Meanwhile, the leaders of the principal Trade Unions indirectly affected by the railway stoppage, notably the various sections of Transport Workers, together with officials or representatives of the Miners, the Parliamentary Committee, and the Labour Party, had been meeting in anxious conclave—summoned, it should be stated, by the Executive of the National Transport Workers’ Federation—with a view to restraining their own members from impetuous action in support of the railwaymen, and to bringing pressure to bear on both parties to secure a settlement. At first the prospect seemed hopeless. The Government took up an attitude of defiance. Mr. Lloyd George declared that he would not enter into any negotiations with the railwaymen’s Unions until the men had unconditionally returned to their duty. A national appeal was made to all the Local Authorities—not to strengthen the police force by special constables, as is the constitutional procedure, but to institute a “Citizen Guard,” in order to repel the forces of disorder; a wild use of a term of bad omen, which was calculated, if not intended, to bring the “class war” into the streets. It was known that measures of arbitrary confiscation of the Union funds were seriously under consideration, together with discriminatory issues of food supplies. On the other side, the feeling of the Trade Unionists was rising to anger. The position could not well have been more serious. But the “eleven”—afterwards the “fourteen”—Trade Union mediators were patient and persistent. They had long interviews with the railwaymen’s Executive. They had long discussions with the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Minister of Transport. They cleared up misunderstandings. They eliminated provocative expressions. They brought the Government to admit that there was no present chance of reducing wages. They got the railwaymen to see that merely to postpone the issue was to strengthen their grip upon what they were actually receiving. Notwithstanding the Government’s defiant words, the Trade Union mediators got the railwaymen’s Executive Council into prolonged and repeated discussions at 10 Downing Street with the Prime Minister and his colleagues.[630] At last, on Sunday morning, October 3, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Thomas were closeted together for the final stage; the news was immediately flashed all over the kingdom that the strike was settled, and in the evening Mr. Thomas announced to a mass meeting of railwaymen in the Albert Hall the terms of settlement. These included an immediate resumption of work without victimisation or recrimination; payment of the impounded arrears of wages; “stabilisation” of existing earnings of all rates (except where improved) until September 30, 1920; negotiations as to “standardisation” and settlement of wage scales to be begun again, and a settlement to be come to before December 31, 1919; and the lowest adult railwayman to be raised forthwith to 51s. per week as a minimum. Before the end of 1919 it was announced that the Government had agreed to concede, for the future, that all questions relating to the conditions of service should be dealt with, not by the railway companies but by a Central Board of ten members (with power to increase by a further one on each side), five nominees of the National Union of Railwaymen and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, and five representatives of the railway management. In case of disagreement, reference will be made to an Appeal Board of twelve members, four nominated by these Trade Unions, four representing the management, and four the general public, with a chairman nominated by the Government. What is specially significant is that it is recognised that “the public” does not consist merely of the upper and middle, or of the capitalist and professional classes. Of the four representatives of the public, two are to be nominated, respectively, by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and the Federation of British Industries, and two, respectively, by the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress and the Co-operative Union, who are thus taken to represent the four-fifths of the population (and therefore of the railway users) who are manual working wage-earners. At the same time it was conceded that the Advisory Committee for Railway Management, which replaces under the Minister of Transport the Railway Executive Committee, is to include, from the start, three representatives of the railwaymen’s Unions, all the members having equal and identical functions and rights.
We do not yet know what agreement will be reached about “standardisation” or the future scale of wages, but the Ministry of Transport is not likely to try another fall with the railwaymen’s Trade Unions. The strike has had, indeed, results of the first importance. The Government has learnt that Trade Unionism is not easily beaten, even when all the resources of the State are put forth against it, and when public opinion is incensed. The great capitalist organisations have seen the warning against their projects of a general reduction of wages; and this is postponed, at least, for a year. On the other hand, the railwaymen’s Unions have realised the magnitude of the struggle into which they so precipitately entered, or into which they were so artfully inveigled. The need for, and the potency of, skilled publicity work, and the possibilities of a highly organised and adequately supported Labour Research Department, are commonly recognised. Finally, it is seen that national industrial conflicts of such a magnitude are matters of wider concern to the Trade Union world than any one Union can appreciate; and an attempt was made, to be subsequently described, if not to continue in existence the group of “Fourteen Mediators,” at least to get established some authoritative standing Council, by which the approach of an impending industrial crisis of national scope could be closely watched, so that all the necessary steps may be taken in time to deal with the situation in the best possible way. The Trade Union world realised its need for what was called a General Staff.
