British Trade Unionism and the War
Though theoretically internationalist in sympathy, and predominantly opposed to “militarism” at home as well as abroad, British Trade Unionism, when war was declared, took a decided line.[678] From first to last the whole strength of the Movement—in spite of the pacifist faith of a relatively small minority, which included the most fervent and eloquent of the Labour members and was supported by the energetic propaganda of the fraction of the Trade Unionists who were also members of the Socialist Society known as the I.L.P.—was thrown on the side of the nation’s effort. From every industry workmen flocked to the colours, with the utmost encouragement and assistance from their Trade Unions; until the miners, the railwaymen, and the engineers, in particular, had to be refused as recruits, exempted from conscription, and even returned from the army, in order that the indispensable industrial services might be maintained. The number of workers in engineering and the manufacture of munitions of war had, indeed, to be largely increased; and the Government found itself, within a year, under the necessity of asking the Trade Unions for the unprecedented sacrifice of the relinquishment, for the duration of the war, of the entire network of “Trade Union Conditions” which had been slowly built up by generations of effort for the protection of the workmen’s Standard of Life. This enormous draft on the patriotism of the rank and file could only be secured by enlisting the support of the official representatives of the Trade Union world—by according to them a unique and unprecedented place as the diplomatic representatives of the wage-earning class. In the famous Treasury Conference of February 1915 the capitalist employers were ignored, and the principal Ministers of the Crown negotiated directly with the authorised representatives of the whole Trade Union world, not only in respect of the terms of service of Government employees, but also with regard to the conditions of employment of all persons, men and women, skilled and unskilled, unionists and non-unionists, engaged on any work needed for the conduct of the war—a phrase which was afterwards stretched to include four-fifths of the entire manual-working class. The Trade Union Executives agreed, at this Conference or subsequently, to suspend, for the duration of the war, all their rules and customary practices restrictive of the output of anything required by the Government for the conduct of the war; all limitation of employment to apprenticed men, to Trade Unionists, to men of proved technical skill, to adults and even to the male sex; all reservation of particular jobs or particular machines to workers of particular trades; all definition of a Normal Day, and all objection to overtime, night-work, or Sunday duty; and even many of the Factory Act prohibitions by which the health and even the safety of the operatives had been protected. In order that the utmost possible output of munitions of every kind might be secured, elaborate schemes of “dilution” were assented to, under which the various tasks were subdivided and rearranged, a very large amount of automatic machinery was introduced, and successive drafts of “dilutees” were brought into the factories and workshops—men and boys from other occupations, sometimes even non-manual workers, as well as women and girls—and put to work under the tuition and direction of the minority of skilled craftsmen at top speed, at time wages differing entirely from the Trade Union rates, or at piecework prices unsafeguarded by Collective Bargaining, for hours of labour indefinitely lengthened, sometimes under conditions such as no Trade Union would have permitted. It must be recorded to the credit of the Trade Unions that not one of the societies refused this sacrifice, which was made without any demand for compensatory increase of pay, merely upon the condition—to which not only the Ministry, but also the Opposition Leaders and the House of Commons as a whole, elaborately and repeatedly pledged themselves—that the abandonment of the “Trade Union Conditions” was only to be for the duration of the war, and exclusively for the service of the Government, not to the profit of any private employer; and that everything that was abrogated was to be reinstated when peace came.
Under stress of the national emergency, the Government made ever greater demands on the patriotism of the Trade Unions, which accepted successively, so far as war-work was concerned, a legal abrogation of the employers’ competition for their members’ services by the prohibition of advertisement for employees, and of the engagement of men from other districts—an unprecedented interference with the “Law of Supply and Demand”—the suspension of the right to strike for better terms; the submission of all disputes to the decision of a Government Department of arbitration, the awards of which, with the abrogation of the right to strike, or even freely to relinquish employment, became virtually compulsory; the legal enforcement under penalties of the employer’s workshop rules; and even legally enforced continuance, not only in munition work, but actually in the service of a particular employer, under the penal jurisdiction of the ubiquitous Munitions Tribunals. The Munitions of War Acts, 1915, 1916 and 1917, by which all this industrial coercion was statutorily imposed, were accepted by overwhelming majorities at successive Trade Union and Labour Party Conferences. It was a serious aggravation of this “involuntary servitude” that the rigid enforcement of compulsory military service—extended successively from single men to fathers of families, from 18 years of age to 51—had the incidental effect of enforcing what was virtually “industrial conscription” on those who were left for the indispensable civilian employment; and the individual workman realised that the penalty for any failure of implicit obedience to the foreman might be instant relegation to the trenches. Although this inevitable result of Compulsory Military Service was foreseen and deplored,[679] the successive Military Service Acts were—in view of the nation’s needs—ratified, in effect, by great majorities at the workmen’s National Congresses. The strongest