CHAPTER X
THE PLACE OF TRADE UNIONISM IN THE STATE
[1890-1920]
In 1890 Trade Union organisation had already become a lawful institution; its leading members had begun to be made members of Royal Commissions and justices of the peace; they were, now and then, given such Civil Service appointments as Factory Inspectors; and two or three of them had won their way into the House of Commons. But these advances were still exceptional and precarious. The next thirty years were to see the legal position of Trade Unionism, actually in consequence of renewed assaults, very firmly consolidated by statute, and the Trade Union claim to participation in all public enquiries, and to nominate members to all governmental commissions and committees, practically admitted. Trade Union representatives have won an equal entrance to local bodies, from Quarter Sessions and all the elected Councils down to Pension and Food and Profiteering Act Committees; an influential Labour Party has been established in Parliament; and most remarkable of all, the Trade Union itself has been tacitly accepted as a part of the administrative machinery of the State.
It is a characteristic feature of Trade Union history, at the end as at the beginning of the record of the past hundred years, that we have to trace the advance of the Movement through a series of attacks upon Trade Unionism itself. It is in this light that we regard the Royal Commission on Labour set up by the Conservative Government of 1891. Its professed purpose was to enquire into the relations between Capital and Labour, with a view to their improvement. But its composition was significantly weighted against the wage-earners. It is true that, in the large total membership, seven Trade Union officials were included, among them being Mr. Tom Mann; but whilst the great employers who sat on the Commission were supported by legislators, lawyers, and economists of their own class, having substantially their own assumptions and opinions, the Trade Unionist minority was allowed no expert colleagues. From the start the Commission set itself—probably quite without any consciousness of bias—to discredit alike the economic basis of the workmen’s combinations, the methods and devices of Trade Unionism, and the projects of social and economic reform that were then making headway in the Trade Union world. In the end, after two years’ exhaustive enquiry, which cost the nation nearly £50,000, the majority of the Commissioners either found it impossible, or deemed it inexpedient, to report anything in the nature of an indictment against Trade Unionism in theory or practice; and could not bring themselves to recommend any, even the slightest, reversal of what had, up to the very date of the report, been conceded or enacted, whether with regard to the recognition of Trade Unions, the collective regulation of wages, the legal prescription of minimum conditions of employment or the political activities of the workmen’s combinations. The majority of the Commissioners—it is significant that they were joined by three out of the seven Trade Unionists—contented themselves with deprecating, and mildly arguing against, every one of the projects of reform that were then in the air. What is interesting is the fact that the most reactionary section of the Commission nearly persuaded their colleagues of the majority to recommend putting Trade Unions compulsorily into the strait-jacket of legal incorporation, involving them in corporate liability for the acts of their officers or agents, with the object of inducing the Unions to enter—not, as is usual in Collective Bargaining, into treaties defining merely minimum conditions—but into legally binding obligations with the employers, in which the Unions would become liable in damages if any of their members refused to work on the collectively prescribed terms. At the last moment the majority of the Commissioners recoiled from this proposal, which was left to be put forward as a separate report over the names of seven Commissioners. The Labour Minority Report, signed by four[651] out of the seven Trade Unionist Commissioners, whilst protesting strongly against any interference with Trade Union freedom, took the form of a long and detailed plea for a large number of immediately practicable industrial, economic, and social reforms, envisaged as step by step progress towards a complete transformation of the social order. [652]
The Commission had no direct results in legislation or administration; but the Board of Trade set up a Labour Department, appointed a number of Trade Unionists as its officials or correspondents, and started the admirably edited monthly Labour Gazette. The next move came in the form of an assault on the legal position of Trade Unionism, which, in one or other manifestation, held the stage for more than a decade.
For a quarter of a century the peculiar legal status which had been conferred upon a Trade Union by the Acts of 1871-76 was not interfered with by the lawyers. At the close of the nineteenth century, when Trade Unionism had by its very success again become unpopular among the propertied and professional classes, as well as in the business world, a new assault was made upon it.