Amalgamations and Federations
Whilst the numerical strength and industrial and political influence of the several Trade Unions have thus steadily increased during the past thirty years, it is less easy to characterise the changes in the relations of Trade Unions with each other.
The multiplicity of separate organisations in which the six or seven million Trade Unionists are grouped, and the complication and diversity of the relations among the various societies, continue to-day, as they did thirty years ago, to baffle classification, and almost to defy analysis. It remains as impossible as it was in 1890 to state precisely how many distinct Trade Unions are in existence, because the endless variety of their federal organisations makes it uncertain which of the local or sectional Unions are to be counted as independent societies. We estimate, however, that upon any computation the number of financially distinct organisations, which we may put at about 1100, remains approximately what it was thirty years ago. The tendency to amalgamation, that is to say, has just about kept pace, arithmetically, with the starting of new organisations, whilst the average membership of each unit has more than quadrupled.
Such a statement fails, however, to do justice to the change that has come over the Trade Union world. Thirty years ago it was, on the whole, a congeries of numerically small units, only two or three of which counted as many as 50,000 members. To-day there are nearly a dozen which severally manage memberships of a quarter of a million, and probably fifty which deal with more than 50,000 each. A few other national societies of smaller membership are of some importance. Scattered up and down the United Kingdom a thousand other local or sectional societies exist, with memberships from a few dozen to a few thousand, but these play no part and exercise no influence in the movement as a whole. Probably five-sixths of all the Trade Union membership, and practically all its effective force, are to be found among the hundred principal societies to which the Ministry of Labour has long confined its detailed statistics. [631]
The movement for the amalgamation of competing societies has, during the past decade, been specially energetic and persistent. This has arisen, partly spontaneously, from the obvious disadvantages attendant both on rivalry between Trade Unions seeking to enrol the same classes of members throughout the kingdom—such as that between the various societies of railway employees—and on the division of workmen of the same craft among a number of independent local societies, such as the Coopers, the Chippers and Drillers, and the Painters and other branches of the Building Trades. But during the past decade the movement has been reinforced by the desire for an organisation based on the whole of an industry, such as engineering, housebuilding, mining, or the railway service, in which all the co-operating crafts and grades of workers would be associated in a single Industrial Union; in contrast with the earlier conception of the separate organisation of each craft throughout the whole kingdom; such as that of the carpenters, the enginemen, the engineering mechanics, the clerks, and by analogy the general labourers, in whatsoever industry they may be working. The case for the Industrial Union in such an industry as mining, for example, merely from the standpoint of Collective Bargaining, and for the sake of getting effective Common Rules, has always been a strong one; but the movement for the substitution of “Industrial” for “Craft” Unionism has been strengthened since about 1911 by the aspirations of those who saw in Trade Unionism something more than an organisation for raising wages and shortening the working day. If the wage-earners were ever to obtain, through their own voluntary associations, the control of their own working lives, and to obtain a steadily increasing participation in the direction of industry; if a Vocational Democracy were to be superimposed on a Democracy based on geographical constituencies; it seemed as if this could be done only by Trade Unions co-extensive with each separate industry. The influence of the movement known as “Guild Socialism” has accordingly been exercised, on the whole, in favour of Industrial Unionism, not so much for the sake of its immediate advantages in improving the conditions of the wage-contract, as because it was only in this form that Trade Unionism could become the vehicle of aspirations to the control of each industry by the whole mass of the workers employed therein.
