POLITICAL ORGANISATION
[1900-1920]
Fifty years ago, when Professor Brentano described the British Trade
Union Movement with greater knowledge and insight than any one else
had then shown,[707] nothing seemed more unlikely than that the
Movement would become organised as an independent political party,
appealing to the whole electorate on a general programme, returning
its own contingent of members to the House of Commons, and asserting
a claim, as soon as that contingent should become the strongest party
in Parliament, to constitute a national administration. For nearly a
quarter of a century more, as we have described in a previous chapter,
though Trade Unionism was making itself slowly more and more felt in
politics, it was still possible for economists and statesmen to believe
that “Labour” in Great Britain would organise only to maintain its
sectional industrial interests, and that it would impinge on politics,
if at all, only occasionally, in defence of Trade Unionism itself,
or in support of some particular project of industrial law. By 1894,
when the first edition of this book was published, there was already
manifest, as we then stated, a great shifting of Trade Union opinion on
the
“pressing question of the position to be taken by the
Trade Union world in the party struggles of To-day and the
politics of To-morrow. In our chapter on ‘The Old Unionism
and the New,’ we described the rapid conversion of the
superior workman to the general principles of Collectivism.
This revolution of opinion in the rank and file has been
followed by a marked change of front on the part of the
salaried officials, and by a growing distrust of the
aristocratic and middle-class representatives of both the
great political parties. To the working-man politician
of 1894 it seems inconceivable that either landlords or
capitalists will actively help him to nationalise land and
mining royalties, to absorb unearned incomes by taxation,
or to control private enterprise in the interests of the
wage-earner. Thus we find throughout the whole Trade Union
world an almost unanimous desire to make the working-class
organisations in some way effective for political purposes.
Nor is this a new thing. The sense of solidarity has, as we
have seen, never been lacking among those active soldiers
and non-commissioned officers who constitute the most
vital element in the Trade Union army. The generous aid
from trade to trade, the pathetic attempts to form General
Unions, the constant aspirations after universal federation,
all testify to the reality and force of this instinctive
solidarity. The Collectivist faith of the ‘New Unionism’ is
only another manifestation of the same deep-rooted belief in
the essential Brotherhood of Labour. But, as we have seen,
the basis of the association of these million and a half
wage-earners is, primarily, sectional in its nature. They
come together, and contribute their pence, for the defence
of their interests as Boilermakers, Miners, Cotton-spinners,
and not directly for the advancement of the whole working
class. Among the salaried officers of the Unions, it is,
as we have said, the Trade Official, chosen and paid for
the express purpose of maintaining the interests of his own
particular trade, who is the active force. The effect has
been to intensify the sectionalism to which an organisation
based on trades must necessarily be prone. The vague
general Collectivism of the non-commissioned officers has
hitherto got translated into practical proposals only in so
far as it can be expressed in projects for the advantage
of a particular trade. Some organised trades have known
how to draft and to extort from Parliament a voluminous
Labour Code, the provisions of which are exceptionally
well adapted for the protection of the particular workers
concerned. The ‘particulars clause’[708] and the law against
the ‘over-steaming’ of weaving sheds are, for instance,
triumphs of collective control which could hardly have been
conceived by any one except the astute trade officials of
the Cotton Operatives. But there is no attempt to deal with
any question as a whole. Trade Unionists are, for instance,
unanimously in favour of drastic legislation to put down
‘sweating’ in all trades whatsoever. But no salaried officer
of the Trade Union world feels it to be his business to
improve the Labour Code for any industry but his own. Thus,
whereas the Factory Acts have been effectively elaborated to
meet the special circumstances of a few trades, for all the
rest they remain in the form of merely general prohibitions
which it is practically impossible to enforce. How far it is
possible, by the development of Trades Councils, the reform
of the Trades Union Congress, the increased efficiency of
the Parliamentary Committee, the growth of Trade Union
representation in the House of Commons, or, finally, by the
creation of any new federal machinery, to counteract the
fundamental sectionalism of Trade Union organisation, to
supplement the specialised trade officials by an equally
specialised Civil Service of working-class politicians,
and thus to render the Trade Union world, with its million
of electors, and its leadership of Labour, an effective
political force in the State, is, on the whole, the most
momentous question of contemporary politics.”[709]
The quarter of a century that has elapsed since these words were
written has seen an extensive political development of the Trade Union
Movement, taking the form of building up a separate and independent
party of “Labour” in the House of Commons, which we have now to
record.[710]
The continued propaganda of the Socialists, and of others who wished to
see the Trade Union Movement become an effective political force, which
we have described as active from 1884 onwards, did not, for nearly a
couple of decades, produce a political “Labour Party.” So strong was
at that time the resistance of most of the Trade Union leaders to any
participation of their societies in general politics, even on the lines
of complete independence of both Liberal and Conservative Parties,
that “Labour Representation” had still, for some years, to be fought
for apart from Trade Unionism. The leaders, indeed, did not really
care about Trade Union influence in the House of Commons.[711] Many
of them, as we have described, remained for a whole generation averse
even from legal regulation of the conditions of employment. In national
politics they were mostly Liberals, with the strongest possible
admiration for Gladstone and Bright; or else (as in Lancashire)
convinced Conservatives, concerned to defend the Church of England or
Roman Catholic elementary schools in which their children were being
educated or carried away by the glamour of an Imperialist foreign
policy. They asked for nothing more than a few working-class members in
the House of Commons, belonging to one or other of the “respectable”
parties, to which they could thus obtain access for the adjustment of
any matters in which their societies happened to be interested.
In 1887, at his first appearance at the Trades Union Congress, J. Keir
Hardie,[712] representing a small Union of Ayrshire Miners, demanded a
new start. He called upon the Trade Unionists definitely to sever their
connection with the existing political parties, by which the workmen
were constantly befooled and betrayed, and insisted on the necessity
of forming an entirely independent party of Labour, to which the whole
working-class movement should rally. On the Congress he produced no
apparent effect.[713] But, six months later, when a Parliamentary
vacancy occurred in Mid-Lanark, Keir Hardie was nominated, against
Liberal and Tory alike, on the principle of entire independence; and
in spite of every effort to induce him to withdraw,[714] he went to
the poll, obtaining only 619 votes. A society was then formed to
work for independent Labour representation, under the designation of
the Scottish Labour Party, having for chairman Mr. R. B. Cunninghame
Graham, M.P., who had been elected as a Liberal but who had become a
Socialist. The “new spirit” of 1889, which we have described, put heart
into the movement for political independence; and after much further
propaganda by the Socialists,[715] at the General Election of 1892 Keir
Hardie was elected for West Ham, avowedly as the first member of an
independent Party of Labour; together with fourteen other workmen,[716]
whose independence of the Liberal Party, even where it was claimed,
was less marked than their obvious jealousy of Keir Hardie. There was
apparently still no hope of gaining the adherence of the Trade Unions
as such; and at the Glasgow Trades Union Congress of 1892 arrangements
were made by a few of the delegates to hold a smaller conference, which
took place at Bradford, in 1893, under the chairmanship of Keir Hardie,
when those who were determined to establish a separate political party
formed a society, made up of individual adherents, which was styled the
Independent Labour Party. In this the Scottish Labour Party was merged,
but it remained without the affiliation of Trade Unions in their
corporate capacity. The Independent Labour Party, of which throughout
his life Keir Hardie was the outstanding figure, carried on a strenuous
propagandist campaign, and during the next two years put up independent
candidates at by-elections, with uniform ill-success. At the General
Election of 1895, no fewer than twenty-eight “I.L.P.” candidates
went to the poll, every one of them (including Keir Hardie himself
at West Ham) being unsuccessful. With two or three exceptions, the
Trade Unionist members in alliance with the Liberal Party successfully
maintained their seats. The establishment of an aggressively
independent Labour Party in Parliament still looked hopeless.
With the new century an effort was made on fresh lines. The continuous
propaganda had had its effect, even on the Trades Union Congress.
In 1898 it could be suggested in the presidential address[717] that
a “committee should be appointed to draft a scheme of political
organisation for the Trade Union world on the ground that just as
trades federation is a matter of vital necessity for industrial
organisation, so also will a scheme of political action be of vital
necessity if we wish Parliament to faithfully register the effect of
the industrial revolution on our social life.” The very next year a
resolution--which had been drafted in London by the members of the
Independent Labour Party--was carried on the motion of the Amalgamated
Society of Railway Servants, against the votes of the miners as well as
of the textile workers, directing the convening of a special congress
representing Trade Unions, Co-operative Societies, and Socialist
organisations, in order to devise means of increasing the number of
Labour members.[718] It was urged on the Parliamentary Committee that
the Socialist organisations had a right to be strongly represented on
the proposed Committee; and the Parliamentary Committee, which had no
faith in the scheme and attached little importance to it, nominated
four of its members (S. Woods, W. C. Steadman, R. Bell, and W. Thorne),
all of whom afterwards became Members of Parliament, to sit with two
representatives each from the Independent Labour Party (Keir Hardie
and J. Ramsay MacDonald), the Fabian Society (G. Bernard Shaw and E.
R. Pease), and the Social Democratic Federation (H. Quelch and H. R.
Taylor). This Committee took the business into its own hands, and drew
up a constitution, upon a federal basis, for a “Labour Representation
Committee,” as an independent organisation, including Trade Unions
and Trades Councils, along with Co-operative and Socialist Societies;
and in February 1900 a specially summoned congress, attended by 129
delegates, representing Trade Unions aggregating half a million
members, and Socialist societies claiming fewer than seventy thousand,
adopted the draft constitution, established the new body, appointed its
first executive, and gave it, in Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, not merely
its first secretary but also a skilful organiser, to whose patient and
persistent effort no small part of its subsequent success has been due.
For two years the Labour Representation Committee, in spite of diligent
propaganda among Trade Union Executives, seemed to hang fire. The
General Election of 1900 found it unprepared; and, though it put
fifteen candidates in the field, only two of them were successful.
No Co-operative Society joined; the Social Democratic Federation
withdrew; scarcely a score of Trades Councils were enrolled; and though
sixty-five separate Trade Unions gradually adhered--being only about
five or six per cent of the total number--the aggregate affiliated
membership of the Party did not reach half a million. Then the tide
turned, mainly through the rally of Trade Unionism as it became aware
of the full implications of the assault upon it made by the decision in
the Taff Vale case, which we have already described. The miners stood
aloof only because they preferred to use their own organisation. In
1901 the Miners’ Federation voted a levy of a penny per month on all
its membership in order to create a Parliamentary Fund; and the running
of as many as seventy candidates was then talked about. During the year
1902 the number of adhering Trade Unions and Trades Councils, and the
total affiliated membership, were alike practically doubled. In the
next two years the Committee contested no fewer than six Parliamentary
by-elections, returning its members in half of them.[719] Meanwhile
the Conservative Government obstinately refused to allow legislation
restoring to Trade Unions the statutory status of 1871-76, of which
the judges’ decision in the Taff Vale case had deprived them. Careful
preparation was accordingly made for a successful appeal to Trade
Unionists at the General Election which was approaching; and when
it came, in January 1906, no fewer than fifty independent Labour
candidates were put in the field against Liberals and Conservatives
alike. To the general surprise of the political world, as many as
twenty-nine of these were successful; besides a dozen other workmen,
mostly miners, who again stood with Liberal Party support and were
still regarded as belonging to that Party. The twenty-nine at once
formed themselves into, and were recognised as, a separate independent
party in the House of Commons, with its own officers and whips,
concerned to push its own programme irrespective of the desires and
convenience of the other political parties. At the same time the Labour
Representation Committee changed its name to the Labour Party.
We need not concern ourselves with the Parliamentary struggles of the
next three years, during which the Parliamentary Labour Party may claim
to have indirectly secured the passage, as Government measures, of the
Trade Disputes Act, the Miners’ Eight Hours Act, and the Trade Boards
Act, and to have developed something like a Parliamentary programme.
It suffered, however, in the Trade Union world, from its inevitable
failure to impress its will on the triumphant Liberal majority of
these years. What saved the Labour Party from decline, and gave it
indeed fresh impetus in the Trade Union movement, was the renewed legal
assault on Trade Unionism itself, which in 1909, as we have described,
culminated in the Osborne Judgement of the highest Appeal Court, by
which the Trade Unions were prohibited from applying any of their
funds to political activities and to the support of the Labour Party
in particular. The refusal of the Liberal Government for four whole
years to remedy this gross miscarriage of justice though conscious that
it was not permanently defensible; and the unconcealed desire of the
Liberal Party politicians to put the Labour Party out of action as an
independent political force, swung over to its side the great bulk of
active Trade Unionists, including many, especially in Lancashire, who
had hitherto counted to the Conservative Party. By 1913, in spite of a
large number of injunctions restraining Trade Unions from affiliating,
the Labour Party could count on a membership of nearly two millions,
and this number has since steadily grown. The two General Elections
of 1910, though dominated by other issues, left the Parliamentary
Labour Party unshaken; whilst the accession to the Party of the Miners’
members raised its Parliamentary strength to forty-two. Payment of
members was secured in 1911, and the Mines (Minimum Wage) Act in 1912,
but not until 1913 could the Government be induced to pass into law
the Trade Union Act, which once more permitted Trade Unions to engage
in any lawful purposes that their members desired. This concession
was, even then, made subject to any objecting member being enabled
to withhold that part of his contribution applicable to political
purposes--an illogical restriction, because it applied only to the
dissentient’s tiny fraction of money, and he was not empowered to
prevent the majority of members from using the indivisible corporate
power of the Union itself. This restriction, not put upon any other
corporate body, was universally believed to have been imposed, in the
assumed interest of the Liberal Party, with the object of crippling
the political influence of Trade Unionism; and is still bitterly
resented.[720]
Whilst it was very largely the successive assaults on Trade Unionism
itself that built up the Labour Party, the ultimate defeat of these
assaults, the concession of Payment of Members, and the attainment of
legal security by the Trade Union Act of 1913, did nothing to stay its
progress. At the same time, the injunctions of the years 1909-12,
and the fear of litigation, together with a certain disillusionment
with Parliamentary action among the rank and file, led to the gradual
falling away of some Trade Unions, mostly of comparatively small
membership. The very basis of the Labour Party, upon which alone it
has proved possible to build up a successful political force--the
combination, within a political federation, of Trade Unions having
extensive membership and not very intense political energy, and
Socialist societies of relatively scanty membership but overflowing
with political talent and zeal--necessarily led to complications. It
needed all the tact and patient persuasion of the leaders of both
sections to convince the Socialists that their ideals and projects were
not being sacrificed to the stolidity and the prejudices of the mass of
Trade Unionists; and at the same time to explain to the Trade Unionists
how valuable was the aid of the knowledge, eloquence, and Parliamentary
ability contributed by such Socialist representatives as Keir Hardie,
Philip Snowden, J. Ramsay MacDonald, and W. C. Anderson. Moreover, the
complications and difficulties of Parliamentary action in a House of
Commons where the Government continuously possessed a solid majority;
the political necessity of supporting the Liberal Party Bills relating
to the Budget and the House of Lords, and of not playing into the hands
of a still more reactionary Front Opposition Bench, were not readily
comprehended by the average workman. What the militants in the country
failed to allow for was the impotence of a small Parliamentary section
to secure the adoption of its own policy by a Parliamentary majority.
But it is, we think, now admitted that it was a misfortune that the
Parliamentary Labour Party of these years never managed to put before
the country the large outlines of an alternative programme based on the
Party’s conception of a new social order, eliminating the capitalist
profit-maker wherever possible, and giving free scope to communal and
industrial Democracy--notably with regard to the administration of
the railways and the mines, the prevention of Unemployment, and also
the provision for the nation’s non-effectives, which the Government
dealt with so unsatisfactorily in the National Insurance Act of 1911.
The failure of the Parliamentary Labour Party between 1910 and 1914
to strike the imagination of the Trade Union world led to a certain
reaction against political action as such, and to a growing doubt among
the active spirits as to the value of a Labour Party which did not
succeed in taking vigorous independent action, either in Parliament
or on the platform and in the press, along the lines of changing the
existing order of society. A like failure to strike the imagination
characterised _The Daily Citizen_--the organ which the Labour Party and
the Trade Union Movement had established with such high hopes--and its
inability to gain either intellectual influence or adequate circulation
did not lighten the somewhat gloomy atmosphere of the Labour Party
councils of 1913-14.[721] This reaction did not appreciably affect the
numerical and financial strength of the Labour Party itself, as the
relatively few withdrawals of Unions were outweighed by the steady
increase in membership of the hundred principal Unions which remained
faithful, by the accession of other Unions, and by the continual
increase in the number and strength of the affiliated Trades Councils
and Local Labour Parties. But the reaction in Trade Union opinion
weakened the influence of the members of the Parliamentary Party,
alike in the House of Commons and in their own societies. A wave of
“Labour Unrest,” of “Syndicalism,” of “rank and file movements” for
a more aggressive Trade Unionism, of organisation by “shop stewards”
in opposition to national executives, and of preference for “Direct
Action” over Parliamentary procedure swept over British Trade Unionism,
affecting especially the London building trades, the South Wales
Miners, and the engineering and shipbuilding industry on the Clyde.
The impetuous strikes in 1911-13 of the Railwaymen, the Coal-miners,
the Transport Workers, and the London Building Trades, which we have
already described, were influenced, partly, by this new spirit. The
number of disputes reported to the Labour Department, which had sunk
in 1908 to only 399, rose in 1911 to 903, and culminated in the latter
half of 1913 and the first half of 1914 in the outbreak of something
like a hundred and fifty strikes per month. British Trade Unionism was,
in fact, in the summer of 1914, working up for an almost revolutionary
outburst of gigantic industrial disputes, which could not have failed
to be seriously embarrassing for the political organisation to which
the movement had committed itself, when, in August 1914, war was
declared, and all internal conflict had perforce to be suspended.
During the war (1914-18) the task of the Labour Party was one of
exceptional difficulty. It had necessarily to support the Government in
a struggle of which five-sixths of its Parliamentary representatives
and probably nine-tenths of its aggregate membership approved. The very
gravity of the national crisis compelled the Party to abstain from any
action that would have weakened the country’s defence. On the other
hand, the three successive Administrations that held office during the
war were all driven by their needs, as we have already described, to
impose upon the wage-earners cruel sacrifices, and to violate, not
once but repeatedly, all that Organised Labour in Britain held dear.
