Boot and Shoemaking
Among the other constituents of the Trade Union world in which a relative decline in influence is to be noted, is that of the boot and shoemakers. Thirty years ago the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives had achieved a position of great influence in the trade. It had joined with the Employers’ Associations in building up, as described in our Industrial Democracy, an elaborate system of Local Boards of Conciliation and Arbitration, united in a National Conference of dignity and influence, with resort to Lord James of Hereford as umpire, by means of which stoppages of work were prevented, and, more important still, the illegitimate use of boy labour was restrained and standard piecework rates were arrived at by collective bargaining, and authoritatively imposed on the whole trade. In 1894 the whole machinery was broken up, at the instance of the very employers who had agreed to it, and had co-operated for years in its working, because they found that, under the rules and at the piecework rates prescribed, the men were “making too much.”
After a prolonged stoppage in 1894 the dispute was patched up by the intervention of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade; and the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, with 80,000 members, has, on the whole, held its own with the employers, with less elaborate formal relations; but the work of the Union is impaired by the weakness of the organisation in the smaller workshops and the less important local centres of the trade.
On the other side, we have the rise to influence, not only in the Trade Union counsels but also in those of the nation, of the Women Workers, the General Labourers, the “black-coated proletariat” of shop assistants, clerks, teachers, technicians, and officials, the miners and the railwaymen, which has been the outstanding feature of the past thirty years.