The History of Trade Unionism / (Revised edition, extended to 1920)

by Sidney Webb; Beatrice Webb

The Cotton Operatives

The most notable of these changes is the decline in relative influence of the cotton operatives. It is not that the Unions of Spinners, Weavers and Card-room Operatives have decreased in membership or in accumulated funds. On the contrary, they have in the aggregate during the past thirty years more than doubled their membership; and the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners, with three-quarters of a million pounds belonging to its 25,000 members (exclusive of 26,000 piecers), is, now as formerly, the wealthiest Trade Union of any magnitude. Nor have these Unions in any sense lost their hold on their own trade, at least in its central district of Lancashire and Cheshire, though its outlying areas in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Glasgow are still somewhat neglected. But the growth of Trade Unionism in other industries has reduced the “Cotton Men” from ten or twelve to four or five per cent of the Trades Union Congress; and, owing partly to internal differences, their leading personalities no longer dominate the counsels of the Movement. The excellent organisation of the Cotton Trade Unions has been maintained; but it has not been copied by other trades, and their internecine dissensions have detracted from the influence of their various federations. There has been, in fact, during the whole thirty years, only two or three important incidents. A general strike of cotton-spinners took place in 1893, when all the mills were stopped for no less than twenty weeks. The employers had demanded a reduction of 10 per cent, whilst the Trade Union urged that the depression should be met by placing all the mills on short time. This stoppage was at last brought to an end by agreement between the employers and the Trade Union, arrived at without external intervention in a fourteen hours continuous session, which made the reduction in rates only 7d. in the £ (2.916 instead of 10 per cent), and included elaborate arrangements for future adjustment of wages and other differences by mutual discussion without cessation of work.[601] This “Brooklands Agreement,” which we described in our Industrial Democracy, governed the spinning trade from 1893 to 1905, but was in the latter year formally terminated by the Unions concerned, on the ground that the machinery worked both slowly and in such a way as to hamper the operatives in obtaining the advantage of good times. Provisional arrangements were made, but these did not prevent a strike of seven weeks in 1908, which ended in a compromise advantageous to the operatives. Apart from minor and local disputes, frequently about bad material or refusal to work with a non-Unionist, there was, however, no forward movement, notably with regard to the hours of labour. In 1902 a slight amendment of the Factory Act was secured by agreement with the employers, by which the factory week was reduced from 56½ to 55½ hours; and with this the trade remained contented. Right down to 1919 there was no important trade movement, but in February of that year all sections of the cotton operatives claimed their share in the general reduction of hours that was proceeding; and, after prolonged negotiations, 300,000 operatives struck in June. When it was seen that the stoppage of the mills had become general, the employers gave way and conceded a Forty-eight Hours week, which has not yet been embodied in law, accompanied by a 30 per cent advance in piece rates so as to involve no reduction of earnings.

The organisation of the cotton operatives, whilst remaining essentially as described in our Industrial Democracy, has gone on increasing in federal complexity. The various sections—notably spinners with their attendant piecers; weavers, including winders, and in some towns also warpers, beamers, and reelers; card, blowing and ring-room operatives; warp-dressers and warpers; tape-sizers; beamers, twisters and drawers; and overlookers—continue to be organised in very autonomous local bodies, which are styled sometimes societies or associations, and sometimes merely branches, and which vary in number in the different sections from half-a-dozen to ten times as many. But these are nearly all doubly united, first in a federal body for the whole of each section (which may be styled an amalgamation, a federation, an association, or a General Union of the section), and also in a local “Cotton Trades Federation” or “Textile Trades Federation,” which combines the local organisations of the weavers and sometimes other sections in each of a couple of dozen geographical districts in Lancashire and Cheshire. The weavers’ “amalgamation,” and other sections of the “manufacturing” trade, are further united in the Northern Counties Amalgamated Association, with 175,000 members. Finally, all the federal organisations of the several sections are brought together in the United Textile Factory Workers’ Association, which focuses the opinion of all the cotton operatives, including the Amalgamated Association of Bleachers and Dyers, on those fundamental issues on which they are conscious of a common and an equal interest. [602]

The officials of the Cotton Trade Unions—herein differing from those of the greatly developed General Union of Textile Workers, which has organised the (principally women) woollen weavers—have remained predominantly technicians, devoting themselves almost entirely to the protection of their members’ trade interests, without taking much part in the wider interests now largely influencing the Trade Union world, and showing little sympathy either in larger federations or in the new spirit. They have been slow to take an active part in the political development of the Trade Union world, which has manifested itself, as we shall describe in a subsequent chapter, in the organisation of the Labour Party. This backwardness may be ascribed, in some degree, to the political history of Lancashire, where an ancestral Conservatism still lingers, and where it was possible, even in the twentieth century, for so prominent a Trade Union official as the late James Mawdsley, the able leader of the cotton-spinners, to stand for Parliament in 1906 as a member of the Conservative Party. The influence of an exceptionally large proportion of Roman Catholics among the cotton operatives must also be noted. It is a unique feature of the technical officials of the Cotton Unions that they have frequently been willing to serve the industry as the paid officials of the Employers’ Associations when they have been offered higher salaries. Their main duty, whether acting for the employers or the workmen, is to secure uniformity in the application of the Collective Agreements as between mill and mill; and such a duty, it is argued, like that of the valuer or accountant, is independent of personal opinion or bias, and can be rendered with equal fidelity to either client. This was not at first resented by the workmen, who even saw some advantage in the Employers’ Association being served by officers thoroughly acquainted with the complicated technicalities as the operatives saw them. There has, however, latterly been a change of feeling; and though such transfers of services cannot be prevented (the Employers’ Associations constantly finding the Trade Union official the best man available), they are now resented. [603]

It is felt in some quarters that many of the “cotton men” have fallen out of harmony with the newer currents of thought in the Trade Union world. It is alleged that they accept too implicitly the employers’ assumptions, and do not sympathise with aspirations of more fundamental change than a variation of wages or hours. But the influence of the “cotton men” is, in the Trade Union world, still important for their specific contribution, to Trade Union theory and practice, of equal piecework rates for both sexes; of a rigid refusal to allow an employer to make the inferiority either of any workers or of any machines that he chooses to employ an excuse for deductions from the Standard Rate, and of the utmost possible improvement of machinery so long as the piecework rates are strictly controlled by Collective Bargaining and firmly embodied in rigidly enforced lists—points on which many Trade Unionists who would deem themselves “advanced” have not yet attained the same level. [604]