The printing trades have remained, during the past thirty years, curiously stationary so far as Trade Unionism, is concerned, the London Society of Compositors, the Typographical Association, the Scottish Typographical Association, and the Dublin Typographical Society having, in the aggregate, increased their membership by three-fifths and steadily increased their rates of pay and strategic strength against their own employers, but commanding little influence in the Trade Union Movement as a whole, and in many small towns still leaving a considerable portion of the trade outside their ranks. The less-skilled workers in the papermaking and printing establishments have greatly improved their organisation; and the National Union of Printing and Paper Workers and the Operative Printers Assistants’ Society—both of them including women as well as men—have become large and effective Trade Unions. All the societies are united in the powerful Printing and Kindred Trades Federation, to which the National Union of Journalists, now a large society, has recently affiliated.
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.
Women Workers
In no section of the industrial community has the advance of Trade Unionism during the last thirty years been more marked than among the women workers. For the first half of this period, indeed—though the aggregate women membership of Trade Unions approximately doubled—this meant only a rise from about 100,000 in 1890 to about 200,000 in 1907, mostly in the textile industries; and the number of women Trade Unionists outside those industries was in the latter year still under 30,000. But the long-continued patient work of the Women’s Trade Union League was having its effect; and the idea of Trade Unionism was being established among the women workers in many different industries. Much is to be ascribed to the efforts during these years of Sir Charles and Lady Dilke, who were unwearied in their assistance. In 1909, largely at the instance of Sir Charles Dilke and the women’s leaders, especially Miss Mary Macarthur, Miss Gertrude Tuckwell, and Miss Susan Lawrence, Mr. Winston Churchill, as President of the Board of Trade, carried through Parliament the Trade Boards Bill, which enabled a legal minimum wage to be prescribed by joint boards in four specially low-paid industries, in which mainly women were employed. This measure not only considerably improved the position of the sweated workers in the chain and nail trades, the slop tailoring trade, paper box making and machine lace-making, but—as had been predicted on one side and denied on the other—greatly stimulated independent organisation among the women whose industrial status was raised. The extension of the Trade Boards and of the legal minimum wage in 1913 to half a dozen other trades had like effects, and the further extension of 1918 is already promising in the same direction. Trade Union membership was further greatly increased during 1912-14 as a result of the National Insurance Act, which brought many thousand recruits to the Approved Society sections of the Unions. It was, however, the Great War, with its unprecedented demand for women workers, and their admission, in “dilution” of or in substitution for men, to all sorts of occupations and processes into which they had not previously penetrated, at earnings which they had never before been permitted to receive, that brought the women into Trade Unionism by the hundred thousand. The National Federation of Women Workers—the largest exclusively feminine Union—rose from 11,000 in 1914 to over 60,000 in 1919. A small number of new Trade Unions exclusively for women were established in particular sections, such as the interesting little society of Women Acetylene Welders. The bulk of the women, however, continued to be organised in Trade Unions admitting both sexes. Besides the various Textile Unions, there are now thousands of women in the National Union of Railwaymen, the Railway Clerks’ Association, Boot and Shoe Operatives, and the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation. Most of the general labour Unions, and others like the National Union of Printing and Paper Workers, the National Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks, the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative and Commercial Employees and Allied Workers, had for a couple of decades been enrolling women members; and the female membership of these societies now grew by leaps and bounds. But the greater part of the field of women’s employment is still uncovered. In 1920, though it may be estimated that the total women membership of Trade Unions is nearly three-quarters of a million, this still represents less than 30 per cent of the adult women wage-earners.