Except in the way of industrial federations, to be hereafter referred to, it is only in mining and the railway service that any great progress has been made in this direction. The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, established, as we have seen, only in 1888, with no more than 36,000 members, has attracted to itself, year by year, an almost continuous stream of local or sectional organisations among the 1,200,000 workers in and about the coal and iron-stone mines; successively absorbing into one or other of its local units or affiliating directly to itself, not only all the district associations, old or new, of coal-hewers and other underground workers, but also some of the separate organisations of enginemen and firemen, mine mechanics, deputies and overmen, colliery clerks, cokemen, and others employed in or about the mines, until its aggregate membership in 1920 is somewhere about 900,000. And though the Miners’ Federation is still only a Federation of fully autonomous district associations—some of these, too, being themselves federations of the organisations of lesser localities; and although it still depends for its funds almost entirely upon specific levies upon its constituents, it has found means, by its frequently meeting delegate conferences, controlling the strong Executive Committee which they elect, to centralise very effectively the general policy of the whole mining industry, notably with regard to the hours of labour, the conditions of safety, the percentage of general advances of wages and the amount of the national war bonuses, and last, though not least, on the burning issue of nationalisation of the mines and the participation of the miners in their administration. But although the Miners’ Federation embodies in its constitution the principles of federalism and an extreme local autonomy, it takes no account of sectional differences, and makes no provision for the representation at its delegate conferences, or upon its Executive Committee, of any distinct grades or sections. Perhaps, for this reason, the Federation does not yet speak directly for all the organised manual working wage-earners in the industry. There are at least forty separate Trade Unions of enginemen, boilermen and firemen, colliery mechanics, cokemen, under-managers, deputies, overmen and other officials, colliery clerks, and surface-workers of various kinds, not yet affiliated to the Miners’ Federation, either locally or nationally; these have formed National Federations, parallel with the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, of enginemen, deputies, colliery mechanics and under-managers respectively; and in February 1917 seventeen of the societies drew together to form the National Council of Colliery Workers other than Miners, for the purpose of maintaining their separate influence.
In the railway service, as we have already described, the merging in the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, first of the Scottish Society in 1892, and then of the General Railway Workers’ Union, and the United Signalmen and Pointsmen’s Society in 1913, made possible the establishment of the National Union of Railwaymen on the basis of an organisation co-extensive with the industry, with the embodiment in the constitution of sectional representation. The four “departments” into which the members are divided vote separately in the elections. Under these provisions the National Union of Railwaymen, though hampered by the continuance of the separate Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, has been able to make effective not only its claims for higher remuneration, but also its demands for a normal Eight Hours Day, a national system of classification, and national wage scales for the several grades; though still not its aspirations (expressed since 1914) to participation in management, or those (expressed for over a decade) to the elimination from industry of the capitalist profitmaker by the scheme of Railway Nationalisation.
In other industries, too, the concentration of Trade Union forces during the past decade has increasingly taken the form of an amalgamation of rival sectional organisations, sometimes in response to a demand from the rank and file. Thus the Ship Constructors’ and Shipwrights’ Association, established in 1888, has successfully absorbed not only the very old Shipwrights’ Provident Union of London, but also all the remaining local Trade Unions of shipwrights that long lingered in Liverpool, Dublin, etc. The National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association has taken over a number of small societies of French polishers, gilders, and upholsterers. The United Garment Workers’ Trade Union was formed in 1915 by the amalgamation of a number of societies in the various sections of the tailoring trade; and in 1919 it was agreed that this, together with the Scottish Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, should be merged in the old Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, which would then include practically all the organised workers in the making of men’s and women’s clothing in Great Britain. Many small Unions of machine workers, minor craftsmen, and general labourers have been absorbed in one or other of the half-a-dozen large Labour Unions. The Amalgamated Card and Blowing-Room Operatives have taken over various small sectional societies in the Cotton trade. In Sheffield thirteen small Unions, catering for different sections of the gold and silver workers, joined together in 1910 in the Gold, Silver, and Kindred Trades Society, which in 1913 absorbed several more societies in this industry. In the autumn of 1919, as we have already mentioned, six of the sectional societies in the engineering industry decided to merge themselves, with the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, in a new and more gigantic amalgamation with 400,000 members; the United Pattern Makers’ Society, the Electrical Trades Union, and many small and specialised societies of mechanics in iron still standing aloof. In the same month three of the principal Unions of postal and telegraph employees united in a single Union of Post Office Workers, with 90,000 members. Other amalgamations among small or local societies took place among the Basketmakers, the Block Printers, the Leather-workers, the Dyers, the various sections in the Pottery Trade, etc.