive. A significant
new feature, recalling an expedient of the Trade Unionism of 1834,
is the establishment of “Composite Branches” of individual building
trades operatives in localities where no branch of the separate
national unions exists. What success may attend this renewed effort at
unified national organisation of the whole industry it is impossible
to predict; there are signs of a movement for actual amalgamation.
The four principal Builders’ Labourers’ Unions are on the point of
uniting in a strong amalgamation with 40,000 members. Other attempts at
amalgamation, including one among the “house builders,” the societies
of bricklayers, masons and plasterers, have been voted. The Furnishing
Trades Association was only prevented from merging in the Amalgamated
Society of Carpenters by technical difficulties. On the other hand
the separate Scottish and Irish Unions (except for the merging of the
Associated Carpenters) stubbornly maintain their independence. Down to
the present it must be said that combination in the building trades,
torn by internecine conflicts and financially weakened by unsuccessful
strikes, has, on the whole, been falling back. The gradual change
of processes, and the introduction of new materials, with an actual
decline in the numbers employed, has not been met by any improvement
in the organisation of the older craft unions, whilst the workers in
the new processes have failed to achieve effective union. With the
great demand for building since the Armistice, the Building Trades
Unions have, however, shown increased vitality; and the position in
the negotiating Joint Boards, at which they are now regularly meeting
the employers’ representatives, has considerably improved. The latest
achievement of the industry is the establishment, jointly with the
employers, of a “Builders’ Parliament”--largely at the instance of Mr.
Malcolm Sparkes--which is the most noteworthy example of the “Whitley
Councils,” to which we shall refer later.
ENGINEERING AND THE METAL TRADES
The large and steadily increasing army of operatives in the various
processes connected with metals (who are combined in Germany in a
single gigantic Metal Workers’ Union) can be noticed here only in its
three principal sections, the engineering industry, boilermaking and
ship-building, and the production of iron and steel from the ore.
Trade Unionism in the engineering industry, though it has, during the
past thirty years, greatly increased in aggregate membership, notably
among the unskilled and semi-skilled workmen employed in engineering
shops, can hardly be said to have grown in strength, whether manifested
in effect upon the engineering employers, who have become very strongly
combined throughout the whole kingdom, or in influence in the Trade
Union world. This relative decline must be ascribed to the continued
lack of any systematic organisation of the industry as a whole; to a
failure to cope with the changing processes and systems of remuneration
which the employers have introduced; and to the persistence of
internecine war among the rival Unions themselves.
The trouble in the engineering world came to a head in 1897,
precipitated perhaps by the employers, who wanted, as they said, to be
“masters in their own shops.” The Amalgamated Society of Engineers,
which had maintained its predominant position among the engineering
workmen, but only commanded the allegiance of a part of them, after a
series of bickerings with the employers about the technical improvement
of the industry, in which the workmen had shown themselves, to say the
least, very conservative, found itself involved in a general strike
and lock-out in all the principal engineering centres, nominally
about the London engineering workmen’s precipitate demand for an
Eight Hours Day, but substantially over the employers’ insistence on
being masters in their own workshops, entitled to introduce what new
methods of working they chose, and whatever new systems of remuneration
according to results that they could persuade the several workmen to
accept. The Union, to which apparently it did not occur to use the
methods of publicity on which William Newton and John Burnett would
have relied, failed to make clear its case to the public; and public
opinion was accordingly against the engineering workmen, believing
them to be at the same time obstructive to industrial improvements and
unable to formulate conditions that would safeguard their legitimate
interests. The result was that the prolonged stoppage, which reduced
the funds of the A.S.E. down to what only sufficed to meet the accrued
liabilities for Superannuation Benefit, ended in a virtual victory for
the employers. The A.S.E. quickly resumed its growth and stood, in the
autumn of 1919, at 320,000 members, or over five times its membership
of 1892. But the sectional societies also increased in size, and down
to 1919 they counted in the aggregate, as in 1892, about half as many
members as the A.S.E. itself.[605] Meanwhile, the great development of
the engineering industry, and the successive changes in the machinery
employed, have been accompanied by the introduction of various forms
of “Payment by Results,” in which the engineering Trade Unions have
not known how to prevent the reintroduction of individual bargaining.
Owing to its quarrels with the various sectional societies in the
industry, the A.S.E. has been alternately in and out of the Trades
Union Congress; and, on general issues, has seldom sought to influence
the Trade Union world as much as its magnitude and position would have
entitled it to do. The same may be said of the other Trade Unions
in the engineering industry, which were contented to hold their own
against their greater rival, and to see their membership progress with
the growth of the industry itself.
The elaborate constitution of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers,
which we described in a preceding chapter, has been, during the past
thirty years, repeatedly tinkered with by delegate meetings, but
without being substantially changed. There has been a perpetual balance
and deadlock of opinion, which has led to successive modifications
and reactions. Alongside the skilled engineering craftsmen, of
different specialities in technique, there has grown up a vast number
of unapprenticed and semi-skilled men, whom the Union has failed to
exclude, not only from the workshops but also from the jobs formerly
monopolised by the legitimate craftsmen. Should these interlopers be
admitted to membership? At one delegate meeting (1912) the rules were
altered so as to admit (“Class F”) not only all varieties of skilled
engineering craftsmen, but also practically any one working in an
engineering shop. This was counteracted by the tacit refusal of most
branches to carry out the decision of their own delegates; and “Class
F,” which never obtained as many as 2000 members, was abolished by
the next delegate meeting (1915.) The method of remuneration has been
another bone of contention. Especially since the disastrous conflict
of 1897, the employers have more and more insisted on the adoption of
systems of “payment by results” instead of the weekly time rates, to
which the engineering operatives, like those of most of the building
trades, devotedly cling. What is to be the Union policy with regard to
these varieties of piecework and “premium bonus” systems? Failing to
discover any device by which (as among the cotton operatives, the boot
and shoe makers, and the Birmingham brassworkers) “payment by results”
can be effectively safeguarded by being subjected to collective
bargaining, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers has wavered, in its
decisions and in the policy of its various districts, between (_a_)
refusing to allow any other system than timework; (_b_) limiting
systems of payment by results to “those shops in which they have
already been introduced”; (_c_) insisting, as a condition of permitting
payment by results, on the “Principle of Mutuality,” which amounts to
no more than the claim that the workman shall not have the piecework
rates or “bonus times” arbitrarily imposed upon him, but shall be
permitted individually to bargain with the foreman or rate-fixer
for better terms. The result is a chaos of inconsistent customs and
practices varying from shop to shop; and withal, a tendency to a
continuous decline in piecework rates (mitigated only by the greater
or less extent to which collective “shop bargaining” prevails, and by
its efficiency) which leads, in sullen resentment, to “ca’ canny,” or
slow working. The third bone of contention has been how to deal with
the competing Trade Unions, which are either societies of varieties of
skilled engineers who prefer to remain unabsorbed in the A.S.E., or
societies of new classes of operatives such as machine workers, workers
in brass and copper, electrical craftsmen, and others, with whom the
A.S.E. found itself disputing the control of the industry. Should
these much smaller organisations be (_a_) ignored and their members
treated as non-unionists; or (_b_) admitted to joint deliberation and
action in trade matters with the view to formulating a common policy;
or (_c_) dealt with by amalgamation on a still broader basis than that
of the A.S.E.? It would be useless to trace the results of the ebb
and flow of these contrary views, which were, in the autumn of 1919,
for the time being, partly reconciled by an agreement by which six of
the competing Unions[606] are in 1920, with the A.S.E., to be merged
in the Amalgamated Engineering Union with a membership of 400,000
and accumulated funds amounting to nearly four millions sterling.