The Party could not refrain, at whatever cost of misconstruction, from
withstanding unjustifiable demands by the Government;[722] protesting
against its successive breaches of faith to the Trade Unions; demanding
the conditions in the forthcoming Treaty of Peace that, as could be
already foreseen, would be necessary to protect the wage-earning class;
standing up for the scandalously ill-used “conscientious objectors,”
and doing its best to secure, in the eventual demobilisation and
social reconstruction, the utmost possible protection of the mass of
the people against Unemployment and “Profiteering.” In all this the
Labour Party earned the respect of the most thoughtful Trade Unionists,
but necessarily exposed itself to a constant stream of newspaper
misrepresentation and abuse. Any opposition or resistance to the
official demands was inevitably misrepresented as, and mistaken for, an
almost treasonable “Pacifism” or “Defeatism”--a misunderstanding of the
attitude of the Party to which colour was lent by the persistence and
eloquence with which the small Pacifist Minority within the Party--a
minority which, it must be said, included some of the most talented
and active of its leading members in the House of Commons--used every
opportunity publicly to denounce the Government’s conduct in the war.
But although the Pacifist Group in Parliament was strenuously supported
in the country by the relatively small but extremely active constituent
society of the Labour Party styled The Independent Labour Party--the
very name helping the popular misunderstanding--the Trade Unionists,
forming the vast majority of the Labour Party, remained, with extremely
few exceptions, grimly determined at all costs to win the war.
If Organised Labour had been against the war, it is safe to say that
the national effort could not have been maintained. The need for the
formal association of the Labour Party with the Administration was
recognised by Mr. Asquith in 1915, when he formed the first Coalition
Cabinet, into which he invited the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour
Party, Mr. Arthur Henderson (Friendly Society of Ironfounders), who
became President of the Board of Education. Later on, in 1916, Mr. G.
N. Barnes (Amalgamated Society of Engineers) was appointed to the new
office of Minister of Pensions. When, in December 1916, Mr. Asquith
resigned, and Mr. Lloyd George formed a new Coalition Government, Mr.
Henderson entered the small War Cabinet that was then formed, with
the nominal office of Paymaster-General; whilst Mr. Barnes continued
Minister of Pensions, Mr. John Hodge (British Steel Smelters’ Society)
was appointed to the new office of Minister of Labour, and three other
members of the Party (Mr. W. Brace, South Wales Miners; Mr. G. H.
Roberts, Typographical Society; and Mr. James Parker, National Union of
General Workers) received minor ministerial posts.[723]
Throughout the whole period of the war all the several demands of
the Government upon the organised workers, the abrogation of “Trade
Union Conditions” in all industries working for war needs, the first
and second Munitions of War Acts, the subversion of individual liberty
by the successive orders under the Defence of the Realm Acts, the
successive applications of the Military Service Acts, the imposition
of what was practically Compulsory Arbitration to settle the rates
of wages--were accepted, though only after serious protest, by large
majorities at the various Conferences of the Labour Party, as well as
by the various annual Trades Union Congresses,[724] in spite of the
resistance of minorities, including more than “pacifists.” The entry of
Mr. Henderson into Mr. Asquith’s first Coalition Government, and that
of Mr. Barnes into Mr. Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, together with the
acceptance of ministerial office by other leading members of the Labour
Party--though any such ministerial coalition was in flagrant violation
of the very principles of its existence, and was strenuously combated
on grounds of expediency by many of its members who loyally supported
the war--equally received the endorsement of large majorities at the
Party Conferences. From the beginning of the war to the end, the Labour
Party, alike in all its corporate acts and by the individual efforts of
its leading members (other than the minority already mentioned), stuck
at nothing in its determination to help the Government to win the war.
More controversial were the persistent efforts made by the Labour
Party to maintain its international relations with the Labour and
Socialist Movements of Continental Europe. From the first it was seen
to be important to get the representatives of the Trade Unions and
Socialist organisations of the Allied Nations, and not merely their
Governments, united in a declaration of the aims and the justification
of a war that was everywhere outraging working-class idealism. Such a
unanimity was successfully achieved in February 1915 at a conference,
held in London at the instance of the Labour Party, of delegates
from the working-class organisations of France, Belgium, and Great
Britain, with Russian representatives, then allied in arms against
the Central Empires.[725] Later on, when a Minority Party had been
formed among the German Socialists, and when the Austrian and Hungarian
working-class Movements were also in revolt against the militarism of
their Government, repeated efforts were made by the Labour Party to
encourage this revolt, and for this purpose to obtain the necessary
Government facilities for a meeting, in some neutral city, of the
working-class “International,” at which the Allied Case could be laid
before the neutrals, and a basis found for united action with all
the working-class elements in opposition to the dominant military
Imperialism. After the Russian revolution of March 1917, the Petrograd
Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council actually issued an invitation for a
working-class “International” at Stockholm; and the participation
of the British Labour Party in this International Congress, which
was not then favoured by Mr. Henderson, received at one time no
small support from the Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George. In the end
the Government despatched Mr. Henderson on an official mission to
Petrograd (incidentally empowering him, if he thought fit, to remain
there as Ambassador at £8000 a year). Meanwhile the proposal for an
International Congress had been modified, first into one for a purely
consultative gathering, and then into one for a series of separate
interviews between a committee of neutrals and the representatives of
each of the belligerents in turn, with a view to discovering a possible
basis for peace--a project to which Mr. Henderson, from what he learnt
at Petrograd, was converted. A National Conference of the Labour
Party in August 1917 approved of participation in such a Congress at
Stockholm; but the French and Italian Governments would not hear of
it, and Mr. Lloyd George went back on his prior approval, absolutely
declining to allow passports to be issued. Amid great excitement, and
under circumstances of insult and indignity which created resentment
among the British working class, Mr. Henderson felt obliged to tender
his resignation of his place in the War Cabinet, in which he was
succeeded by Mr. Barnes, who was getting more and more out of sympathy
with the majority of the Party.[726] The Labour Party Executive, in
alliance with the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress,
then applied itself to getting agreement among the Labour and Socialist
Movements of the Allied Nations as to the lines on which--assuming
an Allied victory--the terms of peace should be drawn, in order to
avert as much as possible of the widespread misery which, it could be
foreseen, must necessarily fall upon the wage-earning class. In this
effort, in which Mr. Henderson displayed great tact and patience, he
had the implicit sanction of the British Government, and, with some
reluctance, also of the Governments of the other Allied Nations by whom
the necessary passports were issued for an Inter-Allied Conference in
London in August 1917, which was abortive; for provisional discussions
at Paris in February 1918; and for a second Inter-Allied Conference
at the end of the same month in London, which resulted in a virtually
unanimous agreement upon what should be the terms of peace,[727] on a
basis already approved on December 28, 1917, by a Joint Conference of
the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, and widely published
all over the world. The terms thus agreed were, in fact, immediately
adopted in outline in a public deliverance by Mr. Lloyd George as those
on which Germany could have peace at any time; and the same proposals
were promptly made the basis of President Wilson’s celebrated “Fourteen
Points” on which eventually (but only after another ten months’ costly
war) the Armistice of November 11, 1918, was concluded. Profound was
the disappointment, and bitter the resentment, of the greater part of
the organised Labour Movement of Great Britain when it was revealed how
seriously the diplomatists at the Paris Conference had departed from
these terms in the Treaty of Peace which was imposed on the Central
Empires.[728]
We have already attempted to sum up the effect of the Great War on
the industrial status of Trade Unionism. It is more difficult to
estimate its effect on the political organisation of the movement. The
outbreak of the war had found the Labour Party, in the see-saw of Trade
Union opinion to which we have elsewhere referred, suffering from an
inevitable disillusionment among Trade Unionists as to the immediate
potency of Parliamentary representation--a disillusionment manifested
in the outbreak of rebellious strikes that characterised the years
1911-14. The achievements of the Labour Party in the House of Commons
had fallen short of the eager hopes with which the new party had raised
its standard on its triumphant entry in 1906. In 1914, it may be said,
the Labour Party was at a dead point. The effect upon it of the Great
War was to raise it in proportion to the height of the vastly greater
issues with which it was compelled to deal. Amid the stress of war,
and of the intensely controversial decisions which it had necessarily
to take, the Labour Party revised its constitution, widened its aims,
opened its ranks to the “workers by brain” as well as the workers by
hand, and received the accession of many thousands of converts from
the Liberal and Conservative Parties. It made great progress in its
difficult task of superimposing, on an organisation based on national
societies, the necessary complementary organisation of its affiliated
membership by geographical constituencies. It equipped itself during
the war, for the first time, with a far-reaching and well-considered
programme not confined to distinctively “Labour” issues, but covering
the whole field of home politics, and even extending to foreign
relations.[729] The formulation of such a programme, from beginning to
end essentially Socialist in character, and including alike ideals of
social reconstruction and detailed reforms of immediate practicability,
together with the wholehearted adoption of this programme, after six
months’ consideration by the constituent societies and branches, was
a notable achievement, which placed the British Labour Party ahead of
those of other countries. Moreover, the formulation of a comprehensive
social programme and of “terms of Peace,” based on the principles
for which the war had ostensibly been fought--principles which were
certainly not carried in the Treaty of Peace--transformed the Labour
Party from a group representing merely the class interests of the
manual workers into a fully constituted political Party of national
scope, ready to take over the government of the country and to conduct
both home and foreign affairs on definite principles. Taken together
with the intellectual bankruptcy of the Liberal Party and its apparent
incapacity to formulate any positive policy, whether with regard to
the redistribution of wealth within our own community or with regard
to our attitude towards other races within or without the British
Empire, the emergence of the Labour Party programme meant that the
Party stood forth, in public opinion, as the inevitable alternative to
the present Coalition Government when the time came for this to fall.
The result was that, aided by the steady growth of Trade Unionism,
the Party came near, between 1914 and 1919, to doubling its aggregate
membership. When hostilities ceased, it insisted on resuming the
complete independence of the other political parties, which it had, by
joining the successive Coalition Governments, consented temporarily to
forgo; and such of its leaders as refused to withdraw from ministerial
office[730] were unhesitatingly shed from the Party. Meanwhile, the
extension of the franchise and redistribution of seats, which had
been carried by general consent in the spring of 1918, turned out to
raise the electorate to nearly treble that of 1910, whilst the new
constituencies proved to have been so adjusted as greatly to facilitate
an increase in the number of miners’ representatives. When the General
Election came, in December 1918, though the Labour Party fought under
great disadvantages and it was seen that most of the soldier electors
would be unable to record their votes, it put no fewer than 361 Labour
candidates in the field against Liberal and Conservative alike,
contesting two-thirds of all the constituencies in Great Britain. In
face of a “Lloyd George tide” of unprecedented strength these Labour
candidates received nearly one-fourth of all the votes polled in
the United Kingdom; and though five-sixths of these numerous Labour
candidatures were unsuccessful (including, unfortunately, most of its
ablest Parliamentarians such as Messrs. Henderson,[731] MacDonald,
Anderson, and Snowden), the Party increased its numerical strength in
the House of Commons by 50 per cent, and, to the universal surprise,
returned more than twice as many members as did the remnant of the
Liberal Party adhering to Mr. Asquith--becoming, in fact, entitled to
the position of “His Majesty’s Opposition.” It can hardly be said that
during the session of 1919 the Parliamentary Labour Party, considerably
strengthened in numbers but weakened by the defeat of its ablest
Parliamentarians, has, under the leadership of the Right Honourable
W. Adamson (Scottish Miners), made as much of its opportunities as
the Labour Party in the country expected and desired. The political
organisation of the Trade Union world remains, indeed, very far from
adequate to the achievement of its far-reaching aims. It is not merely
that the average British Trade Unionist, unlike the German, the Danish,
Swedish, or the Belgian, has learnt so little the duty of subordinating
minor personal or local issues, and of voting with his Party with
as much loyalty as he shows in striking with his fellow-unionists,
that by no means all the aggregate British Trade Union membership
can steadfastly be relied on to vote for the Labour candidates. Nor
is it only that the British Labour Party still fails to command the
affiliation of as many Trade Unions as the Trades Union Congress, and
that the great majority of the smaller and the local societies--less
from dissent than out of apathy--remain aloof from both sides of
the national organisation. The Trades Union Congress itself, after
engendering, as independent organisations, first the General Federation
of Trade Unions, and then the Labour Party, has not yet resigned itself
to limiting its activities. The General Federation of Trade Unions may
be said, indeed, to have now disappeared from the Trade Union world
as an effective force in the determination of industrial or political
policy. There remain three separate organisations of national scope;
the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress which it
is now proposed to transform into a General Council, the Executive
Committee of the Labour Party, and the members of the House of Commons
who form the Parliamentary Labour Party. Unfortunately, between these
three groups there has been some lack of mutual consultation, and an
indefiniteness if not a confusion of policy which stands in the way
of effective leadership.[732] This has prevented the bringing to bear
upon the political field of the full force, now almost a moiety of the
whole registered electorate of Great Britain, that the Trade Union
world may (including the wives of Trade Unionist electors) fairly
claim to include. Fundamentally, however, the shortcomings of the
political organisation of the Trade Union world are to be ascribed
to its failure, down to the present, to develop a staff of trained
political officers at all equal to those of the Trade Union organisers
and Trade Union negotiators in the industrial field. The Labour Party,
which can as yet rely only on the quite inadequate contribution from
its affiliated societies of no more than twopence per member annually,
has, so far, not succeeded in obtaining and keeping the services,
as Registration Officers and Election Agents, of anything like so
extensive and so competent a staff as either of the other political
parties; and Labour Party candidatures are still run, occasionally with
astonishing success, very largely upon that transient enthusiasm of
the crowd upon which experienced electioneers wisely decline to rely
for victory. What is, however, much more crippling to the Labour Party
than the scanty funds with which its constituent societies supply it,
and this insufficiency in the staff of trained election organisers, is
the scarcity of trained Parliamentary representatives. Down to to-day
the great bulk of Labour Members of Parliament have been drawn from
the ranks of the salaried secretaries and other industrial officers
of Trade Unions, who are nearly always not only men of competence in
their own spheres, but also exceptionally good speakers for popular
audiences, and, generally, in many respects above the average of
middle-class candidates. But as Members of Parliament they have serious
shortcomings. They can, to begin with, seldom devote the necessary
time to their new duties. They usually find themselves compelled to
strive to combine attendance at the House of Commons with the onerous
industrial service of their societies. The Trade Unions have, as yet,
only in a few cases realised the necessity of setting free from the
constant burden of Trade Union work--as they might by promotion to
some such consultative office as that of a salaried President--such
of their officials as secure election to Parliament; whilst these
officers, unable to maintain themselves and their families in London
on their Parliamentary allowance for expenses of £400 a year, and
afraid lest the loss of their seats may presently leave them without
incomes, dare not resign their Trade Union posts. The result is an
imperfect and always uncertain attendance of the Labour Members at the
House of Commons; a fatal division and diversion of their attention;
and an inevitable failure on their part to discharge with the fullest
efficiency the duties of their two offices. Equally destructive of
Parliamentary efficiency is the omission of the Trade Union world to
provide or secure any training in the duties of a Member of Parliament
for those whom they select as candidates and whose election expenses
they defray with unstinted liberality. The lifelong training which
these candidates have enjoyed as Branch and District Secretaries, as
industrial organisers and negotiators, and as administrators of great
Trade Unions, valuable as it is for Trade Union purposes, does not
include, and indeed tends rather to exclude, the practical training
in general politics, the working acquaintance with the British
Constitution, the knowledge of how to use and how to control the adroit
and well-equipped Civil Service, and the ability to translate both the
half-articulate desires of the electorate to the House of Commons,
and the advice of the political expert to the electorate, which,
coupled with the general art of “Parliamentarianism,” constitutes the
equipment of the really efficient Member of the House of Commons. Add
to this that the very training which the life of the successful Trade
Union official has given him, his perpetual struggle to rise in his
vocation in competitive rivalry, not with persons of opposite views but
actually with personal acquaintances of the same craft and the same
political opinions as himself, is, in itself, not a good preparation
for the incessant mutual consultation and carefully planned “team-work”
which contributes so much to the effectiveness of a minority party
in the House of Commons. Add to this again the personal rivalries
among members of the Party, the jealousies from which no party is
free, and the almost complete lack of opportunity for the constant
social intercourse with each other away from the House of Commons that
the members of the other parties enjoy--and it will be realised how
seriously the Parliamentary Labour Party is handicapped by being made
up, as it is at present, almost entirely of men who are compelled also
to serve as Trade Union officials. Already, however, there are signs of
improvement. Some Trade Unions, whilst willing to spend large sums on
Parliamentary candidatures, are demurring to their salaried officials
going to Westminster. The Workers’ Educational Association, Ruskin
College, and other educational agencies are doing much to provide a
wider political training than Trade Unionists have heretofore enjoyed.
And as the Parliamentary Labour Party, claiming to-day to represent,
not the Trade Unionists only, but the whole community of “workers
by hand or by brain,” expands from sixty to four or six times that
number--as it must before it can be confronted with the task of forming
a Government--it will necessarily come to include an ever-increasing
proportion of members drawn from other than Trade Union ranks; whilst
even its Trade Union members cannot fail to acquire more of that habit
of mutual intercourse and that art of combined action which, coupled
with the Parliamentary skill and capacity for public administration
of those who rise to leadership, is the necessary basis of successful
party achievement.
Meanwhile, the political organisation of the Trade Union Movement, and
the enlargement of its ideas on Communal and Industrial Democracy,
have been manifesting themselves also in the important sphere of Local
Government. After the “Labour” successes at the elections of Local
Authorities, which continued for a whole decade from 1892, and placed
over a thousand Trade Unionists and Socialists on Parish, District,
Borough and County Councils, there ensued another decade in which,
in the majority of districts, this active participation in local
elections was impaired by the diversion of interest, both to Parliament
and to industrial organisation. From 1914 to 1919 local elections
were suspended. On their resumption in the latter year, they were
energetically contested by the Labour Party, all over Great Britain, on
its new and definitely Socialist programme, with the unexpected result
that, up and down the country, the Labour candidates frequently swept
the board, polling in the aggregate a very substantial proportion of
the votes, electing altogether several thousand Councillors (five or
six hundred in Scotland alone), and being returned in actual majorities
in nearly half the Metropolitan Boroughs, several important Counties
and Municipalities, and many Urban Districts and Parishes.
* * * * *
It must be apparent that any history of Trade Unionism that breaks off
at the beginning of 1920 halts, not at the end of an epoch, but--we may
almost say--at the opening of a new chapter. British Trade Unionism, at
a moment when it is, both industrially and politically, stronger than
ever before, is seething with new ideas and far-reaching aspirations.
At the same time, its most recent advances in status and power are
by no means yet accepted by what remains the governing class; its
political and industrial position is still precarious, and within a
very brief space it may again find itself fighting against a frontal
attack upon its very existence. And in face of the common enemy--now
united as an autocratic capitalism--Industrial Democracy is uncertain
of itself, and almost blindly groping after a precise adjustment of
powers and functions between Associations of Producers and Associations
of Consumers.