The outstanding feature in women’s Trade Unionism during the past decade has been its advance, not merely in numbers and achievements, but also in status and influence. This has come with accelerating speed. To the first Treasury Conference in 1915, at which the Government sought the help of the Trade Unions in the winning of the war, it apparently did not occur to any official to invite the National Federation of Women Workers; but in all subsequent proceedings of the same nature Miss Mary Macarthur and Miss Susan Lawrence, on behalf of the women Trade Unionists in this and other societies, occupied a leading position. Whether before the Munitions Act Tribunals, the Committee on Production, or the Special Arbitration Tribunal set up by the Government to deal with the conditions of employment of women munition-workers, the women’s case, whether put by the representatives of the Women’s Unions, or by those of the principal Unions of general workers that included women, was so ably conducted as to secure for the women workers, almost for the first time, something like the same measure of justice as that which the men had wrested from the employers for themselves. The result was not only a marked rise in the standard of remuneration for women, the opening up to them of many fields of work from which they had hitherto been excluded, and a general improvement in their conditions of employment, but also a rapid development of Trade Unionism among them—nine-tenths of the women Trade Unionists being in societies enrolling both men and women—and the winning, for women’s Trade Unions, of the respect of the Trade Union world. For the first time a woman was elected in 1919 by the Trades Union Congress to its Parliamentary Committee, Miss Margaret Bondfield, of the National Federation of Women Workers, receiving over three million votes. On the reconstitution in 1918 of the Labour Party, in which women had always been accorded equal rights, provision was made so that there should always be at least four women elected to the Executive Committee. A Standing Joint Committee of Women’s Industrial Organisations, established in 1916, now initiates and co-ordinates the action of the principal women’s Trade Unions, the Women’s Co-operative Guild (which organises the women of the Co-operative movement), the Railway Women’s Guild, composed of the wives of railwaymen, and the Women’s Labour League, now the women’s section of the Labour Party itself.
The General Workers
In 1888 the leaders of the skilled craftsmen and better-paid workmen were inclined to believe that effective or durable Trade Unionism among the general labourers and unskilled or nondescript workmen was as impracticable as it had hitherto proved to be among the mass of women wage-earners. The outburst of Trade Unionism among the dockers and gasworkers in 1888-89 was commonly expected to be as transient as analogous movements had been in 1834 and 1871. In 1920 we find the organisations of this despised section, some of them of over thirty years’ standing, accounting for no less than 30 per cent of the whole Trade Union membership, and their leaders—notably Mr. Clynes, Mr. Thorne, and Mr. Robert Williams—exercising at least their full share of influence in the counsels of the Trade Union Movement as a whole. For a few years after 1889, indeed, the aggregate membership of the newly-formed labourers’ Unions declined, and some of the weaker ones collapsed, or became merged in the larger societies. But the Gas-workers’ and General Labourers’ Union (established 1889), which changed its name in 1918 to the National Union of General Workers; and the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Workers’ Union (established 1887) maintained themselves in existence; and already in 1907 there were as many as 150,000 organised labourers in half-a-dozen well-established societies. The outburst of Trade Unionism among the farm labourers in 1890 gradually faded away. But in 1906 a new society, the National Agricultural Labourers and Rural Workers’ Trade Union, was formed, which at once made headway in Norfolk and the adjacent counties; to be followed in 1913 by the energetic Scottish Farm Servants’ Trade Union. Organisation was, between 1904 and 1911, steadily extending in all directions, when the passing of the National Insurance Act, which practically compelled every wage-earner to join an “Approved Society” of some kind, led to a dramatic expansion of Trade Union membership, from which the various Unions of general workers, as they now prefer to be styled, obtained their share of advantage. The Workers’ Union, in particular, which had been established in 1898, for the enrolment of members among the nondescript and semi-skilled workers of all sorts not catered for by the craft Unions, had, after twelve years’ existence, only 5000 members in 111 branches in 1910, but grew during 1911-13 to 91,000 members in 567 branches. In three years more it stood at 197,000 members in 750 branches, and by the end of 1919 its membership had risen to about 500,000 in nearly 2000 branches, comprising almost every kind and grade of worker, of any age and either sex, from clay-workers and tin miners to corporation employees and sanitary inspectors, from domestic servants and waiters to farm labourers and carmen, and every kind of nondescript worker in the factory, the yard, or on the road. The organising of the rural labourers has been shared by nearly all the principal Unions of General Workers. The passing of the Corn Production Act in 1917, with its incidental establishment of Joint Boards in every county of the United Kingdom, empowered to fix a legal minimum wage for a prescribed normal working day, had the result of greatly extending Trade Union membership among all sections of agricultural labourers, who are now (1920), for the first time in history, more or less organised in every county of Great Britain—partly in the very successful Agricultural Labourers’ Union, which had, at the end of 1919, 180,000 members in no fewer than 2700 branches; partly in the Workers’ Union, which has a large number of agricultural branches; partly in the National Union of General Workers, the Dock, Wharf and Riverside Labourers’ Union, and the National Amalgamated Union of Labour; in all the Scottish counties, in the powerful Scottish Farm Servants’ Union; whilst in Ireland the agricultural wage-earners have been enrolled in the Transport and General Workers’ Union. The total number of agricultural labourers in Trade Unions in 1920 probably reaches more than three hundred thousand, being about one-third of the total number of men employed in agriculture at wages.