It remains to be seen whether this wider amalgamation will bring to
engineering Trade Unionism the formulation of a systematic policy,
national organisation, and competent leadership.
Underlying all these issues, and aggravating all the disputes to which
they give rise, is the fundamental divergence between those who insist
on an extreme local autonomy--the district being free to strike, and
free to refuse to settle a local strike,--and those who maintain the
importance of a national unity in trade policy, and the necessity,
with centralised funds, of centralised control. Still more keen is the
controversy between those who wish to maintain the present craftsmen’s
organisation, and those who seek to enlarge it into an organisation
comprising all the workers in the industry, whether skilled or
unskilled. During the past decade the discontent against the Central
Executive, especially on the Clyde, has led to a so-called “rank and
file” movement; the development of the shop steward from a mere “card
inspector” and membership recruiting officer into an aggressive strike
leader; and the joining together of the shop stewards (as at Glasgow,
Sheffield, and Coventry) into such new forms of organisation as the
“Clyde Workers’ Committee,” actively promoting their own local trade
policies irrespective of the views of the Union as a whole.
The “Shop Stewards’ Movement,” which assumed some importance in the
engineering industry in 1915-19, was a new development of an old
institution in Trade Unionism--we have referred elsewhere to the
“Father of the Chapel” among the compositors, and to the checkweighman
among the coal-miners--which acquired a special importance owing to
the growing lack of correspondence between the membership of the Trade
Union Branch or District Council and the grouping of the workmen in
the different establishments, and also from the fact that the workmen
in each establishment found themselves belonging to different Trade
Unions. “The shop steward,” it has been pointed out, “was originally
a minor official appointed from the men in a particular workshop and
charged with the duty of seeing that all the Trade Union contributions
were paid. He had other small duties. But gradually, as the branch got
more and more out of touch with the men in the shop, these men came to
look to the official who was on the spot to represent their grievances.
During the war the development of the shop steward movement was very
rapid, particularly in the engineering industry. In some big industrial
concerns, composed of a large number of workshops, the committees
of stewards from the various shops very largely took over the whole
conduct of negotiations and arrangement of shop conditions. Further, a
national organisation of shop stewards was formed, at first mainly for
propagandist purposes. The existing unions have considered some of the
activities of shop stewards to be unofficial, and there has been a good
deal of dissension within the unions on this score. Attempts have been
made to reach an agreement by which Shop Stewards’ Committees shall be
fully recognised at once by the unions and by the managements. So far
there has been no final settlement. An agreement was made in the early
summer of 1919 between the Engineering Employers’ Federation and the
Unions; how this will work in practice is not yet certain.”[607]
It must, in fact, be said that although the Engineering Trade Unions
have during the past thirty years not taken much part in general
Trade Union issues, they have (in contrast with some other sections)
contributed freely in both men and ideas. We have already dwelt upon
the activities of Mr. John Burns and Mr. Tom Mann. We shall mention the
political progress of Mr. George Barnes, who is also of the A.S.E.;
whilst the Friendly Society of Ironfounders has given Mr. Arthur
Henderson to the Movement. And, in the long run possibly more important
even than men, the ideas emanating from the engineering workshops have
had a more than proportionate share in the ferment of these years. The
vacancy in the office of General Secretary, occasioned by the election
to the House of Commons of Mr. Robert Young, was filled in the autumn
of 1919 by the election of Mr. Tom Mann; and this election, together
with the great amalgamation of competing Unions brought about at the
same time, may perhaps open up a new era in engineering Trade Unionism.
In contrast with the failure of Trade Unionism in the engineering
trades either to develop a systematic organisation or to cope with the
changes in processes and methods of remuneration, the two powerful
Unions of boilermakers and shipwrights have gone from strength to
strength, doubling their numbers, absorbing practically all the
remaining local societies in their industry, and closely combining
with each other in policy and other activities, concluding, indeed,
in the autumn of 1919 an agreement to submit to their respective
memberships a proposal for a formal amalgamation which may be joined
by the strong society of Associated Blacksmiths. This would mean the
consolidation, in one powerful Union of 170,000 members, of practically
all the skilled craftsmen working in the construction of the hulls of
ships, of boilers and tanks, and of steel bridge-work of all sorts.
Concentrated largely in the ports of the north-east coast and those of
the Clyde, with strong contingents in the relatively small number of
other shipbuilding centres, the boilermakers and shipwrights have held
their own in face of all the changes in their industry, and have known
how to maintain a fairly uniform national policy.
Passing from engineering and shipbuilding to the smelting of the iron
and steel from the ore, the one marked advance in organisation is that
of the British Steel Smelters, which, established in 1886, and in
1892 having still only 2600 members, had by 1918, under the prudent
leadership of Mr. John Hodge, drawn to itself over 40,000. The British
steel smelters have the credit of equipping themselves with the most
efficient office in the Trade Union world, with a real statistical
department and a trained staff, including, for all their legal
business, especially that connected with compensation for accidents,
a qualified professional solicitor. Already before the outbreak of
war a far-seeing policy of amalgamation had been virtually decided
on; and in 1915 a scheme was prepared for the merging of all the six
important Unions in the industry of obtaining the metal from the ore,
including the operatives in the tinplate and rolling mills. The plan
for surmounting the legal and other difficulties of amalgamation, of
which we may ascribe the authorship to Mr. John Hodge, Mr. Pugh, and
Mr. Percy Cole, the able officials of the British Steel Smelters’
Union, was one of extreme ingenuity as involving no more than a bare
majority of the members voting, which deserves the attention of other
societies as a “New Model.” Three only out of the six societies (the
British Steel Smelters’ Association, the Associated Iron and Steel
Workers of Great Britain, and the National Steel Workers’ Association)
were able to go forward in 1917,[608] when a new society, the British
Iron, Steel, and Kindred Trades Association, was formed. The four
societies then created the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, to
which they formally ceded powers and functions affecting the members
of more than one of the constituent bodies, and therefore all general
negotiations with the employers. The three old societies continued
formally in existence, but they bound themselves not to enrol any new
members, who were all to be taken by the new society, to which all the
existing members were to be continuously urged to transfer themselves
voluntarily. This process has already gone so far that the new society
has swallowed up the British Steel Smelters’ Society, which has been
wound up and completely merged in the new body, into which the empty
shells of the other two old bodies will presently fall. The Iron and
Steel Trades Confederation will then be composed of one society only,
and may be kept alive only to serve the same transitional purpose for
other incoming societies.
