The life assurance agents—principally those employed in “industrial” insurance—number 100,000, and they have become organised in a score of societies, restricted to the staffs of particular companies. These organisations vary in their nature and in their degree of independence, from mere “welfare societies,” dominated by the management, up to aggressive Trade Unions—the strongest being the National Association of Prudential Assurance Agents. They are mostly united in two different federations. Another, and perhaps wholesomer, basis of organisation is adopted by the National Union of Life Assurance Agents, which has now some thousands of members.

But the greatest development of Trade Unionism among the “black-coated proletariat” has been among the employees of the National and Local Government. This has been entirely a growth of the past thirty years. Beginning among the manual working staff of the Postmaster-General, and among the artisans and labourers of the Government dockyards, arsenals, and other manufacturing departments, there are now a hundred and seventy separate Trade Unions of State employees, from the crews of the Customs launches and the boy clerks, up to the Admiralty Constructive Engineers and the Superintendents of Mercantile Marine Offices. Of recent years, organisation has spread to the higher grades of the Civil Service, even to the “Class I.” clerks; and practically no one below the rank of an Under-Secretary of State is held to be outside the scope of the Society of Civil Servants. All the various societies are grouped in federations, from the “Waterguard Federation” and the Prison Officers’ Federation of the United Kingdom; through the United Government Workers’ Federation and the Federal Council of Government Employees, combining the various kinds of manual working operatives; up to the Customs and Excise Federation, the Civil Service Federation, the Civil Service Alliance, and even the “National Federation of Professional Workers,” which includes also teachers. The strongest of all these bodies is probably that of the various employees of the Postmaster-General, whose fight to secure “recognition” and the opportunity for “Collective Bargaining” has extended over a couple of decades. There are about fifty separate Unions of Post Office employees, mostly small and sectional bodies; but the three principal societies (the Postal and Telegraph Clerks’ Association, the Postmen’s Federation, and the Fawcett Association) were amalgamated in 1919 into one powerful Union of Post Office Workers, with 90,000 members with eleven salaried officers, and affiliated both to the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, which can now meet the managing officials of the Post Office on something like equal terms.

The employees of the Local Authorities—thirty years ago entirely without organisation—are still not so well combined as those of the National Government. A score of different societies, from such grades as school-keepers, police and prison officers and asylum attendants, up to municipal clerks, share the work with the National Union of Corporation Workers and the Municipal Employees’ Association. A large proportion of the wage-earners employed by Local Authorities are to be found in the Unions of General Workers. The National Association of Local Government Officers and Clerks is a large and powerful body, composed mainly of the clerical and supervisory grades.

Trade Unionism in the public service received a great fillip after 1906, when Mr. Herbert Samuel at the Post Office, together with some other Ministers, “recognised” the Unions of their employees, considered their corporate representations, and agreed to meet their officials. It was still further promoted when, in 1912, the Government consented to the establishment of an independent Arbitration Tribunal for determining the terms of employment in the Civil Service for all grades and sections under £500 a year. Before this tribunal, whose awards were definitively authoritative, the representatives of any association could appear as plaintiffs, those of the Treasury appearing always as defendants. Finally, after the promulgation in 1917 of the “Whitley Report,” which the Government, in impressing on other employers, found itself constrained to adopt in its own establishments, there was established during 1919 an elaborate series of joint councils (including even the civil departments of the War Office and the Admiralty) for particular branches of establishments; for whole departments, and for whole grades of the service throughout all departments, in which equal numbers of persons nominated by the employees’ associations, and of superior officers chosen by the Government, representing the management, meet periodically to discuss on equal terms questions of office organisation, professional training, conditions of service, methods of promotion, and what not. [614]

