[645]In view of the failure of the Trades Union Congress to equip its Parliamentary Committee with any staff that would enable it to deal with these problems, the Fabian Society started in 1912 the Fabian Research Department, to investigate and supply information upon these and other questions. This organisation has now become the Labour Research Department, an independent federal combination of Trade Unions, Co-operative and Socialist societies, and other Labour bodies (including the Labour Party, the English, Scottish, and Irish Trades Union Congresses, the Co-operative Union, the Daily Herald, most of the big Trade Unions, and some hundreds of Trade Councils, Local Labour Parties, etc.), with individual students and investigators. It has its offices at 34 Eccleston Square, London, S.W.1, next door to those of the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party; issues to its members a monthly bulletin of information, and has published many useful books, pamphlets, and monographs. It answers a stream of questions from Trade Unions all over the country on every conceivable point of theory or practice; it supplies particulars of rates of pay, hours of labour, and conditions of employment in other trades; and it is frequently employed in helping to prepare cases for submission to Joint Boards or Arbitration Tribunals. Its influential conduct of the “publicity” of the National Union of Railwaymen in the 1919 strike has already been described.

[646]For instance, Henry Taylor, the coadjutor of Joseph Arch in organising the agricultural labourers in 1872, was a carpenter; Tom Mann, for two years salaried President of the Dock, Wharf, and Riverside Labourers, has always been a member, and is now General Secretary, of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers; whilst Edward M’Hugh, for some time General Secretary of the National Union of Dock Labourers, is a compositor; Mr. Charles Duncan, President of the Workers’ Union, is an engineer; Mr. R. Walker, General Secretary of the Agricultural Labourers’ Union, was successively a shopkeeper and a railway clerk, and so on.

[647]The fervent energy of the typical official of the Labour Union of that day was well described in 1894 in the following sketch by Mrs. Bruce Glasier (Katherine Conway), a member of the “Independent Labour Party.” “He has his offices, but is generally conspicuous there from his absence. Walter Crane’s ‘Triumph of Labour’ hangs on the wall, and copies of The Fabian Essays, and the greater proportion of the tracts issued by the Manchester or Glasgow Labour Presses, lie scattered over the room. In England, Byron and Shelley, in Scotland, Byron and Burns, are the approved poets. Carlyle and a borrowed Ruskin or two are also in evidence, and a library edition of Thorold Rogers’ Work and Wages. John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy, side by side with a Student’s Marx, give proof of a laudable determination to go to the roots of the matter, and to base all arguments on close and careful study. But the call to action is never-ceasing, and train-travelling, if conducive to the enormous success of new journalism, affords but little opportunity for serious reading. ‘The daily newspapers are continually filled with lies, which one ought to know how to refute,’ and the situation all over the globe ‘may develop at any moment.’

“Yet, unlike the old Unionist leader, he is ever ready for the interviewer or the sympathetic inquirer, of whatever class or sex. Right racily he will describe the rapid growth of the movement since the great dock strike of 1889, and show the necessity in dealing with such mixed masses of men as fill the ranks of unskilled labour to-day, of continually striking while the iron is hot, and of substituting a policy of coup d’état for the deliberate preparation of the older Unions. ‘Lose here, win there,’ is our only motto, he says, resolutely determined to look at defeat from the point of view of a general-in-chief, and not from the narrower range of an officer in charge of a special division. At the moment of surrender he may have been white to the lips, but the next day will find him cheery and undaunted in another part of the country, carrying on his campaign and enrolling hundreds of recruits by the sheer energy of his confident eloquence.” (Weekly Sun, January 28, 1894.)

[648]It is, we think, only the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation that had laid down and acted on the principle of entrusting the appointment of salaried officials to the Executive Committee, on the express ground that popular election by ballot is not the right way to select administrative officers.

[649]It would clearly be an advantage if the distinction between those responsible for policy (whether designated Executive Councillors, President or otherwise) and those whose function should be executive only, were fully borne in mind. Whilst the former should certainly be elected by, and held responsible to, the membership, it is submitted that experience shows the advantage of purely executive officers—which may be what the secretaries and district delegates should become—being appointed by, and held responsible to, those who are elected.

At least, a separation should be made between persons elected to be responsible for policy, and officers employed for tasks requiring specialised training (such as the whole of the insurance work of the Union and of its Approved Society; its constantly increasing statistical requirements, and its legal business). Such officers should certainly be appointed, not elected; and should take no part in the decision of issues of policy, even as regards their own department. Speaking generally, much more specialisation of functions and officers should be aimed at in all Unions of magnitude.

[650]Such a building was decided on in 1918-19 by joint and separate conferences of the Trades Union Congress and Labour Party, as a “Memorial of Freedom and Peace,” in memory of those who lost their lives in the Great War. It is, however, by no means certain that the necessary large cost will be subscribed.

CHAPTER X

THE PLACE OF TRADE UNIONISM IN THE STATE
[1890-1920]