Let us elaborate these points in detail. One result of the Great War
has been, if not the actual enthronement of Democracy, a tremendous
shifting of authority to the mass of the people. Of this shifting of
the basis of power the advance in the status of Trade Unionism and the
advent, in British politics, of the Labour Party, are but preliminary
manifestations. As yet the mass of the people, to whom power is
passing, have made but little effective use of their opportunities. At
least seven-eighths of the nation’s accumulated wealth, and with it
nearly all the effective authority, is still in the hands of one-eighth
of the population; and the seven-eighths of the people find themselves
in consequence still restricted, as regards the means of life, to less
than half of that national income which is exclusively the product of
those who labour, by hand or by brain. The “leisure class”--the men
and women who live by owning and not by working, a class increasing in
actual numbers, if not relatively to the workers--seem to the great
mass of working people to be showing themselves, if possible, more
frivolous and more insolent in their irresponsible consumption, by
themselves and their families, of the relatively enormous share that
they are able to take from the national income. It is coming to be
more and more felt that the continued existence of this class involves
a quite unwarranted burden upon their fellow-citizens working by
hand or by brain. Very naturally there is widespread discontent, and
the emergence of all sorts of exasperated criticisms and extravagant
schemes.
The truth is, of course, that Democracy, whether political or
industrial, is still in its infancy. The common run of men and women,
who have only just been enfranchised politically, and are even yet only
partially organised industrially, are as yet unable to make full use
of Democratic institutions. The majority of them cannot be induced,
in the economic pressure to which Capitalism subjects them, to take
the trouble or give the continuous thought involved in any effective
participation in public affairs. The result is that such Democratic
institutions as we possess are, of necessity, still inefficiently
managed; and neither the citizen-consumers nor the Trade Unionist
producers find themselves exercising much effective control over their
own lives. The active-minded minority sees itself submerged by the
“apathetic mass”; the individual feels enslaved by the “machine.” The
complaint of the “rank and file”--using that term to mean, not any
“extremist” minority, but merely the majority, the “common run of
men”--comes to no more than that they do not find themselves obtaining
the results in their daily lives which they expected, and which they
were, as they understood, promised. This, we think, is the explanation
of the perpetual “see-saw” within the Labour Movement, decade after
decade, between an infatuation for industrial or “direct” action and
an equal infatuation for political or Parliamentary and Municipal
action--each, unfortunately, to the temporary neglect of the other. Or
to state the Democratic problem in a more fundamental form, the see-saw
is between the aspiration to vest the control over the instruments of
production in Democracies of Producers, and the alternating belief
that this control can best be vested in Democracies of Consumers. But
it is abundantly clear, alike from history and economic analysis, that
in any genuine Democracy both forms of organisation are indispensably
required. In the modern State every person throughout his whole life
consumes a great variety of commodities and services which he cannot
produce; whilst men and women, occupied in production, habitually
produce a single commodity or service for other persons to consume.
Their interests and desires as producers, and as producers of a single
commodity or service, are not, and can never be, identical with the
interests and desires of these same people as consumers of many
different commodities and services--just as their interests and desires
as citizens of a community, or as members of a race which they wish to
continue in independent existence, are not necessarily identical with
those of which they are conscious either as producers or as consumers.
It is, in fact, now realised that Democratic organisation involves
the acceptance, not of a single basis--that of the undifferentiated
human being--but of various separate and distinct bases: man as a
producer; man as a consumer; man as a citizen concerned with the
continued existence and independence of his race or community; possibly
also other bases, such as man as a scientist or man as a religious
believer. What is wrong in each successive generation is the intolerant
fanaticism of the enthusiasts which leads them to insist on any
one form of this multiplex Democracy to the exclusion of the other
forms. We see to-day uppermost a revival of faith in Associations of
Producers, as being, in an industrial community, the form of Democratic
organisation most important to the working people. To some one-sided
minds, as was inevitable, the all-embracing Association of Producers
seems the only form that Democratic organisation can validly take.
Interesting to the historian is the intellectual connection of this
revival with the previous manifestations, in the Trade Union Movement,
of the idea of “Co-operative Production,” whether in the revolutionary
Owenism of 1830-34, the Christian Socialism of 1848-52, or the
experiments of particular Unions in 1872. As we have explained, the
Trade Union, being essentially an Association of Producers, has never
quite lost the idea that, so far as industry is concerned, this form
of association, and no other, is Democracy. But the new form in which
the faith in Associations of Producers is now expressing itself is
concerned less with the ownership of the instruments of production (it
being to-day commonly taken for granted that this must be vested in the
community as a whole) than with the management of industry. According
to the most thoroughgoing advocates of this creed, the management of
each industry should be placed, not separately in the hands of those
engaged in each establishment, any more than in the hands of private
capitalist employers, but in the hands of the whole body of persons
throughout the community who are actually co-operating in the work
of the industry, whether by hand or by brain; this management being
shared, by Workshop or Pit Committees, District Councils and National
Boards, among all these “workers.”
This conception seems to us too one-sided to be adopted in its
entirety, or to be successful if it were so adopted. We venture to
give, necessarily in a cursory and generalised form, the results
of our own investigations into the management of industries and
services by Democracies of Producers and Democracies of Consumers
respectively. In so far as we may draw any valid inferences from
previous experiments of different kinds, we must note that the record
of the successive attempts, in modern industry, to place the entire
management of industrial undertakings in the hands of Associations
of Producers has been one of failure. In marked contrast, the
opposite form of Democracy, in which the management has been placed
in the hands of Associations of Consumers, has achieved a large and
constantly increasing measure of success. We do not refer merely to the
ever-growing development throughout the civilised world, in certain
extensive fields of industrial operation, of Municipal and National
Government, though from this some valuable lessons may be learnt.
Even more instructive is the continuous and ever-widening success, in
the importing, manufacturing, and distributing of household supplies,
of the voluntary Associations of Consumers known as the Co-operative
Movement, which is almost entirely made up of the same class of men and
women--often, indeed, of the very same individuals--as we find in the
abortive “self-governing workshops” and in the Trade Union Movement.
Why, for instance, is it possible for the manual workers, organised as
consumers, to carry on successfully the most extensive establishments
for the milling of flour, the baking of bread, the making of boots and
shoes, and the weaving of cloth, when repeated attempts to conduct such
establishments by the same kind of members organised as Associations of
Producers have not succeeded?[733]
The Democracy of Associations of Consumers, whatever its shortcomings
and defects, has, we suggest, the great advantage of being demonstrably
practicable. The job can be done. It has also the further merit that
it solves the problem presented by what the economists call the Law
of Rent. It does not leave to any individual or group of individuals
the appropriation and enjoyment of those advantages of superior sites
and soils, and other differential factors in production, which should
be, economically and ethically, taken only by the community as a
whole. Moreover, management by Associations of Consumers, whether
National, Municipal, or Co-operative, gives one practical solution to
the problem of fixing prices without competition, by enabling every
producer to be paid at his own full Standard Rate, and distributing
the various products at prices just over cost, the whole eventual
surplus being returned to the purchasers in a rebate or discount
on purchases, called “dividend”; or otherwise appropriated for the
benefit and by direction of the consumers themselves. Hence there is
no danger of private monopoly; no opportunity for particular groups of
producers to make corners in raw materials; to get monopoly prices for
commodities in times of scarcity, or to resist legitimate improvements
in machinery or processes merely because these would interfere with
the vested interests of the persons owning particular instruments
of production or possessing a particular kind of skill. In short,
the control of industries and services by Democracies of Consumers
realises the Socialist principle of production for use and not for
exchange, with all its manifold advantages. The most significant
of these superiorities of Production for Use over Production for
Exchange is its inevitable effect on the structure and working of
Democracy. Seeing that the larger the output the smaller the burden
of overhead charges--or, to put it in another way, the greater the
membership the more advantageous the enterprise--Associations of
Consumers are not tempted to close their ranks. This kind of Democracy
automatically remains always open to new-comers. On the other hand,
Associations of Producers, whether capitalists, technicians or manual
workers, exactly because they turn out commodities and services not
for their own use, but for exchange, are perpetually impelled to
limit their numbers, so as to get, for the existing membership, the
highest possible remuneration. This kind of Democracy is, therefore,
instinctively exclusive, tending always to become, within the
community, a privileged body. All this amounts to a solid reason in
favour of “nationalisation,” “municipalisation,” and the consumers’
Co-operative Movement, which is reflected in the continuous and
actually accelerating extension of all of them, not in one country
only, but throughout the civilised world.[734]
But the Democracy based on Associations of Consumers, whether in the
National Government, the Municipality, or the Co-operative Society,
reveals certain shortcomings and defects, some transient and resulting
only from the existing Capitalism, and others needing the remedy of
a complementary Democracy of Producers. So long as we have a society
characterised by gross inequalities of income, it is inevitable that
the conduct of industries and services by Associations of Consumers
should be even more advantageous to the rich than to the poor, and
of little or no use to those who are destitute. The same trail of a
Capitalist environment affects also the conditions of employment. The
Co-operative Society, the Municipality or the Government Department
cannot practically depart far from the normal conditions of the rest
of the community; and thus avails little to raise the condition of
the manual working class. If, however, the Associations of Consumers
were co-extensive with the community, they would themselves fix the
standard. But there is a more fundamental criticism. The Democracy
of Consumers, in Co-operative Society, Municipality or State--however
wide may be the franchise, however effective may be the Parliamentary
machinery, and however much the elected executive is brought under
constituency control--has the outstanding defect to the manual-working
producer that, so far as his own working life is concerned, he does
not feel it to be Democracy at all! The management, it is complained,
is always “government from above.” It is exactly for this reason
that in the evolution of British Democracy the conduct of industries
and services by Associations of Consumers--whether in the voluntary
Co-operative Society or in the geographically organised Municipality
or State--has had, for a correlative, the organisation of Associations
of Producers, whether Professional Societies or Trade Unions. Their
first object was merely to maintain and improve their members’ Standard
of Life. Without the enforcement of a Standard Rate and protection
against personal tyranny, government by Associations of Consumers is
apt to develop many of the evils of the “sweating” characteristic of
unrestrained capitalism. It is not now denied, even by the economists,
that Trade Unionism, in its establishment of the Doctrine of the Common
Rule, and the elaboration of this into the Standard Rate, the Normal
Day, and the Policy of the National Minimum, has to its credit during
the past three-quarters of a century no small measure of success, with
more triumphs easily within view. Trade Unionism among the manual
workers, like Professional Association among the brain-workers,[735]
has emphatically justified itself by its achievements.
But Trade Unionism, though it has gone far to protect the worker from
tyranny, has not, as yet, gained for him any positive participation in
industrial management. To this extent the complaints of the objectors
among the manual-working class are justified. In the perpetual see-saw
of opinion in the Labour world the movement towards Parliamentary
action and in favour of what we may call Communal Socialism became,
at one time, almost an infatuation, in that its most enthusiastic
advocates thought that it would, by itself, solve all problems. A
reaction was inevitable. The danger is that this reaction may itself
take on the character of an infatuation--this time in favour of the
universal domination of Associations of Producers, and the “Direct
Action” to which they are prone--against which, in the perpetual
see-saw, there will come, in its turn, a contrary reaction, in the
course of which Trade Unionism itself may suffer.
This is not to say that the legitimate and desirable movement,
specially characteristic of the present century, for increased direct
participation in “management” of the Associations of Producers--whether
of Professional Societies or of Trade Unions, of doctors and teachers,
or of miners and railwaymen--has been, in this or any other country,
anything like exhausted. In our view, in fact, it is along these lines
that the next developments are to be expected. But, unless we are
mistaken in our analysis, this does not mean that the Trade Unions or
Professional Societies will take over the entire management of their
industries or services, for which, in our opinion, no Association
of Producers can be fitted.[736] Democracies of Producers, like
Democracies of Consumers, have their peculiar defects, and develop
certain characteristic toxins from the very intensity of the interests
that they represent. The chief of these defects is the corporate
exclusiveness and corporate selfishness habitually developed by
associations based on the common interest of a particular section of
workers, as against other sections of workers on the one hand, and
against the whole body of consumers and citizens on the other. When
Democracies of Producers own the instruments of production, or even
secure a monopoly of the service to be rendered, they have always
tended in the past to close their ranks, to stereotype their processes
and faculties, to exclude outsiders and to ban heterodoxy. We see
this tendency at work alike in the ancient and modern world, in the
castes of India and the Gilds of China, in the mediæval Craft Gilds as
well as in the modern Trade Unions and Professional Associations. So
long as the Trade Union is an organ of revolt against the Capitalist
System--so long as the manual workers are fighting a common enemy in
the private owner of land and capital--this corporate selfishness is
held in check; though the frequency of demarcation disputes, even in
the Trade Union Movement of to-day, gives some indication of what might
happen if the Trade Union became an organ of government. We see no
way of securing the community of consumers and citizens against this
spirit of corporate exclusiveness, and against the inherent objection
of an existing generation of producers to new methods of working
unfamiliar to them, otherwise than placing the supreme control in the
Democracies of Consumers and citizens. There is a further and more
subtle defect in Democracies of Producers, the very mention of which
may perhaps be resented by those Industrial Unionists who seek to curb
the “corporateness” of National Gilds by the “self-government” of the
workshop. The experience of self-governing workshops shows that the
relationship between the indispensable director or manager (who must,
like the conductor of an orchestra, decide the tune and set the time)
and the workers whom he directs becomes hopelessly untenable if this
director or manager is elected or dismissible by the very persons to
whom he gives orders. Over and over again, in the records of the almost
innumerable self-governing workshops that have been established in
Great Britain or on the Continent, we find their failure intimately
connected with the impracticable position of a manager directing the
workers during the day, and being reprimanded or altogether superseded
by a committee meeting of these same workers in the evening! Finally,
there is the difficult question of the price to be put on the article
when it passes to the consumer. Normally the price of a commodity must
cover the cost of production, and this cost is, in the main, determined
by the character of the machinery and process employed. Hence, if the
organised workers are given the power to decide not only the number and
qualifications of the persons to be employed but also the machinery
and process to be used, they will, in fact, determine the price to be
charged to the consumer--not always to the consumer’s advantage, or
consistently with the interests of other sections of workers.[737]
To sum up, we expect to see the supreme authority in each industry
or service vested, not in the workers as such, but in the community
as a whole. Any National Board may well include representatives
of the producers of the particular product or service, and also
of its consumers, but they must be reinforced by the presence of
representatives of the community organised as citizens, interested
in the future as well as the present prosperity of the community. The
management of industry, a complex function of many kinds and grades,
will, as we see it, not be the sole sphere of either the one or the
other set of partners, but is clearly destined to be distributed
between them--the actual direction and decision being shared between
the representatives of the Trade Union or Professional Society on
the one hand, and those of the community in Co-operative Society,
Municipality, or National Government on the other. And this recognition
of the essential partnership in management between Associations of
Producers and that Association of Consumers which is the community
in one or other form, will, we suggest, take different shapes in
different industries and services, in different countries, and at
different periods; and, as we must add, will necessarily take time
and thought to work out in detail. One thing is clear. There will
be a steadily increasing recognition of a fundamental change in the
status both of the directors and managers of industry (who are now
usually either themselves capitalists, or hired for the service of
capitalist interests), and of the technicians and manual workers. The
directors and managers of industry, however they may be selected and
paid, will become increasingly the officers of the community, serving
not their own but the whole community’s interests. The technicians and
manual workers will become ever less and less the personal servants
of the directors and managers; and will be more and more enrolled,
like them, in the service, not of any private employer, but of the
community itself, whether the form be that of State or Municipality
or Co-operative Society, or any combination or variant of these. To
use the expression of the present General Secretary of the Miners’
Federation (Frank Hodges), manager, technician, and manual worker alike
will become parties to a “social” as distinguished from a commercial
contract. All alike, indeed, whatever may be the exact form of
ownership of the instruments of production, will, so far as function
is concerned, become increasingly partners in the performance of a
common public service.
We see in this evolution a great future for the Trade Unions, if they
will, in organisation and personal equipment, rise to the height of
their enlarged function. They will need, by amalgamation or federation,
and by affording facilities for easy admission and for a simple
transfer of membership, to make themselves much more nearly than at
present co-extensive with their several industries. They will have to
make special provision in their constitutions to secure an effective
representation, on their own executive and legislative councils, of
distinct crafts, grades, or specialisations, which must always form
small minorities of the whole body. They will find it necessary to
make the local organisation of their members, in branch or district,
much more coincident than at present with their members’ several
places of employment, so as to approximate to making identical the
workshop and the branch. There would seem to be a great development
opening up for the Works Committees and the “Shop Stewards,” brought
effectively into organic relation with the nationally settled
industrial policy. At any rate, in industries already passing under
the control of Associations of Consumers, whether by nationalisation
or municipalisation, or by the spread of consumers’ co-operation,
there will be great scope for District Councils and National Boards,
as well as for Advisory and Research Committees representative of
different specialities, in which managers and foremen, technicians and
operatives, will jointly supersede the capitalist Board of Directors.
But the management of each industry is very far from being the whole
of the task. In Parliament itself, and on Municipal Councils, the
World of Labour, by hand or by brain, will need to give a continuous
and an equal backing to its own political party, in order to see to
it that it has its own representatives--specialised and trained for
this supreme political function--not by ones and twos, but in force;
gradually coming, in fact, to predominate over the representatives of
the surviving capitalist and landlord parties. Trade Unionists, in
the mass, will not only have to continue and extend the loyalty and
self-devotion which have always been characteristic of successful Trade
Unionism, but also to acquire a more comprehensive understanding of
the working of democratic institutions, a more accurate appreciation
of the imperative necessity of combining both the leading types of
democratic self-government--on the one hand the self-government based
on the common needs of the whole population divided into geographical
constituencies, and on the other the self-government springing from the
special requirements of men and women bound together by the fellowship
of a common task and a common technique. The Trade Unions and
Professional Societies, if they are increasingly to participate in the
government of their industries and services, will in particular have
to provide themselves with a greater number of whole-time specialist
representatives, better paid and more considerately treated than at
present, and supplied with increased opportunities for education and
training.
We end on a note of warning. The object and purpose of the workers,
organised vocationally in Trade Unions and Professional Associations,
and politically in the Labour Party, is no mere increase of wages
or reduction of hours.[738] It comprises nothing less than a
reconstruction of society, by the elimination, from the nation’s
industries and services, of the Capitalist Profitmaker, and the
consequent shrinking up of the class of functionless persons who live
merely by owning. Profit-making as a pursuit, with its sanctification
of the motive of pecuniary self-interest, is the demon that has to
be exorcised. The journey of the Labour Party towards its goal must
necessarily be a long and arduous one. In the painful “Pilgrim’s
Progress” of Democracy the workers will be perpetually tempted into
by-paths that lead only to the Slough of Despond. It is not so much the
enticing away of individuals in the open pursuit of wealth that is to
be feared, as the temptation of particular Trade Unions, or particular
sections of the workers, to enter into alliances with Associations
of Capitalist Employers for the exploitation of the consumer.
