Amalgamations and Federations
Whilst the numerical strength and industrial and political influence of the several Trade Unions have thus steadily increased during the past thirty years, it is less easy to characterise the changes in the relations of Trade Unions with each other.
The multiplicity of separate organisations in which the six or seven million Trade Unionists are grouped, and the complication and diversity of the relations among the various societies, continue to-day, as they did thirty years ago, to baffle classification, and almost to defy analysis. It remains as impossible as it was in 1890 to state precisely how many distinct Trade Unions are in existence, because the endless variety of their federal organisations makes it uncertain which of the local or sectional Unions are to be counted as independent societies. We estimate, however, that upon any computation the number of financially distinct organisations, which we may put at about 1100, remains approximately what it was thirty years ago. The tendency to amalgamation, that is to say, has just about kept pace, arithmetically, with the starting of new organisations, whilst the average membership of each unit has more than quadrupled.
Such a statement fails, however, to do justice to the change that has come over the Trade Union world. Thirty years ago it was, on the whole, a congeries of numerically small units, only two or three of which counted as many as 50,000 members. To-day there are nearly a dozen which severally manage memberships of a quarter of a million, and probably fifty which deal with more than 50,000 each. A few other national societies of smaller membership are of some importance. Scattered up and down the United Kingdom a thousand other local or sectional societies exist, with memberships from a few dozen to a few thousand, but these play no part and exercise no influence in the movement as a whole. Probably five-sixths of all the Trade Union membership, and practically all its effective force, are to be found among the hundred principal societies to which the Ministry of Labour has long confined its detailed statistics. [631]
The movement for the amalgamation of competing societies has, during the past decade, been specially energetic and persistent. This has arisen, partly spontaneously, from the obvious disadvantages attendant both on rivalry between Trade Unions seeking to enrol the same classes of members throughout the kingdom—such as that between the various societies of railway employees—and on the division of workmen of the same craft among a number of independent local societies, such as the Coopers, the Chippers and Drillers, and the Painters and other branches of the Building Trades. But during the past decade the movement has been reinforced by the desire for an organisation based on the whole of an industry, such as engineering, housebuilding, mining, or the railway service, in which all the co-operating crafts and grades of workers would be associated in a single Industrial Union; in contrast with the earlier conception of the separate organisation of each craft throughout the whole kingdom; such as that of the carpenters, the enginemen, the engineering mechanics, the clerks, and by analogy the general labourers, in whatsoever industry they may be working. The case for the Industrial Union in such an industry as mining, for example, merely from the standpoint of Collective Bargaining, and for the sake of getting effective Common Rules, has always been a strong one; but the movement for the substitution of “Industrial” for “Craft” Unionism has been strengthened since about 1911 by the aspirations of those who saw in Trade Unionism something more than an organisation for raising wages and shortening the working day. If the wage-earners were ever to obtain, through their own voluntary associations, the control of their own working lives, and to obtain a steadily increasing participation in the direction of industry; if a Vocational Democracy were to be superimposed on a Democracy based on geographical constituencies; it seemed as if this could be done only by Trade Unions co-extensive with each separate industry. The influence of the movement known as “Guild Socialism” has accordingly been exercised, on the whole, in favour of Industrial Unionism, not so much for the sake of its immediate advantages in improving the conditions of the wage-contract, as because it was only in this form that Trade Unionism could become the vehicle of aspirations to the control of each industry by the whole mass of the workers employed therein.
Except in the way of industrial federations, to be hereafter referred to, it is only in mining and the railway service that any great progress has been made in this direction. The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, established, as we have seen, only in 1888, with no more than 36,000 members, has attracted to itself, year by year, an almost continuous stream of local or sectional organisations among the 1,200,000 workers in and about the coal and iron-stone mines; successively absorbing into one or other of its local units or affiliating directly to itself, not only all the district associations, old or new, of coal-hewers and other underground workers, but also some of the separate organisations of enginemen and firemen, mine mechanics, deputies and overmen, colliery clerks, cokemen, and others employed in or about the mines, until its aggregate membership in 1920 is somewhere about 900,000. And though the Miners’ Federation is still only a Federation of fully autonomous district associations—some of these, too, being themselves federations of the organisations of lesser localities; and although it still depends for its funds almost entirely upon specific levies upon its constituents, it has found means, by its frequently meeting delegate conferences, controlling the strong Executive Committee which they elect, to centralise very effectively the general policy of the whole mining industry, notably with regard to the hours of labour, the conditions of safety, the percentage of general advances of wages and the amount of the national war bonuses, and last, though not least, on the burning issue of nationalisation of the mines and the participation of the miners in their administration. But although the Miners’ Federation embodies in its constitution the principles of federalism and an extreme local autonomy, it takes no account of sectional differences, and makes no provision for the representation at its delegate conferences, or upon its Executive Committee, of any distinct grades or sections. Perhaps, for this reason, the Federation does not yet speak directly for all the organised manual working wage-earners in the industry. There are at least forty separate Trade Unions of enginemen, boilermen and firemen, colliery mechanics, cokemen, under-managers, deputies, overmen and other officials, colliery clerks, and surface-workers of various kinds, not yet affiliated to the Miners’ Federation, either locally or nationally; these have formed National Federations, parallel with the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, of enginemen, deputies, colliery mechanics and under-managers respectively; and in February 1917 seventeen of the societies drew together to form the National Council of Colliery Workers other than Miners, for the purpose of maintaining their separate influence.
