With such imperfect methods of selection for office, and with so complete a lack of systematic training for their onerous and important functions, it is, we think, a matter for surprise that Trade Union officials should have won a well-deserved reputation for knowledge and skill in negotiations with employers. But their haphazard selection and inadequate training are not the only difficulties that they have to overcome. Trade Union officials are nearly always overworked and expected to become specialist experts in half-a-dozen techniques; they are exposed to harassing and demoralising conditions of life, and they are habitually underpaid. The conditions of employment and the terms of service which the Trade Unions, out of ignorance, impose on those who serve them, far from being conducive to efficient administration and wise leadership, are often disgracefully poor. In November 1919 the National Union of Railwaymen set a notable example in raising the salaries of their two principal officers to £1000 a year each. But this is wholly exceptional. Even now, after the great rise in the cost of living, the salary of the staff officer of an important and wealthy Trade Union rarely exceeds £400 or £500 a year, without any provision for any other retiring allowance than the Union’s own Superannuation Benefit of ten or twelve shillings per week, if such a benefit exists at all. The average member forgets that what he has to compare the Secretary’s salary with is not the weekly wage of the manual working members of the Union, but—on the very doctrine of the Standard Rate in which they all believe—the remuneration given by “good employers” for the kind of work that the Secretary has to perform. When we remember that the modern Trade Union official has to be constantly travelling and consorting with employers and officials of much higher standards of expenditure than his own, and when we realise the magnitude and financial importance of the work that he performs, the smallness of the salary and the lack of courtesy and amenity accorded to the office is almost ludicrous. The result is that the able and ambitious young workman in a skilled trade is not much tempted by the career, even if he regards it as one of Trade Union leadership, unless he is (as so many are) an altruistic enthusiast; or unless his ambitions are ultimately political in character. The able young workman will both rise more rapidly and enjoy a pleasanter life by eschewing any ostensible service of his fellow-workmen, and taking advantage of the eagerness of intelligent employers to discover competent foremen and managers, nowadays not altogether uninfluenced by the sub-conscious desire to divert from Trade Unionism to Capitalism the most active-minded of the proletariat. Nor does the danger to the Trade Union world end with the refusal of some of its ablest young members to become Trade Union officials. The inferiority of position, alike in salary, in dignity and in amenity, to which a Trade Union condemns its officers, compared with that enjoyed by men of corresponding ability and function in other spheres, puts a perpetual strain on the loyalty of Trade Union officials. They are constantly being tempted away from the service of their fellows by offers of appointments in the business world, or by Employers’ Associations, or in Government Departments. And there are other evils of underpayment. A Trade Union official whose income is insufficient for his daily needs is tempted to make unduly liberal charges for his travelling expenses, and may well find it more remunerative to be perpetually multiplying deputations and committee meetings away from home than to be attending to his duties at the office. He may be driven to duplicate functions and posts in order to make a living wage. The darkest side of such a picture, the temptation to accept from employers or from the Government those hidden bribes that are decorously veiled as allowances for expenses or temporary salaries for special posts, is happily one which Trade Union loyalty and a sturdy sense of working-class honour have hitherto made it seldom necessary to explore. But such things have not been unknown; and their underlying cause—the unwise and mean underpayment of Trade Union officials—deserves the attention of the Trade Union world.
We have so far considered the officials of the Trade Union world merely as individual administrators. This, indeed, is almost the only way in which their work is regarded by their members. It is remarkable how slow the Trade Union world is to recognise the importance, to administrative or political efficiency, of the constitution of a hierarchy, a group or a team. Where a great society has a salaried staff of half-a-dozen to a score of officials—under such designations as General Secretary, Assistant Secretaries, President, Members of Executive Council or District Delegates, Organisers or Investigators—it is almost invariable to find them all separately elected by the whole body of members, or what is even more destructive of unity, by different district memberships. We only know of one example in the Trade Union world—that of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation—in which the responsible Executive Committee itself appoints the official staff upon which the performance of the work depends. All the salaried officers of a Trade Union, whatever their designations or functions, can usually claim to have the same, and therefore equal authority, namely, their direct election by the members. This results in the lack of any organic relation not only between the Executive Committee and the District Officers who ought to be its local agents, but even between the Executive Committee and the General Secretary and Assistant Secretaries. The Executive Committee can shunt to purely routine work a General Secretary whom it dislikes, and an unfriendly General Secretary can practically destroy the authority of the Executive Committee. In some cases the work of the office is in practice divided up amongst all the salaried staff, Executive Councillors, General Secretary, and Assistant Secretaries indiscriminately, each man doing his own job in the way he thinks best, and any consultation or corporate decision being reduced to a minimum. There is, in fact, no guarantee that there will be any unity of policy within an Executive Committee elected by a dozen different districts, or between an Executive Committee and its leading officials, who are elected at different times for different reasons. The members may choose a majority of reactionary Executive Councillors and simultaneously a revolutionary General Secretary. In nearly all Unions any suggestion as to the desirability of adopting the middle-class device of entrusting a responsible Executive Committee with the power of choosing its own officers has been resented as undemocratic.[649] In some Unions the indispensable amount of unity is secured, not without internal friction, by the presence of some dominant personality, who may be a secretary or president, or merely a member of the Executive Committee. The same drawback is seen in the constitutions of such wider federations as the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party. The result is that the Trade Union Movement has not yet evolved anything in the nature of Cabinet Government, based on unity of policy among the chief administrators, nor do we see any approach to the Party System, which in our national politics alone makes Cabinet Government possible. It looks as if any Democracy on a vocational basis must inevitably be dominated by a diversity of sectional interests which does not coincide with any cleavage in intellectual opinions. From the standpoint of corporate efficiency the drawback is that the sectional divergencies are always interfering with the formulation and unhesitating execution of decisions on wider issues, on which it would be advantageous for the Movement as a whole, in the interests of all, to have an effective general will, even if it be only that of a numerical majority.