The Miners

The outstanding feature of the Trade Union world between 1890 and 1920 has been the growing predominance, in its counsels and in its collective activity, of the organised forces of the coal-miners. Right down to 1888, as we have seen, the coal-miners of England, Scotland, and Wales, though sporadically forming local associations and now and again engaging in fierce conflicts with their employers, first in this coalfield and then in that, had failed to maintain any organisation of national scope. Though their representatives participated from time to time in the general activities of the Trade Union Movement, and sat in the Trades Union Congress; though with the guidance of W. P. Roberts in the ’forties, and under the successive leadership of Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt in the ’sixties and ’seventies, they exercised intermittently a considerable influence on its Parliamentary action—the miners, for the most part, kept to themselves, framed their own policy, and fought their own battles, in which, owing to an apparently incurable “localism,” their success was not commensurate with their strength. The change came with the growing dissatisfaction with the policy of the Sliding Scale. This device for making the rate of wages vary in proportion to the selling price of coal, the adoption of which between 1874 and 1880—against the wish of Alexander Macdonald, and contrary to the advice of such friends as Professor Beesly and Lloyd Jones—we have already described, produced in the ’eighties an ever-increasing discontent. In 1881 the miners of Yorkshire merged their two Unions of South and West Yorkshire into the Yorkshire Miners’ Association, which began its successful career by terminating the local Sliding Scale agreement, and resolutely refused all future attempts to make wages depend on selling prices. The Lancashire and Cheshire Miners’ Federation, a less well-organised body, presently followed its example. In 1885 a Midland Federation was formed by a number of smaller local associations for the purpose both of abolishing the Sliding Scale and of promoting the movement for an Eight Hours Day by legislative enactment. Three years later, at a conference at Manchester, the associations of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire, the Midlands, and Fifeshire, with a nascent local organisation in South Wales, established the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain.[615] The aggregate membership of all these bodies was amazingly small—at the start only 36,000—but the new Federation had, from the first, a definite policy and great driving force. Outside it there remained the solid and numerically strong Durham Miners’ Association and the Northumberland Miners’ Mutual Confident Association, which (together with a surviving remnant of the Amalgamated Association in South Staffordshire, and the purely nominal Sliding Scale Associations which then characterised most of the South Wales coalfield) still clung together as the National Union. It was the National Union which played the leading part in securing reforms in the Coal Mines Regulation Act of 1887, which firmly established the checkweigher in practically every colliery of any importance. But this was its last constructive effort. Its subsequent history is little more than the long-drawn-out resistance of the able and respected leaders of the Northumberland and Durham miners to the new ideas of Labour policy which were, as we have described, becoming dominant in the Trades Union Congress, and which were from the first adopted, if not by all the leaders, at least by the successive delegate conferences of the Miners’ Federation.

The establishment of the Federation coincided with a period of rapid expansion in the coal-mining industry. The number of persons employed rose considerably year after year, and Trade Unionism spread rapidly among them. An effective local organisation was built up in district after district, everywhere based on the autonomy in local concerns of the “lodge” or branch, consisting of the workers at a given colliery, and governed by mass meetings of the members, who elect a committee, which usually meets at least weekly. But although the National Union declined steadily in influence, it took twenty years to bring all the district associations into the Miners’ Federation, the aggregate membership of which did not reach 200,000 until 1893, and seven years later was still only 363,000. Even so, the miners were, as we described them in 1892, in some ways the most effectively organised of the industrial groups into which we divided the Trade Union world of that date. With the adhesion of Northumberland and Durham in 1908, when the National Union came finally to an end, the membership of the Federation rose to nearly 600,000, whilst the next twelve years’ growth of the industry, and the inclusion of a large proportion of the sectional unions among different grades of mine-workers,[616] have brought it in 1920 to nearly 900,000.

Meanwhile issue was joined by the mine-owners, who insisted everywhere in 1893 on considerable reductions in the wage-rates, on the plea that selling prices had fallen. The great strike that followed involved 400,000 men, and lasted from July to November. In the end the men had to submit to reductions, though they gained the important point of the practical though not explicit recognition of a minimum below which there was to be no fall. The next great achievement of the Federation was the carrying into law of the Eight Hours Bill, which, mainly owing to the opposition of the leaders of the Northumberland and Durham Miners, was not accomplished until 1908; and their influence in improving the Mines Regulation Act of 1911. Their third success, the outcome of a decade of successful organisation and intellectual leadership by Mr. Robert Smillie, who since 1912 has been annually elected to the presidency, was attained only at the cost of the greatest industrial struggle that Great Britain had yet experienced.