“Co-partnership,” or profit-sharing with individual capitalists, has
been seen through and rejected. But the “co-partnership” of Trade
Unions with Associations of Capitalists--whether as a development
of “Whitley Councils” or otherwise--which far-sighted capitalists
will presently offer in specious forms (with a view, particularly,
to Protective Customs Tariffs and other devices for maintaining
unnecessarily high prices, or to governmental favours and remissions
of taxation) is, we fear, hankered after by some Trade Union leaders,
and might be made seductive to particular grades or sections of
workers. Any such policy, however plausible, would in our judgement
be a disastrous undermining of the solidarity of the whole working
class, and a formidable obstacle to any genuine Democratic Control of
Industry, as well as to any general progress in personal freedom and in
the more equal sharing of the National Product.
FOOTNOTES:
[707] See his _Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart_, 1871-72; his more
generalised survey, _Das Arbeitsverhältniss gemäss den heutigen Recht_
(Leipsic, 1877), translated as _The Relation of Labour to the Law of
To-day_ (New York, 1890); and his article on “The Growth of a Trades
Union,” in the _North British Review_, October 1870.
[708] Sec. 24 of the Factory Act of 1891 provides, as regards textile
manufactures, that the employer shall supply every worker by the
piece with certain particulars as to the quantity of work and rate of
remuneration for it.
[709] _History of Trade Unionism_, by S. and B. Webb, 1st ed., 1894,
pp. 476-78.
[710] The most important sources of information are the Annual Reports
of the Trades Union Congress, 1874-1919, and other publications of its
Parliamentary Committee; those of the Annual Conferences of the Labour
Representation Committee, 1901-5, and of the Labour Party, 1906-19,
together with the Party’s other publications, especially _Labour and
the New Social Order_, 1918; the reports and contemporary publications
of the Socialist Societies, especially the Independent Labour Party
from 1893, and the Fabian Society from 1884; _Labour Year Book_ for
1916 and 1919; _History of British Socialism_, by M. Beer, vol. ii.,
1920; _History of the British Trades Union Congress_, by W. J. Davis,
2 vols., 1910, 1916; _Die englische Arbeiterpartei_, by G. Guettler,
1914; _Aims of Labour_, by Rt. Hon. A. Henderson, 1918; _History
of the Fabian Society_, by E. R. Pease, 1916; _History of Labour
Representation_, by A. W. Humphrey, 1912; biographies of Joseph Arch,
Henry Broadhurst, Robert Applegarth, Thomas Burt, John Wilson, J. H.
Thomas, W. J. Davis, etc.
[711] The movement for “Labour Representation” (which “at that time
meant working-men members of Parliament and nothing else,” _History
of Labour Representation_, by A. W. Humphrey, 1912) was first got
under way by George Potter’s London Working Men’s Association in
1866, mentioned at the end of Chapter VI. At the second Trades Union
Congress, at Birmingham in 1869, a paper had been read on “Direct
Labour Representation in Parliament,” but Congress took no action.
A separate “Labour Representation League” was then formed under the
presidency of R. M. Lathom, a Chancery barrister, to which many leading
Trade Unionists belonged, of which Henry Broadhurst was secretary
from 1872 to about 1878, and which sought from the Liberal Party
opportunities for the return of a few working-class members; but
(as formerly in the cases of William Newton’s contest for the Tower
Hamlets in 1852 and George Odger’s at Southwark in 1870) in vain. At
the General Election of 1874, as we have already described, fourteen
workmen went to the poll; but in ten of the constituencies they were
fought by both parties, and only in the other four did the Liberals
allow them to be fought by Conservatives alone, with the result that
two only (out of the latter four) were elected, namely, Alexander
Macdonald and Thomas Burt. At the General Election in 1880, again with
Liberal acquiescence, Henry Broadhurst was added to their number;
and in 1885 this was raised to eleven (of whom six were miners). All
these, whilst pushing measures desired by the Trade Unions, acted
habitually with the Liberal Party. In 1886--the Labour Representation
League having faded away about 1881--the Congress appointed a “Labour
Electoral Committee” to do the same work; but this was never able to
free itself from subserviency to the Liberal Party, and it achieved no
success, dying away in 1893. Some personal reminiscences are given in
“Labour Representation Thirty Years Ago,” by Henry Broadhurst, M.P., in
the _Fourth Annual Report of General Federation of Trade Unions_, 1903;
see also _History of Labour Representation_, by A. W. Humphrey, 1912.
[712] In a “scribbling diary” of 1884 is the following entry:
“Written by Jas. K. Hardie, born August 15, 1856, married August 3,
1879, began work as a message boy in Glasgow when 8 years and 9 months
old, wrought for some time also in a printing office in Trongate, in
the brass finishing shop of the Anchor Line Shipping Co., also as a
rivet heater in Thompson’s heatyard. Left Glasgow in the year 1866 and
went into No. 18 pit of the Moss at Newarthill, from thence to Quarter
Iron Works, and again to one or two other collieries in neighbourhood
of Hamilton. Was elected Secretary to Miners’ Association in 1878, and
for the same position in Ayrshire in 1879; resigned April, 1882, when
got appointment unsolicited as correspondent to _Cumnock News_. Brought
up an atheist, converted to Christianity in 1878.”
Keir Hardie, whose kindliness and integrity of character endeared
him to all who knew him, was from 1887 down to his death in 1915 the
apostle of “independency” in the political organisation of Labour. He
sat in the Trades Union Congress from 1887 to 1895 as representative
of the Ayrshire Miners; and in the House of Commons from 1892 to 1895
(for West Ham), from 1906 to 1915 (for Merthyr). He was Chairman of the
“I.L.P.” from 1893 to 1898, and again in 1914. Pending the publication
of a biography by W. Stewart, reference may be made to a biographical
Sketch entitled _From Pit to Parliament_, by Frank Smith; a character
sketch by F. Pethick Lawrence in the _Labour Record_ for August 1905;
the issues of the _Labour Leader_ for September 30 and October 7, 1915;
and an article entitled “An Old Diary,” by F. J. in the _Socialist
Review_, January 1919.
[713] _Annual Report of Trades Union Congress_, 1887.
[714] It is said that the Liberal Party agents attempted, in vain, to
bribe him to withdraw; eventually offering as high a price as a safe
Liberal seat on the first opportunity, all his election expenses, and
£300 a year--if only he would wear the Liberal badge!
[715] See, for instance, the following “Fabian Tracts,” which had a
large circulation among Trade Unionists: No. 6 of 1887, “The True
Radical Programme”; No. 11 of 1890, “The Workers’ Political Programme”;
No. 40 of 1892, “The Fabian Election Manifesto”; No. 49 of 1894, “A
Plan of Campaign for Labour” (_History of the Fabian Society_, by E. R.
Pease, 1916).
[716] These included John Burns (Amalgamated Society of Engineers),
J. Havelock Wilson (National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union), Joseph
Arch (Agricultural Labourers’ Union), W. R. (afterwards Sir William)
Cremer (General Union of Carpenters), G. Howell (Operative Bricklayers’
Society), J. Rowlands (an ex-watchcase-maker), and eight coalminers.
[717] By J. O’Grady (Furnishing Trades), afterwards M.P. for Leeds;
_Annual Report of Trades Union Congress_, 1898.
[718] This was adopted in preference to what was considered a
more extreme proposal (moved by P. Vogel of the Waiters’ Union,
a Socialist), appointing the Trades Union Congress itself the
organisation for independent Labour representation in Parliament;
requiring every Union to contribute a halfpenny per member per annum,
and making the Parliamentary Committee disburse the election expenses
and the salaries of the members returned to the House of Commons
(_Annual Report of Trades Union Congress_, 1899).
It was afterwards stated that the leaders of the Trades Union Congress
had had in contemplation the subordination of the Labour Representation
Committee to the Congress. But with a different constituency the new
body had necessarily to be an independent organisation; and in 1904
the General Purposes Committee reported to the Trades Union Congress,
which endorsed the report, that any resolution to endorse or amend the
constitution of the Labour Representation Committee would not be in
order at the Trades Union Congress (_ibid._, 1904).
[719] D. J. (afterwards Sir David) Shackleton (Lancashire Weavers) was
allowed a walk-over at Clitheroe in 1902; and in 1903 W. (afterwards
the Rt. Honourable W.) Crooks (Coopers) carried Woolwich after an
exciting contest, and Arthur (afterwards the Rt. Honourable Arthur)
Henderson (Friendly Society of Ironfounders) won Barnard Castle in a
three-cornered fight.
[720] In some Unions outside influence, notably that of the railway
companies, went to the expense of printing and distributing hundreds of
thousands of forms by which dissentient members could claim exemption
from the tiny “political” contribution; and in the Amalgamated Society
of Railway Servants, in particular, thousands of such claims were made.
The number has now greatly diminished (1920).
[721] _The Daily Citizen_ was started by a separate limited company,
in which the control was permanently secured to representatives of
the Trade Unions and the Labour Party, on November 8, 1912. The
total capital raised from the Trade Unions from first to last was
approximately £200,000. This important journalistic venture, starting
under good auspices, met with untoward circumstances. It was crippled
by a legal decision that Trade Unions had no power to subscribe to
its cost, or even to make investments in its shares (an inference
from the Osborne Judgement, which was reversed by the Trade Union Act
of 1913, subject to compliance with the conditions as to political
expenditure). Before this set-back could be got over, the outbreak
of war upset all financial calculations, and made the conduct of a
newspaper increasingly onerous. The paper stopped on June 5, 1915, and
the company was wound up, all creditors being paid in full, but the
shareholders losing practically all that they had ventured. The failure
was a serious blow to the Labour Party, which has been badly in want
of a daily newspaper--a lack supplied in 1919 by the energetic and
adventurous _Daily Herald_, which, under the direction of Mr. George
Lansbury, has drawn to itself an unusual amount of talent, and now
needs only whole-hearted support from the Trade Unions.
[722] It was, for instance, only the determined private resistance
of the Trade Unionist leaders of the Labour Party that compelled the
Government to abandon its project of introducing several hundred
thousand Chinese labourers into Great Britain; a project which, if
carried out, not only might have been calamitous in its effect upon
the Standard of Life of the British workman--not to mention other evil
consequences--but would almost certainly have also led to a Labour
revolt against the continuance of the war. In this connection may be
noted the valuable work done throughout the war, not in the interests
of Trade Unionism only, but in those of the wage-earning class, and
of the community as a whole, by the War Emergency Workers’ National
Committee (J. S. Middleton, Honorary Secretary), a body which included
representatives not only of the Parliamentary Committee, Labour
Party, and General Federation, but also of the Co-operative Union,
the National Union of Teachers, and other organisations. The valuable
though often unwelcome assistance which this Committee gave to the
Government by insisting on the redress of grievances that officialdom
would have ignored, and by its working out of policy and persistence
in agitation on such matters as pensions, limitation of prices,
food-rationing, rent restriction, and other subjects, on which its
publications had marked results, deserve the attention of the historian.
[723] Subsequently Mr. J. R. Clynes (National Union of General Workers)
was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Food; and on
Lord Rhondda’s death he succeeded him as Minister of Food.
[724] See the printed reports of Labour Party Conferences and Trades
Union Congresses, 1914-19.
[725] _Report of the Inter-Allied Socialist and Labour Conference_,
February 15, 1915.
[726] Mr. Hodge succeeded to Mr. Barnes as Minister of Pensions, Mr.
Roberts to Mr. Hodge as Minister of Labour, and Mr. G. J. Wardle
(National Union of Railwaymen) to Mr. Roberts as Parliamentary
Secretary of the Board of Trade.
[727] _Memorandum on War Aims_ (Labour Party), February 1918.
[728] It is difficult not to be struck with the greater breadth of
vision, the higher idealism, and (as we venture to say) the larger
statesmanship of the Labour Party in its projects and proposals for
the resettlement of the world after the Great War, compared with
those which the statesmen and diplomatists of the capitalist parties
of Great Britain, France, Italy, and, as we grieve to say, also the
United States, with the acquiescence of deliberately inflamed popular
electorates, succeeded in embodying in the Treaty of Peace. Apart
from the indefensible redistributions of political sovereignty, not
essentially differing in spirit from those of the Congress of Vienna
in 1814-15 (and probably less stable even than these), against which
Labour opinion had strongly protested in advance, it is impossible
not to regret the failure to incorporate in the Treaty the proposals,
for which the Labour Party had secured the support of the organised
working-class opinion of the world, for (i.) the universal abandonment
of discriminatory fiscal barriers to international trade; (ii.) the
administration of Colonial possessions exclusively in the interest of
the local inhabitants, and on the basis of equality of opportunity
for traders of all nations; (iii.) concerted international control
of the exportable surplus of materials and food-stuffs of all the
several countries, so as to mitigate, as far as possible, in the
general world-shortage which the Labour Party foresaw, the inevitable
widespread starvation in the most necessitous areas, whether enemy,
allied, or neutral; (iv.) deliberate Government action in each country
for the prevention of unemployment, instead of letting it occur and
then merely relieving the unemployed. In questions of foreign policy
the Labour Party, inspired by its idealism, has shown itself at its
best, instead of this department of politics being, as is often
ignorantly assumed, altogether beyond its capacity.
[729] The new constitution and enlarged programme which the Labour
Party adopted at its Conferences of 1917-18, after six months’
consideration and discussion by the constituent organisations, were
little more than a ratification for general adoption of what had
become the practice of particular districts. Thus, the more active
Local Labour Parties, such as those of Woolwich and Blackburn, had
long welcomed the adhesion of supporters who were not manual workers.
The successive annual Conferences had passed resolutions which, taken
together, amounted to a pretty complete programme of constructive
legislation, wholly Collectivist in principle. Hence the deliberate
and formal opening of the Party, through the Local Labour Parties,
to “workers by brain” as well as “workers by hand”; and the explicit
adoption, as a programme, of _Labour and the New Social Order_ were not
such innovations as the newspapers made out and as the public generally
supposed. But they created a sensation, not only in the United
Kingdom, but also in the United States and in the British Dominions;
and they led to a considerable accession of membership, largely from
the professional and middle classes, which was steadily increased as
the unsatisfactory character of the Treaty of Peace, the continued
“militarism” of the Government, and the aggression of a “Protectionist”
capitalism became manifest.
[730] Messrs. Barnes, Roberts (who became Minister of Food), Parker,
and Wardle.
[731] Mr. Henderson was re-elected to Parliament in 1919 at a
bye-election, capturing a strong Conservative seat at Widnes
(Lancashire).
[732] A “Joint Board”--from which the General Federation of Trade
Unions was afterwards excluded--and, later on, joint meetings of the
Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress and the Executive
Committee of the Labour Party, did something to remove friction.
[733] For the successive experiments in Co-operative Production by
Associations of Producers the student is referred to _The Co-operative
Movement in Great Britain_, by Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sidney Webb)
(1891); _Co-operative Production_, by Benjamin Jones (1894); and, for a
more recent survey, the supplement to _The New Statesman_ of February
14, 1914, entitled “Co-operative Production and Profit Sharing.”
[734] See _Towards Social Democracy?_ by Sidney Webb (1916); and for
recent surveys, the supplements to _The New Statesman_ of May 30, 1914,
and May 8, 1915, entitled, respectively, “The Co-operative Movement”
and “State and Municipal Enterprise.”
[735] For a recent survey of Professional Association in England and
Wales--the only general study of it known to us--see the supplements
to the _New Statesman_ of September 25 and October 2, 1915 (“English
Teachers and their Professional Associations”), and April 21 and
28, 1917 (“Professional Associations”). The student will note the
distinction between two types of associations among professional
brain-workers, one having essentially Trade Union purposes, the other
(which we distinguish as the Scientific Society) concerned only for the
increase of knowledge.
[736] We add as an Appendix an extract from the concluding chapter of
our _Industrial Democracy_, published in 1897, in which we dealt with
this point.
[737] We do not discuss here all the difficulties inherent in the
government of a large and populous community--such, for instance, as
that of combining a large measure of local autonomy (which is what many
people mean by freedom) with the necessary unity of national policy
and central control (without which there would be gross inequality,
internecine strife, and chaos). This difficulty has to be faced
alike by Industrial Unionists, Gild Socialists, and the advocates of
Democracy based on geographical constituencies. Nor have we mentioned
the problems, in which the Trade Unions have their own wealth of
experience, as to the relationship between elected representatives and
their constituents; between representative assemblies and executive
committees; and between executive committees and the official
staff. These problems and difficulties (on which we have written in
our _Industrial Democracy_) are common to all democratic systems
of administration, whether based on constituencies of producers,
consumers, or citizens. It seems to us that constituencies of producers
present special difficulties of their own, such as (i.) that of
defining the boundaries between industries or services, and (ii.) the
problem, within an industry or a service, of how to provide for the
representation of numerically unequal distinct sections, groups, or
grades, each with its own _technique_. The further we go in Democracy
the more complicated it becomes, and the greater the need for knowledge.
[738] This is well put by an American economist. “The Trade Union
programme, or rather the Trade Union programmes, for each Trade Union
has a programme of its own, is not the unrelated economic demands
and methods which it is usually conceived to be, but it is a closely
integrated social philosophy and plan of action. In the case of most
Union types the programme centres indeed about economic demands and
methods, but it rests on the broad foundation of the conception of
right, of rights, and of general theory peculiar to the workers; and
it fans out to reflect all the economic, ethical, juridical, and
social hopes and fears, aims, attitudes, and aspirations of the group.
It expresses the workers’ social theory and the rules of the game to
which they are committed, not only in industry but in social affairs
generally. It is the organised workers’ conceptual world” (_Trade
Unionism in the United States_, by R. F. Hoxie, p. 280).