THE COMPOSITORS
The printing trades have remained, during the past thirty years,
curiously stationary so far as Trade Unionism, is concerned, the
London Society of Compositors, the Typographical Association, the
Scottish Typographical Association, and the Dublin Typographical
Society having, in the aggregate, increased their membership by
three-fifths and steadily increased their rates of pay and strategic
strength against their own employers, but commanding little influence
in the Trade Union Movement as a whole, and in many small towns still
leaving a considerable portion of the trade outside their ranks. The
less-skilled workers in the papermaking and printing establishments
have greatly improved their organisation; and the National Union of
Printing and Paper Workers and the Operative Printers Assistants’
Society--both of them including women as well as men--have become
large and effective Trade Unions. All the societies are united in the
powerful Printing and Kindred Trades Federation, to which the National
Union of Journalists, now a large society, has recently affiliated.
BOOT AND SHOEMAKING
Among the other constituents of the Trade Union world in which a
relative decline in influence is to be noted, is that of the boot
and shoemakers. Thirty years ago the National Union of Boot and Shoe
Operatives had achieved a position of great influence in the trade.
It had joined with the Employers’ Associations in building up, as
described in our _Industrial Democracy_, an elaborate system of Local
Boards of Conciliation and Arbitration, united in a National Conference
of dignity and influence, with resort to Lord James of Hereford as
umpire, by means of which stoppages of work were prevented, and, more
important still, the illegitimate use of boy labour was restrained and
standard piecework rates were arrived at by collective bargaining, and
authoritatively imposed on the whole trade. In 1894 the whole machinery
was broken up, at the instance of the very employers who had agreed to
it, and had co-operated for years in its working, because they found
that, under the rules and at the piecework rates prescribed, the men
were “making too much.”
After a prolonged stoppage in 1894 the dispute was patched up by the
intervention of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade; and the
National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, with 80,000 members, has,
on the whole, held its own with the employers, with less elaborate
formal relations; but the work of the Union is impaired by the
weakness of the organisation in the smaller workshops and the less
important local centres of the trade.
On the other side, we have the rise to influence, not only in the
Trade Union counsels but also in those of the nation, of the Women
Workers, the General Labourers, the “black-coated proletariat” of shop
assistants, clerks, teachers, technicians, and officials, the miners
and the railwaymen, which has been the outstanding feature of the past
thirty years.
WOMEN WORKERS
In no section of the industrial community has the advance of Trade
Unionism during the last thirty years been more marked than among the
women workers. For the first half of this period, indeed--though the
aggregate women membership of Trade Unions approximately doubled--this
meant only a rise from about 100,000 in 1890 to about 200,000 in
1907, mostly in the textile industries; and the number of women Trade
Unionists outside those industries was in the latter year still under
30,000. But the long-continued patient work of the Women’s Trade Union
League was having its effect; and the idea of Trade Unionism was being
established among the women workers in many different industries. Much
is to be ascribed to the efforts during these years of Sir Charles and
Lady Dilke, who were unwearied in their assistance. In 1909, largely at
the instance of Sir Charles Dilke and the women’s leaders, especially
Miss Mary Macarthur, Miss Gertrude Tuckwell, and Miss Susan Lawrence,
Mr. Winston Churchill, as President of the Board of Trade, carried
through Parliament the Trade Boards Bill, which enabled a legal minimum
wage to be prescribed by joint boards in four specially low-paid
industries, in which mainly women were employed. This measure not only
considerably improved the position of the sweated workers in the chain
and nail trades, the slop tailoring trade, paper box making and machine
lace-making, but--as had been predicted on one side and denied on the
other--greatly stimulated independent organisation among the women
whose industrial status was raised. The extension of the Trade Boards
and of the legal minimum wage in 1913 to half a dozen other trades had
like effects, and the further extension of 1918 is already promising
in the same direction. Trade Union membership was further greatly
increased during 1912-14 as a result of the National Insurance Act,
which brought many thousand recruits to the Approved Society sections
of the Unions. It was, however, the Great War, with its unprecedented
demand for women workers, and their admission, in “dilution” of or
in substitution for men, to all sorts of occupations and processes
into which they had not previously penetrated, at earnings which they
had never before been permitted to receive, that brought the women
into Trade Unionism by the hundred thousand. The National Federation
of Women Workers--the largest exclusively feminine Union--rose from
11,000 in 1914 to over 60,000 in 1919. A small number of new Trade
Unions exclusively for women were established in particular sections,
such as the interesting little society of Women Acetylene Welders. The
bulk of the women, however, continued to be organised in Trade Unions
admitting both sexes. Besides the various Textile Unions, there are now
thousands of women in the National Union of Railwaymen, the Railway
Clerks’ Association, Boot and Shoe Operatives, and the Iron and Steel
Trades Confederation. Most of the general labour Unions, and others
like the National Union of Printing and Paper Workers, the National
Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks, the Amalgamated
Union of Co-operative and Commercial Employees and Allied Workers, had
for a couple of decades been enrolling women members; and the female
membership of these societies now grew by leaps and bounds. But the
greater part of the field of women’s employment is still uncovered.
In 1920, though it may be estimated that the total women membership
of Trade Unions is nearly three-quarters of a million, this still
represents less than 30 per cent of the adult women wage-earners.
The outstanding feature in women’s Trade Unionism during the past
decade has been its advance, not merely in numbers and achievements,
but also in status and influence. This has come with accelerating
speed. To the first Treasury Conference in 1915, at which the
Government sought the help of the Trade Unions in the winning of the
war, it apparently did not occur to any official to invite the National
Federation of Women Workers; but in all subsequent proceedings of the
same nature Miss Mary Macarthur and Miss Susan Lawrence, on behalf
of the women Trade Unionists in this and other societies, occupied
a leading position. Whether before the Munitions Act Tribunals, the
Committee on Production, or the Special Arbitration Tribunal set up
by the Government to deal with the conditions of employment of women
munition-workers, the women’s case, whether put by the representatives
of the Women’s Unions, or by those of the principal Unions of general
workers that included women, was so ably conducted as to secure for
the women workers, almost for the first time, something like the
same measure of justice as that which the men had wrested from the
employers for themselves. The result was not only a marked rise in
the standard of remuneration for women, the opening up to them of
many fields of work from which they had hitherto been excluded, and a
general improvement in their conditions of employment, but also a rapid
development of Trade Unionism among them--nine-tenths of the women
Trade Unionists being in societies enrolling both men and women--and
the winning, for women’s Trade Unions, of the respect of the Trade
Union world. For the first time a woman was elected in 1919 by the
Trades Union Congress to its Parliamentary Committee, Miss Margaret
Bondfield, of the National Federation of Women Workers, receiving over
three million votes. On the reconstitution in 1918 of the Labour Party,
in which women had always been accorded equal rights, provision was
made so that there should always be at least four women elected to the
Executive Committee. A Standing Joint Committee of Women’s Industrial
Organisations, established in 1916, now initiates and co-ordinates the
action of the principal women’s Trade Unions, the Women’s Co-operative
Guild (which organises the women of the Co-operative movement), the
Railway Women’s Guild, composed of the wives of railwaymen, and the
Women’s Labour League, now the women’s section of the Labour Party
itself.