Finally, it is a great drawback to the Trade Union world that it possesses no capital city and no central headquarters even in London. Its salaried officials, on whom it depends for leadership and policy, are scattered all over the country. The General Secretaries of the great Trade Friendly Societies and of the Unions of General Workers are dispersed between London, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Liverpool, and Leicester. The officials of the Cotton Operatives are quartered in a dozen Lancashire towns, and those of the Miners in every coalfield. The District Delegates of the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades and the organisers of the Dockers and the Seamen are stationed in all the principal ports. We have seen how little the Trades Union Congress, meeting once a year for less than a week, supplies any central organ of consultation or direction. The meeting in London, every few weeks, of the two or three dozen members of the Parliamentary Committee and the Executive Committee of the Labour Party is wholly inadequate for the constant consultation upon policy, the mutual communication of each other’s immediate projects, and the taking of decisions of common interest that the present stage of the Trade Union Movement requires. Probably no single thing would do so much to increase the efficiency of the Trade Union world as a whole as the provision of an adequate Central Institute and general office building in Westminster, at which could be concentrated all the meetings of national organisations, federations and committees; and which would make at any rate possible the constant personal communication of all the different headquarters. [650]
FOOTNOTES:
[599]It is doubtful whether, in any country in the world, even in Australia or Denmark, there is in 1920 so large a proportion of the adult male manual workers enrolled in Trade Unions as in the United Kingdom; and—Ireland being still relatively unorganised industrially—certainly not so large a proportion as in Great Britain alone.
The Trade Union Movement in Ireland has, apart from the Irish branches of British Unions, largely concentrated in the Belfast area, little connection with that in Great Britain, but its progress during the past thirty years has been scarcely less remarkable. The Irish railwaymen have abandoned their attempts at organisation in an Irish Union, and have lately swarmed into the National Union of Railwaymen to the number of over 20,000. The engineers in Ireland, whether at Belfast or elsewhere, are, to the number of 9000, in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and other British Unions. The other great Unions have nearly all their Irish branches. But the great transformation has been in the foundation and remarkable development of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, built up by James Connolly and James Larkin, which has survived both its tremendous Dublin strike of 1913 and the loss of both its leaders, and claims in 1920 over 100,000 members in 400 branches, being half the Trade Unionists in all Ireland. The only other Irish Trade Unions exceeding 5000 members are the Flax Roughers’ Union, included with other Unions in an Irish Textile Workers’ Federation, and the Clerical Workers’ Union, together with the Irish Teachers’ Society, which (unlike the National Union of Teachers in England and the Educational Institute of Scotland) is frankly affiliated with the (Irish) Labour Party. Scores of other Irish Trade Unions exist, practically all small, local, and sectional in character, and almost confined to the ten towns of Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Dundalk, Derry, Clonmel, Sligo, and Kilkenny. The total Trade Union membership in Ireland, which thirty years ago was only put at 40,000, may now exceed 200,000, about one-fifth of which is in and about Belfast. The Irish Trades Union Congress, established in 1894, and the Irish Labour Party meet annually.
The Irish Trade Union Movement, emerging from handicraftsmen’s local clubs, some of them dating from the middle of the eighteenth century, and monopolist and sectional in policy, has, during the present century, become fired with nationalist spirit and almost revolutionary fervour. Its heroes are Michael Davitt, James Connolly, and James Larkin. The story of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, with its extraordinary extension to all grades of wage-earners all over Ireland, and its sensational strikes in Dublin in 1913-14, is an epic in itself. Some idea of this development may be gathered from The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919; Labour in Irish History, by James Connolly; Socialism Made Easy, by the same (about 1905); the Annual Reports of the Irish Trades Union Congress since 1895; and those of the Irish Labour Party.
[600]Statistics of aggregate membership in the past are lacking. But we suggest that after the transient mass enrolments of 1833-34 had lapsed, the total membership in Great Britain of such Trade Unions as survived probably did not reach 100,000. It is doubtful whether, as late as 1860, there were half a million Trade Unionists. We give in an Appendix such past statistics as we have found.
[601]Industrial Democracy, pp. 38, 92, 103, 123, 258, etc.
[602]The Amalgamated Association of Card and Blowing Room Operatives is (1920) not now a member. A further development of federal complexity is the formation of a Federation of Kindred Trades connected with the Export Shipping Industry of Manchester.