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I
ON THE ASSUMED CONNECTION BETWEEN THE TRADE UNIONS AND THE GILDS IN
DUBLIN
In Dublin the Trade Union descent from the Gilds is embodied in the
printed documents of the Unions themselves, and is commonly assumed to
be confirmed by their possession of the Gild charters. The Trade Union
banners not only, in many cases, bear the same arms as the old Gilds,
but often also the date of their incorporation. Thus, the old society
of “regular” carpenters (now a branch of the Amalgamated) claims to
date from 1490; the “Regular Operative House-painters’ Trade Union”
connects itself with the Guild of St. Luke, 1670; and the local unions
of bricklayers and plasterers assume the date of the incorporation of
the Bricklayers’ and Plasterers’ Company by Charles II. (1670). The box
of the Dublin Bricklayers’ Society does, in fact, contain a parchment
which purports to be the original charter of the latter Company. How
this document, given to the exclusively Protestant incorporation of
working masters, which was abolished by Statute in 1840, came into the
possession of what has always been a mainly Roman Catholic body of
wage-earners, dating certainly from 1830, is not clear. The parchment,
which is bereft of its seal and bears on the back, in the handwriting
of a lawyer’s clerk, the words “Bricklayers, 28th June, 1843,” was
probably thrown aside as worthless after the dissolution of the Company.
A search among contemporary pamphlets brought to light an interesting
episode in the history of the Dublin building trades. It appears that,
after the dissolution of the Company, Benjamin Pemberton, who had been
Master, and who was evidently a man of energy and ability, attempted
to form an alliance between the then powerful journeymen bricklayers’
and plasterers’ societies and the master bricklayers and plasterers,
in order to resist the common enemy, the “foreign contractor.” This
had long been a favourite project of Pemberton’s. Already in 1812
he had urged the rapidly decaying Company to resist the uprising of
“builders,” and to admit Roman Catholic craftsmen. But the Company,
which then included scarcely a dozen practising master bricklayers
or plasterers, took no action. In 1832 Pemberton turned to the men,
and vainly proposed to the “Trades Political Union,” a kind of Trades
Council, that they should take common action against “the contract
system.” At last, in 1846, six years after the abolition of the
Company, he seems to have succeeded in forming some kind of alliance.
The journeymen bricklayers and plasterers were induced to accept, from
himself and his associates, formal certificates of proficiency. Several
of these certificates, signed by Pemberton and other employers, are in
the possession of the older workmen, but no one could explain to us
their use. The alliance probably rested on some promise of preference
for employment on the one part, and refusal to work for a contractor
on the other. This close connection between a leading member of the
Company and the Trade Unionists may perhaps account for the old
charter, then become waste paper, finding its way into the Trade Union
chest.
Particulars of Pemberton’s action will be found in the pamphlet
entitled _An Address of the Bricklayers and Plasterers to the Tradesmen
of the City of Dublin on the necessity of their co-operating for the
attainment of their corporate rights and privileges_, by Benjamin
Pemberton (Dublin, 1833, 36 pages), preserved in Vol. 1567 of the
_Haliday Tracts_ in the Royal Irish Academy. In no other case, either
in Dublin or elsewhere, have we found a Trade Union in possession of
any Gild documents or relics.
The absolute impossibility of any passage of the Dublin Companies into
the local Trade Unions will be apparent when we remember that the
bulk of the wage-earning population of the city are, and have always
been, Roman Catholics. The Dublin Companies were, to the last, rigidly
confined to Episcopalian Protestants. Even after the barriers had been
nominally removed by the Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the Companies,
then shrunk up into little cliques of middle-class capitalists, with
little or no connection with the trades, steadfastly refused to admit
any Roman Catholics to membership. A few well-to-do Roman Catholics
forced themselves in between 1829 and 1838 by mandamus. But when
inquiry was made in 1838 by the Commissioners appointed under the
Municipal Corporations Act, only half a dozen Roman Catholics were
members, and the Companies were found to be composed, in the main, of
capitalists and professional men. There is no evidence that even one
wage-earner was in their ranks. Long before this time the Trade Unions
of Dublin had obtained an unenviable notoriety. Already, in 1824, the
Chief Constable of Dublin testified to the complete organisation of
the operatives in illegal associations. In 1838 O’Connell made his
celebrated attack upon them in the House of Commons, which led to a
Select Committee. In short, whilst the Dublin Companies were, until
their abolition by the Act of 1840, in much the same condition as those
of London, with the added fact of religious exclusiveness, the Dublin
Trade Unions were long before that date at the height of their power.
The adoption by the Dublin Trade Unions of the arms, mottoes, saints,
and dates of origin of the old Dublin Gilds is more interesting as a
trait of Irish character than as any proof of historic continuity.
Thus, in their rules of 1883, the bricklayers content themselves with
repeating the original preface common to the Trade Societies which
were formed in the beginning of this century, to the effect that “the
journeyman bricklayers of the City of Dublin have imposed on themselves
the adoption of the following laudable scheme of raising a Fund for
friendly society purposes.” A card of membership, dated 1830, bears no
reference to the Gild or Company of Bricklayers and Plasterers from
whom descent is now claimed. The rules of 1883 are entitled those of
the “incorporated” brick or stone layers’ association, and in the
edition of 1888 this had developed into the “Ancient Gild of Saint
Bartholomew.” Finally, the coat of arms of the old company with the
date of its incorporation (“A.D. 1670”) appear on the new banner of
the society. Similarly, the old local society of “Regular Carpenters,”
which was well known as a Trade Union in 1824, and was engaged in a
strike in 1833 (seven years before the abolition of the “Company of
Carpenters, Millers, Masons, and Tylers, or Gild of the fraternity
of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the house of St. Thomas the Martyr,”
established by Henry VIII. in 1532), adopted for the first time, in its
rules of 1881, the coat of arms and motto of the Gild, but retained
its own title of “The United Brothers of St. Joseph.” The card of
membership, printed in 1887, boldly gives the date of establishment
as 1458, whilst other printed matter places it at 1490. The Dublin
painters now inscribe 1670 on their new banner, but the earliest
traditions of their members date only from 1820. In short, the Irish
Trade Unionist, with his genuine love for the picturesque, and his
reverence for historical association, has steadily “annexed” antiquity,
and has embraced every opportunity for transferring the origin of his
society a few generations further back.
APPENDIX II
RULES AND REGULATIONS OF THE GRAND NATIONAL CONSOLIDATED
TRADES UNION OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND, INSTITUTED FOR
THE PURPOSE OF THE MORE EFFECTUALLY ENABLING THE WORKING
CLASSES TO SECURE, PROTECT, AND ESTABLISH THE RIGHTS OF
INDUSTRY (1834).
(Goldsmiths’ Library, University of London.)
I. Each Trade in this Consolidated Union shall have its Grand Lodge in
that town or city most eligible for it; such Grand Lodge to be governed
internally by a Grand Master, Deputy Grand Master, and Grand Secretary,
and a Committee of Management.
II. Each Grand Lodge shall have its District Lodges, in any number, to
be designated or named after the town or city in which the District
Lodge is founded.
III. Each Grand Lodge shall be considered the head of its own
particular trade, and to have certain exclusive powers accordingly; but
in all other respects the Grand Lodges are to answer the same ends as
the District Lodges.
IV. Each District Lodge shall embrace within itself all operatives of
the same trade, living in smaller towns or villages adjacent to it; and
shall be governed internally by a President, Vice-President, Secretary,
and a Committee of Management.
V. Each District Lodge shall have (if necessary) its Branch Lodge
or Lodges, numbered in rotation; such Branch Lodges to be under the
control of the District Lodge from which they sprung.
VI. An unlimited number of the above described Lodges shall form and
constitute the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of Great
Britain and Ireland.
VII. Each District shall have its Central Committee, composed of a
Deputy, or Deputies, from every District Lodge of the different trades
in the district; such Central Committee shall meet once in every
week to superintend and watch over the interests of the Consolidated
Union in that District, transmitting a report of the same, monthly,
to the Executive Council in London, together with any suggestions of
improvements they may think proper.
VIII. The General government of the G.N.C.T.U. shall be vested in a
Grand Council of Delegates from each of the Central Committees of all
the Districts in the C.U., to be holden every six months, at such
places as shall be decided upon at the preceding Council; the next
Meeting of the Grand Council of the C.U. to be held on the first day of
September 1834, and to continue its sitting so long as may be requisite.
IX. During the recess of the Grand Council of Delegates, the Government
of the C.U. shall be vested in an Executive Council of Five; which
Executive will in future be chosen at the Grand Delegate Council
aforesaid.
X. All dispensations or grants for the formation of new Lodges shall
come from the Grand Lodge of each particular trade, or from the
Executive Council. Applications for dispensations to come through the
Central Committee of the District or by memorial, signed by at least 20
Operatives of the place where such new Lodge is proposed to be founded.
XI. The Executive Council shall act as trustees for all Funds provided
by the C.U., for the adjustment of strikes, the purchasing or renting
of land, establishing provision stores, workshops, etc.; or for any
other purposes connected with the general benefit of the whole of the
Union.
XII. All sums for the above purposes to be transmitted from the Lodges
to the Executive Council through some safe and accredited medium.
XIII. District and Grand Lodges shall have the control of their own
funds, subject to the levies imposed upon them by the Executive Council.
XIV. The ordinary weekly subscriptions of members be threepence each
member.
XV. No strike or turn out for an _advance_ of wages shall be made by
the members of any Lodge in the Consolidated Union without the consent
of the Executive Council; but in all cases of a _reduction_ of wages
the Central Committee of the District shall have the power of deciding
whether a strike shall or shall not take place; and should such Central
Committee be necessitated to order a levy in support of such strike
brought on by such reduction of wages, such order shall be made on
all the Lodges; in the first instance, in the District in which such
reduction hath taken place; and on advice being forwarded to the
Executive they shall consider the case, and order accordingly.
XVI. No higher sum than 10s. per week each shall be paid to members
during a strike or turn out.
XVII. All Lodges shall be divided into local sections of 20 men each,
or as near that number as may be.
_Miscellaneous and Auxiliary Lodges_
XVIII. In all cases where the number of operatives in a particular
Trade, in any District, is too limited to allow of such Trade forming
a Lodge of itself, the members of such Trade shall be permitted to
become Unionists by joining the Lodge of any other Trade in the
District. Should there be several Trades in a District thus limited
with respect to the number of their Operatives, they shall be allowed
to form together a District Miscellaneous Lodge, with permission, in
order to extend the sphere of the brotherhood, to hold out the hand of
fellowship to all really useful Labourers employed productively.
XIX. And, in order that all acknowledged Friends to the Productive
Classes may attach themselves to the C.U., an Auxiliary Lodge may be
established in every City or Town in the Kingdom. The members of each
Lodge shall conform to all the Rules and Regulations herein contained,
and be bound in the same manner, and subject to all the Laws of the
G.U.C.T.U.; and shall not, in any manner, or at any time or place,
speak or write _anything_ in opposition to these Laws or the interests
of the Union aforesaid. The Auxiliary Lodge shall be liable to be
dissolved according to Article XXII.
XX. Lodges of Industrious Females shall be instituted in every District
where it may be practicable; such Lodges to be considered, in every
respect, as part of, and belonging to, the G.N.C.T.U.
_Employment of Turn Outs_
XXI. In all cases of strikes or turn outs, where it is practicable
to employ Members in the making or producing of such commodities
or articles as are in demand among their brother Unionists, or any
other operatives willing to purchase the same, each Lodge shall
provide a work-room or shop in which such commodities and articles
may be manufactured on account of that Lodge, which shall make proper
arrangements for the supply of the necessary materials; over which
arrangements the Central Committee of the District shall have the
control, subject to the scrutiny of the Grand Lodge Committee of the
Trade on strike.
XXII. The Grand Lodge of each Trade to have the power of dissolving
any District Lodge, in that Trade, for any violation of these Laws,
any outrage upon the Public Peace, or for gross neglect of Duty. All
Branch, Miscellaneous, or Auxiliary Lodges to be subject to the same
control.
XXIII. The internal management and general concerns of each Grand or
District Lodge are vested in a Committee of Management, composed of at
least Seven, and not more than 25 Members, each to be chosen by Ballot,
and elected by having not less than three-fourths of the Votes of the
Members present, at the time of his election, in his favour. The whole
of this Committee to go out of office Quarterly, eligible, however,
to re-election. The Grand Master, or President, and the Secretary,
or Grand Secretary of a Grand or a District Lodge, to be considered
Members of its Committee of Management by virtue of their Offices.
XXIV. Each Grand Lodge, in this C.U., to be considered the centre of
information regarding the general affairs of its particular Trade; each
District Lodge to communicate with its Grand Lodge at the end of each
month, and to give an account to it of the number of people Members in
the District Lodge--the gross number of hours of labour performed by
them in that district--the state of its funds--and any local or general
intelligence that may be considered of interest to the Grand Lodge.
XXV. The Committee of Management in each Lodge shall sit at least on
one evening in every week for the despatch of business--and oftener if
necessary.
XXVI. Each Grand or District Lodge to hold its meetings on one evening
in every month; at which meeting a Report of the Proceedings of the
Committee, during the past month, shall be laid before the Members,
together with an Abstract of the state of the Funds, an account of the
prospects of the Society, and any propositions or By-Laws which the
Committee may have to suggest for adoption, and any other information
or correspondence of interest to the Members. All nominations of fresh
Officers to be made at Lodge meetings, and all complaints of Members to
be considered and discussed therein.
XXVII. The Grand Master or Deputy Grand Master, President, or
Vice-President, or both, shall preside at all meetings of Grand or
District Lodges, to keep order, state and put questions according to
the sense and intention of the Members, give effect to the resolutions,
and cause them to be put in force; and they shall be addressed by
Members, during Lodge hours, by their proper titles.
XXVIII. No subject which does not immediately concern the interests of
the Trade shall be discussed at any meetings of Committees or Lodges;
and no proposition shall be adopted in either without the consent of
at least three-fourths of the members present at its proposal--the
question to be decided by ballot if any Member demand it. Not less
than five Members of Committee of Management to constitute a Quorum,
provided the rest have all been duly summoned; no Grand or District
Lodge to be considered open unless at least 30 members be present.
XXIX. Each Grand or District Lodge shall have the power to appoint
Sub-Committees to enquire into or manage any affair touching their
interests, of which Committees the head officers of the Lodge are
always to be considered Members.
_Of Secretaries_
XXX. The duties of a secretary to a Grand or District Lodge are:--To
attend Lodge and Committee meetings and take minutes of the
proceedings, entering the same in a book to be kept for that purpose.
To conduct all the correspondence of the Society. To take down the
names and addresses of parties desirous of being initiated into the
Order; and upon receiving the initiation fee from each, and entering
the amount into a book, he will give each party a card, by which they
may be admitted into the place appointed for the ceremony.
To receive the subscriptions of members, entering the same into a small
account book, numbering the Subscribers from No. 1, and following up
the sequence in regulation order, giving to each Subscriber a card, on
which his contribution or payment shall be noted.
To enter all additional weekly payments, and all levies, into separate
small books; all subscriptions and payments to be afterwards copied
into a ledger, ruled expressly for the purpose.
The Secretary to be paid an adequate weekly salary; and to be allowed
an Assistant if the amount of business require it.
The Secretary of each Grand or District Lodge shall balance his books
once every fortnight, and the Managing Committee shall audit them,
going over each item of receipt and expenditure with strict attention,
checking the same with scrupulous care; and if found correct, three of
the Committee shall verify the same by affixing their signatures to the
page on which the balance is struck.
_Initiation_
XXXI. Any of the Officers or Members of a Lodge may be appointed by the
Committee of Management to perform the Initiation Service; and to have
charge of the Robes, etc., for that purpose; for which the Committee
may allow him a reasonable remuneration.
Any party applying to be initiated must bring forward two witnesses as
to character and the identity of his trade or occupation.
_Of Branch Lodges_
XXXII. Branch Lodge Meetings shall be held on one evening in every
week, in the respective localities; at which Lodges any motion,
proposed by law, etc., may be discussed and considered by the Members
previous to its being finally submitted to the Grand or District Lodge
Committee.
XXXIII. The Members of each Branch may elect a President to preside at
the Branch Lodge, and a Secretary to collect subscriptions or levies
for their Grand or District Lodge; who shall also attend meetings of
the Committee of Management for instructions and information, and
to submit suggestions, complaints, etc., from his Branch Lodge. No
salaries or fees to be allowed to officers of Branch Lodges, unless by
the unanimous consent of their Members.
_Wardens, Etc._
XXXIV. In addition to the Officers before mentioned in these
regulations, there shall be, in each Grand and District Lodge a Warden,
an Inside Tyler, an Outside Tyler, and a Conductor, whose principal
duties are to attend Initiations, and see that no improper persons be
admitted into the meetings. These officers to be elected in the same
manner, and at the same periods, as other officers.
_Miscellaneous Articles_
XXXV. Any Member shall be liable to expulsion from the Lodges for any
improper conduct therein; and shall be excluded from the benefits of
the Society if his subscriptions be more than six months in arrear,
unless the Committee of Management shall see cause to decide otherwise.
XXXVI. The _G.U.C.T.U. Gazette_ to be considered the official organ of
the Executive Council, and the general medium of intelligence on the
affairs of the Union.
XXXVII. Each Lodge shall, as soon as possible, make arrangements for
furnishing the means of instituting Libraries or Reading-Rooms, or any
other arrangements, affording them every facility for meeting together
for friendly conversation, mutual instruction, and rational amusement
or recreation.
XXXVIII. In all cases, where it be practicable, each Lodge shall
establish within its locality one or more Depots for provisions and
articles in general domestic use, in order that its Members may be
supplied with the best of such commodities at little above wholesale
prices.
XXXIX. Each District and Grand Lodge shall endeavour to institute
a Fund for the support of sick and aged Members, and for defraying
the funeral expenses of deceased Members, on a similar principle to
that of Benefit Societies; such fund to be kept up by small monthly
contributions from those Unionists who are willing to subscribe towards
it.
XL. Each Grand or District Lodge to have the power of making its own
By-Laws for purposes not comprised in these Regulations; but such
By-Laws or Laws must not be in opposition to, or in counteraction of,
any of the Articles herein specified.
XLI. No Member can enter Lodge Meetings without giving the proper
signs, and producing his card to prove his membership, and that he is
not in arrears of subscription for more than one month, unless lenity
has been granted by order of Committee.
XLII. That a separate Treasurer be appointed for every £20 of the funds
collected; and that such Treasurers shall not suffer any money to be
withdrawn from their hands without a written order, signed by at least
three of the Managing Committee and presented by the Secretary, or one
of the other officers of the Society.
XLIII. All sums under £30 shall be left in the hands of the Secretary
for current expenses; but no outlay shall be made by him without an
express order from the Managing Committee, signed by at least three of
its Members.
XLIV. That every Member of this Union do use his best endeavours,
by fair and open argument, and the force of good example, and not
by intimidation or violence, to induce his fellows to join the
brotherhood, in order that no workmen may remain out of the Union
to undersell them in the market of labour; as, while that is done,
employers will be enabled to resist the demands of the Unionists,
whereas, if no operatives remain out of union, employers will be
compelled to keep up the price of Labour.