THE GENERAL WORKERS
In 1888 the leaders of the skilled craftsmen and better-paid workmen
were inclined to believe that effective or durable Trade Unionism
among the general labourers and unskilled or nondescript workmen was
as impracticable as it had hitherto proved to be among the mass of
women wage-earners. The outburst of Trade Unionism among the dockers
and gasworkers in 1888-89 was commonly expected to be as transient as
analogous movements had been in 1834 and 1871. In 1920 we find the
organisations of this despised section, some of them of over thirty
years’ standing, accounting for no less than 30 per cent of the
whole Trade Union membership, and their leaders--notably Mr. Clynes,
Mr. Thorne, and Mr. Robert Williams--exercising at least their full
share of influence in the counsels of the Trade Union Movement as a
whole. For a few years after 1889, indeed, the aggregate membership
of the newly-formed labourers’ Unions declined, and some of the
weaker ones collapsed, or became merged in the larger societies. But
the Gas-workers’ and General Labourers’ Union (established 1889),
which changed its name in 1918 to the National Union of General
Workers; and the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Workers’ Union
(established 1887) maintained themselves in existence; and already in
1907 there were as many as 150,000 organised labourers in half-a-dozen
well-established societies. The outburst of Trade Unionism among
the farm labourers in 1890 gradually faded away. But in 1906 a new
society, the National Agricultural Labourers and Rural Workers’ Trade
Union, was formed, which at once made headway in Norfolk and the
adjacent counties; to be followed in 1913 by the energetic Scottish
Farm Servants’ Trade Union. Organisation was, between 1904 and 1911,
steadily extending in all directions, when the passing of the National
Insurance Act, which practically compelled every wage-earner to join an
“Approved Society” of some kind, led to a dramatic expansion of Trade
Union membership, from which the various Unions of general workers,
as they now prefer to be styled, obtained their share of advantage.
The Workers’ Union, in particular, which had been established in 1898,
for the enrolment of members among the nondescript and semi-skilled
workers of all sorts not catered for by the craft Unions, had, after
twelve years’ existence, only 5000 members in 111 branches in 1910,
but grew during 1911-13 to 91,000 members in 567 branches. In three
years more it stood at 197,000 members in 750 branches, and by the
end of 1919 its membership had risen to about 500,000 in nearly 2000
branches, comprising almost every kind and grade of worker, of any
age and either sex, from clay-workers and tin miners to corporation
employees and sanitary inspectors, from domestic servants and waiters
to farm labourers and carmen, and every kind of nondescript worker in
the factory, the yard, or on the road. The organising of the rural
labourers has been shared by nearly all the principal Unions of
General Workers. The passing of the Corn Production Act in 1917, with
its incidental establishment of Joint Boards in every county of the
United Kingdom, empowered to fix a legal minimum wage for a prescribed
normal working day, had the result of greatly extending Trade Union
membership among all sections of agricultural labourers, who are now
(1920), for the first time in history, more or less organised in every
county of Great Britain--partly in the very successful Agricultural
Labourers’ Union, which had, at the end of 1919, 180,000 members in no
fewer than 2700 branches; partly in the Workers’ Union, which has a
large number of agricultural branches; partly in the National Union of
General Workers, the Dock, Wharf and Riverside Labourers’ Union, and
the National Amalgamated Union of Labour; in all the Scottish counties,
in the powerful Scottish Farm Servants’ Union; whilst in Ireland the
agricultural wage-earners have been enrolled in the Transport and
General Workers’ Union. The total number of agricultural labourers
in Trade Unions in 1920 probably reaches more than three hundred
thousand, being about one-third of the total number of men employed in
agriculture at wages.
Throughout the years of war the membership of the various Unions
classified under the head of Transport and General Labour (including
the dockers and seamen), which in 1892 was only 154,000, continued to
increase by leaps and bounds until, in 1920, their aggregate membership
considerably exceeds that of the entire Trade Union world of 1890, and
does not fall far short of a couple of millions.
Of recent years there has been a steady pressure towards amalgamation
and consolidation of forces. Many small and local Unions have been
merged, and several of the larger bodies seem to be on the point of
union. Meanwhile the movement towards closer federation is strong.
In 1908 all the big general Labour Unions became associated in the
General Labourers’ National Council, a useful consultative body,
having for its principal function the prevention of overlapping and
conflict among the different Unions. It was successful in arranging for
freedom of transfer and mutual recognition of each other’s membership
among its constituent Unions, and in promoting a certain amount of
demarcation of spheres, and even of amalgamation. This Council in May
1917 developed into a National Federation of General Workers, which
includes eleven important general Unions of General Workers, having an
aggregate membership of over 800,000. This important federation took a
significant step towards unification in November 1919, in appointing
ten District Committees, consisting of two representatives of each of
the affiliated societies, charged to consult with regard to any local
trade dispute involving more than one society.
Recent years have seen the rise of a new grouping. The several Unions
of seamen, lightermen, dock and wharf labourers, coal-porters and
carmen have asserted themselves as Transport Workers, seeking not
merely to take common action in matters of wages and hours, but also
to formulate regulations for the government of the whole industry of
transport (apart from that of railways), which is one more example of
the tendency to create “industrial” federations on a national basis.
The organisation for the purpose is the National Transport Workers’
Federation, comprising three dozen of the Unions having among their
members men engaged in waterside transport work, including seamen,
dockers, and carters. It was formed in November 1910 at the instance
of the Dockers’ Union, and came at once into prominence during the
London strike of 1911, which it handled with great vigour.[609] This
was the first great fight in the Port of London since the upheaval
of 1889. The National Union of Sailors and Firemen, which had in
vain appealed to the Shipping Federation to unite in constituting a
Conciliation Board, in June 1911 struck for a uniform scale at all
ports and various minor ameliorations of their conditions. Largely
as a result of the excitement caused by the seamen’s strike, the
dockers in July came out for a rise from 6d. to 8d. per hour, with 1s.