In the railway service, as we have already described, the merging in the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, first of the Scottish Society in 1892, and then of the General Railway Workers’ Union, and the United Signalmen and Pointsmen’s Society in 1913, made possible the establishment of the National Union of Railwaymen on the basis of an organisation co-extensive with the industry, with the embodiment in the constitution of sectional representation. The four “departments” into which the members are divided vote separately in the elections. Under these provisions the National Union of Railwaymen, though hampered by the continuance of the separate Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, has been able to make effective not only its claims for higher remuneration, but also its demands for a normal Eight Hours Day, a national system of classification, and national wage scales for the several grades; though still not its aspirations (expressed since 1914) to participation in management, or those (expressed for over a decade) to the elimination from industry of the capitalist profitmaker by the scheme of Railway Nationalisation.
In other industries, too, the concentration of Trade Union forces during the past decade has increasingly taken the form of an amalgamation of rival sectional organisations, sometimes in response to a demand from the rank and file. Thus the Ship Constructors’ and Shipwrights’ Association, established in 1888, has successfully absorbed not only the very old Shipwrights’ Provident Union of London, but also all the remaining local Trade Unions of shipwrights that long lingered in Liverpool, Dublin, etc. The National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association has taken over a number of small societies of French polishers, gilders, and upholsterers. The United Garment Workers’ Trade Union was formed in 1915 by the amalgamation of a number of societies in the various sections of the tailoring trade; and in 1919 it was agreed that this, together with the Scottish Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, should be merged in the old Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, which would then include practically all the organised workers in the making of men’s and women’s clothing in Great Britain. Many small Unions of machine workers, minor craftsmen, and general labourers have been absorbed in one or other of the half-a-dozen large Labour Unions. The Amalgamated Card and Blowing-Room Operatives have taken over various small sectional societies in the Cotton trade. In Sheffield thirteen small Unions, catering for different sections of the gold and silver workers, joined together in 1910 in the Gold, Silver, and Kindred Trades Society, which in 1913 absorbed several more societies in this industry. In the autumn of 1919, as we have already mentioned, six of the sectional societies in the engineering industry decided to merge themselves, with the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, in a new and more gigantic amalgamation with 400,000 members; the United Pattern Makers’ Society, the Electrical Trades Union, and many small and specialised societies of mechanics in iron still standing aloof. In the same month three of the principal Unions of postal and telegraph employees united in a single Union of Post Office Workers, with 90,000 members. Other amalgamations among small or local societies took place among the Basketmakers, the Block Printers, the Leather-workers, the Dyers, the various sections in the Pottery Trade, etc.
Such amalgamation is greatly obstructed by legal requirements. Down to 1917 the law demanded that each society desiring to unite should ratify the decision by a two-thirds majority not merely of those voting, but of the entire membership. Such a poll is almost impossible of attainment by Trade Unions, whose members cannot usually be individually communicated with, owing not only to their frequent changes of residence and the absence of many of them abroad, but also to the lack, in most cases, of any complete register of addresses. In 1917 the Government at last permitted the passage of an Amending Act for which Trade Unionists had often pressed; but even then insisted on any amalgamation being carried, at a 50 per cent poll of the whole membership, by at least 20 per cent majority, conditions which make amalgamation everywhere difficult, and in some Unions (such as those of seamen) quite impossible. In several cases Unions in which the general opinion has been in favour of amalgamation have failed to get the necessary vote. We have already described the ingenious device by which the British Steel Smelters’ Society and the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation surmounted this difficulty.
Meanwhile, of federations as distinct from amalgamations the Trade Union world has a variety more bewildering than ever, some of which have already been referred to. We have to note that the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades Federation, the establishment of which in 1889 we described in Industrial Democracy, has continued in existence, doing useful work from time to time in connection with demarcation disputes and other subjects of inter-union controversy, especially on the North-East Coast, notably contributing also in 1905 to the successful claim of the Clyde trades to weekly instead of fortnightly pays, which the employers had stubbornly resisted for a whole decade, but continuing to be weakened by the abstention, except for a few years, of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, which, however, now frequently consents to act in conjunction with it in general trade questions.
What is significant is the change in type and purpose of these multifarious industrial federations, which have now come to form an important element in the Trade Union world.[632] Federation, in fact, has undergone a subtle change of character. Instead of loose alliances for mutual support in disputes, or for the adjustment of mutual differences as to “demarcation” and transfer of members, the federations of all the craft or sectional Unions engaged in particular industries—notably those of the Building Trades, the Transport Workers, and, though not yet to the same extent, the Printing Trades and the Woollen Workers, like the older organisation of the Cotton Operatives—have become increasingly, themselves negotiating bodies, recognised by the equally organised employers, and concerting with these what are, in effect, national regulations governing their industries throughout the whole kingdom. The later development of the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades Federation has been in the same direction. In the case of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain the development has gone still further; and this great organisation, whilst retaining the federal form, and, even now, not completely admitted to “recognition” by the Mining Association of Great Britain, unquestioningly acts for the whole industry in national issues, as if it were an “amalgamated” Union. Whether or not we are to see all the rival and sectional Unions in each industry amalgamating into a single “Industrial Union,” as many Trade Unionists desire, it must be recognised that the development, during the past decade, of active negotiating federations for the several industries goes far to supply the most urgent need. In short, although financially distinct Trade Unions remain, on the whole, as numerous as ever, the number of separate negotiating bodies, so far as concerns matters relating to an industry as a whole, becomes steadily smaller.
We pass now to federal bodies of a different character.