XLV. That each Member of the C.U. pay a Registration Fee of 3d. to
defray the general expenses; which fee is to be transmitted to the
Executive once in every month.
XLVI. That although the design of the Union is, in the first instance,
to raise the wages of the workmen, or prevent any further reduction
therein, and to diminish the hours of labour, the great and ultimate
object of it must be to establish the paramount rights of Industry and
Humanity, by instituting such measures as shall effectually prevent
the ignorant, idle, and useless part of Society from having that undue
control over the fruits of our toil, which, through the agency of a
vicious money system, they at present possess; and that, consequently,
the Unionists should lose no opportunity of mutually encouraging and
assisting each other in bringing about +A Different Order of Things+,
in which the really useful and intelligent part of society only shall
have the direction of its affairs, and in which well-directed industry
and virtue shall meet their just distinction and reward, and vicious
idleness its merited contempt and destitution.
XLVII. All the Rules and Regulations herein contained be subject to the
revision, alteration, or abrogation of the Grand Delegate Council.
APPENDIX III
SLIDING SCALES
The Sliding Scale, an arrangement by which it is agreed in advance that
wages shall vary in a definite relation to changes in the market price
of the product, appears to have been familiar to the iron trade for a
couple of generations. “About fifty years ago Mr. G. B. Thorneycroft,
of Wolverhampton, head of a well-known firm of iron-masters, suggested
to certain other houses that wages should fluctuate with the price
of ‘marked bars’--these words indicating a quality of iron that then
enjoyed a high reputation. The suggestion was adopted to this extent,
that when a demand was made by the men for an advance in wages, any
advance that was given was proportionate to the selling price of
‘marked bars.’ The puddlers received, as a rule, 1s. for each pound of
the selling price; but on exceptional occasions, a special temporary
advance or ‘premium’ was conceded. The terms of this arrangement do not
seem to have been reduced to writing, though they remained in force for
many years, and were well known as the Thorneycroft scale.”[739]
At the time of the great strike of Staffordshire puddlers, in 1865,
a local understanding of a similar nature appears to have been in
existence. The joint committee of iron-masters and puddlers, which
was established at Darlington in 1869 as the “North of England
Manufactured Iron Board,” soon worked out a formal sliding scale for
its own guidance. This scale, as well as that adopted by the Midland
Iron Trade Board, has been repeatedly revised, abandoned, and again
re-established; but its working has, on the whole, commended itself
to the representatives of the ironworkers, and has, so far as the
principle is concerned, produced no important dissensions among them.
“We believe,” said Mr. Trow, the men’s secretary, to the Labour
Commission in 1892, “it would be most satisfactory if this principle
were generally adopted.... In all our experience of the past we have
had less trouble in the periods in which sliding scales have obtained.”
The cause of the exceptional satisfaction of the ironworkers with their
Wages Boards and Sliding Scales is obscure, but it may be interesting
to the student to note that the members of the Ironworkers Association
are largely sub-contractors, themselves employing workmen who are
usually outside the Union, and have no direct representation on the
Board. For a careful statement of the facts as to these Wage Boards
and Sliding Scales in the iron industry, see _The Adjustment of Wages_
(by Sir W. J. Ashley, 1903), pp. 142-151, and specimen rules, reports,
and scales, pp. 268-307. At present (1920) separate Sliding Scales of
this nature are in force for the Cleveland and the North Lincolnshire
Blast-furnacemen; the Scottish Iron and the Consett Millmen; Brown
Bayley’s No. 1 Mill; the Scottish Enginemen and Steel Millmen; the
Staffordshire Sheet Trade; the Midlands Puddling Mills and Forges; and
the South Wales and Monmouthshire Iron and Steel Trade.
Widely different has been the result of the Sliding Scale among the
coal miners. Its introduction into this trade dates from 1874, though
it was not until 1879 that its adoption became common. Since then it
has been abandoned in all districts, and it is energetically repudiated
by the Miners’ Federation. The following table includes all the Sliding
Scales in the coal industry known to us. Between 1879 and 1886 there
were a number of informal Sliding Scales in force for particular
collieries, which were mostly superseded by the more general scales, or
otherwise came to an end. It is believed that no Sliding Scale is now
in force in any coal district.
July 24, 1874 South Staffordshire I. Revised 1877.
May 28, 1875 South Wales I. Revised 1880.
April 13, 1876 Somerset. Ended 1889.
February 6, 1877 Cannock Chase I. Revised 1879.
March 14, 1877 Durham I. Revised 1879.
November 1, 1877 South Staffordshire II. Revised 1882.
April 14, 1879 Cannock Chase II. Revised 1882.
October 11, 1879 Durham II. Revised 1887.
October 31, 1879 Cumberland I. Ended 1881.
November 3, 1879 Ferndale Colliery I. (S. Wales). Revised 1881.
November 10, 1879 Bedworth Colliery I. (Warwick). Revised 1880.
November 15, 1879 Northumberland I. Revised 1883.
December 19, 1879 Ocean Colliery I. (S. Wales). Revised 1882.
January 17, 1880 South Wales II. Revised 1882.
January 20, 1880 West Yorkshire. Ended ?
January 26, 1880 North Wales. Ended 1881.
February 14, 1880 Bedworth Colliery II. Ended ?
January 1, 1881 Ashton and Oldham I. Revised 1882.
December 31, 1881 Ferndale Colliery II. ?
January 1, 1882 South Staffordshire III. Ended 1884.
April 29, 1882 Durham III. Revised 1884.
June 6, 1882 South Wales III. Revised 1889.
June 22, 1882 Cannock Chase, &c. III. Ended 1883.
July 18, 1882 Ashton & Oldham II. Ended 1883.
August 24, 1882 South Wales (Anthracite). Ended ?
September 29, 1882 Cumberland II. Revised 1884.
March 9, 1883 Northumberland II. Ended 1886.
June 12, 1884 Durham IV. Ended 1889.
November 28, 1884 Cumberland III. Revised 1886.
March 12, 1886 Forest of Dean. Ended 1888 ?
April 14, 1886 Altham Colliery (Northd.). Ended ?
February 25, 1887 Cumberland IV. Ended 1888 ?
May 24, 1887 Northumberland III. Ended 1887.
June, 1887 Lanarkshire. Ended 1889.
October, 1888 South Staffordshire IV. Ended ?
January 18, 1890 South Wales IV. Ended ?
September, 1893 Forest of Dean. Ended ?
An exposition of the construction and working of Sliding Scales is
contained in _Industrial Peace_, by L. L. Price. Details of numerous
Scales are given in the report made by a Committee to the British
Association, entitled _Sliding Scales in the Coal Industry_, which was
prepared by Professor J. E. C. Munro (Manchester, 1885), and in the
_Particulars of Sliding Scales, Past, Present, and Proposed_; printed
by the Lancashire Miners’ Federation in 1886 (Openshaw, 1886, 20 pp.).
Supplementary information is given in Professor Munro’s papers before
the Manchester Statistical Society, entitled, “Sliding Scales in the
Iron Industry” (Manchester, 1885), and “Sliding Scales in the Coal
and Iron Industries from 1885 to 1889” (Manchester, 1889). The whole
question is discussed in _The Adjustment of Wages_ (by Sir William
Ashley, 1903), pp. 45-71; and in our own _Industrial Democracy_, 1897.
The proceedings in the numerous arbitrations in the coal and iron
trade in the North of England, as well as several others which are
printed, furnish abundant information on the subject of their working.
A table of the variations of wages under sliding scales was prepared by
Professor J. E. C. Munro for the Royal Commission on Mining Royalties,
and published as Appendix V. to the First Report, 1890 (C 6195).
FOOTNOTES:
[739] Statement furnished to Professor Munro by Mr. Daniel Jones, of
the Midland Iron and Steel Wages Board, quoted in _Sliding Scales in
the Coal and Iron Industries_ (p. 141).
APPENDIX IV
THE SUMMONS TO THE FIRST TRADE UNION CONGRESS
No copy of the invitation to the first Trade Union Congress has been
preserved, either in the archives of the Congress, the Manchester
Trades Council, or any other organisation known to us. Fortunately, it
was printed in the _Ironworkers’ Journal_ for May 1868. But of this
only one file now exists, and as the summons is of some historical
interest we reprint it for convenience of reference.
“Manchester, _April 16, 1868_.
“Sir--You are requested to lay the following before your
Society. The vital _interests_ involved, it is conceived,
will justify the officials in convening a special meeting
for the consideration thereof.
“The Manchester and Salford Trades Council having recently
taken into their serious consideration the present aspect
of Trades Unions, and the profound ignorance which prevails
in the public mind with reference to their operations and
principles, together with the probability of an attempt
being made by the Legislature, during the present Session
of Parliament, to introduce a measure which might prove
detrimental to the interests of such Societies _unless some
prompt and decisive action be taken by the working classes
themselves_, beg most respectfully to intimate that it has
been decided to hold in Manchester, as the main centre of
industry in the provinces, a Congress of the representatives
of Trades Councils, Federations of Trades, and Trade
Societies in general.
“The Congress will assume the character of the Annual
Meetings of the Social Science Association, in the
transactions of which Society the artisan class is almost
excluded; and papers previously carefully prepared by
such Societies as elect to do so, will be laid before the
Congress on the various subjects which at the present time
affect the Trade Societies, each paper to be followed by
discussion on the points advanced, with a view of the merits
and demerits of each question being thoroughly ventilated
through the medium of the public press. It is further
decided that the subjects treated upon shall include the
following:
“1. Trade Unions an absolute necessity.
“2. Trade Unions and Political Economy.
“3. The effect of Trade Unions on foreign competition.
“4. Regulation of the hours of labour.
“5. Limitation of apprentices.
“6. Technical Education.
“7. Courts of Arbitration and Conciliation.
“8. Co-operation.
“9. The present inequality of the law in regard to
conspiracy, intimidation, picketing, coercion, etc.
“10. Factory Acts Extension Bill, 1867: the necessity of
compulsory inspection and its application to all places
where women and children are employed.
“11. The present Royal Commission on Trades Unions--how far
worthy of the confidence of the Trade Union interests.
“12. Legalization of Trade Societies.
“13. The necessity of an Annual Congress of Trade
Representatives from the various centres of industry.
“All Trades Councils, Federations of Trades, and Trade
Societies generally are respectfully solicited to intimate
their adhesion to this project on or before the 12th of
May next, together with a notification of the subject of
the paper that each body will undertake to prepare, and
the number of delegates by whom they will be respectively
represented; after which date all information as to the
place of meeting, etc., will be supplied.
“It is not imperative that all Societies should prepare
papers, it being anticipated that the subjects will be
taken up by those most capable of expounding the principles
sought to be maintained. Several have already adhered to the
project, and have signified their intention of taking up the
subjects Nos. 1, 4, 6, and 7.
“The Congress will be held on Whit-Tuesday, the 2nd of June
next, its duration not to exceed five days; and all expenses
in connection therewith, which will be very small, and as
economical as possible, will be equalized amongst those
Societies sending delegates, and will not extend beyond
their sittings.
“Communications to be addressed to Mr. W. H. Wood,
Typographical Institute, 29 Water Street, Manchester.
“By order of the Manchester & Salford Trades Council.
“S. C. Nicholson, President.
“W. H. Wood, Secretary.”
APPENDIX V
DISTRIBUTION OF TRADE UNIONISTS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
We endeavoured in 1893-94 to analyse the membership of all the Trade
Unions of which we could obtain particulars, in such a way as to show
the number and percentage to population in each part of the United
Kingdom. The following table gives the local distribution of 1,507,026
Trade Unionists in 1892. The distribution was, in most cases, made by
branches, special estimates being prepared for us in a few instances
by the officers of the Unions concerned. With regard to a few Unions
having about 4000 members no local distribution could be arrived at.
_Table showing the distribution of Trade Union membership in
1892 in each part of the United Kingdom, with the percentage
to population in each case._
------------------------------+-------------+-------------+------------
| | | Number of
| | Ascertained | Trade
County. | Population | Trade | Unionists
| in 1891. | Unionists | per 100 of
| | in 1892. | population.
------------------------------+-------------+-------------+------------
Bedfordshire | 165,999 | 553 | 0·33
Berkshire | 268,357 | 975 | 0·36
Buckinghamshire | 164,442 | 720 | 0·44
Cambridgeshire | 196,269 | 2,855 | 1·45
Cheshire | 707,978 | 32,000 | 4·52
Cornwall | 318,583 | 630 | 0·20
Cumberland | 266,549 | 10,280 | 3·86
Derbyshire | 432,414 | 29,510 | 6·82
Devonshire | 636,225 | 6,030 | 0·95
Dorsetshire | 188,995 | 305 | 0·16
Durham | 1,024,369 | 114,810 | 1·21
Essex | 396,057 | 3,370 | 0·85
(without West Ham, | | |
included in London). | | |
Gloucestershire | 548,886 | 26,030 | 4·74
Hampshire | 587,578 | 5,665 | 0·96
(without Isle of Wight, | | |
treated separately). | | |
Herefordshire | 113,346 | 385 | 0·34
Hertfordshire | 215,179 | 1,125 | 0·52
Huntingdonshire | 50,289 | 20 | 0·04
Isle of Wight | 78,672 | 295 | 0·37
Kent | 737,044 | 12,445 | 1·69
(without Bromley, | | |
included in London). | | |
Lancashire | 3,957,906 | 331,535 | 8·63
Leicestershire | 379,286 | 27,845 | 7·34
Lincoln | 467,281 | 9,480 | 2·03
London | 5,517,583 | 194,083 | 3·52
(including Bromley, | | |
Croydon, Kingston, | | |
Richmond, West | | |
Ham and Middlesex). | | |
Norfolk | 460,362 | 4,880 | 1·06
Northamptonshire | 308,072 | 12,210 | 3·96
Northumberland | 506,030 | 56,815 | 11·23
Nottinghamshire | 505,311 | 31,050 | 6·14
Oxford | 188,220 | 1,815 | 0·96
Rutland | 22,123 | 0 | 0·00
Shropshire | 254,765 | 3,225 | 1·26
Somerset | 510,076 | 6,595 | 1·29
Staffordshire | 1,103,452 | 49,545 | 4·49
Suffolk | 353,758 | 14,885 | 4·21
Surrey | 275,638 | 730 | 0·26
(without Croydon, | | |
Kingston, and Richmond, | | |
included in London). | | |
Sussex | 554,542 | 2,810 | 0·51
Warwickshire | 801,738 | 33,600 | 4·19
Westmoreland | 66,215 | 530 | 0·80
Wiltshire | 255,119 | 3,680 | 1·44
Worcestershire | 422,530 | 7,840 | 1·86
Yorkshire, East Riding | 318,570 | 23,630 | 7·42
Yorkshire, North Riding | 435,897 | 15,215 | 3·49
(with York City). | | |
Yorkshire, West Riding | 2,464,415 | 141,140 | 5·73
Total, England | 27,226,120 | 1,221,141 | 4·49
------------------------------+-------------+-------------+------------
North Wales | 451,090 | 8,820 | 1·96
South Wales and Monmouth | 1,325,315 | 88,810 | 6·70
+-------------+-------------+------------
Total, Wales and Monmouth | 1,776,405 | 97,630 | 5·50
------------------------------+-------------+-------------+------------
Total, England and Wales | 29,002,525 | 1,318,771 | 4·55
------------------------------+-------------+-------------+-----------
Scotland | 4,033,103 | 146,925 | 3·64
Ireland | 4,706,162 | 40,045 | 0·85
Isle of Man | 55,598 | 75 | 0·13
Guernsey | 35,339 | 1,170 | 3·31
Jersey | 54,518 | 40 | 0·07
Alderney and Sark | 2,415 | 0 | 0·00
------------------------------+-------------+-------------+------------
Total, United Kingdom | 37,889,660 | 1,507,026 | 3·98
------------------------------+-------------+-------------+------------
APPENDIX VI
THE STATISTICAL PROGRESS OF TRADE UNION MEMBERSHIP
It is unfortunately impossible to present any complete statistics of
Trade Union membership at different periods. Until the appointment, in
1886, of John Burnett as Labour Correspondent to the Board of Trade,
no attempt was made to collect any statistics of the movement; and the
old Unions seldom possess a complete series of their own archives. The
Friendly Society of Ironfounders, it is true, has exact figures since
its establishment in 1809. No total figures can be given with any
confidence.
The following tables may be useful as placing on record such
comparative figures as we have been able to collect:
1. Amalgamated Society of Engineers.
2. Friendly Society of Ironfounders.
3. Steam Engine Makers’ Society.
4. Associated Ironmoulders of Scotland.
5. United Society of Boilermakers and Iron Shipwrights.
6. Operative Stonemasons’ Friendly Society.
7. Operative Bricklayers’ Society.
8. General Union of Operative Carpenters and Joiners.
9. Typographical Association.
10. London Society of Compositors.
11. Bookbinders’ and Machine Rulers’ Consolidated Union.
12. United Kingdom Society of Coachmakers.
13. Flint Glass Makers’ Friendly Society.
14. Amicable and Brotherly Society of Machine Printers.
15. Machine, Engine, and Iron Grinders’ Society.
16. Associated Blacksmiths’ Society.
17. Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners.
18. Associated Carpenters and Joiners.
19. National Association of Operative Plasterers.
20. Northumberland Miners’ Mutual Confident Association.
21. United Journeymen Brassfounders’ Association of Great Britain and
Ireland.
22. United Operative Plumbers’ Association.
23. Alliance Cabinet Makers’ Association.
24. United Operative Bricklayers’ Trade, Accident, Sick, and Burial
Society.
25. Amalgamated Society of Tailors.
26. Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners.
27. Glass Bottle Makers of Yorkshire United Trade Protection Society.
28. Durham Miners’ Association.
29. National Society of Amalgamated Brassworkers.
30. United Pattern Makers’ Association.
31. National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives.
32. Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants.
33. Yorkshire Miners’ Association.
34. United Machine Workers’ Association.
35. National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association.
36. Railway Clerks’ Association.
37. Amalgamated Tramway and Vehicle Workers.
38. National Union of Dock Labourers.
39. British Steel Smelters.
40. National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants.
41. Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees.
42. National Union of Clerks.
43. Workers’ Union.
44. Amalgamated Musicians’ Union.
45. National Amalgamated Union of Labour.
46. Postmen’s Federation.
47. Post Office Engineering Stores.
_Table showing the Membership of certain Trade Unions at Successive
Periods, from 1850 to 1918 inclusive._
--------+---------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+---------
Number | Year | | | | | | | | | | | |
of | of | 1850.| 1855.| 1860.| 1865.| 1870. | 1875. | 1880. | 1885. | 1890. | 1900. | 1910. | 1918.