protests were made, but as each measure was passed it was accepted without resistance, and proposals to resist were always rejected by large majorities. It speaks volumes, both for the patriotism of the Trade Unionists and for the strength of Trade Union loyalty and Trade Union organisation, that under such repressive circumstances the Trade Union leaders were able, on the whole, to prevent their members from hindering production by industrial revolts. A certain amount of friction was, of course, not to be avoided. Strikes, though greatly reduced in number, were not wholly prevented; and the South Wales coal-miners and the engineering workmen on the Clyde—largely through arbitrary and repressive action by their respective employers—broke into open rebellion; which led, in the one industry, to the Government overriding the recalcitrant South Wales employers and assuming the direction and the financial responsibility of all the coal mines throughout the kingdom; and, in the other, to the arbitrary arrest and deportation of the leaders of the unofficial organisation of revolt styled the “Clyde Workers’ Committee.” The Trade Union Executives and officials, whilst restraining their members and deprecating all stoppages of production, were able to put up a good fight against the unnecessary and unreasonable demands which, with a view to “after the war” conditions, employers were not unwilling to use the national emergency to put forward. These Trade Union spokesmen had to obtain for their members the successive rises in money wages which the steadily rising cost of living made necessary, and they had constantly to stand their ground in the innumerable mixed committees and arbitration proceedings into which the Government was always inveigling them. On the whole, whilst co-operating in every way in meeting the national emergency, the Trade Union organisation during the four and a-quarter years of war remained intact; and Trade Union membership—allowing for the millions absent with the colours—steadily increased. Nor did the Trade Union Movement make any serious revolt when the Government found itself unable to fulfil, with any literal exactness, the specific pledges which it had given to Organised Labour. The complications and difficulties of the Government were, in fact, so great that the pledges were not kept. The first promise to be broken was that the abrogation of Trade Union Conditions and the removal of everything restrictive of output should not be allowed to increase the profits of the employers. The so-called “Munitions Levy” was imposed in 1916 on “controlled establishments,” in fulfilment of this pledge, in order to confiscate for the Exchequer the whole of their excess profit, over and above a permitted addition of 20 per cent and very liberal allowances for increased capital and extra exertion by the employers themselves. It will hardly be believed that, in flagrant disregard of the specific pledge, within a year this Munitions Levy was abolished; and the firms especially benefiting by the workmen’s sacrifices were made merely subject, in common with all other trades where there had been no such abrogation of Trade Union Conditions, to the 80 per cent Excess Profits Duty, with the result of increasing the net income left to those employers whose profits had doubled, and of doing, with regard to all the employers, the very thing that the Trade Unions had stipulated should not be done, namely, giving the employers themselves a financial interest in “dilution.”[680] As the war dragged on, and prices rose, the successive war-bonuses and additions to wages—especially those of the miners and the bulk of the women workers—in many cases fell steadily behind the rise in the cost of living; and in 1917 the War Cabinet was actually guilty of a formal instruction to the presumedly impartial central arbitration tribunal that no further increase of wages was to be awarded—an instruction which, on its public disclosure, had to be apologised for and virtually withdrawn. Even the pledge as to wages in the solemn “Treasury Agreement” of 1915, at which the “Trade Union Conditions” were surrendered, was not fulfilled, at any rate as regards the women workers; and had to be made the subject of a subsequent serious investigation by the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry, in which all the “white-washing” of a Government majority failed to convince the Trade Unionists, any more than it did the only unpaid member of the Committee, that the Government officials had not betrayed them.[681] The solemnly promised “Restoration of Trade Union Conditions” was only imperfectly carried out. What the Government did, and that only after long delay, was not what it had promised, namely, actually to see the pre-war conditions and practices reinstated, but to enact a statute enabling the workmen to proceed in the law courts against employers who failed to restore them; continuance of any such restoration to be obligatory only for one year. [682]
The Trade Unionists, in fact, who had at the outset of the war patriotically refrained from bargaining as to the price of their aid, were, on the whole, “done” at its close. Though here and there particular sections had received exceptionally high earnings in the time of stress, the rates of wages, taking industry as a whole, did not, as the Government returns prove, rise either so quickly or so high as the cost of living; so that, whilst many persons suffered great hardship, the great majority of wage-earners found the product in commodities of their rates of pay in 1919 less rather than more than it was in 1913. During the war, indeed, many thousands of households got in the aggregate more, and both earned and needed more; because the young and the aged were at work and costing more than when not at work, whilst overtime and night-work increased the strain and the requirements of all. When peace came, it was found that the Government, for all its promises, had made no arrangements whatever to prevent unemployment; and none to relieve the unemployed beyond an entirely improvised and dwindling weekly dole, which (so far as civilians were concerned) was suddenly brought to an end on November 20, 1919, without any alternative provision being immediately made.