The national strike of miners in 1912, when practically every mine was stopped, and nearly a million miners suspended work for more than a month, arose out of the failure of the colliery companies to make adequate provision for repeated cases of individual hardship and injustice. The piecework rates of the hewers or getters of coal might be satisfactorily adjusted to the agreed day-wage standard of the district, though the arrangements for this adjustment vary from district to district, and even from mine to mine, and are very far from complete or satisfactory. But what was to happen when, from circumstances beyond his own control, the miner found himself unable to get enough coal to produce a subsistence wage? If he is assigned an “abnormal place”—where the seam is thin or crushed into small coal (for which, in South Wales, the hewer is not paid at all); or where exceptional timbering is required to prevent dangerous falls; or where there is much “stone” or water: or if, in “normal places,” the colliery management does not keep him regularly supplied with “trams” or “tubs” into which to load the coal; or with a sufficient provision of timber for props and sleepers; or of rails—no amount of skill, strength, or assiduity will prevent his earnings from falling away, it may be to next to nothing. What had long been customary was, in some coalfields, the casting of lots for “places,” and thus a periodical exchange of opportunities; and in others the granting of an allowance, or “consideration,” to hewers who complained of insufficient earnings. These allowances were granted irregularly, without the protection of Collective Bargaining, with insufficient provision for ensuring the avoidance of injustice; and it is not now denied that, in some collieries, particularly in South Wales, the owners resorted to the simple expedient of restricting the manager to a fixed maximum sum each “measuring-up day,” irrespective of the number and extent of the men’s reasonable claims. These sums, moreover, were much reduced in times of bad trade, when profits were at a minimum, especially in collieries which were actually working at a loss. The agitation for securing a prescribed minimum of daily earnings for all the piece-workers continued for a whole decade without much result, producing not a few local stoppages, especially in South Wales. These flared up, in the latter part of 1910, in the Aberdare and Rhondda valleys, into an almost continuous series of disputes. The Miners’ Federation found itself compelled in July 1911 to take the matter up as a national question; and a ballot of its whole membership decided for a national strike if the universal adoption of the principle of a prescribed daily minimum, not merely for hewers but for all grades, was not conceded. The owners quibbled and eventually refused; and after a further ballot a national strike was decided on, which the Government negotiations failed to avert, and which, after long and repeated notice, began at the end of February 1912, and rapidly extended to practically every colliery in the kingdom. As neither the employers nor the workmen would give way, the Government then announced its intention of introducing a Bill to provide for the payment, to all underground workers in the mine, not of the prescribed minimum rates which the several districts had formulated, nor yet of the overriding national minima of 5s. for a man and 2s. for a boy which were being demanded, but of district minima, to be prescribed in each coalfield by a Joint Board of employers and workmen, presided over by an impartial chairman. These provisions were bitterly opposed, not only by the coal-owners, who objected to any legal minimum, but also by the workmen’s representatives in the House of Commons, who demanded a prescribed national minimum; but they were carried into law by substantial majorities. The Federation Executive was perplexed as to the line to take, as half the membership wanted to carry on the struggle; but it was eventually decided to give the Act and the Joint Boards a chance, and the strike was declared at an end. The district minima and the rules applicable thereto had, in most cases, to be decided by the impartial chairmen; and they varied considerably from district to district, being usually a little less than the workmen had claimed. But when the working of the system was understood, and it was got smoothly into operation, it was recognised that the Miners’ Federation had achieved a very substantial victory. The miners had brought to their aid, in enforcing the payment of a periodically prescribed Minimum Day Wage to all underground workers, the strong arm of the law—not, it is true, as under the Mines Regulation Acts and the Factory and Workshop Acts, the criminal law, enforced by Government inspectors and prosecutions, but the civil law of contract, which they could themselves enforce by actions in the County Court. What the Federation extorted from the Government and the Legislature was “an extraordinary piece of hastily prepared legislation rushed through Parliament in the shadow of an unprecedented national calamity.”[617] It has been found by experience that this Act, which is nominally only temporary, does secure to the hewers a substantial minimum of day wages, however unremunerative their conditions of work; and the fixing of rates by the Joint Boards has, on the whole, considerably increased the wages of the various grades of the less skilled workers. But more important than these immediate results was the demonstration and the consolidation of the national strength of the Miners’ Federation itself; and the respect which its great power henceforth secured for it, alike in the Trade Union Movement, with the employers, and at the hands of the Government and the House of Commons.

The miners’ organisations were fully occupied for a year or two in putting into operation the Act of 1912, and in enforcing the determinations of the Joint Boards. But in 1913 the delegate conference made a new move in authorising the Executive Committee to enter into relations with other Trade Unions with a view to joint action for mutual assistance. A formal alliance had been made between the Miners’ Federation, the National Union of Railwaymen, and the Transport Workers’ Federation—commonly referred to as the Triple Alliance—when everything was suddenly changed by the breaking out of the Great War. The 1500 colliery companies and individual colliery owners, most of whom are united in the Mining Association of Great Britain, as well as in district associations, have, throughout, steadfastly refused to meet the Miners’ Federation for the negotiation of any national agreement, or the concession of national advances; although there has long been elaborate machinery for negotiation in each district.