Society.| Estab- | | | | | | | | | | | |
|lishment.| | | | | | | | | | | |
--------+---------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+---------
1. |1851[740]| 5,000|12,553|20,935|30,984| 34,711| 44,032| 44,692| 51,689| 67,928| 87,672|110,733| 298,782
2. |1809 | 4,073| 5,685| 7,973|10,604| 8,994| 12,336| 11,580| 12,376| 14,821| 18,357| 17,990| 28,586
3. |1824 | 2,068| 1,662| 2,050| 2,521| 2,819| 3,871| 4,134| 5,062| 5,822| 8,566| 14,401| 27,206
4. |1831 | 814| 1,381| 2,084| 3,046| 2,766| 4,346| 4,664| 5,611| 6,198| 7,504| 7,880| 7,961
5. |1832 | 1,771| 3,500| 4,146| 8,621| 7,261| 16,191| 17,688| 28,212| 32,926| 47,670| 49,393| 95,761
6. |1832 | 4,671| 8,093| 9,125|15,483| 13,965| 24,543| 12,610| 11,285| 12,538| 19,419| 7,055| 4,929
7. |1848 | 340| 924| 1,641| 4,320| 1,441| 4,832| 5,700| 6,412| 12,740| 38,830| 23,284| 34,441
8. |1827 | 535| 1,180| 2,228| 6,986| 8,008| 10,885| 4,420| 1,734| 2,485| 7,727| 5,653| 12,000
9. |1849 | 603| 1,288| 1,473| 1,992| 2,430| 3,600| 5,350| 6,551| 9,016| 16,179| 21,436| 11,602
10. |1848 | 1,800| 2,300| 2,650| 2,800| 3,350| 4,200| 5,100| 6,435| 8,910| 11,287| 12,230| 12,940
11. |1835 | 420| 340| 500| 748| 915| 1,670| 1,501| 1,788| 2,910| 4,064| 5,027| --[741]
12. |1834 | 1,567| 3,040| 4,086| 4,599| 5,801| 7,251| 4,989| 4,560| 5,367| 6,536| 6,854| 15,118
13. |1849 | 500| 897| 1,355| 1,606| 1,776| 2,005| 1,963| 1,985| 2,123| 2,409| 916| 775
14. |1841 | 375| 452| 508| 530| 570| 650| 690| 740| 860| 963| 983| 228
15. |1844 | 200| 110| 330| 449| 280| 390| 258| 277| 304| 433| 703| 746
| +------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+---------
| |24,737|43,405|61,084|95,289| 95,087|140,802|125,339|144,717|184,948|277,616|284,538| 551,075
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
16. |1857 | -- | -- | 856 | 1,815| 1,590| 2,113| 2,002| 2,335| 2,300| 2,933| 2,953| 17,238
17. |1860 | -- | -- | 618 | 5,670| 10,178| 14,917| 17,764| 25,781| 31,495| 65,012| 55,785|} 124,841
18. |1861 | -- | -- | -- | 4,453| 3,585| 6,642| 4,673| 4,535| 4,742| 9,808| 3,964|}
19. |1862 | -- | -- | -- | 4,441| 2,461| 3,742| 3,211| 2,110| 4,236| 11,009| 6,522| 4,110
20. |1863 | -- | -- | -- | 4,250| 5,328| 17,561| 10,707| 13,128| 16,961| 23,950| 37,361| 40,000
21. |1866 | -- | -- | -- | -- | 1,457| 1,821| 1,890| 2,344| 2,162| -- | 5,241| 7,500
22. |1832 | ? | ? | ? | ? | 1,537| 1,679| 2,232| 2,666| 5,350| 11,186| 10,907| 13,000
23. |1865 | -- | -- | -- | ? | 242| 1,965| 1,346| 1,246| 4,298| 5,270| -- | --[742]
24. |1832 | ? | | ? | ? | 3,850| 7,350| 3,282| 1,975| 1,725| 3,428| 1,655| 2,950
25. |1866 | -- | -- | -- | -- | 4,006| 14,352| 12,583| 13,969| 16,629| 13,439| 12,143| 29,422
26. |1853 | -- | ? | ? | ? | 10,518| 14,257| 11,834| 16,579| 18,145| 18,384| 22,992| 24,806
27. |1860 | -- | -- | ? | ? | 792| 1,120| 1,061| 1,522| 1,899| 2,840| 2,450| 2,800
28. |1869 | -- | -- | -- | -- | 1,899| 38,000| 30,000| 35,000| 49,000| 80,260|121,805| 126,250
| | | | | +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+---------
| | | | | |142,530|266,321|227,924|267,907|343,890|546,135|559,316| 944,992
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
29. |1872 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 5,271| 4,633| 3,582| 7,958| 8,675| 7,373| 25,000
30. |1872 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 418| 824| 1,241| 2,205| 4,604| 7,214| 10,290
31. |1874 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 4,311| 6,404| 10,464| 23,459| 27,960| 30,197| 83,017
32. |1872 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 13,018| 8,589| 9,052| 26,360| 62,023| 75,153| --[743]
33. |1858 | -- | -- | ? | ? | ? | 8,000| 2,800| 8,000| 50,000| 54,475| 88,271| 100,400
34. |1844 | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | 276| 279| 455| 2,501| 3,769| 4,843| 23,374
| | | | | | +-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+---------
| | | | | | |297,615|251,453|300,701|456,373|707,641|772,367|1,187,073
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
35. |1902 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 6,248| 6,685| 47,220
| | | | | | | | | | | (1902)| |
36. |1897 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 1,550| 9,476| 66,130
37. |1889 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | ? | 9,214| 17,076| 40,564
38. |1889 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | ? | 13,388| 14,253| 45,000
39. |1886 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | ? | 10,467| 17,491| 40,000(?)
| | | | | | | | | | | | | [744]
40. |1891 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 7,551| 22,426| 83,000
| | | | | | | | | | | | | (1919)
41. |1891 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 6,733| 29,886| 87,134
42. |1891 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 82| 3,166| 35,000
43. |1898 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | ? | 2,879| 5,016| 230,000
44. |1893 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 3,286| 6,182| 14,649
45. |1889 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | ? | 21,111| 16,017| 143,931
46. |1891 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 23,180| 37,892| 65,078
47. |1896 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | 940| 3,500| 14,000
| | | | | | | | | | +-------+-------+---------
| | | | | | | | | | |106,629|189,046| 911,706
| | | | | | | | | | +-------+-------+---------
| | | | | | | | | | |814,270|961,413|2,098,779
--------+---------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+---------
We have suggested that it is doubtful whether, in 1842, there were
as many as 100,000 enrolled and contributing members. A quarter of a
century later George Howell and others could talk vaguely of a million
members, but we doubt whether this number was reached until the years
of good trade that followed 1871. In 1878-80 there was a great falling
off, and we doubt whether the aggregate of a million was again reached
until 1885. In 1892 we recorded a million and a half. Not until the end
of the century were two millions attained--a number doubled by 1915,
and in the last four or five years again increased by over fifty per
cent.
_Table showing the aggregate Trade Union Membership in groups of
Industries at the end of each of the years 1892-1917 inclusive._[745]
-----+---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+----------+-----------------------------+---------
| | | Metal, | | | | |
| | Mining | Engin- | | | | | Total,
Year.|Building.| and | eering, |Textile.|Clothing.|Transport.| Other Trades. | all
| | Quarry-| and | | | | | Unions.
| | in | Ship- | | | | |
| | |building.| | | | |
-----+---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+----------+-----------------------------+---------
1892| 157,971 | 315,272| 279,534| 204,022| 83,299 | 154,947 | 307,313 |1,502,358
1893| 172,870 | 318,112| 266,813| 205,546| 80,768 | 142,084 | 293,224 |1,479,417
1894| 178,721 | 307,276| 263,572| 214,331| 81,786 | 123,896 | 266,718 |1,436,300
1895| 179,283 | 280,065| 269,169| 218,805| 78,560 | 120,475 | 261,479 |1,407,836
1896| 193,341 | 279,977| 303,518| 217,950| 76,997 | 134,877 | 287,805 |1,494,465
1897| 215,603 | 283,054| 319,745| 218,619| 75,852 | 183,994 | 317,131 |1,613,998
| | | | | | | +--------+--------+-------+ |
| | | | | | |/Printing,| Wood- | Other\|
| | | | | | | Paper, |working.| Trades.|
| | | | | | | etc. | | |
1898| 232,040 | 366,731| 312,444| 240,895| 69,954 | 147,957 | 54,436 | ---- | 264,074|1,688,531
1899| 249,988 | 445,706| 335,746| 245,301| 66,777 | 163,685 | 56,727 | ---- | 284,640|1,848,570
1900| 253,412 | 524,150| 342,079| 245,438| 67,183 | 171,599 | 57,228 | ---- | 294,615|1,955,704
1901| 248,967 | 530,953| 338,468| 243,474| 65,660 | 169,199 | 58,274 | ---- | 311,766|1,966,761
1902| 245,141 | 532,082| 337,064| 246,829| 64,094 | 158,714 | 59,062 | ---- | 310,321|1,953,307
1903| 238,141 | 529,028| 337,122| 244,081| 61,713 | 159,051 | 60,138 | ---- | 301,769|1,931,043
1904| 225,149 | 501,764| 334,822| 246,473| 58,598 | 159,788 | 62,428 | ---- | 306,087|1,895,109
1905| 205,179 | 496,828| 340,364| 266,416| 60,394 | 167,017 | 62,368 | ---- | 321,807|1,920,373
1906| 196,492 | 571,336| 361,453| 302,968| 59,806 | 190,155 | 64,451 | ---- | 367,145|2,113,806
1907| 193,190 | 703,344| 376,805| 354,427| 68,810 | 238,813 | 68,221 | ---- | 403,136|2,406,746
1908| 177,718 | 719,384| 365,134| 362,540| 65,637 | 230,642 | 72,970 | 41,797| 353,505|2,388,727
1909| 162,278 | 722,639| 359,838| 366,445| 65,882 | 224,037 | 71,531 | 39,240| 357,177|2,369,067
1910| 156,985 | 731,305| 370,055| 379,644| 67,158 | 245,223 | 74,275 | 38,881| 382,816|2,446,342
1911| 173,182 | 752,419| 415,176| 436,927| 74,423 | 513,538 | 77,252 | 45,474| 530,512|3,018,903
1912| 203,773 | 757,147| 479,471| 478,097| 91,855 | 514,724 | 76,807 | 50,853| 635,107|3,287,884
1913| 248,647 | 915,734| 538,541| 515,684| 105,929 | 699,952 | 84,414 | 64,442| 813,772|3,987,115
1914| 235,828 | 870,198| 557,769| 497,494| 102,538 | 705,501 | 92,283 | 64,296| 796,902|3,918,809
1915| 228,475 | 857,183| 633,502| 507,731| 114,085 | 737,004 | 97,290 | 65,210| 886,313|4,126,793
1916| 229,272 | 877,694| 695,347| 530,411| 121,656 | 803,872 | 97,669 | 69,403|1,012,623|4,437,947
1917| 257,286 | 941,120| 847,202| 627,919| 149,756 | 903,109 | 109,586 | 83,369|1,360,165|5,287,522
-----+---------+--------+---------+--------+---------+----------+----------+--------+---------+---------
FOOTNOTES:
[740] Established January 10, 1851. The membership given for 1850 is
that with which the amalgamation started.
[741] Merged in the National Union of Bookbinders and Machine Rulers,
1911.
[742] In 1902 joined with the Operative Cabinet and Chair Makers of
Scotland to form the National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association.
[743] Amalgamated in 1913 with the United Pointsmen and Signalmen
and the General Railway Workers’ Union to form the National Union of
Railwaymen.
[744] In 1917 the members of the British Steel Smelters were merged in
the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation.
[745] [From Labour Department’s Reports on Trade Unions for 1900,
1905-7 and 1912, Cmd. 773, 4651 and 6109, and _Labour Gazette_.]
APPENDIX VII
PUBLICATIONS RELATING TO TRADE UNIONS
In the first edition of this book we gave a list, 45 pages long, of
books, pamphlets, reports, and other documents bearing on the workmen’s
combinations. In _Industrial Democracy_, 1897, we gave a supplementary
list, 23 pages long. We do not reproduce these lists, to which the
student can always refer; nor have we attempted to bring them down to
date. The really useful material for Trade Union study is to be found
in the publications of the Trade Unions themselves--the innumerable
editions of rules, the thousands of annual and monthly reports, the
voluminous lists of piecework prices, the intricate working agreements,
the verbatim reports of conferences, delegate meetings and proceedings
before Conciliation and Arbitration Boards--which are ignored by the
British Museum, and are practically never preserved in local public
libraries. We made an extensive collection in 1891-97, which we have
deposited in the British Library of Political Science, attached to the
London School of Economics and Political Science, where it has been,
to some extent, kept up to date, and where it is accessible to any
serious student. Some old pamphlets and reports of interest are in
the Goldsmiths’ Library at the University of London. Of Trade Union
publications since 1913 the most extensive collection is that of the
Labour Research Department, attached to the Labour Party, 34 Eccleston
Square, London.
APPENDIX VIII
THE RELATIONSHIP OF TRADE UNIONISM TO THE GOVERNMENT OF INDUSTRY
In our work on _Industrial Democracy_, published in 1897, we formulated
the following tentative conclusions with regard to the participation of
the workmen’s organisations in industrial management, and the relation
of Trade Unionism to political Democracy:
“This survey of the changes required in Trade Union policy leads us
straight to a conclusion as to the part which Trade Unionism will be
expected to play in the management of the industry of a democratic
state. The interminable series of decisions, which together make up
industrial administration, fall into three main classes. There is,
first, the decision as to what shall be produced--that is to say, the
exact commodity or service to be supplied to the consumers. There is,
secondly, the judgement as to the manner in which the production shall
take place, the adoption of material, the choice of processes, and the
selection of human agents. Finally, there is the altogether different
question of the conditions under which these human agents shall be
employed--the temperature, atmosphere, and sanitary arrangements amid
which they shall work, the intensity and duration of their toil, and
the wages given as its reward.
“To obtain for the community the maximum satisfaction it is essential
that the needs and desires of the consumers should be the main factor
in determining the commodities and services to be produced. Whether
these needs and desires can best be ascertained and satisfied by the
private enterprise of capitalist profit-makers, keenly interested
in securing custom, or by the public service of salaried officials,
intent on pleasing associations of consumers (as in the British
Co-operative Movement), or associations of citizens (the Municipality
or the State), is at present the crucial problem of Democracy. But
whichever way this issue may be decided, one thing is certain, namely,
that the several sections of manual workers, enrolled in their Trade
Unions, will have, under private enterprise or Collectivism, no more
to do with the determination of what is to be produced than any other
citizens or consumers. As manual workers and wage-earners, they bring
to the problem no specialised knowledge; and as persons fitted for the
performance of particular services, they are even biassed against the
inevitable changes in demand which characterise progressive community.
This is even more the case with regard to the second department of
industrial administration--the adoption of material, the choice of
processes, and the selection of human agents. Here, the Trade Unions
concerned are specially disqualified, not only by their ignorance of
the possible alternatives, but also by their overwhelming bias in
favour of a particular material, a particular process, or a particular
grade of workers, irrespective of whether these are or are not the
best adapted for the gratification of the consumers’ desires. On
the other hand, the directors of industry, whether thrown up by the
competitive struggle or deliberately appointed by the consumers or
citizens, have been specially picked out and trained to discover the
best means of satisfying the consumers’ desires. Moreover, the bias of
their self-interest coincides with the object of their customers or
employers--that is to say, the best and cheapest production. Thus, if
we leave out of account the disturbing influence of monopoly in private
enterprise, and corruption in public administration, it would at first
sight seem as if we might safely leave the organisation of production
and distribution under the one system as under the other to the expert
knowledge of the directors of industry. But this is subject to one
all-important qualification. The permanent bias of the profitmaker,
and even of the salaried official of the Co-operative Society, the
Municipality, or the Government Department, is to lower the expense
of production. So far as immediate results are concerned, it seems
equally advantageous whether this reduction of cost is secured by a
better choice of materials, processes, or men, or by some lowering
of wages or other worsening of the conditions upon which the human
agents are employed. But the democratic state is, as we have seen,
vitally interested in upholding the highest possible Standard of Life
of all its citizens, and especially of the manual workers who form
four-fifths of the whole. Hence the bias of the directors of industry
in favor of cheapness has, in the interests of the community, to be
perpetually controlled and guided by a determination to maintain, and
progressively to raise, the conditions of employment.