It would thus be easy to argue that the representatives of the Trade Union world made a series of bad bargains with the Government, and through the Government with the capitalist employers, at a time when the nation’s needs would have enabled the organised manual workers almost to dictate their own terms. But this is to take a short-sighted view. It is a sufficient answer to say that the great mass of the Trade Unionists, like the leaders themselves, wanted above all things that the nation should win the war; found it repugnant to make stipulations in the national emergency, and did not realise the extent to which they were being tricked and cheated by the officials. But apart from this impulsive and unself-regarding patriotism we think that, when it becomes possible to cast up and balance all the results of the innovations of the war period, the Trade Union Movement will be found to have gained and not lost. We may suggest, perhaps paradoxically, that the very ease with which the War Cabinet suppressed the civil liberties of the manual-working wage-earners during the war, and even continued after the Armistice a machinery of industrial espionage, with agents provocateurs of workshop “sedition,” enormously increased the solidarity of the Trade Union Movement—an effect intensified during 1919 by the costly and futile intervention of the British Government in Russia on behalf of military leaders whom the Trade Unionists, rightly or wrongly, believed to be organising the forces of political and economic reaction. Sober and responsible Trade Unionists, who had taken for granted the easy-going freedom and tolerance characteristic of English life in times of peace, suddenly realised that these conditions could at any moment be withdrawn from them by what seemed the arbitrary fiat of a Government over which they found that they had no control. In this way the abrogation of Trade Union liberty during the war gave the same sort of intellectual fillip to Trade Unionism and the Labour Party in 1915-19 that had been given in 1901-13 by the Taff Vale Case and the Osborne Judgement. At the same time the Government found itself compelled, in order to secure the co-operation of the Trade Unions, both during the war and amid the menacing economic conditions of the first half of 1919, to accord to them, and to their leaders, a locus standi in the determination of essentially national issues that was undreamt of in previous times. The Trade Unions, in fact, through shouldering their responsibility in the national cause, gained enormously in social and political status. In practically every branch of public administration, from unimportant local committees up to the Cabinet itself, we find the Trade Union world now accepted as forming, virtually, a separate constituency, which has to be specially represented. We shall tell the tale in our next chapter of the participation of members of the Parliamentary Labour Party in the Coalition Governments of Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George. What is here relevant is that these Trade Union officials were selected in the main, not on personal grounds, but because they represented the Trade Union Movement. They accepted ministerial office with the approval, and they relinquished ministerial office at the request of the National Conference of the Labour Party, in which the Trade Unions exercised the predominant influence. A similar recognition of the Trade Union Movement has marked all the recently constituted Local Government structure, from the committees set up in 1914 for the relief of distress to those organised in 1917 for the rationing and control of the food supply, and the tribunals formed in 1919 for the suppression of “profiteering.” In all these cases the Government specifically required the appointment of representatives of the local Trade Unions. Trade Unionists have to constitute half the members appointed to the Advisory Committees attached to the Employment Exchanges; and Trade Unionist workmen sit, not only on the temporary “Munitions Courts” administering the disciplinary provisions of the Munitions of War Acts, but also on the local Tribunals of Appeal to determine whether a workman is entitled to the State Unemployment Benefit. In the administration of the Military and Naval Pensions Act of 1916 a further step in recognition of Trade Unionism was taken. Not only were the nominees of Labour placed upon the Statutory (Central) Pensions Committee, but, in the order constituting the Local Pensions Committees, the Trade Union organisations in each locality, which were named in the schemes, were expressly and specifically accorded the right to elect whom they chose as their representatives on these committees by which the pensions were to be awarded.[683] When, towards the close of the war, the Committee presided over by the Rt. Hon. J. H. Whitley, M.P., propounded its scheme of Joint Industrial Councils of equal numbers of representative employers and workers for the supervision and eventual administration of many matters of interest in each industry throughout the kingdom—the “mouse” which was practically the whole outcome as regards industrial reorganisation of the Ministry of Reconstruction—it was specifically to the Trade Unions in each industry, and to them alone, that the election of the wage-earners’ representatives was entrusted. [684] When, in 1919, it seemed desirable to make a series of comprehensive reforms in the terms of employment, it was not to Parliament that the Prime Minister turned, but to a “National Industrial Conference,” to which he summoned some five hundred representatives of the Employers’ Associations and Trade Unions. It was by this body, through its own sub-committee of thirty employers’ representatives and thirty Trade Union representatives, that were elaborated the measures instituting a Legal Maximum Eight Hours Day and a statutory Minimum Wage Commission that the Ministry undertook to present to Parliament. In the Royal Commission on Agriculture of 1919, the several Unions enrolling farm labourers were invited to nominate as many members (eight) as were accorded to the farmers, whilst of the four remaining members appointed as scientific or statistical experts—all landlords being excluded—two were chosen among those known to be sympathetic to Labour. In the statutory Coal Industry Commission of the same year, to which reference has already been made, the Miners’ Federation made its participation absolutely conditional on being allowed to nominate half of the total membership, under a presumedly impartial Judge of the High Court, including not merely three Trade Union officials to balance the three mine-owners, but also three out of the six “disinterested” members by whom—all royalty owners being excluded—the Commission was to be completed. All this constitutional development is at once the recognition and the result of the new position in the State that Trade Unionism has won—a position due not merely to the numerical growth that we have described, but also to the uprise of new ideas and wider aspirations in the Trade Union world itself.