per hour for overtime. The stevedores, the gasworkers, the carmen,
the coal-porters, the tug-enginemen, the grain porters, and various
other bodies of men engaged in or about the port, put forward their
own claims. Amid great excitement the whole port was stopped, great
meetings on Tower Hill were held daily, and processions of strikers,
said to have been as many as 100,000 in number, paraded through the
City. The unrest spread to most other ports, and there were some local
disturbances. The Port of London Authority, under Lord Devonport,
refused all parley, and the Government for some time practically
supported this great corporate employer, which had failed (and has to
this day failed) to comply with the section of the Act of Parliament
by which it was constituted directing it to institute a scheme for
more civilised conditions of employment for its labourers. The War
Office, at the request of Mr. Winston Churchill, who was then at the
Home Office, accumulated troops in London, and actually threatened to
put 25,000 soldiers to break the strike by doing the dockers’ work--a
step which would undoubtedly have led to bloody conflict in the
streets. Finally, however, the Cabinet gave way, and persuaded Lord
Devonport and his colleagues, together with shipowners, wharfingers,
and granary proprietors, to meet the representatives of the Unions
with a view to agreement. For three whole days they sat and argued,
ultimately arriving at an agreement under which the men returned to
work on the immediate concession of about half their demand and the
remission of the other half to arbitration. This was undertaken by Sir
Albert Rollit, M.P., at the instance of the London Chamber of Commerce,
his award eventually conceding to the men substantially their whole
claim; summed up in 8d. per hour for the dockers, with 1s. per hour
for overtime, other trades, and the men at other ports, obtaining, in
one or other form, analogous advantages.[610] In May 1912 the dispute
flared up again in the Thames and Medway, when a combined strike
and lock-out, in which 80,000 men were involved, stopped the work of
the port for six weeks. Sympathetic strikes in other ports led to
some 20,000 men being idle for a few days. The men asserted that the
employers had not in all cases fulfilled the agreement of the previous
year, and were discriminating against Trade Unionists. The employers
seem to have been concerned, in the main, to avoid recognition of the
Transport Workers’ Federation, and to check its growing authority. In
spite of the vigorous support of the _Daily Herald_; of pecuniary help,
not only from Australia and the United States, but also from the German
Trade Unions; and of the mediation of the Government, the strike failed
owing to the men breaking away, and to the stubborn obstinacy of Lord
Devonport, as Chairman of the Port of London Authority, who insisted
on a resumption of work upon the employers’ assurance that they would
respect all agreements and consider any grievances put forward by the
representatives of any section. Notwithstanding the failure of this
somewhat premature effort of the Transport Workers’ Federation, its
formation, together with that of the National Federation of General
Workers, have gone far to transform the position. For a couple of
decades the efforts of the General Labourers’ Unions took the form of
innumerable local and sectional demands, not merely for higher rates
of pay, though advances of several shillings per week have continually
been secured, but for mutual agreement of piecework rates, a reduction
of working hours, insistence on compensation for accidents, the
provision of better accommodation or greater amenity in work, and extra
allowances for tasks of peculiar strain or discomfort. The efforts of
the federations have raised these local and sectional arrangements
to the level of national questions; and the agreements now concluded
with the employers’ national representatives amount to an increasingly
effective control over the industry.
THE “BLACK-COATED PROLETARIAT”
If Trade Unionism has, in the past thirty years, successfully
progressed downward to the women and the unskilled labourers, its
advance, in a sense upwards, among the various sections of the
“black-coated proletariat,” has been no less remarkable. In 1892
there were only the smallest signs of Trade Union organisation among
the clerks and shop assistants, the various sections of Post Office
and other Government employees, the municipal officers, and the life
assurance agents. Among wage-earners in these various occupations,
numbering in the United Kingdom possibly several millions--badly paid,
working under unsatisfactory conditions, and sometimes subject to
actual tyranny--there were, thirty years ago, a few dozen small and
struggling Trade Unions, with only a few tens of thousands of aggregate
membership. In 1920 these have developed into powerful amalgamations
in most of the several sections, nearly all fully recognised by their
employers, whether private or public, with whom they enter into
collective agreements; and enrolling a total membership falling not far
short of three-quarters of a million.
We may note first the army of shop assistants, warehousemen, and other
employees in the distributive trades, wholesale and retail.[611]
The National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen,
and Clerks, established in 1891, made at first slow progress, and
counted in 1912, after a couple of decades of growth, fewer than
65,000 members. Partly as a result of the National Insurance Act,
which practically compelled all employees under £160 to join some
organisation, the Union went ahead by leaps and bounds, multiplying
its branches and swelling its numbers, until it counts now over
100,000 members. Meanwhile the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative
Employees (also established in 1891)--in 1918 adding to its title also
“Commercial Employees and Allied Workers”--has benefited by a similar
expansion, counting, in 1920, also about 100,000 members. This society
started on the basis of enrolling all employees of the Co-operative
Societies, whatever their crafts, and no other persons, a constitution
now disapproved of by the Trades Union Congress. It is, however, not
now confined to persons employed by co-operative societies; and whilst
it includes a number of carmen, tailors, bakers, bootmakers, and
others in co-operative employment who should more appropriately belong
to other Unions, the negotiations that have been for some time in
progress for the merging of both organisations in a single great Union
of persons employed in the distributive trades, and the transfer of
those belonging to specific crafts to their own societies, may probably
presently be successful.
Of clerks, the most effective organisation is that of the clerical
service of the railway companies, the Railway Clerks’ Association,
which takes in also stationmasters, inspectors, and ticket-collectors
(who are all eligible also for the National Union of Railwaymen, which
some of them have joined). Established in 1897, it continued for a
decade insignificant in magnitude, and had not by 1910 enrolled as many
as 10,000 members. After the railway strike of 1911 it began to forge
ahead, passing from 30,000 in 1914 to 42,000 in 1915--a total doubled
by 1920, and with increasing strength it obtained gradually increasing
recognition from the railway companies, successfully maintaining its
right to enrol, not only clerks in the General Managers’ offices, but
also inspectors and stationmasters. As its membership grew, it was
able successfully to contest the elections for representatives on
the committees of the various superannuation funds instituted by the
companies, and thereby to demonstrate its right to speak for the whole
body of railway clerks. Whilst acting in friendly association with
the National Union of Railwaymen, the Railway Clerks’ Association
has latterly drawn to itself an ever-increasing proportion of the
inspectors and stationmasters; and in 1920, when it can count on a
membership of nearly 90,000, it is claiming to speak for all grades
of the Railway Clerical Administrative and Supervisory Staff. Since
1913, at least, it has been asserting a claim, as soon as the railways
are nationalised, to some participation in their management; and
at the end of 1919, it is understood, some promise was made by the
Minister of Transport that, in any Railway Board or National Advisory
Committee that may be constituted, the Railway Clerks’ Association
would, with the National Union of Railwaymen and the Associated Society
of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, be accorded its due share of
representation.
The great army of clerks in commercial offices has made less progress
in organisation than the shop assistants and the railway clerks. For
years, indeed, it seemed as if commercial clerks would not form a Trade
Union; and the National Union of Clerks (established 1890) made little
headway. In 1912 it had still under 9000 members. In the past seven
years it has bounded up to 55,000 members.[612] There is also a small
Irish Clerical Workers’ Union, principally in Dublin, resulting from a
secession from the National Union. Most remarkable of all has been the
formation, during the war, of a Bank Officers’ Guild and an Irish Bank
Officials’ Association, having definitely Trade Union objects (though
not yet seeking to join the Trades Union Congress), both of them being
independent of the Bankers’ Institute, which retains the character of
a scientific and educational society. There is now even a Guild of Law
Court Officials, having definitely Trade Union objects.
The great body of teachers of all kinds and grades, numbering
altogether about 300,000 men and women in the United Kingdom, have,
during the past thirty years, become strongly and very elaborately
organised in many different societies.[613] What is significant is
the extent to which many of these professional associations have
latterly adopted the purposes, and even the characteristic methods,
of Trade Unionism. The largest of these bodies, the National Union
of Teachers, established in 1890, has now over 102,000 members, and
exercises great influence upon the conditions of employment of the
teachers in elementary schools. During the past few years it has
supported various district or county strikes for better salary-scales.