“This leads us to the third branch of industrial administration--the
settlement of the conditions under which the human beings are to be
employed. The adoption of one material rather than another, the choice
between alternative processes or alternative ways of organising the
factory, the selection of particular grades of workers, or even of a
particular foreman, may affect, for the worse, the Standard of Life of
the operatives concerned. This indirect influence on the conditions
of employment passes imperceptibly into the direct determination
of the wages, hours, and other terms of the wage contract. On all
these matters the consumers, on the one hand, and the directors of
industry on the other, are permanently disqualified from acting as
arbiters. In our chapter on ‘The Higgling of the Market’ we described
how, in the elaborate division of labour which characterises the
modern industrial system, thousands of workers co-operate in the
bringing to market of a single commodity; and no consumer, even if
he desired it, could possibly ascertain or judge of the conditions
of employment in all these varied trades. Thus, the consumers of
all classes are not only biassed in favour of low prices; they are
compelled to accept this apparent or genuine cheapness as the only
practicable test of efficiency of production. And though the immediate
employer of each section of workpeople knows the hours that they work
and the wages that they receive, he is precluded by the stream of
competitive pressure, transmitted through the retail shopkeeper and
the wholesale trader, from effectively resisting the promptings of his
own self-interest towards a constant cheapening of labour. Moreover,
though he may be statistically aware of the conditions of employment
his lack of personal experience of those conditions deprives him of
any real knowledge of their effects. To the brain-working captain of
industry, maintaining himself and his family on thousands a year,
the manual-working wage-earner seems to belong to another species,
having mental faculties and bodily needs altogether different from his
own. Men and women of the upper or middle classes are totally unable
to realise what state of body and mind, what level of character and
conduct, result from a life spent, from childhood to old age, amid the
dirt, the smell, the noise, the ugliness, and the vitiated atmosphere
of the workshop; under constant subjection to the peremptory, or it may
be brutal, orders of the foreman; kept continuously at the laborious
manual toil for sixty or seventy hours in every week of the year; and
maintained by the food, clothing, house-accommodation, recreation, and
family life which are implied by a precarious income of between ten
shillings and two pounds a week. If the democratic state is to attain
its fullest and finest development, it is essential that the actual
needs and desires of the human agents concerned should be the main
considerations in determining the conditions of employment. Here then
we find the special function of the Trade Union in the administration
of industry. The simplest member of the working-class organisation
knows at any rate where the shoe pinches. The Trade Union official is
specially selected by his fellow-workmen for his capacity to express
the grievances from which they suffer, and is trained by his calling
in devising remedies for them. But in expressing the desires of their
members, and in insisting on the necessary reforms, the Trade Unions
act within the constant friction-brake supplied by the need of securing
employment. It is always the consumers and the consumers alone, whether
they act through profit-making _entrepreneurs_ or through their own
salaried officials, who determine how many of each particular grade of
workers they care to employ on the conditions demanded.... Thus we find
no neat formula for defining the rights and duties of the individual
in society. In the democratic state every individual is both master
and servant. In the work that he does for the community in return
for his subsistence he is, and must remain, a servant, subject to
the instructions and directions of those whose desires he is helping
to satisfy. As a Citizen-Elector jointly with his fellows, and as a
Consumer to the extent of his demand, he is a master, determining,
free from any superior, what shall be done. Hence, it is the supreme
paradox of democracy that every man is a servant in respect of the
matters of which he possesses the most expert proficiency, namely,
the professional craft to which he devotes his working hours; and he
is a master over that on which he knows no more than anybody else,
namely, the general interests of the community as a whole. In this
paradox, we suggest, lies at once the justification and the strength
of democracy. It is not, as is commonly asserted by the superficial,
that Ignorance rules over Knowledge, and Mediocrity over Capacity:
In the administration of society Knowledge and Capacity can make no
real and durable progress except by acting on and through the minds of
the common human material which it is desired to improve. It is only
by carrying along with him the ‘average sensual man,’ that even the
wisest and most philanthropic reformer, however autocratic his power,
can genuinely change the face of things. Moreover, not even the wisest
of men can be trusted with that supreme authority which comes from
the union of knowledge, capacity, and opportunity with the power of
untrammelled and ultimate decision. Democracy is an expedient--perhaps
the only practicable expedient--for preventing the concentration in any
single individual or in any single class of what inevitably becomes,
when so concentrated, a terrible engine of oppression. The autocratic
emperor, served by a trained bureaucracy, seems to the Anglo-Saxon a
perilously near approach to such a concentration. If democracy meant,
as early observers imagined, a similar concentration of Knowledge and
Power in the hands of the numerical majority for the time being, it
might easily become as injurious a tyranny as any autocracy. An actual
study of the spontaneous democracies of Anglo-Saxon workmen, or, as we
suggest, of any other democratic institutions, reveals the splitting
up of this dangerous authority into two parts. Whether in political or
in industrial democracy, though it is the Citizen who, as Elector or
Consumer, ultimately gives the order, it is the Professional Expert who
advises what the order shall be.
“It is another aspect of this paradox that, in the democratic state, no
man minds his own business. In the economic sphere this is a necessary
consequence of division of labour; Robinson Crusoe, producing solely
for his own consumption, being the last man who minded nothing but
his own business. The extreme complication brought about by universal
production for exchange in itself implies that every one works with a
view to fulfilling the desires of other people. The crowding together
of dense populations, and especially the co-operative enterprises which
then arise, extend in every direction this spontaneous delegation to
professional experts of what the isolated individual once deemed ‘his
own business.’ Thus, the citizen in a modern municipality no longer
produces his own food or makes his own clothes; no longer protects
his own life or property; no longer fetches his own water; no longer
makes his own thoroughfares, or cleans or lights them when made; no
longer removes his own refuse or even disinfects his own dwelling.
He no longer educates his own children, or doctors and nurses his
own invalids. Trade Unionism adds to the long list of functions thus
delegated to professional experts the settlement of the conditions on
which the citizen will agree to co-operate in the national service.
In the fully-developed democratic state the Citizen will be always
minding other people’s business. In his professional occupation he
will, whether as brain-worker or manual labourer, be continually
striving to fulfil the desires of those whom he serves; whilst as an
Elector, in his parish or his co-operative society, his Trade Union or
his political association, he will be perpetually passing judgment on
issues in which his personal interest is no greater than that of his
fellows.
“If, then, we are asked whether democracy, as shown by an analysis of
Trade Unionism, is consistent with Individual Liberty, we are compelled
to answer by asking, What is Liberty? If Liberty means every man being
his own master, and following his own impulses, then it is clearly
inconsistent, not so much with democracy or any other particular form
of government, as with the crowding together of population in dense
masses, division of labour, and, as we think, civilisation itself. What
particular individuals, sections, or classes usually mean by ‘freedom
of contract,’ ‘freedom of association,’ or ‘freedom of enterprise’
is freedom of opportunity to use the power that they happen to
possess--that is to say, to compel other less powerful people to accept
their terms. This sort of personal freedom in a community composed of
unequal units is not distinguishable from compulsion. It is, therefore,
necessary to define Liberty before talking about it; a definition which
every man will frame according to his own view of what is socially
desirable. We ourselves understand by the words ‘Liberty’ or ‘Freedom,’
not any quantum of natural or inalienable rights, but such conditions
of existence in the community as do, in practice, result in the utmost
possible development of faculty in the individual human being. Now, in
this sense democracy is not only consistent with Liberty, but is, as
it seems to us, the only way of securing the largest amount of it. It
is open to argument whether other forms of government may not achieve
a fuller development of the faculties of particular individuals or
classes. To an autocrat, untrammelled rule over a whole kingdom may
mean an exercise of his individual faculties, and a development of
his individual personality, such as no other situation in life would
afford. An aristocracy or government by one class in the interests
of one class, may conceivably enable that class to develop a
perfection in physical grace or intellectual charm attainable by no
other system of society. Similarly, it might be argued that, where
the ownership of the means of production and the administration of
industry are unreservedly left to the capitalist class, this ‘freedom
of enterprise’ would result in a development of faculty among the
captains of industry which could not otherwise be reached. We dissent
from all these propositions, if only on the ground that the fullest
development of personal character requires the pressure of discipline
as well as the stimulus of opportunity. But however untrammelled
power may affect the character of those who possess it, autocracy,
aristocracy, and plutocracy have all, from the point of view of
the lover of liberty, one fatal defect--they necessarily involve a
restriction in the opportunity for development of faculty among the
great mass of the population. It is only when the resources of the
nation are deliberately organised and dealt with for the benefit, not
of particular individuals or classes, but of the entire community;
when the administration of industry, as of every other branch of human
affairs, becomes the function of specialised experts, working through
deliberately adjusted Common Rules; and when the ultimate decision on
policy rests in no other hands than those of the citizens themselves,
that the maximum aggregate development of individual intellect and
individual character in the community as a whole can be attained.
“For our analysis helps us to disentangle from the complex influences
on individual development those caused by democracy itself. The
universal specialisation and delegation which, as we suggest,
democratic institutions involve, necessarily imply a great increase
in capacity and efficiency, if only because specialisation in service
means expertness, and delegation compels selection. This deepening and
narrowing of professional skill may be expected, in the fully-developed
democratic state, to be accompanied by a growth in culture of which our
present imperfect organisation gives us no adequate idea. So long as
life is one long scramble for personal gain--still more, when it is one
long struggle against destitution--there is no free time or strength
for much development of the sympathetic, intellectual, artistic, or
religious faculties. When the conditions of employment are deliberately
regulated so as to secure adequate food, education, and leisure to
every capable citizen, the great mass of the population will, for the
first time, have any real chance of expanding in friendship and family
affection, and of satisfying the instinct for knowledge or beauty. It
is an even more unique attribute of democracy that it is always taking
the mind of the individual off his own narrow interests and immediate
concerns, and forcing him to give his thoughts and leisure, not to
satisfying his own desires, but to considering the needs and desires of
his fellows. As an Elector--still more as a chosen Representative--in
his parish, in his professional association, in his co-operative
society, or in the wider political institutions of his state, the
‘average sensual man’ is perpetually impelled to appreciate and to
decide issues of public policy. The working of democratic institutions
means, therefore, one long training in enlightened altruism, one
continual weighing, not of the advantage of the particular act to the
particular individual, at the particular moment, but of those ‘larger
expediencies’ on which all successful conduct of social life depends.
“If now, at the end of this long analysis, we try to formulate our
dominant impression, it is a sense of the vastness and complexity
of democracy itself. Modern civilised states are driven to this
complication by the dense massing of their populations, and the course
of industrial development. The very desire to secure mobility in the
crowd compels the adoption of one regulation after another, which limit
the right of every man to use the air, the water, the land, and even
the artificially produced instruments of production, in the way that he
may think best. The very discovery of improved industrial methods, by
leading to specialisation, makes manual labourer and brainworker alike
dependent on the rest of the community for the means of subsistence,
and subordinates them, even in their own crafts, to the action of
others. In the world of civilisation and progress, no man can be his
own master. But the very fact that, in modern society, the individual
thus necessarily loses control over his own life, makes him desire to
regain collectively what has become individually impossible. Hence
the irresistible tendency to popular government, in spite of all its
difficulties and dangers. But democracy is still the Great Unknown.
Of its full scope and import we can yet catch only glimpses. As one
department of social life after another becomes the subject of careful
examination we shall gradually attain to a more complete vision. Our
own tentative conclusions, derived from the study of one manifestation
of the democratic spirit, may, we hope, not only suggest hypotheses for
future verification, but also stimulate other students to carry out
original investigations into the larger and perhaps more significant
types of democratic organisation.”
In 1920, after nearly a quarter of a century of further experience and
consideration, we should, in some respects, put this differently. The
growth, among all classes, and especially among the manual workers and
the technicians, of what we may call corporate self-consciousness and
public spirit, and the diffusion of education--coupled with further
discoveries in the technique of democratic institutions--would lead us
to-day to include, and even to put in the forefront, certain additional
suggestions, which we can here only summarise briefly.
There is, in the first place, a genuine need for, and a real social
advantage in giving recognition to, the contemporary transformation
in the status of the manual working wage-earners, on the one hand,
and of the technicians on the other, as compared with that of the
manager or mere “captain of industry.” This change of status, which is,
perhaps, the most important feature of the industrial history of the
past quarter of a century, will be most easily accorded its legitimate
recognition in those industries and services in which the profit-making
capitalist proprietor is dispensed with in favour of public ownership,
whether national, municipal, or co-operative. This is, incidentally,
an important reason for what is called “nationalisation.” It is a
real social gain that the General Secretary of the Swiss Railwaymen’s
Trade Union should sit as one of the five members of the supreme
governing board of the Swiss railway administration. We ourselves look
for the admission of nominees of the manual workers, as well as of
the technicians, upon the executive boards and committees, on terms
of complete equality with the other members, in all publicly owned
industries and services; not merely, or even mainly, for the sake
of the advantages of the counsel and criticism that the newcomers
may bring from new standpoints, but principally for the sake of
both inspiring and satisfying the increasing sense of corporate
self-consciousness and public spirit among all those employed in these
enterprises.
In the second place we should lay stress on the change that is taking
place in the nature (and in the conception) of authority itself. In
our analysis of 1897 we confined ourselves unduly to a separation of
spheres of authority. Whilst still regarding that analytic separation
of “management” into three classes of judgements or decisions as
fundamentally valid, we should nowadays attach even more importance
to the ways in which authority itself, in industry as well as in the
rest of government, is being rapidly transformed, alike in substance
and in methods of expression. The need for final decisions will remain,
not merely in emergencies, but also as to policy; and it is of high
importance to vest the responsibility for decision, according to the
nature of the case, in the right hands. But we suggest that a great
deed of the old autocracy in industry and services, once deemed to
be indispensable, is ceasing to be necessary to efficiency, and will
accordingly, as Democracy becomes more genuinely accepted, gradually
be dispensed with. A steadily increasing sphere will, except in
matters of emergency, be found for consultation among all grades and
sections concerned, out of which will emerge judgements and decisions
arrived at, very largely, by common consent. This will, we believe,
produce actually a higher standard of industrial efficiency than mere
autocracy could ever hope for. Where knowledge is a common possession
the facts themselves will often decide; and though decisions may be
short, sharp, and necessarily formulated by the appropriate person,
they will not inevitably bear the impress of (or be resented as) the
dictates of irresponsible autocracy. We may instance two large classes
of considerations which will, we think, with great social advantage,
come to be matters for mutual consultation in those committees
and councils which already characterise the administration of all
industry on a large scale, whether under private or public ownership,
and which will, in the future, be increasingly representative of
all grades of workers by hand or by brain. To such committees and
councils there will come, as a matter of course, a stream of reports
from the disinterested outside costing experts, which will carry with
them no coercive authority, but which will graphically reveal the
efficiency results, so far as regards cost and output, of each part
of the enterprise, in comparison both with its own past, and with
the corresponding results of other analogous enterprises. Similarly,
there will come a stream of financial and merely statistical reports
from equally disinterested outside auditors and statisticians,
making graphic revelations as to the progress of the enterprise, in
comparison with its own previous experience and with the progress
of like enterprises elsewhere. Further, there will be a stream of
what we may call scientific reports, also from disinterested outside
experts, not only describing new inventions and discoveries in the
technique of the particular enterprise, but suggesting, in the light
of recent surveys of the work, how they could be practically applied
to its peculiar circumstances. These three classes of reports, all of
them by disinterested experts, engaged in keeping under review all
analogous enterprises at home or abroad, and having neither interest
in, nor authority over, any of them, will, we suggest, be discussed by
the members of the committees and councils on terms of equality; the
decisions being taken, according to the nature of the case, by those in
whom the responsibility for decision may be vested.
But there will be a second extensive class of reports of a different
character, conveying not statements of fact but views of policy.
There will, we must assume, be reports from those responsible, not
merely or mainly for satisfying the existing generation of consumers,
producers, or citizens, but for safeguarding the interests of the
community as a whole, in the future as well as in the present. There
will be the reports from the organs of the consumers or users of the
particular commodity or service (such as the District Committees
representing telephone users set up by the Postmaster-General as
organs of, criticism and suggestion for his telephone administration).
Finally there will be reports conveying criticisms and suggestions
from committees or councils representing other enterprises, or other
sections of producers (whether technicians or manual workers), which
may have something to communicate that they deem important. These
reports will, none of them, come with coercive authority, but merely
as conveying information, to be considered in the consultations out of
which the necessary decisions will emerge.
Opinions may differ as to the competence to take part in such
consultations of the selected representatives of the manual workers
and the technicians respectively. We are ourselves of opinion that,
taking the business as a whole, such representatives will be found to
compare, in competence, quite favourably with the average member of a
Board of Directors. But whether or not the counsels and decisions of
great industrial enterprises are likely to be much improved by such
consultations--and we confidently expect that they will be--we suggest
that it is predominantly in this form that the principles of Democracy
may, in practice, be applied to industrial administration; and that it
will be for the Professional Associations of the technicians and the
Trade Unions of the manual workers to prove themselves equal to the
transformation in their status that this or any other application of
Democracy involves.
But here we must pause. In a future work on the achievements, policy,
and immediate controversies of the British Labour and Socialist
Movement we shall give the historical and the psychological analysis,
in the light of the experience of the past few decades, upon which we
base our present conclusions.
INDEX
Aberdare, 514
Aberdare, Lord, 276-7, 285
Aberdeen, cotton-weavers of, 82;
tailors of, 79
Abnormal place, 513-16
Abraham, William, 596
Acetylene Welders, 495
Acland, Sir A. H. Dyke, 308
Actions for damages, 597-634
Actors’ Association, 507
Actuarial position of T.U., 267-8
Adamson, W., 699
Admiralty Constructive Engineers, 507
Agricultural Labourers, 136, 144-6, 328-34, 405, 416, 439-40, 488-9,
624, 648
Agriculture, Royal Commission on, 648
Albert Hall, 666, 669
Alison, Sir Archibald, 170, 173
“All Grades Movement,” 525-6
Allan, Wm., 210-14, 232, 234 (life), 233-40, 243, 248, 350, 362, 419.
Alliance Cabinet Makers’ Association.
_See_ Cabinet Makers
Almshouses, provided by the Liverpool Shipwrights, 39
Althorpe, Lord, 132
Amalgamated Association of Boot and Shoe Makers, 436
Amalgamated Association of Miners, 306, 349, 511
Amalgamated Engineering Union, 488, 551
Amalgamated Metal Wire and Tube Makers’ Society, 359
Amalgamated Society of.
_See_ Carpenters, Engineers, Cotton-spinners, Cotton-weavers, Boot
and Shoemakers, Builders’ Labourers, Card and Blowing Room
Operatives, Metal Planers, Railway Servants, Tailors, Watermen and
Lightermen
Amalgamated Tramway and Vehicle Workers, 744
Amalgamations and Federations, 546-554
American Federation of Labour, 135, 556
Amicable and Brotherly Society of Machine Printers (Cotton and
Calico), 70, 75
Amicable Society of Woolstaplers, 83
Anderson, W. C., 699
Anti-corn Law League, 174, 176
Applegarth, Robert, 232, 233-40, 236-7 (life), 248, 350, 362, 391,
419, 680
Appleton, W. A., 556
Apprentices, 27, 29, 38, 45, 47, 83, 267
Apprentices, Statute of, 47, 59, 66, 250-51
Arbitration, 29, 71, 226-7, 337, 643
Arch, Joseph, 329, 334, 680, 682
Armstrong, Lord, 315
Arnot, R. Page, 489, 511, 524, 532, 633, 662
Ashley, Sir W. J., 4, 5, 13, 15, 29, 511, 735-7
Ashton, murder of, 122
Ashton, Thomas, 311, 356
Ashton-under-Lyne, strikes at, 119, 122
Ashworth, 169
Asquith, H. H., 528-9, 636, 645, 692
Assinder, G. F., 599
Associated.
_See_ Blacksmiths, Carpenters, Engineers, Iron-forgers,
Railwaymen, and Shipwrights
Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, 439, 505,
527, 530, 535, 539, 545.
_See also_ Railwaymen
Associations of Consumers, 706-18
Associations of Producers, 653-63, 704-18, 752-62
Atchison’s Haven, 10
Austin, Michael, 596
Ayrshire Miners, 681
Bachelor Companies, 4, 5, 6, 7
Baernreither, Dr., 220, 300
Baker, C., 634
Bakers, 369, 438, 559
Bamford, Samuel, 96, 164
Bank Officers’ Guild, 505
Barker, Ernest, 414
Barnes, Geo. N., 490, 692-3, 695, 698
Barnsley, first working-man Town Councillor elected in, 305
Basketmakers, 14, 45, 438, 552
Bass, Michael, 523
Bass-dressers, 336
Beale, C. G., 530
Beamers, 477