The teachers in secondary schools are organised in four societies,
for headmasters, headmistresses, assistant masters, and assistant
mistresses respectively, united in a Federal Council of Secondary
School Associations, which, though it has not yet fomented or supported
a strike, has of late organised effective pressure to obtain greater
security of tenure for assistants, better salary-scales, and a
universal superannuation scheme.
Equally significant is the recent development of organisation
among the industrial technicians, whether engineers, electricians,
chemists, or merely foremen and managers; among the workers in
scientific laboratories, whether for research, medical, teaching,
or administrative purposes; and among the junior lecturers and
assistants at University institutions. These organisations overlap
in their spheres, if not also in their memberships, and are not yet
stabilised, but most of them are united in the National Federation of
Professional Workers of even wider scope. What is important is the
growing divergence between what are essentially Trade Unions of the
brain-working professionals and the purely “scientific societies” to
which such persons have, until recent years, restricted their tendency
to professional association. Some of the new bodies (such as the
Society of Technical Engineers) have actually registered themselves
as Trade Unions, a step taken also by the Medico-Political Union, a
vigorous association of medical practitioners; whilst the newly formed
Actors’ Association, like the National Union of Journalists, has
applied for affiliation to the Trades Union Congress.
The life assurance agents--principally those employed in “industrial”
insurance--number 100,000, and they have become organised in a score
of societies, restricted to the staffs of particular companies. These
organisations vary in their nature and in their degree of independence,
from mere “welfare societies,” dominated by the management, up to
aggressive Trade Unions--the strongest being the National Association
of Prudential Assurance Agents. They are mostly united in two different
federations. Another, and perhaps wholesomer, basis of organisation is
adopted by the National Union of Life Assurance Agents, which has now
some thousands of members.
But the greatest development of Trade Unionism among the “black-coated
proletariat” has been among the employees of the National and Local
Government. This has been entirely a growth of the past thirty years.
Beginning among the manual working staff of the Postmaster-General,
and among the artisans and labourers of the Government dockyards,
arsenals, and other manufacturing departments, there are now a hundred
and seventy separate Trade Unions of State employees, from the crews
of the Customs launches and the boy clerks, up to the Admiralty
Constructive Engineers and the Superintendents of Mercantile Marine
Offices. Of recent years, organisation has spread to the higher grades
of the Civil Service, even to the “Class I.” clerks; and practically
no one below the rank of an Under-Secretary of State is held to be
outside the scope of the Society of Civil Servants. All the various
societies are grouped in federations, from the “Waterguard Federation”
and the Prison Officers’ Federation of the United Kingdom; through
the United Government Workers’ Federation and the Federal Council of
Government Employees, combining the various kinds of manual working
operatives; up to the Customs and Excise Federation, the Civil
Service Federation, the Civil Service Alliance, and even the “National
Federation of Professional Workers,” which includes also teachers. The
strongest of all these bodies is probably that of the various employees
of the Postmaster-General, whose fight to secure “recognition” and the
opportunity for “Collective Bargaining” has extended over a couple
of decades. There are about fifty separate Unions of Post Office
employees, mostly small and sectional bodies; but the three principal
societies (the Postal and Telegraph Clerks’ Association, the Postmen’s
Federation, and the Fawcett Association) were amalgamated in 1919
into one powerful Union of Post Office Workers, with 90,000 members
with eleven salaried officers, and affiliated both to the Trades
Union Congress and the Labour Party, which can now meet the managing
officials of the Post Office on something like equal terms.
The employees of the Local Authorities--thirty years ago entirely
without organisation--are still not so well combined as those of the
National Government. A score of different societies, from such grades
as school-keepers, police and prison officers and asylum attendants,
up to municipal clerks, share the work with the National Union of
Corporation Workers and the Municipal Employees’ Association. A large
proportion of the wage-earners employed by Local Authorities are to
be found in the Unions of General Workers. The National Association
of Local Government Officers and Clerks is a large and powerful body,
composed mainly of the clerical and supervisory grades.
Trade Unionism in the public service received a great fillip after
1906, when Mr. Herbert Samuel at the Post Office, together with
some other Ministers, “recognised” the Unions of their employees,
considered their corporate representations, and agreed to meet their
officials. It was still further promoted when, in 1912, the Government
consented to the establishment of an independent Arbitration Tribunal
for determining the terms of employment in the Civil Service for
all grades and sections under £500 a year. Before this tribunal,
whose awards were definitively authoritative, the representatives of
any association could appear as plaintiffs, those of the Treasury
appearing always as defendants. Finally, after the promulgation in
1917 of the “Whitley Report,” which the Government, in impressing
on other employers, found itself constrained to adopt in its own
establishments, there was established during 1919 an elaborate series
of joint councils (including even the civil departments of the War
Office and the Admiralty) for particular branches of establishments;
for whole departments, and for whole grades of the service throughout
all departments, in which equal numbers of persons nominated by the
employees’ associations, and of superior officers chosen by the
Government, representing the management, meet periodically to discuss
on equal terms questions of office organisation, professional training,
conditions of service, methods of promotion, and what not.[614]
THE MINERS
The outstanding feature of the Trade Union world between 1890 and
1920 has been the growing predominance, in its counsels and in its
collective activity, of the organised forces of the coal-miners.
Right down to 1888, as we have seen, the coal-miners of England,
Scotland, and Wales, though sporadically forming local associations
and now and again engaging in fierce conflicts with their employers,
first in this coalfield and then in that, had failed to maintain
any organisation of national scope. Though their representatives
participated from time to time in the general activities of the Trade
Union Movement, and sat in the Trades Union Congress; though with the
guidance of W. P. Roberts in the ’forties, and under the successive
leadership of Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt in the ’sixties and
’seventies, they exercised intermittently a considerable influence
on its Parliamentary action--the miners, for the most part, kept to
themselves, framed their own policy, and fought their own battles, in
which, owing to an apparently incurable “localism,” their success was
not commensurate with their strength. The change came with the growing
dissatisfaction with the policy of the Sliding Scale. This device for
making the rate of wages vary in proportion to the selling price of
coal, the adoption of which between 1874 and 1880--against the wish
of Alexander Macdonald, and contrary to the advice of such friends as
Professor Beesly and Lloyd Jones--we have already described, produced
in the ’eighties an ever-increasing discontent. In 1881 the miners of
Yorkshire merged their two Unions of South and West Yorkshire into the
Yorkshire Miners’ Association, which began its successful career by
terminating the local Sliding Scale agreement, and resolutely refused
all future attempts to make wages depend on selling prices. The
Lancashire and Cheshire Miners’ Federation, a less well-organised body,
presently followed its example. In 1885 a Midland Federation was formed
by a number of smaller local associations for the purpose both of
abolishing the Sliding Scale and of promoting the movement for an Eight
Hours Day by legislative enactment. Three years later, at a conference
at Manchester, the associations of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire,
the Midlands, and Fifeshire, with a nascent local organisation in
South Wales, established the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain.[615]
The aggregate membership of all these bodies was amazingly small--at
the start only 36,000--but the new Federation had, from the first, a
definite policy and great driving force. Outside it there remained
the solid and numerically strong Durham Miners’ Association and the
Northumberland Miners’ Mutual Confident Association, which (together
with a surviving remnant of the Amalgamated Association in South
Staffordshire, and the purely nominal Sliding Scale Associations which
then characterised most of the South Wales coalfield) still clung
together as the National Union. It was the National Union which played
the leading part in securing reforms in the Coal Mines Regulation Act
of 1887, which firmly established the checkweigher in practically
every colliery of any importance. But this was its last constructive
effort. Its subsequent history is little more than the long-drawn-out
resistance of the able and respected leaders of the Northumberland and
Durham miners to the new ideas of Labour policy which were, as we have
described, becoming dominant in the Trades Union Congress, and which
were from the first adopted, if not by all the leaders, at least by the
successive delegate conferences of the Miners’ Federation.
The establishment of the Federation coincided with a period of rapid
expansion in the coal-mining industry. The number of persons employed
rose considerably year after year, and Trade Unionism spread rapidly
among them. An effective local organisation was built up in district
after district, everywhere based on the autonomy in local concerns of
the “lodge” or branch, consisting of the workers at a given colliery,
and governed by mass meetings of the members, who elect a committee,
which usually meets at least weekly. But although the National Union
declined steadily in influence, it took twenty years to bring all
the district associations into the Miners’ Federation, the aggregate
membership of which did not reach 200,000 until 1893, and seven years
later was still only 363,000. Even so, the miners were, as we described
them in 1892, in some ways the most effectively organised of the
industrial groups into which we divided the Trade Union world of that
date. With the adhesion of Northumberland and Durham in 1908, when the
National Union came finally to an end, the membership of the Federation
rose to nearly 600,000, whilst the next twelve years’ growth of the
industry, and the inclusion of a large proportion of the sectional
unions among different grades of mine-workers,[616] have brought it in
1920 to nearly 900,000.
Meanwhile issue was joined by the mine-owners, who insisted everywhere
in 1893 on considerable reductions in the wage-rates, on the plea that
selling prices had fallen. The great strike that followed involved
400,000 men, and lasted from July to November. In the end the men
had to submit to reductions, though they gained the important point
of the practical though not explicit recognition of a minimum below
which there was to be no fall. The next great achievement of the
Federation was the carrying into law of the Eight Hours Bill, which,
mainly owing to the opposition of the leaders of the Northumberland and
Durham Miners, was not accomplished until 1908; and their influence
in improving the Mines Regulation Act of 1911. Their third success,
the outcome of a decade of successful organisation and intellectual
leadership by Mr. Robert Smillie, who since 1912 has been annually
elected to the presidency, was attained only at the cost of the
greatest industrial struggle that Great Britain had yet experienced.
The national strike of miners in 1912, when practically every mine
was stopped, and nearly a million miners suspended work for more
than a month, arose out of the failure of the colliery companies to
make adequate provision for repeated cases of individual hardship
and injustice. The piecework rates of the hewers or getters of coal
might be satisfactorily adjusted to the agreed day-wage standard of
the district, though the arrangements for this adjustment vary from
district to district, and even from mine to mine, and are very far
from complete or satisfactory. But what was to happen when, from
circumstances beyond his own control, the miner found himself unable
to get enough coal to produce a subsistence wage? If he is assigned
an “abnormal place”--where the seam is thin or crushed into small
coal (for which, in South Wales, the hewer is not paid at all); or
where exceptional timbering is required to prevent dangerous falls;
or where there is much “stone” or water: or if, in “normal places,”
the colliery management does not keep him regularly supplied with
“trams” or “tubs” into which to load the coal; or with a sufficient
provision of timber for props and sleepers; or of rails--no amount of
skill, strength, or assiduity will prevent his earnings from falling
away, it may be to next to nothing. What had long been customary
was, in some coalfields, the casting of lots for “places,” and thus
a periodical exchange of opportunities; and in others the granting
of an allowance, or “consideration,” to hewers who complained of
insufficient earnings. These allowances were granted irregularly,
without the protection of Collective Bargaining, with insufficient
provision for ensuring the avoidance of injustice; and it is not now
denied that, in some collieries, particularly in South Wales, the
owners resorted to the simple expedient of restricting the manager to a
fixed maximum sum each “measuring-up day,” irrespective of the number
and extent of the men’s reasonable claims. These sums, moreover, were
much reduced in times of bad trade, when profits were at a minimum,
especially in collieries which were actually working at a loss. The
agitation for securing a prescribed minimum of daily earnings for all
the piece-workers continued for a whole decade without much result,
producing not a few local stoppages, especially in South Wales. These
flared up, in the latter part of 1910, in the Aberdare and Rhondda
valleys, into an almost continuous series of disputes. The Miners’
Federation found itself compelled in July 1911 to take the matter up
as a national question; and a ballot of its whole membership decided
for a national strike if the universal adoption of the principle of a
prescribed daily minimum, not merely for hewers but for all grades, was
not conceded. The owners quibbled and eventually refused; and after a
further ballot a national strike was decided on, which the Government
negotiations failed to avert, and which, after long and repeated
notice, began at the end of February 1912, and rapidly extended to
practically every colliery in the kingdom. As neither the employers nor
the workmen would give way, the Government then announced its intention
of introducing a Bill to provide for the payment, to all underground
workers in the mine, not of the prescribed minimum rates which the
several districts had formulated, nor yet of the overriding national
minima of 5s. for a man and 2s. for a boy which were being demanded,
but of district minima, to be prescribed in each coalfield by a Joint
Board of employers and workmen, presided over by an impartial chairman.
These provisions were bitterly opposed, not only by the coal-owners,
who objected to any legal minimum, but also by the workmen’s
representatives in the House of Commons, who demanded a prescribed
national minimum; but they were carried into law by substantial
majorities. The Federation Executive was perplexed as to the line to
take, as half the membership wanted to carry on the struggle; but it
was eventually decided to give the Act and the Joint Boards a chance,
and the strike was declared at an end. The district minima and the
rules applicable thereto had, in most cases, to be decided by the
impartial chairmen; and they varied considerably from district to
district, being usually a little less than the workmen had claimed. But
when the working of the system was understood, and it was got smoothly
into operation, it was recognised that the Miners’ Federation had
achieved a very substantial victory. The miners had brought to their
aid, in enforcing the payment of a periodically prescribed Minimum
Day Wage to all underground workers, the strong arm of the law--not,
it is true, as under the Mines Regulation Acts and the Factory and
Workshop Acts, the criminal law, enforced by Government inspectors
and prosecutions, but the civil law of contract, which they could
themselves enforce by actions in the County Court. What the Federation
extorted from the Government and the Legislature was “an extraordinary
piece of hastily prepared legislation rushed through Parliament in
the shadow of an unprecedented national calamity.”[617] It has been
found by experience that this Act, which is nominally only temporary,
does secure to the hewers a substantial minimum of day wages, however
unremunerative their conditions of work; and the fixing of rates by the
Joint Boards has, on the whole, considerably increased the wages of the
various grades of the less skilled workers. But more important than
these immediate results was the demonstration and the consolidation of
the national strength of the Miners’ Federation itself; and the respect
which its great power henceforth secured for it, alike in the Trade
Union Movement, with the employers, and at the hands of the Government
and the House of Commons.
The miners’ organisations were fully occupied for a year or two
in putting into operation the Act of 1912, and in enforcing the
determinations of the Joint Boards. But in 1913 the delegate conference
made a new move in authorising the Executive Committee to enter into
relations with other Trade Unions with a view to joint action for
mutual assistance. A formal alliance had been made between the Miners’
Federation, the National Union of Railwaymen, and the Transport
Workers’ Federation--commonly referred to as the Triple Alliance--when
everything was suddenly changed by the breaking out of the Great War.
The 1500 colliery companies and individual colliery owners, most of
whom are united in the Mining Association of Great Britain, as well as
in district associations, have, throughout, steadfastly refused to meet
the Miners’ Federation for the negotiation of any national agreement,
or the concession of national advances; although there has long been
elaborate machinery for negotiation in each district.
During the four and a quarter years that the world conflict lasted
(1914-18), the miners, like the rest of the British working class,
patriotically subordinated their interests to those of the nation as
a whole. They volunteered for military service in such numbers that
they had to be forbidden to leave the mines, and numbers of them were
sent back from the armies in order to maintain the output of coal.
Where, as in Durham, they had agreements securing them advances of
wages in proportion to the rise in the selling price, they forewent
these advances; and they contented themselves everywhere with less
substantial percentages of rise in rates, and with the two successive
war bonuses of eighteen pence a day each--much below the rise in the
cost of living--which the Government accorded to them in 1917 and 1918.
With the cessation of hostilities at the end of 1918, as the cost of
living continued to advance, the Miners’ Federation (which had elected
for its new secretary a young South Wales miner, Mr. Frank Hodges,
who had educated himself at Labour Colleges; and had also converted
its presidency into a full-time salaried post, and for the first time
acquired an office in London) again took up the forward movement
which it had been concerting five years before; and in February 1919,
after balloting its whole membership, and giving elaborate notice,
it demanded from the employers a general advance of wages of 30 per
cent, the reduction of the hours of labour by an average of one-fourth
(the nominal Eight Hours Day to be made a nominal Six Hours Day),
and--most momentous of all--the elimination of the profit-making
capitalist from the industry by the Nationalisation of the Mines,
for which the Trades Union Congress had been vainly asking for over
twenty years. As the railwaymen and the transport workers were at the
same time in negotiation for improvements in their condition, there
seemed, in March 1919, every prospect of the outbreak of a general
strike on a scale even greater than that of 1912, the “Triple Alliance”
uniting a membership of more than a million and a half, and wielding
in combination the adult male labour of something like one-sixth of
the whole nation. The Government, which was still, under war powers,
directing both the mines and the railways, responded by the offer
of a Statutory Commission, under a Judge of the High Court, with
practically unlimited powers of investigation and recommendation; at
the same time giving the Federation publicly to understand that, whilst
a strike would be suppressed with all the powers of the State, the
recommendations of the Commission would be accepted by the Cabinet. The
conference of the Miners’ Federation spent many hours in deliberation.
A large section of the delegates was for an immediate strike. The men
had, indeed, an extraordinarily advantageous strategic position. The
nation’s stocks of coal were at a minimum, London having only three
days’ supply in hand. Ultimately the advice of the leaders prevailed;
and it was decided to postpone the withdrawal of labour for three
weeks, and to take part in the Statutory Commission, on the express
condition that this body presented an Interim Report within that time;
and--most revolutionary of all--that the Federation should be allowed
to nominate to the Commission, not only three of its own members to
balance the three coal-owners who had been informally designated by
the Mining Association of Great Britain, but also three out of the
six professedly disinterested members, so as to balance the three
capitalists whom the Government had already chosen as representing the
principal industries dependent on the supply of coal at a moderate
price. To these terms the Prime Minister acceded. The Miners’
Federation, setting a new precedent of far-reaching effect, thereupon
nominated, along with its President, Vice-president, and Secretary, not
three other workmen, but three economists and statisticians belonging
to the Fabian Society, known to them by their lectures and writings.
The proceedings of this Commission, which sat daily in public in the
King’s Robing-Room at the House of Lords, created an immense sensation.
Instead of the Trade Union, it was the management of the industry that
was put upon its trial. The large profits of the industry under war
conditions were revealed, and especially the enormous gains of the most
advantageous mines; and although the Government itself had benefited
through the Excess Profits’ Duty by 50, 60, and eventually 80 per cent
of these gains, it became apparent to every one that, but for this
abstraction, the price of coal might have been reduced and the miners’
conditions improved to an extent never before suspected. It was seen,
too, that it was the separate ownership of the mines which stood in
the way of the national sharing of the advantages of the best among
them. The chaotic state of the industry, with 1500 separately working
joint-stock companies operating at very different costs--with no
co-ordination of production, and with extremely wasteful arrangements
for transport and retail distribution--was vividly presented. At
the same time the unsatisfactory conditions under which the miners
lived were impressively demonstrated, the scandalously bad housing of
the mining community in Lanarkshire and elsewhere making a national
sensation. Prompt to the appointed day the Commission presented
three Reports. The three mine-owners proposed no improvement in the
organisation of the industry, and offered an advance of eighteen pence
a day and a reduction of hours by one per day, being only half what
was demanded. The six representatives of the miners presented a long
and reasoned justification of the men’s case; arguing that, with a
unification of the industry in national ownership, with the adoption
in all the mines of the mechanical improvements already in use in the
best-managed among them, with a more carefully concerted transport
system, and with a municipal organisation of retail distribution,
it was practicable to concede the men’s full claim of 30 per cent
advance and a two hours’ shortening of the working day without any
increase in the price of coal to the consumer. The Chairman of the
Commission presented a third report, intermediate in its tenour, in
which he was joined by the three disinterested capitalist members,
proposing an immediate advance of two shillings per day, or 20 per
cent, and an immediate reduction of one hour per day, with a promise
of a further reduction by an hour in 1920, if the condition of the
industry warranted it. With regard to nationalisation, this Report
declared that, as there had not been sufficient time to investigate
the proposal, the Commission would continue its sittings, and promptly
present a further report; but that it was plain, even on the evidence
so far submitted, that the present system stood condemned, and
that some other system must, by national purchase of the mines, be
substituted for it--either State administration, or some plan by which
the mines could be placed under a joint control in which the miners
would share. This impressive declaration by the judicial Chairman,
supported by the three capitalist members who were not mine-owners,
made a great public sensation. The Cabinet immediately accepted the
Chairman’s Report, pledging itself to carry it out “in the letter and
in the spirit.” The Miners’ Federation hesitated, but ultimately, in
consideration of the offer of an immediate further examination of
nationalisation, in the light of Mr. Justice Sankey’s significant
findings, decided to ballot its members, who, to the great relief
of the public, by large majorities agreed to accept the Government
proposal.